On March 23, 1933, inside a dimly lit chamber filled with the stale scent of cigar smoke, Ludwig Kaas tried to convince himself he was making the right decision. A Catholic priest and the leader of Germany’s establishment Center Party, he stood at a crossroads. For several years, his party had sought to block Adolf Hitler’s rise. But in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) became the largest force in parliament, and in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. As he moved to consolidate power, the Center Party had become the last remaining obstacle to his bid for total control over Germany.
Hitler had introduced the Enabling Act, which would allow him and his cabinet sweeping powers to rule by decree, thereby dismantling democracy at its core. The act needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The Social Democrats—the only other significant group of parliamentarians that still fundamentally supported democracy—were too few to stop it alone. If the Center Party also resisted, it could block the act’s passage.
But Kaas hesitated. He feared what would happen if his party defied the Nazis. Would it survive? Could democracy endure if his party resisted? Hitler’s storm troopers had already begun arresting political opponents. Kaas convinced himself that his best option was to cooperate—to work within the new reality rather than be crushed by it. “We must preserve our soul,” he told his colleagues, “but a rejection of the Enabling Act will result in unpleasant consequences for our party.” The act passed, 444 to 94, opening the path to Hitler’s dictatorship.
This episode illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule. Kaas was not alone in this kind of thinking. In the years leading up to that moment, three catastrophic miscalculations—each rooted in short-term maneuvering and self-justification—paved the way for Hitler’s ascent.
Today, this chapter of the Weimar Republic’s history should be revisited. At a moment in which democracy is backsliding in places as varied as Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States, it is a reminder that democracy often erodes slowly at first, via the gradual surrender of those entrusted to defend it. But with each concession, autocrats become bolder, defenses grow weaker, and reversal becomes harder. Responses that, early on, can feel pragmatic—waiting it out, remaining silent, cutting a deal—only embolden autocrats, leading ultimately to the demise of democracy itself.
FATAL TRANSACTIONS
The fateful decisions that doomed the Weimar Republic were made in the aftermath of World War I, shortly after the birth of a new democracy in Germany. The Weimar constitution, drafted in 1919 under the influence of luminaries such as the legal scholar Hugo Preuss and the sociologist Max Weber, enshrined civil liberties, expanded rights for women, and established labor protections. Building on wins secured by an already robust civil society, a broad and confident coalition of progressive forces, liberals, Social Democrats, and the Catholic Center Party established Germany’s post–World War I republic.
Yet this republic was also fragile. It was roiled by rampant political violence, frequent political assassinations, and street fights between communists and fascists, both of whom rejected the new regime. Still, after three turbulent years of hyperinflation and political unrest, by 1924 the Weimar Republic had entered a period of relative stability.
Beginning in 1929, however, the crash of the U.S. stock market hit Germany, triggering a catastrophic economic downturn and mass unemployment. The Communist Party and the Nazis gained ground in elections. This made it difficult for the German parliamentary system to form governments, and country’s president had to resort to installing new chancellors at the head of parliament without parliamentary backing—an extraordinary measure. The resulting policy gridlock enhanced the Nazis’ appeal.
The German conservative establishment granted Hitler legitimacy.
But the Great Depression alone did not doom the Weimar Republic. Many other embattled republics in Europe and North America survived this era of economic and political turmoil, including two other new European republics, Czechoslovakia and Finland. What mattered most were not just the shocks themselves but German leaders’ responses to them—choices that shaped the republic’s fate.
The country’s conservative establishment made the first mistake. In the late 1920s, the mainstream right-wing party, the German National People’s Party, was struggling. Its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a powerful businessman and media mogul, but he lacked charisma and mass appeal. As he watched Hitler’s Nazi movement gain popularity in state and national elections in the late 1920s, Hugenberg saw an opportunity—not to stop Hitler, but to use him.
Hugenberg recruited the Nazis into a campaign to undo Germany’s obligation to pay World War I reparations. He hoped that their fervor would help reinvigorate the conservative cause. A 1929 referendum attempting to rally the German public behind annulling the debt—and classifying politicians who agreed to pay it as traitors—failed, but the partnership changed everything. It elevated the Nazis from a band of fringe extremists to a political force that had been granted legitimacy by one of Germany’s most influential political figures.
Hugenberg’s miscalculations did not end there. In 1931, he hosted a major right-wing rally in the spa town of Bad Harzburg, inviting Hitler to stand alongside Germany’s nationalist elite. The idea was to present a united conservative front. Instead, Hitler stole the spotlight. His paramilitary forces marched through the streets in a show of discipline and power as Hugenberg faded into the background. By 1933, Hugenberg had realized the full scale of his mistake. He reportedly told a fellow conservative: “I have committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in human history.” But by then it was far too late. At a pivotal moment, Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.
A PREVENTABLE DEATH
The German political establishment’s next miscalculation was even graver: elevating Hitler to power outright. By 1932, Germany’s parliament remained paralyzed. No governing majority could be formed. Conservatives were desperate to establish a stable government that excluded the Social Democrats and Communists, but they lacked the numbers to govern alone. President Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero, continued to cycle through chancellors, unable to find anyone who could command the support of a majority of parliamentarians or contain Germany’s deepening economic crisis. Then former Chancellor Franz von Papen made a bold suggestion: offer the chancellorship to Hitler—but surround him with conservative ministers who could control him.
Von Papen was confident that Hitler could be kept on a leash. “Don’t worry,” he told his right-wing colleagues. “Within two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he’ll squeal.” In January 1933, Hindenburg signed on to the plan, believing that Hitler would remain a figurehead.
The opposite happened. Hitler immediately began consolidating power, sidelining his handlers and dismantling the opposition by arresting leading figures such as the former Prussian minister of the interior and other Social Democratic and Communist Party members of parliament. The Nazi Party was not the choice of a majority of Germans—about two-thirds of Germans had voted against it in the 1932 national elections—and Hitler’s violent moves to seize more influence caused a new atmosphere of intense fear to grip the country. The gamble that antidemocrats could be tamed if they were granted power had failed spectacularly.
German politicians believed they could bargain away democracy’s protections.
The February 1933 Reichstag fire, which did so much damage to the parliament building that it temporarily forced the body to hold sessions in the Kroll Opera House a few blocks away, provided the perfect pretext for repression. Hitler’s new government blamed communists for the blaze, also claiming to have proof that they were stockpiling explosives. The Nazi-led government launched mass arrests, and Hitler immediately promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure restricting freedom of the press and assembly and allowing the police to detain suspects indefinitely without a trial.
It was this climate of emergency following the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to propose the Enabling Act. Kaas and his fellow Center Party leaders debated it for hours, torn between principle and self-preservation. Some urged resistance, warning that Hitler’s power must be checked. But most feared the consequences of defiance. Still others clung to the hope that by cooperating, they might influence Hitler from within—perhaps by helping weaken their Social Democrat rivals or by carving out protections for Center Party or Catholic leaders. In the final vote, all 73 Center Party parliamentarians capitulated, justifying their surrender as a necessary evil to save the party. As Kaas himself told his colleagues, “If a two-thirds majority [is] not achieved, the government will carry out its plans through other means.”
But there was nothing strategic about this vote. Along with all of Germany’s other opposition parties, the Center Party was dissolved within months. The Center Party’s support for the act did not moderate Hitler; it gave him total control. This was the final, fatal miscalculation—the belief that democracy’s protections could be bargained away but democracy itself could still somehow survive.
DON’T BET ON IT
No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.
The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections. Mainstream political leaders had many opportunities to push back. But Hugenberg believed he could use Hitler to revitalize his conservative movement. Von Papen believed he could control Hitler after making him chancellor. Kaas believed that capitulating to Hitler’s demands would protect his party and buy time for a more significant resistance. They were all wrong.
Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.
In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million miles from Earth. This was caused by the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex, which collected the resulting dust and returned those samples to Earth, marking the first time a U.S. mission had retrieved material from an asteroid.
Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That’s not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse — a mirror image — of the way those building blocks appear on Earth.
This was interesting timing. Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts — in a paper published in Nature — had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of “mirror life.”
While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids are not going to have any impact on our home planet, the experts feared that biologists may — in the lab — be able to artificially create entire mirror-image organisms, to potentially disastrous results.
Mirror life
To understand this, look at your hands. They look alike. But you can’t perfectly overlap them, no matter how you rotate or contort. Hands cannot be confused with their mirror image. It turns out the molecules making up our bodies also have this fundamental asymmetry. They can come in “right-handed” and “left-handed” configurations.
For example, our DNA — and the DNA of all other animals in our biosphere — is universally right-handed. This provides excellent evidence that all life on Earth shares one common ancestor. But, as the experts pointed out, there’s no reason life can’t be synthetically manufactured from molecules oriented inversely — hence, “mirror life.” Such life would be molecularly sinister in the original meaning of the term: left-handed.
Though the capacity to forge such unprecedented creatures in the lab doesn’t yet exist, it might be developed soon. The fear is mirrored microorganisms: capable of infecting our cells and feeding on them, but also potentially entirely invisible to our immune systems. Such newcomers could rapidly spread through planetary ecosystems, causing “immense” and “irreversible” harm.
In the months since, a steady stream of news stories has echoed this warning. But similar fears are far from new. From accidental black holes to worries that chemical experiments might suddenly freeze all Earth’s oceans, this is the story of concerns scientists are on the brink of discovering exotic, deadly new forms of matter or life that might quickly spread, snuffing us out.
The idea of mirror life goes back a surprisingly long way. In 1848, the young Louis Pasteur — inventor of pasteurization and rabies vaccination — became the first to notice that organic molecules can come in mirror-image versions. He immediately knew he’d discovered something profound.
In 1871’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is magically transported to an inverted world. But years before, Pasteur was already anticipating the ways science could make mirrored life a concrete reality. In a 1860 lecture, Pasteur pondered what would happen if the cells of “living beings” could be made to suddenly assume “opposite asymmetry”: If, molecularly speaking, “right” became “left.” This, Pasteur marvelled, might produce “a new world.”
The idea never left him. Later in life, at a Parisian lecture, Pasteur again spoke on the possibility of mirrored life. “Who can say,” he queried, “what the future of germs would be” if “we could replace” their proteins with “inverse” versions?
Pasteur himself didn’t opine on whether this might threaten existing life, but others were soon expressing unease following his breakthroughs in unlocking life’s chemical secrets.
On a spring day in 1869, at a salon on one of Paris’s bustling boulevards, a group of prominent thinkers — including some of Pasteur’s close colleagues — discussed science’s future. Buoyed by the pace of recent discoveries, they issued bold predictions.
Going first, the chemist Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot — an early proponent of synthetic biology and artificial food — proclaimed that “within a hundred years” humans would understand atoms and, with this, control the power of the Sun itself. (With the invention of thermonuclear weapons in 1952, which harness the same forces as stars, this prediction became hauntingly true.)
Following Berthelot, the biologist Claude Bernard offered his own prophecy, announcing that scientists would soon be able to artificially forge new lifeforms. Such comments inspired some present to dream of a future wherein “natural species” are “considered remnants of an aged, inconvenient world.”
But other attendees worried, commenting that meddling with “organic laws” would surely provoke the closing of the curtains on the human species. They imagined “old, good God with his white beard” responding by descending to Earth — like a weary bartender announcing last orders — and declaring “Gentlemen, we’re closing!”
Five years later, in 1874, the English economist W.S. Jevons produced a chilling image, expressing invention’s potential perils. He imagined “reasoning creatures dwelling in a world” where the atmosphere is “inflammable gas.” If “devoid of fire,” their kind may have persisted for epochs, happily ignorant of the “tremendous forces” a “single spark” could summon. How, Jevons asked, can we know we aren’t in a similar position?
A few decades later, one Hungarian science writer commented that when the first electric arc furnaces were developed in the 1890s — capable of producing unprecedented temperatures — no one was sure this wouldn’t ignite the atmosphere: producing, by chain reaction, a “world furnace.”
Fears of catastrophically igniting Earth’s atmosphere also hovered around early subatomic experiments, ever since Marie Curie first isolated radium in 1902. But, so too, did fears of synthetic organisms also begin spreading surprisingly early in the previous century.
Visions of artificial life
In 1905, The New York Timesreported that Bernard’s daring dream — of artificial life — had already become reality. It was sensationally relayed that a Cambridge professor had “produced artificial life.” The professor in question was John Butler Burke, who had produced what he thought were self-replicating globules by barraging sterilized beef broth with radium rays.
The New York Times article of 1905 also referred to Jacques Loeb, a German-American physiologist who had, in the previous year, declared biology must determine whether it is “possible to produce new species artificially.” By 1906, Loeb was declaring this was now “the goal of biology.” Having pointed out that “the number of species existing today is only an infinitely small fraction of those which can,” he added that nothing indicates “artificial production of living things” is impossible.
In 1910, following Loeb’s lead, the French biologist Stéphane Leduc became the first to announce the founding of biologie synthétique, or “synthetic biology.” But others immediately began envisioning the catastrophic potentials of the scientific creation of bizarre new forms of biology. In the same year Leduc introduced the world to the term “synthetic biology,” the Belgian novelist J.-H. Rosny aîné published his surreal 1910 Morte de la Terre. Therein, he imagined progress in chemistry accidentally producing a new “kingdom” of life, genetically unrelated to all previous terrestrial biology.
In the story, iron-based lifeforms first appear as “bizarre violet stains” and geometric patterns on human-made alloys. These angular creatures eventually organize into swarms resembling giant mobile ferrofluids, spreading over the landscape, feeding on traditional biology. It results in the rise of a parallel biosphere, which eventually consumes our own, causing human extinction.
Matter beyond our control
Not long afterward, in the 1930s, H.G. Wells visited General Electric’s New York headquarters. The company’s chief scientist, the Nobel-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, was tasked with entertaining Wells. Langmuir used his expertise in chemistry to brainstorm sci-fi plot ideas with the celebrated author, suggesting one involving the accidental invention of “a form of ice that was stable at room temperature.”
Theoretically, such an unprecedented form of ice, when encountering normal water, could act as a “seed crystal” — converting the entire liquid body into the newer version of H2O, which remains frozen at higher temperatures than before. The idea being that water, in its familiar form, is only metastable: capable of being nudged into a new state that — being more molecularly stable — spreads through all water in contact with the initial “seed.” If such a substance were somehow released into waterways, it could spell global disaster.
Wells wasn’t interested, but the idea eventually made its way to the American author Kurt Vonnegut, whose brother had worked with Langmuir. Vonnegut adopted the idea as inspiration for his sardonic 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. It depicts the invention of just such an unprecedented form of water — called “ice-nine” — which accidentally leaks into the sea, causing the Earth’s oceans to immediately freeze, eventually killing all life.
Thankfully, the production of substances like Vonnegut’s “ice-nine” appears physically infeasible, though scientists have indeed created exotic versions, or “phases”, of frozen water in the lab. Nonetheless, other possibilities — imagining the creation of unprecedented forms of matter that can catastrophically spread — have haunted physicists for decades. In 1986, the science magazine Omniclaimed that the invention of self-replicating nanobots, capable of feeding off normal biomatter, could rapidly reduce Earth’s entire biosphere to seething, synthetic “gray goo” — provoking reverberating worries in ensuing years.
A decade later, the launching of ever-larger particle colliders triggered yet more exotic fears. Could these experiments, it was asked, produce accidental black holes — devouring Earth — or even conditions that might tip the Universe, cataclysmically, into a new physical state? Again, the fear was now that our entire Universe may be metastable: capable of being prodded into a new and stabler state, entirely hostile to life as we currently know it, which would spread outward — propagating at the speed of light — from the initial starting point. This “ultimate catastrophe” came to be known as “vacuum collapse.”
Or, similarly, what about production of “strangelets”: hypothesized forms of matter, stabler than any previously extant, that might convert all our ordinary atoms into “stranger” stuff? Again, this would be universally deadly. Some scientists worried such accidents might genuinely threaten our existence. Thankfully, no such scenarios materialized; seemingly, we needn’t worry that current particle colliders will annihilate our Universe.
A new chapter in an old fear
Today’s concerns about mirror life are serious and should be taken very seriously. Just because a disaster is unprecedented doesn’t mean it cannot happen. That we have been lucky so far — like the “reasoning creatures” imagined, over a century ago, by Jevons — doesn’t mean we always will be.
Our probing into the world’s workings and our incessant tinkering with its laws hasn’t uncovered the “single spark” some have feared — the spark that might rapidly spread, snuffing us out — but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, silent, waiting to be found.
Some might look back at this history, of recurrent fears we are on the brink of creating deadly new forms of matter or life, and conclude that we needn’t worry. We’ve been wrong every time before, after all.
But the history of science is also full of failed statements about things that could “never” happen. Writing on future potentials for synthetic biology in 1912, none other than Stéphane Leduc — the scientist who, as previously mentioned, gave the field its name — made precisely this claim.
He pointed to his French precursor, Auguste Comte. In 1835, Comte claimed humans ascertaining the chemical composition of stars would forever remain “an obvious and eternal impossibility.” The method for accomplishing precisely this was invented only 24 years later, in the form of spectroscopy. This, as Leduc put it, immediately “made it possible to analyse stars more accurately than we can analyse an egg.” If science can tackle the riddle of the stars, once considered beyond our grasp, it might well one day also tackle the riddle of producing life, Leduc implied.
Given that invention’s rapidity hasn’t slackened since Pasteur’s day, it’s important to be abundantly precautious. History shows we are a trepidatiously intrepid species: restless in invention, fearful in result. Indeed, until surprisingly recently, scientists haven’t often given much thought to the wider ramifications and fallouts of research before embarking on it. But noticing this, and acknowledging it, is the first step to acting more thoughtfully — when it comes to probing nature’s perilous potentials — in the future.
What’s Up With Peter Thiel’s Obsession With the Antichrist?
The tech mogul is amping up his apocalyptic rhetoric—and adding a dangerous dose of extremism into the already-fraught culture war.
Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.
Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.
Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.
These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”
But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.
“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”
(The Four Horses of the Apocalypse, announced by the Fifth Trumpet)
Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.
Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”
Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.
“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.
Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.
“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”
Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.
“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”
He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.
Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.
Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.
Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”
Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.
“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.
Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.
“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”
Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.
“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”
He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.
Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.
Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.
Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.
After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”
These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”
But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.
“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”
Thiel is not a theologian, scholar, or prophet. So why pay attention to his biblical musings? Because Thiel is one of the world’s most influential men and his Antichrist speeches reveal his deep belief that religion is a weapon for political warfare—and he’s right.
Thiel’s Antichrist fixation fits a long tradition in American politics. Since the nation’s founding, Americans have sought to name the Antichrist—usually by pointing the finger at their political enemies. “The symbol of the Antichrist has played a surprisingly significant role in shaping Americans’ self-understanding,” wrote historian Robert Fuller in 1995’s Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession. “Because they tend to view their nation as uniquely blessed by God, they have been especially prone to demonize their enemies.”
Over time, the identity of Satan’s Little Helper has shifted from Native Americans to Communists, Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama—even barcodes and microchips have been implicated. From colonial days to the AI era, the hunt for the Antichrist continues. Today’s QAnon conspiracy theorists believe they are battling a cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. Unhumans, a 2024 book praised by JD Vance, equated progressives with bloodthirsty “unhuman” creatures. This turns politics into a zero-sum holy war.
“Once we label our adversaries in these cosmic terms—all good versus all evil—now there’s going to be no compromise,” said Fuller.
Thiel understands this. He frames his interest in the Antichrist as part of his own “political theology,” a term he borrows from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher who defined the practice of politics as a struggle against an existential enemy, arguing that politics is just religion in disguise. Thiel also draws on René Girard, a Catholic thinker (and one of Thiel’s Stanford professors) who warned that human societies tend to spiral toward violence in a hunt for scapegoats.
“There’s always a question of whether politics is like a market … or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don’t look into the sausage factory?” Thiel said, during a 2024 talk at Stanford. He explained the mechanism: “If, say, we’re having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we’ll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village … this sort of thing doesn’t really work if you’re self-aware.”
Thiel knows these dynamics well, but it’s not clear whether he’s horrified or impressed. His talks stop short of providing solutions. Instead, they meld Schmitt, Girard, and scripture into an incisive meditation on the power of apocalyptic ideas. Thiel positions himself as someone trying to help the world navigate a “narrow path” between Armageddon and Antichrist. But his rhetoric also sketches a playbook for holy war, scapegoating, crisis, and power—since Schmitt famously argued that power consolidates during existential crises, when constitutions can be suspended.
“We’re told that there’s nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is,” said Thiel during a talk at Oxford in 2023. “Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one-world totalitarian state more than Armageddon.”
He is already experimenting with this doomsday script: In January, he wrote an op-ed framing Donald Trump’s return to power as an “apokálypsis”—an “unveiling” of hidden truth and a chance to cleanse the nation’s “sins.” And in his religion talks, Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation. This reveals a telling urge to wield scripture as political weaponry.
Yet his approach has major flaws. For example, Thiel claims the Antichrist will be someone focused on existential threats and apocalypse, and who will usher in a totalitarian world government under the slogan of “peace and safety.” But Thiel’s Antichrist checklist—a paranoid obsession with apocalypse, control, and surveillance—describes Thiel himself.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a software company literally named after an all-seeing orb controlled by an evil wizard in The Lord of the Rings. Palantir is partnering with the Trump administration to supercharge government surveillance at a moment when the president openly embraces authoritarianism. The irony is so striking it almost seems like a confession. As comedian Tim Dillon quipped on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently: “It’s so strange.… You build domestic surveillance technology to surveil our friends and neighbors—and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
Thiel isn’t alone in mimicking religious themes. Billionaire Nicole Shanahan recently declared Burning Man “demonic,” while Andreessen Horowitz partner Katherine Boyle has invoked Christ’s crucifixion to argue that governments destroy families. Trae Stephens, a Thiel ally and self-proclaimed “arms dealer” who co-founded the drone warfare company Anduril (another warped Lord of the Rings reference), frames his work as part of a quest to “carry out God’s command to bring his Kingdom to earth as it is in Heaven.” Stephens’s wife, Michelle, co-founded ACTS 17 Collective (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), which evangelizes to tech workers and is hosting Thiel’s Antichrist lectures.
Meanwhile in Russia, Alexander Dugin—an ultranationalist philosopher and propagandist known as “Putin’s brain”—is the only other major political figure who fixates on the Antichrist as much as Thiel. In Dugin’s version, Russia is at war with the Antichrist, which is liberal modernity emanating from the “country of apocalypse”—the United States.
Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.
After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”
These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”
But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.
“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”
Not everyone is convinced by Silicon Valley’s pivot to piety. At the National Conservatism Conference this month, some traditional religious conservatives railed against their would-be tech brethren. Conservative firebrand Geoffrey Miller blasted artificial intelligence developers as “betrayers of our species” and “apostates to our faith,” calling for what The Verge described as a “literal holy war” against tech.
After all, if we’re hunting for existential enemies, Silicon Valley’s diabolically greedy tech billionaires—who wish to create “godlike” AI systems powerful enough to destroy humanity—top the list. But we must avoid falling into the Antichrist name-calling trap. Instead of asking, “Who is the Antichrist?” we must ask, “Why is a tech billionaire trying to convince us we’re on the brink of apocalypse?”
These rehashed Satanic panic tactics must be exposed for what they are: a cynical ploy to further inflame political divisions. It also seems like an awkward effort to cement an alliance with religious nationalists in the Republican Party, who also use apocalyptic language to frame their political goals. Journalist Matthew D’Ancona described Thiel’s Antichrist theories as a “highbrow version of MAGA End-Times theology.”
But naming the Antichrist is a dangerous tactic that often leads to crisis and violence.
“The whole concept of the Antichrist … fosters a crisis mentality,” said Fuller, the Antichrist historian. “And with the crisis mentality, now we put aside all other differences. There’s a tribal cohesion, a tribal unity, and it justifies even immoral acts because, to defeat an evil enemy, a Satanic enemy, you must do whatever is necessary.”
(Carl Schmitt quote, his “sovereign” was A. Hitler)
Last week, in the hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the words “demon” and “evil” trended on X as some on the right portrayed his murder as the work of supernaturally possessed Democrats and leftists. Major right-wing influencers echoed Carl Schmitt’s ideas, calling for a political crackdown on Kirk’s critics. Chris Rufo, a prominent right-wing propagandist, called on law enforcement to “infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate” the “radical left.”
This is where apocalyptic rhetoric always leads. When political opponents become evil, cosmic enemies, persecution, and violence become a sacred duty. This surge in demon and devil talk showed that Thiel has correctly identified a potent but perilous impulse in our politics.
But if tech billionaires seek to spread Christianity, they should stop hunting Antichrists and reflect on the words of Jesus Christ, who urged his followers to practice empathy and forgiveness and to care for people rather than exploit and surveil them. Instead of worrying about Armageddon, Thiel should heed the Gospels, which warn that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Now there’s scripture worth dwelling on—and it’s a problem that no AI, no surveillance, no power, no money can fix.
A large mural depicting current and former Chinese leaders: clockwise from top, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, and Jiang Zemin.Photograph by Mark Schiefelbein / AP
When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea has not aged well. According to a European survey of more than two hundred countries, 2022 was the first time in two decades that closed autocracies outnumbered liberal democracies in the world. Americans have become unreliable underwriters of the international order. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has incited Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War and China’s Xi Jinping is remaking global institutions in his own image, bereft of democratic values. When Xi visited the Kremlin in March, 2023, a little over a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told Putin that the world was changing in ways “we haven’t seen in a hundred years.” “Let’s drive those changes together,” he said. Putin, hands outstretched, nodded. “I agree.”
Donald Trump’s victory this November turned what some dismissed as an electoral fluke, in 2016, into an enduring political reality. “We have won,” Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian ideologue known to some as “Putin’s philosopher,” proclaimed on X. “Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.” Ren Yi, a blogger and grandson of a former Chinese Communist leader, wrote that Trump’s win, along with his chumminess with Elon Musk, has created something of a “techno-authoritarian-conservative” alliance that resembled the authoritarian cultures of East Asia. “The ‘beacon’ of the free world, the United States, will lead various countries into illiberal democracy,” Ren predicted. “There is no end to history, only the end of the Fukuyama-ists.”
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The morning after the U.S. election, I got a message from a seventy-eight-year-old historian in Shanghai named Xiao Gongqin. “I have predicted on several private occasions that Trump would win,” he wrote. Trump, he reasoned, was a necessary corrective against a “woke left” that “had truly gone overboard in recent years.” This level of antipathy toward American progressives is not uncommon among Chinese liberals, who, since 2016, have flocked toward Trump, in part to repudiate a Democratic Party whose emphasis on political correctness—real or imagined—reminds them of China’s past disasters in socialist governance. But Xiao is not a liberal, and his well-known anti-democratic influence on Chinese politics made him an instructive voice on America’s current predicament.
Xiao is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. Drawing on a range of sources—Chinese history; Samuel Huntington’s theory of “modernizing authoritarianism”; the Asian “dragons” of Singapore and South Korea, which had grown rapidly under authoritarian rulers—these intellectuals pushed, and supplied the moral ballast, for China to postpone the end of history.
Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”
As a writer covering Chinese culture and politics, I’ve watched with a sense of foreboding as America has begun to manifest the same authoritarian compulsions that have long dominated Chinese life. There is a cosmic irony in the way that the twenty-first century has played out: the West, hoping its adversaries would become more like it, has inextricably become more like them. Slowly, ideas that Xiao and his allies had propagated decades ago—the stabilizing force of the strongman and a reverence for cultural traditions—seem to have arrived in the control center of the world’s most powerful liberal democracy.
After Trump’s recent victory, I decided to pay Xiao a visit. I wanted to understand the scholar who had helped salvage the strongman from the dustbin of history, and to know what he made of the figure’s present, and likely future, proliferation. What I found, to my surprise, was a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people. He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism, and he even seemed to support America’s New Right. But as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao told me, “has its own problems.”
When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control.
On an overcast Monday evening, I arrived at a low-rise apartment tower in Shanghai, where Xiao lives with his wife. He is a sprightly man, with salt-and-pepper hair and wispy bangs that he brushes to one side. Every day, for twenty years, he has kept to an intense exercise routine—a hundred and fifty squats and more than three hundred volleys of a squash or tennis ball outside. During that time, he has been hard at work on a hefty three-volume history of China from antiquity to Deng’s “reform and opening up.” (He hopes to complete it by 2030.) Xiao has an obsession with classical music. He often leads guests into a spartan living room, where he shows off an oversized speaker system on which he spent tens of thousands of dollars. (“My entire life savings,” he told me.) On my visit, we listened to the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter’s rendition of the “Carmen Fantasy,” at a volume suited to the hard of hearing.
In the days after the U.S. election, Xiao wrote an essay on his blog in which he opined about the result’s geopolitical ramifications. He feared that Trump’s isolationist bluster would lead some Chinese to underestimate U.S. commitments to Taiwan, raising the “probability of direct conflict between the U.S. and China.” During our meeting, however, he also expounded on how the countries were similar. China’s neo-authoritarianism in the eighties, he told me, shared a common enemy with today’s Republican Party: the “romanticism” espoused by the “radical liberals.”
Xiao used the term romanticism to describe the belief, inspired by the Enlightenment, that humanity can design ideal societies through reason. He criticized this view for disregarding history and experience—or, to riff on an old adage, for “making the perfect the enemy of the feasible.” Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism, witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.
Shortly after Mao died, in 1976, the reckoning began. Crowds gathered around a Democracy Wall near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to post demands for freedom and accountability. Intellectuals called for a “New Enlightenment,” and an iconoclastic 1988 documentary, “River Elegy,” compared Chinese civilization to a muddied Yellow River that was in need of a “good scrubbing.” In the frenzy to repudiate the past, Xiao saw history repeating itself. The Cultural Revolution had cemented his faith in a liberal modernity, but it also, paradoxically, instilled a visceral fear of that modernity’s real-life accelerants. In the spirit of William F. Buckley, Jr., the architect of modern American conservatism, Xiao stood “athwart history yelling Stop.”
The seeds of “neo-authoritarianism” came to Xiao around 1983, when he was researching republican China, the country’s first major attempt at democracy. The experiment followed the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty, in 1911, and was seen by many of Xiao’s coevals as a fount of inspiration. But what Xiao found was complete and utter chaos. “The National Assembly couldn’t do anything except mess things up,” Xiao told me. “The parties would just go at each other with total disregard for the nation’s interests.” China, Xiao concluded, lacked the “software system” for democracy: a civil society, a rule of law, a culture of political bargaining and compromise. “I do not mean to say that I am fundamentally opposed to Western democracy,” Xiao told me. “I personally feel very envious of the United States and the West.” But, he went on, moving the system over is implausible because China “lacks so many of the conditions.” What China needed was something like a final emperor, the breaker of the despotic chain who would summon modernity by fiat. Xiao reverse-engineered democracy back to the strongman: “In order to have democracy, there must be civil society,” he told me. A civil society requires economic prosperity; economic prosperity requires political stability; and political stability “requires a strongman.”
In 1988, Xiao introduced his theory at an academic symposium, and “neo-authoritarianism” officially entered the public discourse. The idea was reviled by liberal intellectuals, who accused Xiao of rationalizing the status quo—or, worse, tilting China back toward the system that it had just escaped. But his theory seemed to mirror the temperament of Deng, who, for all his reformist tendencies, was a ruthless apparatchik. Throughout his reign, the man hailed as a pragmatic liberalizer jailed Democracy Wall activists and denounced unwelcome foreign ideas as “spiritual pollution.” In the spring of 1989, students gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest for greater political freedoms. Intellectuals led by the literary critic Liu Xiaobo joined a hunger strike in solidarity. Deng imposed martial law and approved the final order to clear the square.
Xiao told me that Liu and the demonstrators held “considerable responsibility” for the carnage on June 4th that year. The hunger strikers, it seemed, had contracted the same romantic virus that plagued the turn-of-century reformers, the Red Guards, and Gorbachev. “Neo-authoritarianism’s No. 1 enemy,” Xiao told me, “is the radical liberals.” Only once they were “marginalized,” he continued, could Chinese society stabilize and experiment with political freedoms. (Liu Xiaobo died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison.)
If reformers like Liu had, in Xiao’s view, pushed China beyond its immediate capacities, American progressives were now doing the same to the United States. For Xiao, the Democratic Party, élite universities, and Western corporate boards were the new epicenters of romanticism. Open borders ignored the real difficulties of cultural assimilation—it was, as he put it, like “mixing Type B blood with a Type A body.” Transgender identity was just pseudoscience: “The belief that everyone can decide their gender—it disregards human experience,” Xiao told me. (Xiao did not seem to be familiar with “radicalism” on the American right, from white nationalism to QAnon.) The implication was clear: in 1989, the man who repelled the radicals was Deng Xiaoping. In 2024, it was Donald Trump.
Perhaps one reason why authoritarianism has returned to America is that the country’s fundamental political questions are beginning to resemble those of the East. For most of American history, politics revolved around how to limit government. But, in the Communist world, the question was often about how to rebuild it—and save it from bad actors. The stakes felt higher. There are many probable causes of our eastward drift: the failures of globalization, the betrayals of technological progress, cultural anomie, the provocateurs who profit from the sense that the world is about to burn. Whatever the origin, America’s inner conflict now feels comparable to the pivotal decade when Xiao and his liberal adversaries fought over China’s future.
Following what many Americans considered the most consequential election of a lifetime, Elon Musk has vowed to “delete” a bloated government. Trump promises to eradicate an army of deep-state conspirators, whom he calls “the enemy within.” Democratic norms and the rule of law are mere windshield ornaments on the road to American redemption. In its emphasis on results, this approach is familiar to Chinese authoritarians. “The people didn’t want romanticism, they wanted performance,” Xiao told me when I asked him why he thought Trump had won. The Democrats didn’t perform, he added: they didn’t secure the border, and they didn’t improve the economy.
For all of Xiao’s attention to the psyche of “radical liberals,” I was most struck by his own. In the Liu Xiaobos of the eighties, Xiao had glimpsed a romanticism redolent of the Red Guards. In this light, an advocate for peaceful democratic change, who kept vigil in Tiananmen Square to protect students from oncoming tanks, had been similar to violent revolutionaries. Xiao, of course, had been a revolutionary himself—and who better to recognize a radical than a recovering radical? The current generation of Communist Party leaders is not so different in their perspective. “The Politburo is a Red Guard Politburo,” Geremie Barmé, a prominent Australian sinologist, told me. China, he continued, “lives with a completely unresolved, profound historical trauma . . . and is now led by people who are all the product of trauma. All of this is why it is so repressive.”
One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century’s giant of illiberal thought, drew his theories from his personal experience living in the Weimar Republic. Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel traced his anti-democratic conversion to earlier defeats: his “trench warfare” against progressive students in college; the post-financial-crisis marginalization of libertarian dogma. Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.
Thiel and Xiao are vastly different thinkers, but this only makes their commonalities more striking. In believing that democracy was either premature or past its prime, they turned to the strongman as an antidote. “The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, told me, “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When I asked Xiao what a democracy in China might look like, he said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.
For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won, where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.” ♦
Chang Che, formerly the Asia technology correspondent for the New York Times, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2022.
Donald Trump is a gift to science that allows us to better understand a variety of mental illnesses, how cults work, and the effectiveness of gaslighting.
The greatest presidents in American history had a lasting impact on the country and the world. The four Founding Fathers who served in the White House gave other countries a blueprint for making democracy work, Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, and Franklin D. Roosevelt returned prosperity to the US and helped end World War II.
But what about the awesomest president of them all (by his own account)? What will Donald Trump’s legacy be?
We believe that, ultimately, he will be remembered as a president who advanced science like no other… not as a champion of it but rather as an example of how various mental illnesses manifest themselves, as a case study on how gaslighting works, and how even a complete idiot with no discernible skills (other than a knack for conning people) can start a cult.
In other words, Trump is a gift to future generations of psychologists and social scientists that will keep on giving.
The former president likes to shower himself and his “accomplishments” with superlatives. In this case, they may actually be deserved.
Trump is probably the most prominent narcissist in history. As we have pointed out, he exhibits every symptom of this mental illness.
He deserves the title “Greatest of All Narcissists” (which is something all of them would aspire to) not only because he became the world’s most powerful person but also because he is so omnipresent and displays every symptom all the time.
Since most of his life has been well documented, researchers might be able to better understand any number of psychological disorders because of him.
Are people born as malignant narcissists or do they turn into them? Do they get worse over time? If so, why? Are there triggering events or is that a gradual process? Did Trump’s daddy issues have something to do with how he turned out?
These are all fascinating questions for experts that have not been answered conclusively.
What about being a compulsive liar? There has never been anybody who has lied as publicly and prolifically as Trump. Sometimes, it seems as though he lies only for the sake of lying. The former president lies both when it benefits him and when it doesn’t.
But does he even consider it lying, or does he just live in a fantasy world in which the things he says are true?
Is the compulsive lying linked to his other mental disorders, like the narcissism or his delusions of grandeur? Sometimes, it certainly seems like it. Many of his lies are tied to the compulsion to be best or to be right. Still, others are not.
Again, this will keep researchers busy for decades. And, when it is all said and done, maybe we can understand liars better.
And, while Fox News is a propaganda network from our perspective, for sociologists it might as well be a 24-hour webcam broadcasting from the inside of a cult. This is unprecedented and could answer questions explaining religious fanaticism, nationalist movements, and more.
That is Trump’s true legacy… and he deserves some recognition for his contributions to science.
Sadly, there is no Nobel Prize for being the best case study for a mental illness.
In addition, even though there are those (including Trump himself), who want to bestow traditional post-presidential honors upon him, these seem inappropriate and insufficient.
You can’t name a bunch of elementary schools after a guy who is so clearly an imbecile (to be fair, if you knew beforehand which schools would be shot up, it would be great to name those after Republicans).
And, even though GOP lawmakers want to change Dulles International Airport to Trump International Airport, that hardly seems fitting since the former president once ran an airline into the ground.
So, what to do?
To cement his place in history, it would seem most appropriate to name one of his mental illnesses after Trump. But which one?
The lying? Probably not. “Compulsive Trumping” sounds a bit… clunky.
What about narcissism? Now we are onto something.
First, let’s consider where the term comes from. In Greek mythology, Narcissus was so smitten by himself that he could love no other.
But Trump far eclipses that beautiful Greek boy in terms of vanity.
Not only is he the best at everything, but, at 6’3” and 215 lbs, he also has the body of a Roman god?
Poor Narcissus, so absorbed with his own image in the water (mirrors hadn’t been invented yet), that he was condemned to view himself as his life ebbed away. At least he didn’t choose to inflict his image upon others.
Therefore, it’s time for Narcissus to make way for somebody even more self-absorbed.
We suggest: Donald Trump’s Disease.
Just as Lou Gehrig is now better known for the eponymous illness than his Hall of Fame baseball career, it would be appropriate for future generations to know Trump as the poster manchild for narcissism.
Malignant Trump’s Disease does have a nice ring to it, and it seems like a fitting tribute to a man who will allow scientists to advance the study of mental disorders like no other.
Author
Klaus Marre is a senior editor for Politics and director of the Mentor Apprentice Program at WhoWhatWhy. Follow him on Twitter @KlausMarre.
(Empires, wherever they existed, had certain common characteristics):
Emperors, whether conspicuously insane and angry/paranoid (Caligula, Nero, Ivan “the terrible”) or, in some cases, relatively amiable and approachable, were consumed by the need to perpetuate, defend and expand the boundaries of the Empire.
In order to accomplish this mandate, Empires required outsize expensive standing armies and navies, fueled by priority demands on the treasury of the country, and an endless supply of male citizens of acceptable levels of mental and physical health obliged to be available from the age of 18 to 55.
Patrilineal succession was the usual way for Emperors to keep power within the family, with exceptions within the inner circle involving poisons and assassinations altering course to competing patrilineal lines or even Empresses—Elizabeth and Catherine of Russia—Elizabeths I and II, Victoria of England. Citizens of the Empire had no say whatever in the selection of their leaders at any level.
HOW “IMPERIUM” IN THE US, 2024, TOOK ROOT
Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, left his family home in Kallstadt, Germany in 1885, obtained a steerage ticket and joined the 1.8 million Germans who emigrated to the US, settling initially in New York City pursuing the barber trade. His motive for leaving Germany had to do with the requirement of Imperial Germany that male citizens of sound mind and body commit to 2 years of compulsory military service.
Life in the chaos and overcrowding resulting from huge numbers of immigrants settling in NYC did not agree with Frederick, so after 6 years he managed to join the long trek to the west coast and the opportunities presented by desperate gold rush participants.
First in Seattle and later in the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush, Friedrich (later anglicized to Frederick) engaged in various business ventures such as restaurants and brothels-both in high demand where money flowed like water and “anything goes” was the norm.
As the “gold fever” died off along with the lure of profits from gambling, prostitution and extortionate prices for supplies for gold seekers, Frederick gathered up his wealth and planned to live the rest of his life not as a struggling barber but a member of the property owning “gentry” of his home town (Kallstadt, Bavaria) in Germany.
For a time, Frederick, now with wife, property and standing in his home town, looked ahead to launching a family and a comfortable life going forward.
The Bavarian Palatinate authorities, however, would not let him. They claimed he had left Germany as an illegal emigrant, evading taxes and the compulsory two-year military service. Frederick pleaded that he and Elisabeth were “loyal Germans and stand behind the high Kaiser and the mighty German Reich”. It was all to no avail.
Before the bureaucracy could mobilize its police powers to carry out the penalties due an “illegal alien”, Frederick liquidated what he could and, with his new bride and what he could carry boarded another ship to the US with, at the time, only cursory medical checks and paperwork at Ellis Island for west European immigrants with provable assets.
Frederick Trump and his bride arrived in NYC at the peak of a real estate frenzy extending into the cities outer boroughs. So instead of going further west, Frederick’s assets went into apartments and commercial properties in the city. Eventually, a son was born, Frederick Christ Trump. All was well until Frederick Senior died of the Spanish Flu in 1918, leaving his wife and son, 15 years old. Frederic C. and his mother managed to keep the family business going until Junior was old enough to take over full management responsibilities.
(Looking ahead to Donald J. Trump’s 2015 campaign for President, largely based on immigration fears. It’s worth noting that the Trump family was, upon the US entry into World War I, threatened along with many other immigrants from Germany who were referred to as “enemy aliens” to such an extent that some were murdered and assaults on the street were common. As a result, Frederick Trump’s family began to claim that they hailed from Sweden instead.)
Donald’s father Fred continued to invest heavily in New York real estate, laying the foundations for today’s business empire.
He eventually had a management team with which he could enjoy the fruits of wealth, including a visit to Scotland during which he met Mary, a maid, then employed at the Andrew Carnegie estate in Scotland. Courtship and marriage took place, after which, eventually, 4 children were born, the last of whom in 1946 was Donald John Trump.
Over time Frederick C.’s management team activities got the attention of the Manhattan District Attorney for various shady practices and links with criminal organizations. Clearly however, Junior’s skill at marshalling permits, materials and contractors for the construction of new buildings got the attention of the War Department which was faced with the need to speedily get housing built for workers at defense plants all over the country during World War II, so a deal was struck to relax Trump’s legal issues while he was engaged in constructing worker housing.
Not to mention the princely sums paid Frederick C. during the worker’s housing construction. It’s been remarked upon that this government project was the foundation of the Trump Organization’s rapid acquisition of power and wealth in Queens Borough, New York City.
Junior’s eldest son Frederick Christ Trump Jr. had been groomed by his father to succeed him in managing the Trump Organization, but was unhappy with the practices and associations with organized crime his father employed and resisted having anything to do with them. Aviation was his “independence” card, as he trained, and pursued a career as a pilot with Trans World Airlines.
Unfortunately the unrelenting pressure his father applied to abandon his aviation career and take the reins of the Trump Organization took its toll, causing Frederick Junior to eventually become an alcoholic and forfeit his pilot certifications, causing his early death at 42. This left Donald J. as the only male heir left as Frederick Sr. descended into early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Donald J. made a great show of concern for his father, while at the same time being mentored by daddy’s Mafia lawyer, Roy Cohn.
When Donald J. took the reins of the Trump Organization officially, one of his first acts was to try to deprive the family of his elder brother of their share of the inheritance by, among other things, cutting his nephew, suffering from a variety of health issues, out of the corporate health plan to which the family was entitled. The psychologist Mary Trump, Donald J.’s niece and sister of the nephew mentioned, was often quoted during the 2024 campaign as trying to alert the public of the danger of allowing Donald J. another chance at the Presidency. Unfortunately her warnings were not heeded by the voters.
The irony here is that Donald J.’s grandfather fled Imperial Germany, only to wind up with a grandson who, according to all indications seeks to create an Imperial regime on the smoking ruins of Constitutional Republic we have, up to now enjoyed.
Addendum
Dr. Mary Trump published a book, ominously titled, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
Most readers won’t need any more clues about her subject – her uncle, President Trump. But those who do could consult the cover, which features a photo of a young Trump before he became the figure who now lumbers upon the world stage and lurks in so many nightmares.
Three and a half years into the Trump era, endless words have been spent illustrating the chaotic and cruel personality that can, to cite just one example, schedule a huge ego-gratifying rally in the middle of a deadly Covid pandemic caused by a viciously contagious virus.
According to her publisher, Mary Trump will bring her special perspective – insider, psychologist, writer – to bear on incidents and information never before revealed.
Trump isn’t aging well
Having devoted years to the study of the man and the Trump clan, I can say that the bits teased so far suggest that Mary Trump has the goods. To begin with, she’s the daughter of the President’s eldest sibling, Fred Trump Jr., who may have been the original victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.
As publisher Simon and Schuster put it: “She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for regifting, to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.”
Warm and easygoing, Frederick Junior was, by all accounts, ill-suited to play the role of cutthroat real estate baron, which was what his father expected of him. Happy to step in, Donald did all he could to prove that he was the more deserving son.
When Fred Jr. finally ceded first position among the heirs to the family business, he became an airline pilot. Donald mocked his profession. “What’s the difference between what you do,” he would ask, “and driving a bus?”
After Fred Jr. died at age 42 from complications of alcoholism, Donald turned his death into an object lesson that reflected well on himself. Donald pointedly abstained from tobacco and alcohol because of his brother’s struggle, saying, “I watched him. And I learned from him.”
The cruelty didn’t stop with Fred Jr.’s death in 1981. Later, when the paterfamilias Fred Trump Sr. died, heirs learned that his will distributed his estate among his children and their offspring “other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr.” The children of Fred Jr. sued, noting that an earlier will, written prior to Fred Sr. being diagnosed with dementia, had granted them proper shares.
Soon after the suit was filed, Donald changed a health insurance policy, taking away coverage for a disabled infant born to Fred’s own son, Fred III. (A second telling anecdote from author Harry Hurt III, who has written about the Trumps, describes Donald briefly considering evicting his brother and sisters from their rent-free homes in a Trump building unless they paid cash for the property.)
When asked in 2000 whether withdrawing the child’s insurance was cold-hearted, the man who claimed to be a billionaire said, “I can’t help that. It’s cold when someone sues my father.”
The suit was settled and the baby was again insured, but 16 years later, when he was running for president, Donald Trump seemingly had no regrets. Asked about the incident, he said, “I was angry because they sued.”
For those who know the family lore, the circle is completed by a little anecdote published in Hurt’s 1993 book “Lost Tycoon.” Hurt reports overhearing Fred Trump Sr. talking about his son Donald and his wife Mary flying off together. “I hope their plane crashes,” said Fred, adding that then “all my problems will be solved.”
Reports on the upcoming book suggest that the author will share juicy stories she learned from the President’s sister, Maryanne Barry. It wouldn’t be the first time that Barry, perhaps inadvertently, revealed something true about her brother. Speaking with writer Gwenda Blair in 1990, Barry shared a story about when Donald was a young man and turned a game of catch with Barry’s seven year-old son into a cruel contest.
“Donald kept throwing it faster and faster, harder and harder, until I hear this crack and the ball hit David’s head. Donald had to beat the seven year-old.”
This cold-hearted nature followed him into his political career. As president, Donald Trump has treated the children of asylum-seeking immigrants with great cruelty, separating them from their parents and locking them in cages. During our current pandemic, with over 116,000 dead in the US and more succumbing every hour, he has been so cavalier as to advocate dangerous unproven cures.
The biographer quoted below is Michael D’Antonio, a former journalist for Newsday and the author of The Truth About Trump. “In my own experience as a Trump biographer I have answered questions about the origins of the President’s weird ways by citing both genetics and his upbringing. This nature-and-nurture answer is a bit of a cop-out, but it is the best I have been able to muster after studying the man and his family.”
Because she has lived close to the source and possesses real expertise in mental health, Mary Trump’s opinion matters greatly to those seeking answers. I can’t wait to read her book.
Trump’s comments are in line with his vicious verbal attacks on Mexicans and other immigrant groups in the United States. But they betray his own family background. His grandfather, Friedrich Trump, a German, lived a migrant life in the US on the edge of illegality and rejection. During the World War I, he belonged to an immigrant group which was sweepingly labelled the “enemy within” or – in his grandson’s parlance – a Trojan horse.
World War I was not a happy time for German-Americans. They were summarily labelled as “alien enemies” whose true allegiance lay with the Fatherland. Nativist spokesmen agitated against “hyphenated Americans” as potential spies and saboteurs. Use of the German language was seen with suspicion. In contrast to many of their compatriots, the Trumps did not need to anglicise their surname as it worked perfectly in English.
The most notorious case of public violence was the lynching of German immigrant Robert Prager in Illinois. He was tarred and feathered, forced by an agitated crowd to kiss the American flag and sing patriotic songs, and finally hanged from a tree in front of 200 onlookers.
Frederick Trump evaded the fate of Prager, but not the other deadly weapon which swept the world once the war was nearing its end. In 1918 and 1919, Spanish influenza killed between 20m and 50m people worldwide. On a summer’s day in 1918, Frederick returned home from a stroll through New York with his son Fred (Donald’s father), went to bed feeling sick, and passed away the next day.
Paranoid nation
The dangerous mix of paranoia and xenophobia directed against German-Americans during World War I had profound and long-lasting effects. The Alien Enemy Bureau was established in the early days of the war with a brief to identify and arrest disloyal foreigners. It was headed by J. Edgar Hoover, then a young civil servant in the Justice Department. Here he picked up the tools he would use later as all-powerful director of the FBI.
In 1940, the notorious House Un-American Affairs Committee published The Trojan Horse in America, a compendium of domestic organisations believed to work for foreign powers. Chapter titles included “Mussolini’s Trojan Horse in America” and “A Trojan Horse of German War Veterans”.
All this was reason enough for the business-minded Trumps to deny their German heritage, claiming they hailed from Sweden instead. Donald’s father Fred invested heavily in New York real estate, laying the foundations for today’s business empire. It was only from the 1980s that Donald Trump started to stand by his German roots.
Trump’s own grandfather was an illegal emigrant whose income stream included alcohol and prostitution at a time when these were legally contested. He was an unwanted returnee to Germany, and then a potential “enemy alien” within the United States who had declared his loyalty to the German Kaiser – but ultimately made an immense economic contribution spanning generations.
Today, his grandson lambastes Mexicans as criminals, intends to erect a wall to keep them out, and warns of Syrian refugees as Trojan horses. If Donald Trump wins his party’s nomination, historians will have many a field day digging out the contradictions between his anti-immigrant rhetoric and his family background.
Most Serene, Most Powerful Prince Regent! Most Gracious Regent and Lord!
I was born in Kallstadt on March 14, 1869. My parents were honest, plain, pious vineyard workers. They strictly held me to everything good — to diligence and piety, to regular attendance in school and church, to absolute obedience toward the high authority.
After my confirmation, in 1882, I apprenticed to become a barber. I emigrated in 1885, in my sixteenth year. In America I carried on my business with diligence, discretion, and prudence. God’s blessing was with me, and I became rich. I obtained American citizenship in 1892. In 1902 I met my current wife. Sadly, she could not tolerate the climate in New York, and I went with my dear family back to Kallstadt.
The town was glad to have received a capable and productive citizen. My old mother was happy to see her son, her dear daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter around her; she knows now that I will take care of her in her old age.
But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.
Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.
In this urgent situation I have no other recourse than to turn to our adored, noble, wise, and just sovereign lord, our exalted ruler His Royal Highness, highest of all, who has already dried so many tears, who has ruled so beneficially and justly and wisely and softly and is warmly and deeply loved, with the most humble request that the highest of all will himself in mercy deign to allow the applicant to stay in the most gracious Kingdom of Bavaria.
In 1879, anti-monopolist Henry George published Progress and Poverty, one of the most important books on the politics of industrialization. At the time, unparalleled technological progress through the deployment of railroads and telegraphs had generated massive wealth. But instead of broadly shared prosperity, Americans saw deep poverty in the midst of all the bounty. George asked why. In the tradition of Anglo-American land reformers, he concluded that the root cause of radical inequality was neither labor nor capital, but land. George’s argument went as follows. While mankind could pool its labor and efforts to create a surfeit of new consumer goods, the amount of land – an input into everything – was fixed. Moreover, the value of land had no relationship to work. Simply owning a lot around which a city grew up meant you’d get rich, where if your lot remained in a sparsely populated area, you wouldn’t. Conversely, if you ran a business or a factory to help build that city, or lived in a rented apartment, your income would be increasingly sucked up by the landowner profiting from the value you created by operating or living there. It was the social community that generated the wealth of the landowner, not the landowner itself.The result, George argued, was an entire rentier class of landowners, men who did nothing but grow fat on the backs of both capital and labor. The solution was to tax land, because such a tax, unlike taxes on incomes or tariffs, couldn’t be avoided. The book was a runaway bestseller, not just in America, but worldwide. Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet had many Georgeists, and the National Park system, among other American institutions, was shaped in part by it, as was in some ways the mid-20th century libertarian movement. The profession of economics formed in opposition to George’s popularity. There are still Georgeists today.And indeed, George has a lot to teach us about one of the key drivers of inflation for the middle class – housing. While inflation isn’t as high as it was in 2022, prices are still the number one concern for voters. And it’s not hard to see why. Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with inflation statistics, showing that though price aren’t going up as fast, costs are still rising, especially in a category of something everyone needs. “The index for shelter rose 0.4 percent in July,” wrote the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “accounting for nearly 90 percent of the monthly increase in the all items index.” That’s… a lot.Prices for housing are already at a record high, because of a pervasive long-term structural housing shortage in America. Since 2022, interest rates have increased, so homeowners with a locked in low mortgage rate don’t want to sell their homes and move, the result being fewer existing homes on the market. One would think that the response would simply be to build more housing, especially on the cheap end. And yet, that’s not happening. The traditional “starter home” for a young family just doesn’t exist anymore.And it’s puzzling why there isn’t more construction. One reason, posited by a noisy group who self-identify as “YIMBY’s,” which stands for “yes in my backyard,” argue there are too many local rules limiting development put forward by annoying people that want to maintain the local character and high housing values of their neighborhood by keeping others out. And yet, just pointing at over-regulation in and of itself isn’t a satisfying explanation. After all, the collapse in housing starts really began in 2007, and it hasn’t rebounded. Something is wrong with the market, as price signals aren’t working.To understand what is going on, the low output of housing production in the face of high demand, let’s start with a slide in the most recent investor presentation from the number one homebuilder in America, D.R. Horton. Here the corporation maps its market share – on the right – with the number of homes sold – on the left.In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023! D.R. Horton isn’t some anomaly, it’s the market leader, along with Lennar, PulteGroup, Toll Brothers, and NVR, who round out the top five. In fact, these firms have gained so much pricing power and margin that Warren Buffett, who prefers purchasing firms with what he calls a competitive “moat,” aka market power, recently bought stakes in D.R. Horton, Lennar, and NVR.The story here, in other words, is consolidation. In 1994, the ten largest builders had just 10% of the national market. By 2018, the top ten builders had a little less than a third. Partly this consolidation is due to a credit crunch. During the financial crisis from 2007-2012, 55% of residential developers disappeared. There were also post-crisis mergers, like Pulte Homes and Centex, Lennar and CalAtlantic, Tri Pointe and Weyerhauser, and so forth, but many of the acquisitions these days are smaller roll-ups, like D.R. Horton buying an Arkansas specialty builder Riggins Custom Homes, Gulf Coast builder Truland Homes, or lot developer Forestar Group, or Lennar acquiring developer WCI Communities. Analysts are projecting 2024 to be another strong year for M&A.Of course, such numbers understate consolidation; national shares matter very little, since housing is local, and concentration is higher when you get to local levels. In Miami-Fort Lauderdale, for instance, Lennar has 47% of the market for new homes, in Los Angeles, D.R. Horton has about a third. As economist Luis Quintero noted in a paper, 60% of local markets are now “highly concentrated,” a new phenomenon. In 25 of the top 82 markets, one builder controls at least 25% of the market. That’s 60% of the housing markets in “Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and western Pennsylvania.”D.R. Horton brags to its investors about this fact, because local dominance is the name of the game.So why all the consolidation? And more importantly, why hasn’t the number of builders bounced back? If margins are up, why aren’t there new entrants coming in to take profit and share? To answer this question I started by reading a bunch of investor documents from the big homebuilders. And I realized that to call these businesses “homebuilders” is misleading. It’s striking how little of their business has to do with, well, building. For instance, here’s D.R. Horton in 2023: “Substantially all of our land development and home construction work is performed by subcontractors.” Here’s Lennar in 2023: “We use independent subcontractors for most aspects of land development and home construction.” I suspect most of the other big guys would say something similar. These aren’t builders, they are financiers that borrow cheaper than real developers and use that cheap credit to speculate in land, hiring contractors to do the work. They are, in other words, middlemen.These are large financial institutions that own a bunch of land which appreciates in value, and then build on it and sell homes. It can be quite risky, since they have to hold land on their books and that land can go down in value. But for the last fifteen years or so, it’s been a bull market.A centralized industrial structure for building is a new phenomenon in America. Homebuilding used to be decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of contractors. And to some extent, it still is. You can hire a contractor to build a house. However, smaller developers increasingly struggle, as going to a bank to borrow and start or grow a development is difficult. So is access to land. And that means that over the past three decades, the center of the industry, the construction of the starter home that millions of people need, has been centralized in the hands of a small number of players. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2017. “By the Commerce Department’s count,” wrote Justin Lahart, “there were about 368,000 construction firms operating in the U.S. as of 2014 (the last year with available data). That compares with about 530,000 in 2005, and is the lowest number on record going back to 1977.” The big homebuilders are clear about their advantages, which have nothing to do with operational efficiency. Here’s D.R. Horton:“We believe that our national, regional and local scale of operations provides us with benefits that may not be available to the same degree to some other smaller homebuilders, such as greater access to and lower cost of capital due to our balance sheet strength and our lending and capital markets relationships and volume discounts and rebates from national, regional and local materials suppliers and lower labor rates from certain subcontractors.”Capital, construction supplies, and labor are all cheaper for the big guys. Neat trick. And then there’s land. “New builders also have to secure land to build on,” reported the WSJ, “which is difficult in areas where large builders have already secured the most attractive lots.” Large builders with access to capital can hold land for long periods of time, especially in a period like the post-financial crisis era when the Fed held interest rates quite low. In May of this year, the CEO of Toll Brothers described this dynamic to investors, discussing how their advantage in capital leads smaller players to sell out their land holdings.So, what we’re actually seeing more from the smaller builders who are facing some capital crunch is land deals that they have tied up, they’ve processed approvals on, they thought about building homes on, they’re having a hard time finding the regional banks to finance them. And while they can’t make a full profit they would have made had they built homes, they can make a fair profit by flipping the land to us. And so, we’re seeing quite a few deals like that out of the smaller, more local and regional builders.In other words, these middlemen are really all about financing. From 2008-2022, the Federal Reserve held interest rates at zero, which allowed those who could borrow to do so very cheaply. But of course, whether you could borrow makes all the difference in the world, as I noted when discussing the Cantillon effect. Big middlemen can borrow, whereas smaller players or new entrants cannot, so land ends up in the hands of those with strong balance sheets.In 2022, the Fed raised rates, changing the industry. Big builders no longer want to hold billions of dollars of land on their balance sheet because financing costs have gone up. So what they’ve done is pay a financier, often private equity, to hold the land for them and take the risk of the land dropping in value, which is called a “land light” strategy. In return the financier gets a fee. Builders retain the right to buy the land back if they want it, through a “right of first offer” contract. Here’s an example of a deal between D.R. Horton and lot management company Forestar.Here’s how D.R. Horton characterizes their control of housing lots.Interestingly, I suspect there’s a cartelization effect going on as well. Here’s Toll Brothers CEO Doug Yearley a few years ago:“We’re doing significantly more third-party land banking where we assign a contract to a professional land banker, who then feeds us land back on an as-needed basis,” Yearley said. “And then, we’re doing joint ventures with either Wall Street private equity or with our friends in the home building industry, the other builders.”What exactly does that quote mean? I don’t know, but it seems kind of crazy that large homebuilders would be doing joint ventures with each other on land acquisition, when that could very easily lead to holding supply off the market and preventing smaller developers from competing to build cheaper homes. More broadly, the story here is the differentiation of homebuilding into two different groups. The first are the financial middlemen who contract everything out and control the industry, buying cheap and hoarding land. The second are actual developers who want to build, but are boxed out because they can’t borrow money. I suspect that in this dynamic we might find an incentive for local overregulation. I don’t know much about the political strategy of the homebuilders, but it would be weird if they didn’t use such a competitive weapon. And we do see some elements of that, such as when D.R. Horton and its private equity partner Brookfield were able to get valuable underpriced land in Arizona because of their financing advantages.Regardless, the net effect of consolidation of homebuilders is significant, estimated at keeping 150,000 new homes from being built every year, which is roughly $100 billion of construction. So what’s the solution?Well, in this case, the answer is likely a combination of policy interventions. The most important is to equalize credit access for smaller and local developers. We should foster the creation of more local banks, or offer local subsidies or preferential treatment of local developers in buying public land. Another big part of this dynamic is a lack of knowledge. Policymakers and smaller developers need more information about who holds local land lots and who are the big builders, especially at a municipal or regional level.There aren’t great sources of data for who holds undeveloped parcels off the market. Another is to impose land limitations to prevent land hoarding, or tax the land of lot developers so they don’t hold land off the market. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division have a loophole in their merger disclosure form, which is called the Hart Scott Rodino form, which allows big firms to avoid telling the Federal government when they make acquisitions of real estate. That’s a problem, considering the likelihood of consolidation.Regardless, it’s important to move the discussion about housing away from the focus on local regulations, as this dynamic is clearly a national problem involving a market structure where price signals are not bringing in more supply, but are bringing higher margins to a small group of players. In some ways, the land monopoly is the very first monopoly America ever addressed, through the equal parsing out of land lots through the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass ascribed the cause of slavery as consolidation of “land monopoly” and called for “land limitation” in response. Many states today still have land limits on the books, though these are often ignored. Henry George, in other words, was just representing an American tradition. And it’s one we should take seriously.,
Notes on Putin’s game theory for pressuring Kharkiv and the real reasons behind his wartime cabinet reshuffle.
Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side. Photo: Contributor/Getty Images
In the last few days, Russian troops have launched an offensive in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, advancing around 5 kilometers and seizing a few border villages along the way. None of this is surprising: Ukrainian forces have been shelling the neighboring Russian region of Belgorod for months, and Russian officials have been openly discussing creating a buffer zone to protect the territory and its residents. Troops have been massing on the Russian side for weeks. The only thing left was for Vladimir Putin to approve the order to move in.
The Kharkiv offensive is likely designed to achieve two parallel political and tactical goals. “Moving the border a few kilometers is not necessarily going to prevent Ukraine from launching drones and missiles at Belgorod,” noted the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Michael Kofman. “When they’re discussing a buffer zone, what they are attempting to do is shift the line so that they can threaten Kharkiv and force a partial evacuation, which would prove politically significant.” Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city and, until the war, was primarily Russian-speaking. “It’s not the Russians’ intention to take Kharkiv, nor do they have the forces for it,” Kofman explained. “The point is to draw Ukrainian forces to its defense, fix their reserves there, potentially weakening the front line in Donetsk for a Russian attack.”
Russian troops are advancing quickly in part because they haven’t yet reached Ukraine’s main defensive lines, but also because the offensive comes after key problems have been allowed to fester on the Ukrainian side, both in Washington and in Kyiv. In Washington, it took seven months to finally approve critical military aid for Ukraine, during which Ukrainian forces steadily ran out of ammunition, both to shoot back at the enemy and to intercept the drones and missiles attacking its cities and civilian infrastructure.
But, as I’ve written before, Kyiv’s problems aren’t all Washington’s fault. Volodymyr Zelensky dawdled on the politically sensitive question of expanding the military draft, allowing the Ukrainian military’s manpower shortage to grow acute. Now that the draft law has finally been signed and implemented (just this month), it will take many more months to find these new soldiers, equip and train them, and get them to the battlefield. In the meantime, Ukraine is uniquely vulnerable, and it had long been expected that Moscow would take advantage of this window to launch a new offensive. “The Russian military can see what everybody else sees: Ukraine has a deficit of manpower and reserves to cover the front,” Kofman explained. “Their goal is to create a dilemma whereby the Ukrainian military cannot reinforce the defense of Kharkiv without weakening the front line elsewhere.”
There is some hope in the West that Ukraine might be saved now that American aid is flowing again. But, as Kofman told me, “the supplemental is not talismanic.” It hasn’t helped with manpower—nor was it supposed to. It doesn’t help with the building of fortifications—and it wasn’t supposed to do that either. And it certainly can’t do anything to help Ukraine address the systemic problems within its own military, like poor communication, training, cohesiveness, and the unwillingness to report bad news up the chain of command. The supplemental, Kofman said, “will help Ukraine avoid the worst-case scenario this year, but things are likely to get worse before they get better.”
Kremlin Musical Chairs
By law, a Russian president must form a new government after his inauguration. By custom, since Russian law is a hazy concept, the Russian president—who, for the last two decades, has almost always been Putin—has used the opportunity to reshuffle his friends and allies among the various ministerial positions. It’s a game of musical chairs in which demotions are masked as lateral moves, and in which a simulacrum of change at the top is used to paper over the fact that there is only a finite number of people Putin trusts with the ship of state.
And because loyalty is, for Putin, the key qualification for government service, he has a hard time getting rid of anyone for incompetence. Such people are not fired but simply moved to another powerful (and lucrative) position, where he can continue to keep an eye on them.
This is why Putin removed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu from his post on Sunday and scooted him over to the National Security Council. Under Shoigu’s leadership, the Russian army failed to execute Putin’s harebrained scheme to take Kyiv in 72 hours—or in the ensuing two-plus years. The amount of corruption and theft in the Russian military meant recruits were poorly equipped after Russia began its “partial mobilization” in September 2022—remember the video of a commander telling the men to stock up on their wives’ tampons because they’re handy in treating bullet wounds? Ammunition was often in short supply. Who can forget the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rants at Shoigu, asking him, crudely, where the artillery shells were?
Prigozhin then led a march on Moscow to demand the defense minister’s ouster. Putin, with the help of Aleksandr Lukashenko, defused the immediate crisis, then killed Prigozhin two months to the day he began his anti-Shoigu mutiny. But despite the allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness, Putin left Shoigu in place. After all, Shoigu was a good friend—the two often vacation and partake in shamanistic rituals together—and a loyal servant.
But then, last month, several ultra-high-ranking military officials were arrested for corruption and for taking eye-popping bribes. One of them, Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, was a close associate of Shoigu’s. The noose was clearly tightening, and now, eleven months after Prigozhin called for his firing, Shoigu is finally out, replaced with economist Andrei Belousov, who will work as the head beancounter at M.O.D., making sure the generals and the bureaucrats don’t steal quite as much, quite as openly—and that the artillery shells get to the front.
This, of course, is classic Putin. “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold,” C.I.A. director Bill Burns said last summer at the Aspen Security Forum, and he’s right. Putin believes in punishment delayed, meted out slowly and deliberately, on his terms, on his timeline, and never under public pressure. Which is why Shoigu’s firing may have seemed like a surprise to anyone who thought Putin had moved on and forgiven. He never really does.
The real surprise, though, was the ouster of Nikolai Patrushev as the head of Russia’s National Security Council. Patrushev, a silovik’s silovik, was a K.G.B. man like Putin and shares many of Putin’s hard-line, paranoiac—and increasingly millenarian—views of the world. He was a member of Putin’s innermost circle, one of the very few people who knew about and encouraged Putin’s plans for conquering Ukraine.
And then, bam, just like that, he was out, replaced by… Shoigu. (Today, it was announced that Patrushev would be one of the president’s special “assistants” in charge of… shipbuilding.) This one really puzzled me, so I called my good friend Mikhail Zygar, an immaculately connected Russian journalist and author of All the Kremlin’s Men. Zygar, who now lives in New York (Moscow recently issued a warrant for his arrest), has just started writing The Last Pioneer, a Substack on the inner workings of the Kremlin. It has quickly become my favorite and most illuminating source on how that byzantine place really operates.
“They’re very close in terms of their point of view, but Patrushev has a big personal agenda,” Zygar explained when I asked him, essentially, Why Patrushev? “Even though they share a worldview, it’s a personal thing. As [Putin] gets older, he wants less and less that [others] burden him with their opinions. Patrushev is someone who is constantly buttonholing him.” This demotion, Zygar believes, is a way of shutting Patrushev up. Shoigu, Zygar added, is another example of someone who is a kindred spirit but whose opinions Putin no longer values since he now envisions himself as the generalissimo. “Putin needs fewer and fewer people,” said Zygar. “You can tell by all these arrangements that he doesn’t need people who will say anything to him. He needs people who will listen, not talk. Putin is acting like someone who is fucking fed up with people’s opinions. He already knows everything by himself.”
Another interesting point here: Patrushev had been advocating for his son, Dmitry, who until Sunday was the agricultural minister. Patrushev apparently—and incredibly—told Putin that his son would make an excellent prime minister. (Zygar has more on Dmitry Patrushev and the other “princes” of Russia here and here; don’t miss it.) Instead, over the weekend, the younger Patrushev was promoted to vice premier at the same time that his father, Putin’s old friend Nikolai, was demoted.
This too, Zygar points out, is classic Putin: Putin the referee, who makes sure that no one sinks too low or rises too high. “In some ways, this is a strengthening of the Patrushev clan’s influence,” Zygar said of Dmitry’s promotion (along with the promotion of another Patrushev acolyte). “In that case, if you add something in this column, you have to take something away from the other column.” By demoting Patrushev senior, Putin was able to maintain an equilibrium and show that only his own power is endless. This, Zygar explained, was a way to show both Patrushev and everyone else in the system that, in the czar’s palace, “no one’s influence is unlimited.”
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow is a staunch critic of a Western-induced ‘cultural miasma’. Records have shown his links to the KGB and to Vladimir Putin.
The patriarch and the president reinforce each other’s conviction that the two-year-old war in Ukraine is necessary to prevent a decadent West imposing its depraved liberal values on Russia.
In April 1242, with the Russian lands in danger of being overrun by the advancing forces of the Teutonic Knights, Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod needed a miracle. And, as his outnumbered forces rode out to confront the invaders on the frozen waters of Lake Peipus, he got one. “In fierce battle came the crash of breaking lances and the ringing of sword on sword, until the ice turned red with the blood of men,” wrote the official chronicler of the Novgorodian princedom, “until in the sky appeared God’s hosts of heavenly troops, aiding our Prince to victory … I know this is true, for an eyewitness hath told me so.”
The chronicler’s reassurance that God must be on our side because “an eyewitness hath told me so” is a curlicue embellishment on a time-honoured theme. Princes and presidents throughout history have claimed the endorsement of Heaven to shore up their authority. Vladimir Putin is no exception.
The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has generally been an ally – oftentimes, a servant – of the Russian state since the establishment of the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus’ in 1589. Under the ultra-conservative, antisemitic Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who served as procurator of the Holy Synod between 1880 and 1905, the ROC became part of the campaign to fight foreign influence and return Russia to its own “God-appointed” path, opposing western ideas of individualism, democracy and freedom of thought – desiderata that would be voiced again with gusto in the second half of Putin’s reign.
Despite the Bolshevik persecution of the Church, in 1927 Patriarch Sergius pledged the ROC’s loyalty to the Soviet state, triggering a schism and the declaration of a rival seat of Russian Orthodox power, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. Under Boris Yeltsin, the ROC was kept largely on the margins of power. Putin made a bigger effort. He spoke of his lifelong Orthodox faith and used it to his advantage. At his first meeting with George W. Bush, he showed him a metal cross that he said had been a gift from his mother on the occasion of his secret baptism in the 1950s. Although he didn’t wear it during his time in the KGB, Putin said he had had the cross blessed on a trip to Jerusalem in the mid 1990s at his mother’s behest and it had later miraculously survived a fire at the family dacha. Since then, Putin said, “I have never taken it off.” Putin returned much of the property confiscated from the Church by the Bolsheviks and showered its leaders with praise and money. In 2007, he attended the ceremony in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that ended the 80-year-old schism within Russian Orthodoxy. “The restoration of church unity is an important condition for rediscovering the lost unity of the Russian people,” he declared.
When Putin announced in 2012 that he would return to the presidency after serving a term as prime minister, Patriarch Kirill, who had been elected in 2009, was his most vocal champion. The reign of Vladimir Putin, he assured the faithful, was “God’s miracle”. Kirill endorsed Putin’s description of the 1990s as a new Time of Troubles and blamed Russia’s “moral collapse” on western influences, including the excessive individualism that accompanied the liberalisation of politics and the economy. He gave thanks that the Church had remained a bastion of integrity, holding Russian society together in those difficult years, preserving the nation’s true values and ready now to aid President Putin in his crusade to put Russia back on its feet.
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and the president of the Russian Federation were soulmates, dedicated to the same “eternal principles” of conservatism, stability and strong rule from the top. When the KGB archives were opened briefly in the 1990s, a free-thinking Orthodox priest, Fr Gleb Yakunin, trawled through the classified documents and came away convinced that the Moscow Patriarchate was “practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB”. Yakunin listed all the agents within the Church who made regular reports to the security services. He revealed that “agent Mikhailov”, who travelled regularly to Switzerland, was none other than “a certain Archimandrite Kirill, working in the Church’s department of external relations”.
When members of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after staging a performance of their “Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Kirill made the most of it. Russia and Orthodoxy were once more under threat, he warned, for the moment by “blasphemy and outrage”, but physical violence might not be far behind. “Those who would invite us all to mock our shrines, reject our faith and, if possible, destroy our churches are testing the people’s ability to protect their holy places.” For Kirill, the “holy places” that require protection extend beyond the borders of the Russian Federation: the “canonical territory” of the ROC is considered to encompass all places where Orthodox Christians follow the Russian rite, just as canon law shall be applied to Russian citizens wherever they abide. His own title, Kirill is fond of reminding people, is Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’.
Kirill’s assertion of Moscow’s authority abroad paralleled the state’s Russkiy Mir doctrine, entitling the motherland to intervene in the fate of Russians beyond its boundaries. Putin, in turn, cited Kirill’s devotion to “God’s intentions regarding [his] land and [his] people” as legitimising his own mission to reunite the Russian lands. Patriarch and president both declared themselves in favour of Russian pride and Russian patriotism; and both stated their intention to defend “traditional values” in the face of the “cultural miasma” seeping into Russia from the West.
Following the protests of 2011–12, Putin increasingly adopted the sort of conservative language that Kirill had long favoured, with the apparent aim of shoring up his support among traditional Orthodox believers, some of whom had taken to the streets to demonstrate against him. Kirill’s favourite themes – that Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” was being assailed by “liberal trends emanating from the Protestant societies in the West” – appeared with regularity in Putin’s speeches. He told the Russian parliament that the West had sunk into a morass of depravity and was now trying to inflict it on Russia. “The Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God. What can you say! Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction. The [western] elites are going crazy and this cannot be cured, it seems. But our duty is to protect our children. And we will do this. We will protect our children from degradation.”
The annexation of Crimea in 2014 presented Kirill with a dilemma. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church in Ukraine had split, with some priests no longer accepting the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. When masked soldiers of the Russian Federation – Putin’s “Little Green Men” – appeared in Crimea, priests of the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) had rushed to their side, blessing their holy mission and helping to negotiate the surrender of Ukrainian troops. Fr Dimitry Vasilenkov, a priest who would receive the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship by presidential decree for “providing care in Crimea”, saw the Church’s role as the fulfilment of divine will. “What can this be, if not God’s miracle? The Lord did not allow for any bloodshed. [After all], polite people need polite chaplains.” The invading forces were invited to use religious premises as barracks and for stockpiling weapons, while Orthodox priests loyal to Ukraine who refused to help were chased out of their churches. One them, Fr Ivan Katkalo, said the clergy were acting on direct orders from Moscow. “[Their] priests carried out assignments that were set at the very top levels […] When priests allow military people carrying weapons into their church, this stops being a church and starts being an organisation that answers to the state.”
Other participants in the “Crimean Spring” also had connections to the ROC, including the banker Konstantin Malofeyev, the so-called “Orthodox oligarch” whose charitable foundation had spent tens of millions of dollars supporting the Russian Orthodox Church. In February 2014, he had warned Putin that Western Europe was on the verge of “absorbing” Ukraine “element by element”. He demanded the immediate annexation of Crimea, to be followed by the fomenting of discontent in eastern Ukraine to create “political legitimacy and moral justification” for a Russian takeover. In Malofeyev’s plan, the pro-Russian message and the call to rebellion would be disseminated by ROC priests in sermons to parishioners across Russian-speaking Ukraine. Within a matter of weeks, Crimea had been annexed and Malofeyev’s former head of PR, Alexander Borodai, was named Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Malofeyev subsequently spent large sums of money financing Igor Girkin’s Sloviansk Brigade and promoting the “historic” duty of Russians to volunteer to fight to protect their Orthodox brothers abroad (the most famous literary example of this is Anna Karenina’s lover Vronsky setting off to defend the Serbs from the Ottomans in the 1870s). A unit calling itself the Russian Orthodox Army was also commanded by Girkin and financed by Malofeyev. It was, said Borodai, a “public-private partnership” with the Russian state.
Far from condemning Russian military aggression, Patriarch Kirill seemed to condone it. As early as 2011, he had commended the willingness of the “[Russian] Christian believer to sacrifice his life more easily than the non-believer, as he knows that his existence is not going to end with the end of this life”, and declared that the Church had always blessed those who fought in a “just war”. Christians, he said, had an obligation to defend their homeland and, given that the Russian Orthodox lands encompassed the entire territory of Holy Rus’, it was right and proper to continue the fight for Russia’s “spiritual sovereignty” in Ukraine. When hostilities escalated in Donbas in 2014, Kirill claimed that “the conflict has an unambiguous religious underpinning”. “Catholics and schismatics”, he said, were moving from “preaching hatred for the Orthodox Church [to] carrying out direct aggression … under the guise of an anti-terrorist operation”. He instructed priests to bless the Russian troops departing for battle, as well as the tanks, rockets and shells that would be used to kill the Christians over the border. The head of the Church’s department for cooperation with the army, Bishop Stefan of Klin, explained that “our armed forces have sacred help from above, from God and from the heavenly saints”.
When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Patriarch Kirill supported his contention that it had been made necessary by the actions of “groups who view Russia as a thorn in their flesh [and] wish to wipe Orthodox Rus’ from the face of the earth”. In a sermon at the Cathedral of Cyril and Methodius in Kaliningrad, he assured the congregation that the war was the fault of the West: “Our Fatherland has committed no crime. People are against us not because we are bad, but because we are different.”
When in September 2022 Putin announced the mobilisation of young Russians to fight in Ukraine, Kirill assured them it was their Orthodox duty to go. In a speech that could have been made by Islamist jihadis, he promised eternal joy to those willing to sacrifice themselves in the cause of holy war. An international group of Orthodox scholars and clergy made the case for expelling the Russian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches. “Just as Russia has invaded Ukraine,” they declared, “so too the Moscow Patriarchate of Patriarch Kirill has invaded the Orthodox Church.”
Instead of bringing the faithful back to the Russian fold, Kirill has seen millions of them depart. Fr Nicolay Pluzhnik, a Russophone priest in the Kharkiv region, had previously been loyal to Moscow, but could not accept the patriarch’s authority. “When I hear them say they are protecting us and fighting some ‘Holy War’, I think they are either blind, or they are not serving God but the devil. We were living peacefully until they came. But far from protecting us, they bombed and tortured and killed. Before the war, parishioners were completely free to choose what church they went to […] For many of them it was not even a significant difference to go to a church that followed Moscow or not, they just wanted to pray to God. Now all of that has changed.”
Some formerly pro-Moscow priests joined the autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church; others, including the monks of the historic Pecherskaya Lavra in central Kyiv, faced searches and evictions as the Kyiv authorities became convinced they were sheltering Russian personnel and equipment. According to a 2023 Royal United Services Institute report, “the one body of ideologically committed agents supporting the invasion was the Russian Orthodox Church. Beyond its efforts to support Russian information operations, its priests were widely recruited and run by the Russian special services and their monasteries and churches used as safe houses […] The use of religion as cover is not only a widely established method of the Russian special services but also creates its own protection mechanism because of the political sensitivities of state targeting of religious institutions.”
When the desired rapid victory in Ukraine did not materialise, religion provided another useful prop. Putin’s long-time adviser and sabre rattler, Sergey Karaganov, declared it was time to go nuclear, with a pre-emptive strike on a Nato city such as Poznan. It would be a hard choice, Karaganov admitted, but – just as he did with Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Teutonic Knights – God would support Russia’s cause. “The creation of nuclear weapons was the result of divine intervention. God handed a weapon of Armageddon to humanity to remind those who have lost the fear of hell that it exists,” he said. “We will use God’s weapon, thus dooming ourselves to grave losses. But if we do not do this, Russia will die and most likely the whole of human civilisation will cease to exist.” By using God’s nukes, Russia “will not only save ourselves and finally free the world from the five-century-long western yoke, but we will also save humanity”, Karaganov declared. “In the end, the winners are not judged. And the saviours are thanked.”
Martin Sixsmith is an author, television and radio presenter and journalist. Adapted from Putin and the Return of History: How the Kremlin Rekindled the Cold War by Martin Sixsmith with Daniel Sixsmith (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25; Tablet price £22.50).
In 1953, a peek under the curtain enveloping what Churchill called “a mystery wrapped in an enigma”—his definition of the Soviet Union, revealed the following events. First “Stalin” (Josef Djugashvili) died of a “stroke”? while dreaming up yet another purge. Then Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s “executioner in chief”, begging for his life, joined his pal in the afterlife via numerous bullets administered by various likely purge targets, and, according to N. Kruschev, himself among them.
After the brief appearance on the scene of Stalin’s “heir” soon enough exiled to managing a power plant in Siberia, the team of “Bulgy and Krush”, as they were referred to in the Western press, Nicolai Bulganin and Nikita Kruschev—later only Kruschev, emerged as the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, the office formerly held by Stalin.
Over time, the feared NKVD, renamed the KGB, settled into a slightly relaxed relationship with, among others, the US CIA. During this time Kruschev and his family traveled to the US as a guest of President Eisenhower, participating in the famous “Kitchen Debate” with his “minder”, Vice President Richard Nixon.
The agent of the title, assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow, officially a protocol officer, known in this capacity as Micheal Phillips, performed his tasks with the usual efficiency and dispatch.
His wife accompanied him in this assignment, whose biography referred to her as a former schoolteacher, complimented his role with forbearance (Spaso House, our embassy in Moscow was no holiday hotel) and an unusual ability to read her husband’s unspoken signals and expressions along with passing skill in the Russian language, enabling both to regularly be found mixing with Russian crowds, habitués, venues and the natural landscapes present in the city of Moscow, “minders” from the KGB always on watch.
Unusually for a foreign service officer, Micheal, whose hobby involves restoring and maintaining collector cars during his respites in the US, drove around in a second hand Pobeda typical of the make used by his KGB minders, necessitating random visits to various service garages around Moscow.
It was a little odd to see an aging Russian car with US diplomatic plates running around here and there among the thousands of Pobedas in Moscow’s roads, usually messy with the “mud” of melting snow making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. Besides that, an assortment of plates from the “Union’s” band of captive nations sometimes replaced the diplomatic plates on Micheal’s car. No doubt that “losing the yankee’s car” led to a number of embarrassments and likely demotions among Micheal’s minders.
Suddenly it was realized that there was a “mole” in our embassy leaking secrets to the KGB. Micheal, among his other duties, was assigned to track down the mole. Tricky business, finding a traitor among colleagues tightly bound to each other socially in the confines of embassy life in an officially hostile country.
Not long after Micheal’s assignment, he and Margaret, his wife, drove to their usual service garage for maintenance. They waited in a reception area for customers—this being a “high-end” service facility, while work was being done. As usual, someone would roll a cart with glasses of tea into the reception area. This time however, instead of the usual low-ranking employee doing this job, a rather more upscale character propelled the cart, clearly more attuned to the social graces of an educated person.
Micheal paid special attention to the shoes of this individual, clearly free of traces of the muddy sidewalks a worker would have on his shoes, not to mention the light color of the soles of the man’s shoes—clearly never having gone near a puddle or splash, not to mention the floors of the service garage.
With something of a flourish, the attendant carefully placed the glasses of tea before the two Americans. As he was leaving, the attendant looked back as if to see the Americans enjoying their “gift”. Micheal coughed as he raised his glass, which Margaret interpreted as his “don’t do that” signal. The attendant went on his way, satisfied that his “gift” would have its planned effect. Quickly, thanks to the carpet in the reception area, Micheal quickly emptied his glass behind his chair, as Margaret, on cue, did the same.
It was clear to Micheal that the mole was a person who knew of Micheal’s new assignment, which narrowed the list of suspects down to no more than the fingers on one hand—one of whom was Micheal’s section chief.
The Dénouement
In the spooky world of “Intelligence”, reporting on suspicious activity on the part of a friend and colleague is a requirement of the job. Confrontation however, of whatever sort is never used in such cases. The best route to resolution is actually to use the spy organization which handles the mole to expose him or her. Micheal was well versed in this process.
The time, 1 minute into May 9 Moscow time, is celebrated in the Soviet Union as “Victory Day”, when Germany’s surrender in WWII actually took effect. Micheal was unusual in the CIA because he was, for more than a decade, despite being offered several promotions, remaining in his Moscow post (with annual “vacations” in the US).
“Long termers” such as Micheal were the real professionals in the intelligence trade, cultivating deep relations with their assigned country and even, in some cases, developing virtual relationships with counterparts in the host country’s intelligence service as a sometimes useful “back channel” in, for example, hostage and sometimes spy exchanges.
Nameless on both sides, Micheal’s and his counterpart engaged in an annual gift exchange to coincide with Russia’s Victory Day holiday. The following is a typical scenario: On an agreed upon time and date, Micheal would carry a mesh bag containing 6 bottles of Johnnie Walker Red to a tea vendor whose cart was stationed along a walking path in one of Moscow’s parks. While exchanging pleasantries with the tea vendor, Micheal’s mesh bag would be traded for a similar mesh bag containing six cans of the same caviar served at tables of the Kremlin’s highest officials.
This exchange however contained a twist. The night before, Micheal carefully removed the cover over the bottle caps, placing an english word on each bottle before carefully restoring the cover. The words were, when assembled: “the mole has seen the light”. This, of course, is not a lie because moles (the animal variety) experience light even as they are blind when dug up by humans or animals, or facing obstacles forcing them to surface and start another tunnel in a new direction.
Human moles, just like animal ones don’t always understand the meaning of their exposure, and can be used to convey bogus information to their handlers which, when intercepted, confirms their treachery.
Of course, Micheal’s nameless counterpart knows this scenario well, and suspects that he may be being “set up” to receive information designed to mislead, which his superiors might blame him for passing on.
At this point, the mole is totally useless to his Russian handlers, besides being a source, when exposed and interrogated, of Russian tactics and methods. At some point the “mole” will realize that every minute he spends in Russia might be his last and will suddenly seek a new posting elsewhere, if not forfeiting his career by resigning—an admission of guilt like no other.
Whatever happens, Micheal got the result he was assigned to get, in exchange for which he got two more months leave in the US, enough time to finally finish restoring the Morgan 4/4 and taking it on a long road trip with Margaret—a lot more fun than driving his battered, rusty Pobeda on the polluted roads of Moscow.
Following are photos of, first, the various models of the Pobeda, Russia’s first “mass produced” automobile, then a view of the Morgan 4/4, featured in the Agent/Micheal story.
1946 Pobeda, Russia’s first mass-produced car
1936 Morgan 4/4, handbuilt, ordered years in advance, this model beyond price.
Klaus Marre is a senior editor for Politics and director of the Mentor Apprentice Program at WhoWhatWhy. Follow him on Twitter @KlausMarre.
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