The Social World

Category: Books and Arts

  • RIP Rob Reiner

    RIP Rob Reiner

    The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

    It is particularly ironic that Reiner met such a horrible end, stabbed to death in his own home, because the vast majority of the films that he made, especially earlier in his career, were infused with a sense of all-American joyfulness and hope that made him, for a while, a filmmaker talked off in the same breath as Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg. Son of Hollywood royalty Carl Reiner, he began his career as an actor, most notably in the role of Meathead in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. It made him a household name, but also contributed to a sense of Reiner as a dumb, good-natured left-winger: he once remarked that “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’”

    It was in part in an attempt to escape from this straitjacket of typecasting that Reiner switched from acting to directing – although he continued to appear onscreen throughout his career, both in his own films and in those of others – and the first picture that he made was a particular triumph, in the form of 1984’s rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. With a script that was co-written by Reiner along with its stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, it resulted in endless quotable lines – not least the description of an amp that “goes up to eleven” – and Reiner’s own performance as the hapless documentary maker Marty Di Bergi demonstrated his ability to play both warmth and uselessness on screen with great skill.

    The film’s modest success led to a new and hugely successful second wind for Reiner, whose first seven films as a director represent one of the most interesting and accomplished runs of form that any 20th-century filmmaker ever managed. He excelled at romantic comedies, which included the John Cusack vehicle The Sure Thing and, of course, the peerless When Harry Met Sally, but his varied repertoire included everything from Stephen King horror (Misery) and swashbuckling meta-comedy (The Princess Bride) to all-American military courtroom drama (A Few Good Men). Another King adaptation, the coming-of-age drama Stand By Me, is commonly regarded as one of the seminal films of the Eighties, and his pictures made huge amounts of money at the box office.

    Although Reiner never won an Oscar – he was nominated for producing A Few Good Men – and was probably, ironically enough, too versatile a talent to be seen as a true auteur, it was once a dependable badge of quality to see A Rob Reiner Film. He was also a skillful producer of high-end cinema through his Castle Rock production company, which was responsible for such modern-day classics as In The Line of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption and the loopy Malice, in which the Aaron Sorkin-doctored script allowed Alec Baldwin to declare, histrionically, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I AM GOD!”

    Any suggestion that Reiner had traded his soul to anyone – be it a deity or a devil – to achieve success came crashing down with his first megaflop, the Bruce Willis family comedy North, which attracted bemused reviews and repulsed audiences. He rebounded with the Sorkin-scripted The American President, a slick, assured piece of entertainment that inadvertently led to The West Wing, but his directorial career never reached the same heights again. Instead, for the next three decades, he either made undemanding comedies or soft-focus issue dramas that played to his status as one of Hollywood’s premier liberal filmmakers.

    The major exception was 2015’s Being Charlie, an unusually gritty drama about addiction and familial conflict that was explicitly autobiographical; it was co-written by his son Nick and was based on his life as an addict, as well as dealing with his strained relationship with his successful, distant father. The film was both a commercial and critical flop, and most journalists observed that there was a tension, both on and off-screen, between Reiner’s attempts to bring about reconciliation and a real-life happy ending for his troubled son, and Nick himself, who had clearly undergone experiences that no swell of orchestral music could compensate for. If reports of Reiner’s murder are accurate, then it will be this film – not this year’s lackluster Spinal Tap sequel, or indeed anything else in his great, distinguished career – that will be remembered, for all the wrong reasons. Which is an undeserved end to what was a fine life – right up until its horrific ending.

  • The fight for the future of Warner Bros.

    That creaking sound you hear creaking is Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. studio, turning in his grave. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had purchased one of Hollywood’s most respected studios for a staggering, indeed insane $83 billion – which makes Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 seem like the bargain of the century. The sale would create a monopoly the likes of which has never been seen before in the film industry.

    Most people assumed that such a bid – in this increasingly beleaguered business – is very, very bad news. They might be correct. That’s why it’s even more staggering that Paramount have today, with impeccable timing, announced their own hostile takeover bid for Warner, offering an even more outlandish $108.4 billion and asking its shareholders to reject the Netflix dollar in favor of a deal that values its shares at $30 each.

    Paramount, which has offered repeatedly to buy Warner but been rebuffed six times in the past 12 weeks, has shown its teeth in no uncertain terms. CEO and chairman David Ellison announced that it was suggesting a “strategically and financially compelling offer to WBD shareholders” and that “WBD shareholders deserve an opportunity to consider our superior all-cash offer for their shares in the entire company.” For good measure, Ellison called it “superior value, and a more certain and quicker path to completion.” In other words, a very, very wealthy man is set on acquiring Warner, and not even the Netflix deal – which was looking all but a fait accompli last week – will stop him.

    Anyone who knows the slightest thing about cinema will recognize that three very different games are in play here. Warner has traditionally had a reputation as “the directors’ studio,” working closely with auteurs such as Kubrick, Eastwood, Nolan – until they screwed up the release of Tenet and he fled to the loving arms of Universal – and, more recently, Greta Gerwig. Netflix has a similar reputation for working with auteurs (Scorsese, Fincher, Bigelow and Guillermo del Toro have enthusiastically taken their dollar), but they are – shall we say – less than committed to the theatrical experience. And Paramount have just wrapped up their Mission: Impossible series with Tom Cruise – the latter two films of which underperformed financially – and their biggest franchises are Sonic the Hedgehog, A Quiet Place and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Auteurs are not to be found on their lot.

    Warner has been having a vintage year, notwithstanding the departure of Nolan. Under the inspirational guidance of Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, the studio has produced hit after hit, making every other Hollywood institution look uninspired and tame, and this has been recognized accordingly with the Golden Globes nominations. The genius of it is that they’ve put out everything from the likely Oscar front-runners One Battle After Another and Sinners to the squillion-grossing likes of Minecraft and Weapons. No other studio currently rivals Warner for creativity, verve and, indeed, financial success. Lest we forget F1, which they distributed, was a mega hit off the back of Brad Pitt’s charisma and an iconic Hans Zimmer score. Their absorption into either the Netflix or Paramount fold cannot, in all honesty, be seen as a good thing.

    What is likely to happen? President Trump suggested last weekend that a Netflix-Warner acquisition “could be a problem” because of market share laws, and so Ellison’s offer, which was not entirely unexpected save in its enormity, might appear to circumvent this, much as Disney’s purchase of Fox (for a mere $71.3 billion) has established similar precedent. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, a man who thinks you can and should watch Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone, will be furious – and it’s not impossible that he will counter with a yet-higher offer.

    None of this is especially good for cinemagoers. De Luca and Abdy may be visionaries, but the studio is still under the control of David Zaslav, an uninspired bean-counter if ever there was one. In The Studio, the Seth Rogen Hollywood satire, one of the central jokes was that the eponymous institution is desperate to make a film based on the Kool-Aid man. At this rate, whoever ends up buying Warner will have drunk the Kool-Aid in no uncertain terms and will want a return on their investment. Cinema, in its most fragile state imaginable, will only suffer as a result of this dick-swinging – and Jack Warner’s ghost must be tormented by what it is witnessing happen to his pride and joy.

  • Will the new Avatar be the last?

    Will the new Avatar be the last?

    For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I’m unemployed right now.”

    Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate. He has now spent 16 years in the Avatar universe, and after the inordinate success of the first picture – still the highest-grossing film in history – he has shown no interest in diversifying away from the world of Pandora and its motion-captured blue denizens, instead constructing an increasingly baroque and detailed universe that drags in vast audiences. The films may be titanic in length – the latest one clocks in at 195 minutes – but they are also staggering in ambition and imaginative force, even if those who might prefer something more cerebral and less, well, blue are likely to be disappointed.

    Nonetheless, the now-71-year-old Cameron might be forgiven for dampening sky-high expectations with the latest release, as the world of cinema has changed beyond all recognition since 2009. Back then, 3D was the hottest game in town, with the Terminator and Aliens director its leading pioneer, and audiences were desperate to put on their plastic glasses and soak up the spectacle. Now, these same audiences have been reduced in the post-Covid, streaming era, and 3D is a novelty format that only Cameron still seems enamored of, despite or perhaps because of the high supplements that theater owners can charge for tickets.

    There are other issues, too. While the PG-13 Avatar films are hardly adult-oriented, there is also a sense that the only pictures that are doing really well are those aimed at teenagers and children – witness the recent success of the Wicked and Zootopia sequels, and the failure of virtually everything else – and that Cameron’s eco-zealotry may be an uncomfortable fit in the MAGA era; its predecessors both were released under Democratic administrations and seemed almost the cinematic exemplars of those governments.

    There is also the problem that the Avatar pictures aren’t actually all that good. Cameron’s undeniable skills as a director – pacing, action, spectacle – are perhaps outweighed by his deficiencies, namely that he cannot write dialogue or convincing characters to save his life, that his plots are stick-thin and that his love of technology is far greater than his interest in actors. Yet he seems unwilling to move into the kind of joyfully dynamic blockbusters that The Terminator, its superior sequel and Aliens represent – as well, for a guilty pleasure, as 1994’s very silly, very funny True Lies. Instead, he seems as lost in Pandora as his paraplegic marine Jake Sully, forever doomed to walk its groves in his own version of a giant blue body.

    For all this, I suspect that Fire and Ash will be an enormous hit, just like its predecessors, and that Cameron will remain within the Avatar universe, as planned, until 2031, when the final installment in the series is intended for release. By then, the filmmaker will be nearly 80; not in itself an ancient age, but the idea of his doing another Titanic-esque epic might seem beyond him. And when he finally expires, worn out by too much boundary-pushing and technical fiddling, we may look at this long period that this undeniably gifted filmmaker chose to spend in an imaginary world of his own creation, and wish that he had done something more interesting, instead.

  • The Last Westerner captures the American Southwest

     The epigraph to this novel is from Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, one of the French author’s Arthurian romances. It is fitting because The Last Westerner is a medieval romance, as well as an epic set in the American Southwest in the closing years of the 20th century. The dedication is to the author’s wife and to the late Edward Abbey, a personal friend. It is equally fitting because The Last Westerner is a western novel in setting and theme and will bring to mind other western novels such as Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992). Abbey’s book is subtitled, An Old Tale in a New Time. That could be the subtitle for The Last Westerner too, and as for pretty horses, Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s novel is full of them. For this is a story about the search for a beautiful horse, a Peruvian Paso named Cortez. And as far as the Western landscape it is here too in all its awful grandeur, evoked beautifully by riveting descriptive prose like that found in McCarthy.

    The story begins at the Bar Nun Ranch in southeastern Utah, owned by Jody James. The prized show horse is hers, and when it’s stolen, thus initiating the action of the novel, her lover Jeb Ryder vows to recover it for her. Ryder is a retired range detective in his early 50s, and what follows is a story that turns into an epic quest on horseback through the canyons and desert mountains of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, a journey that finally ends in Mexico. The horse changes hands many times, and once is running with a herd of wild horses. Early on, Ryder acquires a helper, a 16-year-old Navajo kid named John-Wayne Bilagody, who was one of the thieves. He wants the horse too, for his girlfriend. Williamson means us to think of Don Quixote’s loyal retainer Sancho. It is not the only reference or evocation of that greatest of novels. For Ryder, like the famous Don, is trying to live according to values of an older more honorable time. Like him, he sometimes looks ridiculous, as when in a fever-induced delirium he charges the radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory west of Socorro, New Mexico. Ryder is the last westerner, then, in two distinct senses. He is a holdover from the Old American West of history and folklore, and he is a western knight-errant in a postmodern America.

    While Ryder is convalescing at the Quantrill ranch in Catron County, New Mexico, John-Wayne takes over the narration. Ryder has gotten himself into trouble with the law, but the ranch owner, Jack Quantrill, is a local lawyer who knows how to deal with a judge. Quantrill brings to this reviewer’s mind Gavin Stevens, the gentleman lawyer from William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust. Like Stevens, Quantrill is a regional patriot and lover of books, rooted in the land and loyal to the values of another time.

    Ryder has a female counterpart also, Carmen Dominguin, a beautiful woman of Spanish and English ancestry, who is the leader of an armed band of Mexican insurgents who have crossed the border into the United States to escape pursuing government forces. Now they have Cortez, whom Carmen names Juarez (after the famous Mexican revolutionary). She promises to return the horse, but not until the brigada gets back to Mexico. So Ryder and John-Wayne must ride with them south through the remnant of what Williamson calls “the ancient American wilderness.” It is still there, even today, crisscrossed by highways of course, which the brigada crosses at night to avoid detection. The greatest danger to the two Americans is the second-in-command, Humberto, who wants to kill them to simplify things, and to eliminate a rival (he is in love with Carmen also); but they are protected by Carmen, who lives and commands by a code of honor very similar to Ryder’s.

    Williamson has a fine eye for detail, and his prose captures, or recreates, the subtle changes in climate (fall is approaching), as well as the changes in light and temperature from early morning to twilight, and from day to day as the nights grow colder and the light becomes more angular. Nor does he neglect describing the physical work of making camp, finding water, shooting game, bedding down.

    The last section takes place in the State of Sonora in Northern Mexico. The ordeal is over, but the story is not, nor the romance. Ryder claims Cortez (or Tortuga, as he has nicknamed him), but pays John-Wayne for his help, plenty for him to buy his own girlfriend a horse. Ryder and Carmen spent several weeks in the charming colonial-era city of Hermosillo, and then journey to the Sea of Cortez. At Bahia Kino, a fisherman offers to take them to visit an island. They are nearly trapped by a storm, but escape. Ryder, being a man of his word, returns with the horse to Jody and her splendid Utah ranch. But he finds that things have changed. Jody is not exactly overjoyed to see Ryder, or the horse (it’s three months of living in the wild have ruined it for showing). And so Ryder is a free man again, free to return to Mexico and Carmen. Searching for months for a prized possession, he has found what is infinitely more important. For Ryder, the son of chivalry, “women are the whole world, and the promise of it.”

  • Margaret Atwood’s autobiography reveals a steely self-possession

    Margaret Atwood’s autobiography reveals a steely self-possession

    The problem with the contemporary literary life, most of its observers usually agree, is that nobody at large in it does anything much except write. A century ago, your specimen male novelist could be found fighting in wars or traveling to places from which the reportage he brought back had genuine novelty. These days, alas, our man just sits at a desk and every so often looks out of the window at the teeming world beyond.

    The trajectory of the 21st-century novelist is as familiar – and as unavoidable – as a portrait of Taylor Swift. You grow up, you show an aptitude for literature, you start writing books and, unless something very unusual happens, you go on writing them. A rackety private life may add spice to this blameless professionalism and put the gossip-hounds on your track, but beyond that there is often nothing very much to say.

    Margaret Atwood manages to sidestep this drawback by a) having had a childhood that most creative writers would give their arm for; b) by having being a woman at a time when women had serious things to fight for (this is not to suggest that they don’t have serious things to fight for now); and c) by being born in Nova Scotia. In fact, that Canadian passport is a godsend for, in terms of what Atwood wanted to do with her life, it provided a set of obstacles whose surmounting offers quite as much of a story as her grandparents’ tales of the Great Halifax explosion of 1917 or her parents’ honeymoon, spent canoeing down the Saint John River in New Brunswick.

    It would be a mistake to claim that Atwood’s lengthy and much-anticipated autobiography is an exercise in tough-babydom, with no quarter given or received, for the tone is consistently oblique. The reader is invited to take a ringside seat while various old scores are settled – these include the college boys who spiked her drinks, the mean-minded school chums who would reappear in Cat’s Eye (1988) and Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail – but many of the blows are glancing and she takes most of the barriers thrown across her career path in her stride.

    In the end, though, the self-deprecation and the constant claims of ingenuousness can only take you so far. For what really lies at the heart of Book of Lives is a sense of steely self-possession and the thought of a woman with whom you – and “you” might be a domineering boyfriend, a college lecturer or an equivocating publisher – messed at your peril.

    No doubt much of this has to do with the question of her upbringing. Atwood – she was “Peggy” in those days, “Peygie” to her South Carolinian college roommate and “Peggy Nature” to the children in the program she ran at Camp White Pine – was the daughter of Carl, a self-reliant Canadian entomologist whose appointments guaranteed a peripatetic childhood spent in log cabins and beach houses or skidding across frozen lakes.

    Significantly, most of the first batch of photographs included here have Peggy engaged in thoroughly practical tasks, helping her dad to fill the wood box or bang nails into the roof. I spent quite a long time over the early chapters trying to establish a literary context for this lost 1940s world – Atwood was born November 18, 1939 – discarding and rejecting Jack London (although there are certainly wolves howling in the forests) before realizing that the milieu it most reminded me of was the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

    Naturally, there are substantial differences between the Ingalls family’s travails in the pioneer-era Midwest and the Atwoods heading for their destination at “the northern end of a large, cold, and convoluted lake,” but the animating spirit looks exactly the same and Carl, who at each site they visit spends his spare time building his own house, is Pa Ingalls’s spiritual heir.

    Margaret, Atwood’s one-time dietician mother, has the same resourcefulness, prefers the woods, no electricity and no running water because there is “less housework” – and sees off a bear that has come marauding down the path by jabbing it with a broom. When it freezes up, they retire to an apartment block in Ottawa for the winter and Peggy and her brother Harold are taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a portrait of Hitler. Atwood has a third sibling, Ruth, who arrives much later.

    The singularity of these early chapters functions in two ways. Not only do they work on their own terms, shifting a bygone landscape under a lens in the way that Carl Atwood might bring one of his specimens to the microscope, they also cast a paralyzing light on some of the difficulties involved in writing the modern autobiography.

    And here we return to the second of the sidesteps mentioned above. Another problem of literary life is recasting it in terms of the “struggle” that so many memoirists imagine themselves to have been engaged in since nanny first snaffled that teddy bear from the pram or Pop blew the college tuition fees at the Sarasota race track. Atwood scores high here, not because fate or poverty blocked the road ahead of her, but because the literary citadels she aimed to storm were so far from the world she inhabited.

    Basically, when Atwood began her writing career – she was originally known as a poet and didn’t publish her first novel until 1969 – there was hardly such a thing as a Canadian literary scene. A few British publishers had satellite branches, but to make a living – or even a splash – you had to go to England or America, both of which she hung out in during her formative years. Happily studying in Canada was a different thing, and Atwood’s tutors on the way to her Harvard PhD included Northrop Frye and Jerome Hamilton Buckley, author of The Victorian Temper.

    There was an early marriage to a fellow grad student named Jim Polk, the union marked down in typical Atwood style as “one of the odder things to happen to both of us,” and a great many formative experiences that were later transferred to fiction. Harvard was understandably cross about being used as The Handmaid’s Tale’s locale; her colleagues at the marketing agency that provided the backdrop to The Edible Woman (1969) were more understanding.

    What does Atwood make of herself in these years? Again, modest down-playing is the order of the day. Of the reaction of her Harvard contemporaries, she remarks that, “I must barely have registered. They would have seen an unglamorous, furtive little person in horn-rimmed spectacles, not stylishly dressed, hair done in a bubble cut created with big bristle rollers and stuck unsuccessfully into place with Dippity-Do, creeping about and making tappy sounds in her room.” One of the marketing agency people reckons “that new girl doesn’t look too bright.” A potential publisher, reading an early collection of stories, thinks she is “incredibly good on detail and incredibly good on human sensibilities,” the only problem being that “her people seem to be semi-mad… but that is undoubtedly the way Peggy is herself and that’s probably what makes her a great writer.”

    Quite a lot of Book of Lives works from this template: Atwood filing a judgment, sometimes her own, sometimes someone else’s, and not exactly undermining it but providing the neutral observer with materials that may or may not call it into question. All this is an exhilarating experience which keeps the reader going through that second stretch – difficult even for writers without the advantages of Atwood’s childhood, sex or nationality to negotiate – when the fame kicks in and you spend your time either getting on with your writing or going to festivals. The death of Atwood’s adored second husband, the writer Graeme Gibson, actually takes place during a promotional tour for The Testaments (2019) and she prints a terrific valedictory poem about “what he was like as he diminished, about what it would be like without him”:

    Mr. Lionheart is away today.

    He comes and goes,

    He flickers on and off.

    You might have heard a roar,

    You might not.

    Still, amid the accounts of lovely lunches and equally lovely publicists hard at work on her behalf, the sly humor keeps up. Her summary of the reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale by country, for example, runs “England: Jolly good yarn. (They’d had their religious civil wars in the 17th century and had survived the puritanical and autocratic Oliver Cromwell and weren’t intending to repeat the experience.) Canada: Nervous, as usual. ‘Could it happen here?’ The United States: On the one hand ‘Don’t be silly, we’re the world’s leading liberal democracy, it could never happen here.’ On the other hand, ‘How long have we got?’” As for a final judgment on this riproaring, autocracy-defying ascent to the top of world literature’s greasy pole, I’d say that on this evidence it’s the furtive little people in horn-rimmed spectacles creeping about and making tappy sounds in their rooms that you need to watch.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • It feels as if Michael McFaul’s audience has long since left

    Since the end of the Cold War, politicians and commentators have been searching for a new paradigm through which to understand international relations. Notwithstanding Francis Fukuyama’s oft-misunderstood The End of History, we have tried various patterns to classify the world order, of which George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” first used in 2002, was among the more enduring.

    In Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul acknowledges the widespread if nebulous consensus that the challenge presented by Russia and China is a kind of second Cold War – historian Niall Ferguson has labeled America’s relations with China “Cold War II.” But McFaul rejects the easy creation of a model which is reminiscent of past conflicts, arguing that it fails “accurately [to] describe the complex, unique dynamics of our current era of great power competition.”

    While McFaul’s analysis draws on his experience as a social scientist and a historian, he also dons his “policymaker hat” to provide a solution as well as commentary. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not – of which more anon – for that, at least, we should be grateful. It is easy enough to lament, to use Seán O’Casey’s phrase, that “th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis,” but considerably more demanding to say what can and should be done about it.

    There is a touch of the straw man around the edges of McFaul’s arguments. When he explains that “China is not an existential threat to the United States or the free world,” for example, he is suggesting a position which few serious foreign policy observers hold. Indeed, it is hard to say what a truly existential threat to the US would look like – at least a foreign one. As a young Abraham Lincoln told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge… if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

    One current difficulty lies in characterizing the foreign policies of the Trump administration. McFaul notes, correctly, that the President, on returning to the White House, “immediately withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council.” It is hard to think of a multilateral institution that Donald Trump likes or trusts, from the UN to NATO to the World Trade Organization. McFaul sums this up as “an even stronger commitment to an isolationist agenda.”

    But that will not quite do. President Trump authorized major air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he is escalating military action against drug cartels in the Caribbean Sea, declaring that the US is at war with the drug cartels and creating a Joint Task Force within US Southern Command to coordinate strikes; he has interposed himself as a “peacemaker” between India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan and, most recently, in the Middle East. This is hardly shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on domestic concerns.

    What, then, would the former ambassador and director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies advise the nation’s chief executive to do? McFaul advocates selective but not complete economic decoupling from China, lifting most of the tariff barriers Trump has imposed and encouraging American investment abroad, attracting Russian and Chinese scientific, technological and entrepreneurial talent to the US. He also argues that “defense is only part of a successful strategy. America needs more offense,” though it is hard to see him and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth agreeing on the implementation of that statement.

    Fundamentally, McFaul believes in international cooperation and in multilateralism, not only for America’s prosperity and security but also as a way of prying apart the ad hoc and transactional alliance which currently holds sway between Moscow and Beijing. I freely confess to being an enthusiast for informed debate and vigorous but respectful exchange of ideas, and someone with McFaul’s background should be listened to as America decides how to approach international relations.

    However, Autocrats vs. Democrats founders on two obstacles. The first is the highly personal and utterly unpredictable nature of Trump’s foreign policy. The President has few guiding principles save his own instincts and his attitudes can turn on a dime, making it very difficult to formulate any coherent kind of framework which can direct American policy. As we have seen with his wildly varying views on Ukraine and Russia, it sometimes feels as if he himself does not know what he will think tomorrow – making it a sheer impossibility for anyone else.

    More broadly, there is a feeling that American politics is not currently amenable to debate, discussion and exchanges of information. While the extent to which the electorate is polarized may be exaggerated, politicians certainly seem to have retreated to entrenched positions and debate can seem like a concession to a sworn enemy. In that respect, there is something slightly old-fashioned about McFaul’s book. He may have prepared an intellectual case and a list of detailed propositions, but it feels as if his audience has long since left, taken up arms and rushed to the ideological barricades.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Sir Anthony Hopkins, outsider actor

    Sir Anthony Hopkins, outsider actor

    Yes, Sir Anthony Hopkins did have a life before The Silence of the Lambs. And after it, too. But most casual moviegoers would be hard pressed to add too many other entries to his filmography. Like his most famous screen creation, the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins has always been something of a study in contrasts. As an actor, he sits in the middle of the Venn diagram where the mainstream and the fringe overlap, seemingly as happy to mug his way through the Transformers franchise as to direct and star in a project like 1996’s August, a drily worthy adaptation of Uncle Vanya that barely registered on the sordidly commercial level.

    He has done all this through a powerful mix of supreme professionalism (he’s the sort of actor who knows not only his own lines, but everyone else’s, too), constant work, versatility and setting himself slightly apart from the other cast members. “I don’t have a single friend who’s an actor,” he writes by way of self-analysis, of which there’s quite a lot.

    Indeed, Hopkins lingers on his own unloveliness, at least up to the point in his life, around his 40th birthday, when he quit alcohol. A youthful brawler both on the streets of his native South Wales and while doing National Service in the British army, he was once asked by a sympathetic commanding officer why he behaved as he did. “I don’t know, sir,” Hopkins replied. “I just seem to cause trouble. I’m a bit stupid.” The fractious reputation followed him through his early days in semi professional provincial theater and then the refined halls of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

    Hopkins’s talent was obvious, and in due course he was spotted by Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After he stood in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having “walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.” But the young Hopkins was already bored by the repetition of the stage. “I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,” he writes. “I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.”

    Pleasure in someone’s performance on stage or screen carries no guarantee of personal fulfillment and, whatever his professional achievements from the mid-1960s onwards, Hopkins clearly found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world. He walked out on his first wife and their infant daughter and remains estranged from the girl, his only child. By his own admission, he was spiteful, cynical and not a little neurotic. Arriving in New York, he fell into the habit of walking down the sides of the busy Manhattan streets rather than on the sidewalk. “If I had confessed the reason, they might have locked me up,” he writes. “I was afraid that somebody would do a suicide jump from a high window and fall on top of me.”

    And the drink. It’s a flood, at least in the first half of the book. “I became one of those good old looking-for-trouble drunks,” Hopkins says. “I was loaded and ready to go, full steam ahead, Tugboat Annie. I’m Popeye the Sailor Man, and I am what I am I am, and I’m Tony the Tiger Man, the tiger, the tiger, the tiger burning oh so bright in the Welsh forests of the night.” (There’s quite a lot more like this in the book.)

    Eventually Hopkins discovered Alcoholics Anonymous, settled down with a good woman and moved to a clifftop mansion in Malibu. He still acts, of course, although like many in his profession he apparently longs to be acclaimed for something else. As a result, there’s a generous amount here about his passion both for painting and classical music, the latter of which saw him release an album with the unambiguous title Composer. As an actor, Hopkins has always been of the less-is-more school, imbuing his most malign characters with an air of sinister control rather than going full Freddy Krueger. He brings a similar note of restraint to his memoir. There’s a good deal of reflection on his solitary upbringing in Wales and his consequent sense of being one of life’s permanent outsiders – and not much by way of riotous Hollywood anecdotage. Anyone looking for dirt on any of Hopkins’s fellow cast members may be disappointed, although he does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino (the wiseguy Paulie in Goodfellas), with whom he worked, unhappily, in Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

    When he’s on form, Hopkins’s gift for portraying the essential strangeness of the acting profession can be compared to that of Alec Guinness in his own wonderful memoirs. If you’re able to skim the occasional longueurs about man’s struggle for existence and the protracted descriptions of the way the dappled light falls through the trees, and so on, there are gems of genuine pathos awaiting discovery. Just be wary should Hopkins happen to call you with an excitable proposal about “having an old friend for dinner.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Cameron Crowe’s cringe magic

    Cameron Crowe’s cringe magic

    Cameron Crowe’s long-awaited memoir The Uncool can be read intertextually as the real Almost Famous. The Uncool is also about lush California summers, grief, the unwavering support of a mother, cool big sisters, and Almost Famous: The Musical, but when you peel back the pages like it’s a vintage magazine, there’s an elegiac aroma. This is a crinkled love letter to a deceased paramour; in this case, the beating heart of rock journalism. Crowe treats writers such as Lester Bangs (“my heart was almost all Lester Bangs”) and Danny Sugerman with devotional reverence that is as uncool or “problematic” in 2025 as learning about sex from your mom in a laundromat and writing about it. Crowe’s lack of cool thus becomes the book’s artistic frame.

    “The personal tone of that embarrassing article [learning about sex from your mom in a laundromat] is now my favorite kind of writing. In fact, it’s the tone of this book,” writes Crowe, who acts as a fanboy chronicler timestamping each vignette. The book consists of a series of short diaristic entries with a concert review (e.g., Elton John at the Civil Theater, 1971), a snippet from a rock tour, a magazine profile, some sagacious advice from his mother, Alice, and interviews with some of the last rock stars.

    An example: it’s 1972 and Crowe is a shaggy-haired 16-year-old rock obsessive who wants to interview David Bowie, except Bowie doesn’t do interviews. A seasoned rock journalist (Sugerman) tells Crowe that they’re going to find Bowie and interview him. Crowe is uncool, and Bowie’s mystique is informed by the fact that he’s intensely and prodigiously cool, but Sugerman drags Crowe across the Sunset Strip on a quest to find Bowie. Crowe peers up at billboards plastered with rock album covers (now replaced by Skims adverts). They stop at Rodney’s English Disco (now an art gallery): “all mirrors” that shimmer with disco lights. “David was just here,” Rodney tells them; they also just missed Elvis.

    They find Bowie at the Beverly Wilshire. “The most sought-after subject to every cassette-slinging rock writer” is gaunt and pale with red hair, deep in his Thin White Duke era. Bowie invites Crowe back to his room to play some records (bonding over a shared love of R&B and soul). Eight days later, Bowie calls Crowe at his parents’ house: “You can ask me whatever you want,” Bowie later tells him. “Hold up a mirror and show me what you see.” Crowe describes this as an “artistic challenge from David Bowie” when he was young, just “young enough to be honest.” The Uncool wants to be as honest as that teenager. That is its conceit and its artistic challenge.

    The Bowie story is not a deleted scene from Almost Famous, which was conceived by Crowe as a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old boy who convinces Rolling Stone (and his mother) to let him tour with Stillwater, a stand-in for the Allman Brothers: a band Crowe toured with when he was 16, an experience documented in the book in great detail. The memoir, like the semi-autobiographical film that precedes it, which Crowe has described as a love letter to family and music, is equally concerned with music and the feeling it conjures through memory, nostalgia, translation and the artistic challenge of being authentic in the commercialized world of corporate magazines.

    Crowe’s essence isn’t cool or intellectual; it’s his ability to translate real experiences into shamelessly cringe (and relatable) pop storytelling that sings. The “Bangsian magic, wild and beer-stained and beautiful” was never Crowe’s beat. That’s why he’s still alive. “Danny [Sugerman] would indeed make his mark,” writes Crowe, “and he’d sadly check out early like his hero [Jim Morrison], but to my mom he was always just ‘the kid with the smelly feet.’” Crowe’s protective mother kept him from becoming another tragic footnote in the history of rock journalism.

    The Uncool ably chronicles Crowe’s Almost Famous-coded moments and snippets including Bob Dylan waxing poetic about the 1960s, the “karate king” incarnation of Elvis, Jann Wenner handing Crowe a copy of Joan Didon’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem – “…if you want to be a real writer” – and Led Zeppelin hiding from female groupies at gay discos, which do not compute with our modern understanding of managed celebrity or PR-driven journalism.

    I should have put “rock journalism” in scare quotes as its authenticity has been diluted into manufactured poses, exactly as Bangs had predicted. This brings me back to Crowe, who’s all heart and authenticity when he anchors the book with the voices of his loving parents. It culminates in a sustained note that summarizes Crowe’s nostalgia: “Nothing beats the sound of the human voice. I still hear my mom’s voice all the time. She’s still teaching.” Her voice – and the voices of rock’s past – are the things Crowe aims to preserve before there’s no one left alive to do so.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • The stubborn resilience of Mexico

    The stubborn resilience of Mexico

    When they looked back, indigenous historians remembered how the fall of the Aztec empire to Hernán Cortés had been prefigured by terrifying omens and portents. The central valley had been plagued by comets, eclipses and supernatural storms. The previous emperor, Ahuitzótl, died after hitting his head on a lintel. A strange woman stalked the streets of Tenochtitlán, the capital, at night, crying “O my sons! We are about to perish.”

    But there were other signs that might have been heeded, too. The empire itself was only a few decades old when Cortés arrived in 1519. It was a patchwork of rebellious territories and city states, surrounded by yet more hostile peoples. Tenochtitlán fell after a three-month siege in 1521. It was the Aztecs’ many local enemies that sealed the empire’s fate; Cortés proved better at negotiating competing political realities than many of his successors. At the beginning of that year, he had fewer than 600 of his own men under his command. Thanks to indigenous support, however, he had at his disposal more than 100,000 troops.

    As Paul Gillingham makes clear in his magnificent new history of post-conquest Mexico, this fractious relationship between the margins and the center, the governed and the governing, would prove a surprisingly consistent feature of Mexican politics over the centuries. Something of this tension is reflected in the book’s structure: a strong narrative is interspersed with chapters approaching it from different thematic perspectives that reflect some of the country’s many contradictions.

    New Spain, as the territory was called, would be a viceroyalty – a semi-autonomous kingdom – not a colony. Its autonomy was amplified by imperial indifference: “I have had no reply [to my letters],” Luis de Velasco, the second viceroy, wrote to Charles V in 1553. “It is two-and-a-half years since I wrote the first of them.” The indifference was often mutual. There was a diplomatic, if paradoxical, formula for evading unpalatable edicts: obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey, but I won’t do it”).

    Stubbornness, the persistence of difference, is another recurrent theme; Gillingham stresses continuity as much as change. Old boundaries and family-based political structures remained largely in place. The elites that most indigenous people dealt with were their own from the pre-conquest world. The Montezuma family held power in Mexico City into the 1620s; a century later, one of them, the count of Montezuma, would be the last Habsburg viceroy.

    Nevertheless, the Spanish did bring profound disruption. New diseases – smallpox, typhoid, malaria, yellow fever and more – caused devastation. “They died in heaps, like bedbugs,” the Franciscan friar Motolinía reported of the arrival of smallpox in 1520. Two 16th-century outbreaks of enteric fever, a kind of typhoid, reduced the population of Texcoco from 15,000 to 600. The bishop of Oaxaca reported that in 20 years it killed 90 percent of his flock. Quarantine was one of the few available means of halting disease. The Spanish policy of congregación was its opposite: villagers were driven into towns where Christianity was easier to impose and people were easier to tax and control.

    Control wasn’t easy. Riots were common: Gillingham records 140 of them in central Mexico and Oaxaca alone between 1680 and 1811. The greatest, in Mexico City, in June 1692, began with the death of a pregnant woman in a hungry crowd outside the city’s grain exchange. Government buildings went up in flames, including the viceroy’s palace and the mint. There were moments of humor – “Shoot! Shoot!” one protester shouted. “And if you have no musket ball, hurl tomatoes!” – but 12 rioters were either hanged or beheaded. This was the exception, however. Reprisals were rare. Bargains were usually struck and order restored. Riots, Gillingham suggests, were typically “counterintuitive solutions to conflict.”

    Gillingham’s is first and foremost a political and economic history, and he is keen to show Mexico’s place on the world stage. First discovered in 1546, Mexican silver revolutionized the global economy, he argues. It flooded Europe. At least a third of it ended up in Asia, paying for silk and spices, tea and cotton. It also fueled urban growth in Mexico, making it “the world’s first wholly multicultural place.” To New Spain’s 160 ethnic groups were added some 150,000 people of African descent by the mid-17th century, together with traders and migrants from across Europe and Asia.

    The Spanish fought a long, futile taxonomic battle to demarcate the population along racial lines. An entire genre of painting – the pinturas de castas, showing 16 different Mexican racial types – was invented. But the enslavement of Indians was illegal from 1542. Those who sued their owners usually won. In 1549, two slaves named Pedro and Luisa sued the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán – notorious for torture, enslavement and slaughter – and secured both freedom and substantial compensation. Indians proved enthusiastic litigants: one judge complained of endless opportunistic lawsuits, “Indians against Indians… subjects against lords… towns against towns.”

    In 1810, two years after Napoleon placed his own brother on the Spanish throne, a parish priest in an obscure northern town launched a rebellion, ringing his church bell and shouting, “Death to the Spaniards! Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!” It turned into a war. Independence came in August 1821. But it was only the beginning of Mexico’s troubles: the government changed hands 48 times in the next 34 years.

    The country’s elites became addicted to a distinctively Mexican form of low-fat coup called a pronunciamiento – Gillingham calls them “choreographed rituals” of revolt. Like the riots, they were more bargaining mechanism than revolutionary moment. General Santa Anna, intermittently the country’s president, specialized in them. He launched one in 1822 to reopen Congress and another in 1835 to close it. “He was very good at getting power,” Gillingham notes, “and very bad at exercising it.” The century also saw the beginning of Mexico’s difficulties with its increasingly powerful neighbor. “So far from God, so close to the United States,” the cliché ran. Texas seceded. The US invaded and took California, Utah and much else besides. The French put another Habsburg on the throne; Emperor Maximilian lasted three years before he was executed by Benito Juárez in 1867. His death was a watershed: between them, Júarez and a successor, Porfirio Díaz, would rule the country for more than 50 years.

    Mexico modernized fast, helped by foreign money: half of all US overseas investment went into Mexico. The country’s GDP trebled, but economic links to the US proved a double-edged sword. When the US went into recession in 1907, Mexico followed. Díaz, nearing 80, promised to allow free elections in 1910. Then he changed his mind.

    Guerrilla warfare erupted in the always-fractious north. The revolution lasted a decade. It cost close to one-and-a-half million lives – Gillingham calls it “the greatest mass dying in Latin America since the conquest” – and became a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. “La Revolución es la Revolución,” the saying went; a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders. Gillingham places the death toll in a contemporary global context. It is dwarfed by the collective dead of Ypres, the Somme and other such battles.

    A further civil war erupted in the 1920s between the government and the Catholic Cristeros; civil war, a contemporary wrote bitterly, was “Mexico’s national sport.” Another was assassination.

    Serious land reform arrived in the 1930s when the government redistributed nearly half of Mexico’s cultivable land – some 46 million acres. Lázaro Cárdenas, the president, hoped to “Mexicanize the indio,” the old dream at the heart of Mexican history. But there were always too many Mexicos, each as proud and independent as any other.

    From 1938 until 2000, the country was a one-party state – sometimes a dictablanda, a soft dictatorship with elements of both democracy and autocracy, but latterly unambiguously dictatorial.

    The October 1968 massacre of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of protesting students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco district was a particular low. The government was in the early years of a guerra sucia, a “dirty war,” against some 40 different guerrilla groups nationwide. Suspects were disposed of in canvas sacks dropped from low-flying planes over the Pacific. How many isn’t known, but “the regime clearly killed thousands.” As ever, there are contradictions: this all coincided with 1,000 percent increases in health and welfare budgets; a million new homes were built for the country’s poor.

    Gillingham’s account of Mexico’s history since its return to democracy in 2000 is dominated by the war against the drug cartels, which has many of the hallmarks of a full-blown civil war. It’s another facet of the country’s complex relationship with America. Mexico’s drug use is low by global standards; the cartels exist to feed US demand. By 2020, 200,000 Mexicans had been killed and a similar number had become refugees. Migration is another constant. The country’s first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, elected last year, has troubles to confront.

    But what a history her country has, and Gillingham’s account of it is a tour de force. If it’s easy for critics to focus on Mexico’s long struggle with internal violence, we might also think more about its enduring resilience and endless capacity for negotiating peace and stability – however contested – from apparent chaos. There is always cause for hope, however dark the omens. There are indeed many Mexicos; but there is also only one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Is there such a thing as right-wing art?

    This has been adapted from a speech titled “The Myth-Maker as Nation-Builder,” which was delivered by Jonathan Keeperman, who runs publishing house Passage Press, at the National Conservatism Conference 2025.

    As W.B. Yeats once said: “There is no great literature without nationality. There is no great nationality without literature.” People often ask me whether it is possible to produce right-wing art, or otherwise to use art to engineer a more nationalist politics. But this strikes me as backward thinking. Culture is the field in which a people encounters the shared symbols and language that make political life possible. Art, done well, discloses the deeper truths a people already carry within themselves. Art therefore does not produce the nation; it reveals the nation.

    What is art trying to accomplish? This wanders a bit into the philosophical weeds, but I think it’s important to begin here. The purpose of art is to reveal what is capital-T true about the world and our experience in it. Some statements, stories, films, pieces of music have the quality of “truthness,” and some do not. Neither “truthness” nor “untruthness” is merely imagined or constructed. Some things are true and some things are not.

    But language alone cannot determine what is true and what is not. Argument alone cannot mediate our disagreements. Resorting only to language leaves us with such mistaken phrases as “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This is wrong. This is also dumb. But it points to the difficulty of arguing our way into a shared understanding of what is or is not true.

    Rather, capital-T truth is felt, not something that is asserted. It is revealed to us, or unconcealed from us. Truth is disclosed. The philosopher Martin Heidegger talks about this as aletheia. Truth is about unconcealing reality, not being merely correct. We can then say that art is true when it creates the emotional and spiritual conditions for the world to be revealed, much like how a profound dream allows the mind to reveal itself to itself.

    For those who find Heidegger a little too abstruse, I offer Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi’s task is to train his pupil to become an expert at karate. But he doesn’t do this directly. If you recall the movie, Mr. Miyagi teaches a young Ralph Macchio through a series of household chores: painting a fence, cleaning a car – “Wax on! Wax off!” The philosophical lesson contained in this truth is unconcealed only when it is lived into and becomes embodied. As Sensei Miyagi says: “Lesson not just about karate. Lesson about whole life.”

    One of the bedrock properties of truth is that it coheres and it endures. Truth is lindy – it lasts. Falseness succumbs to entropy. To survive, it must be propped up and artificially stabilized. False stories, false art are brittle. Lies are brittle. Truth obtains.

    With this framework, we can understand artists as nation-revealers. First, understand that nations are constellations of enduring truths about a people, an embodied people. It’s their histories, their language, their rituals, their ways of being that cohere over time. When they no longer cohere, there is no longer a nation to speak of. Second, understand that artists and their art unconceal those truths about the people, preparing the mind and spirit so that those truths can become embodied and felt. The conclusion here is that it is therefore not the artist’s job to assert or construct or build the nation. It is the artist’s job to reveal the nation to itself.

    What are some examples of artists as nation-revealers? The first that came to mind for me was Theodor Herzl’s novel The Old New Land. He wrote this in 1902, while he was still in Austria. It’s a terrible novel. The dialogue is wooden; the characters are flat; the plot is stitched together absurdly. Its utopian vision of a future state of Israel is very naive and implausible – in a word, false.

    But it does have one redeeming quality in the form of a more enduring capital-T truth: the novel reveals the longing of European Jewry for the possibility of a nation, a nation reborn. And what Herzl’s book does is project a future in which Jews could and eventually do live.

    A less obvious example of nation revealing from this same period is the poetry of Yeats in Ireland. Yeats is reimagining Irish nationalism on the precipice of the war for independence. This came a couple of decades later, but he embarks on this very self-conscious cultural project right at the tail end of the 19th century. The poet is a Protestant, not a Catholic, who speaks English, not Irish, and is an avatar for this emergent Irish culture.

    His identity and art force a series of questions: is there such a thing as Ireland? And if so, what is it? Is there an Irish people? Who are they? Is Ireland Celtic? Is it Christian? Catholic? Republican? Norse? Danish? Scottish? Is it English? And how do all these different origin stories potentially fit together? Can some truth cohere out of this cultural mosaic? Through Yeats’s art, can Irishness be revealed and lived into by its people? Among all these disparate parts, can a shared identity be embodied?

    Yeats creates this identity not by projecting a future, like Herzl, but rather by looking into a mythic past. Following the insight that nationalism is first a state of mind, Yeats understood that to change the national state of mind, you must change what that mind feels to be true. He adopts a few strategies to achieve this. We know from his autobiographies that he did so intentionally.

    First, he revives the old Irish tradition of the poet as a central political figure. In the poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” he places himself in the pantheon of great Irish poets of the past who conferred legitimacy on their kings and often spoke on their behalf. The point of this for Yeats is to assert the importance of the role of the artist and of art more broadly so that the pronouncements of the artist carry the weight of political authority.

    He also deliberately and explicitly excavates the stories and heroes of the medieval Ulster Cycle. These poems are some of Yeats’s most well-regarded and demonstrate his real literary genius. They are self-consciously nostalgic and homesick for a lost Ireland that begs to be reclaimed, but without the cloying sentimentality that usually comes with these qualities. They also maintain a kind of mythic grandeur and supernatural magic that elevates them above mere history and above the specific ethnoreligious claims of any particular contemporary Irish subgroup while still being squarely grounded in a recognizably Irish tradition.

    Finally, Yeats understood that a nation’s art, if it is indeed going to bind the nation, must not be too insular. His Abbey Theatre, which he opened in 1904, puts his mythic poems on the stage where they can be more viscerally felt and made into a more central part of Irish cultural life. Yeats explained: “I am no longer writing for a few friends here and there, but I’m asking my own people to listen, as many as can find their way into the theater.” Perhaps through plays – where one has more room than in songs and ballads – one can explain those elaborate emotions and intricate thoughts that are oneself.

    What about America? The truth is that neither the examples of Herzl nor Yeats are applicable to us now. Our situation is very different. We do have an established past. We have a self-understanding of our founding. We reinterpret and negotiate that founding often – there are disagreements about motivations and intentions – but there is no disagreement about when and where and what it is. We agree that it happened when the Founders convened. We can point to Plymouth Rock. We can walk the battle green at Lexington.

    What we lack is confidence in our present. We do not need a Herzl to conjure a future or a Yeats to excavate a buried origin. We need artists who can reveal what America is now. Think again of Mr. Miyagi. His pupil will not be told. He must be led by indirection from self-doubt into confidence. Perhaps it is the case with our own self-conception. Now our cultural life is very confused, attenuated, lacking confidence, lacking coherence. It is too fragmented. It is self-antagonizing and it will not be explicitly directed. A durable national identity cannot be asserted into being.

    I’ll conclude with a poem that models an oblique kind of revelation of the type we ought to encourage would-be artists to consider carefully. This comes from William Carlos Williams, a 20th-century modernist poet. The poem is called “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923):

    so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

    I will not elaborate further.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.