Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the ice-skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude fed a notion that the city was fundamentally ungovernable. A mayor famous for cheekily asking New Yorkers “How am I doing?” appeared not to be doing very well at all.

The trouble had begun six years earlier, when the happy little attraction near the Plaza Hotel was abruptly closed for repairs. Having constructed the rink during the go-go years following the Second World War, the city then let it decay. To cut costs, the Parks Department started to explore the possibility of replacing its clunky brine-based refrigeration system with Freon, which was purported to cost $20,000 less a year to operate. So, in 1980, city hall ordered the rink shut down, the pipes beneath it torn out, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that was to take less than three years to complete.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back.

The project quickly went sideways. After ripping up the old system, a contractor installed 22 miles of new pipe for the Freon. But when that initial phase was completed, the department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new piping. For more than a year, it was exposed to the elements; flooded by an underground stream; and, according to subsequent investigations, subjected to stray electric currents. When, in 1982, pavers were finally hired, engineers underestimated how much concrete would be required to cover the pipes. Rather than call for more, the pavers diluted the insufficient supply. Then, to protect the delicate piping, they chose not to deploy vibration machines typically used to collapse air pockets in concrete. The result was predictable. When the job was done, the ice on the surface melted. The rink simply didn’t work.

The mayor seemed to have little choice but to order the Parks Department to begin anew. To rip up the piping. To abandon the new technology. To revert to the traditional refrigeration system. That, of course, would require the department not only to close Wollman for another two years but to add another $3 million to the taxpayers’ tab. The whole thing was looking like an unmitigated public-relations disaster until, almost by the grace of God, Koch received an unexpected reprieve: A local developer offered to step in and make things right.

[Read: Privatization is changing America's relationship with its physical stuff]

In an unusual arrangement, Koch cut a deal to pay the developer to take control of the rink project, complete it for a fee, and hand it back to the city. “If it costs less, we’ll pay less,” the mayor explained when some questioned the wisdom of trusting someone outside government to do something that would typically have been handled by a public authority. “If it costs more, he’ll pay.”

Lost in the focus on the city’s incompetence was a more nuanced reality. More than 60 years earlier, the New York state legislature had passed a law designed to prevent mayors (and the machine bosses who controlled them) from throwing municipal construction gigs to politically connected contractors. At the time, progressives in both parties rightly presumed that the state was rife with graft—that construction companies were bribing municipal officials to secure contracts at inflated prices. Wicks Law had aimed to solve the problem by requiring cities to hire, separately, the lowest-bidding general construction, plumbing, electrical, heating, and ventilation contractors on any municipal project slated to cost more than $50,000. Mayors were prohibited from hiring general contractors. As a result, Ed Koch’s Parks Department was legally prohibited from hiring a single firm to deliver a project on time and on budget.

Fortunately for Koch, his collaboration with the outside developer was a huge success. The project cost less than the original estimate—$750,000 less—and the rink opened ahead of the holiday season. But from a public-relations perspective, the developer’s success just seemed to highlight city hall’s incompetence. The Parks Department, as columnists and reporters liked to remind the public, had wasted six years and $13 million on a project the private sector managed to complete in six months and at roughly a sixth of the cost. Asked about the lesson learned from the whole episode, the developer responded: “I guess it says a lot about the city.” The government was fundamentally incompetent. The municipal bureaucracy was a nightmare. Even liberal New Yorkers, many of whom reviled President Ronald Reagan, would have been tempted to nod along to his famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Not long thereafter, a reporter traipsed over to Central Park to interview members of the public. A local man enjoying a skate was asked his impressions of the rigmarole. “Anybody who can get anything done right and done on time in New York is a bona fide hero,” the skater replied. And it’s probably safe to say the developer would have agreed. His name, as it happens, was Donald Trump.

Roughly a century before the fiasco in Central Park, the Progressive movement was launched to address the same perception of government incompetence. City halls around the country, caught in the grip of rapacious political machines, simply couldn’t get things done—mayors and governors couldn’t build sewer and water lines, couldn’t maintain parks and school systems, couldn’t manage the nation’s messy transition from farm to factory. Progressivism emerged to stand up a system that would work. But the reformers drawn into the movement were torn between two ideas about how to turn things around. Some, adopting a perspective that would come to be associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, believed that the key was returning power to the individuals and small businesses that had defined 19th-century life. Others, many of whom would align themselves with Theodore Roosevelt, took the opposite view, having grown convinced that imbuing bigger, more robust bureaucracies with new power—public-service commissions and public authorities, for example—was the only realistic way to overcome the power wielded by the political hacks and charlatans then dominating American life.

The tension between these two ideas—Brandeis’s Jeffersonian impulse to push power down and Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian impulse to push it up—became the most consequential divide within Progressivism. Faced with the pernicious influence of monopolistic corporations, for example, the two camps were at odds over whether to prioritize efforts to break up trusts, thereby enabling competition from below, or to subject corporate behemoths to more stringent regulation from above. The Jeffersonians scored a handful of major victories before the First World War, including breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil. But in the decades that followed, Progressivism’s Hamiltonian impulse came to predominate, advancing the notion that big, powerful government was the key to doing big, important things. The New Deal was defined by an alphabet soup of robust bureaucracies empowered to wield enormous authority—the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority among them. And while the Jeffersonian impulse did not fade entirely—Wicks Law was passed in the 1920s—the Progressive project largely sought to empower what many would come to call the “establishment.”

[From the March 1940 issue: America can build]

Then, in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the teeter-totter tipped back across its fulcrum. The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, an environmental reawakening, second-wave feminism, Watergate—soured reformers on the very establishment they’d helped erect. Rather than empower centralized institutions, they would now endeavor to rein them in, placing guardrails around various power brokers and giving voice to the ordinary people the establishment ignored. The movement became culturally averse to power. Over the past half century, that Jeffersonian impulse to check authority—to return influence to the meek among us—has become progressivism’s abiding priority. And rarely do those inside the movement register that, entirely apart from the influence of conservatism, these two warring impulses cut in separate directions.

The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—a Jeffersonian check on municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted the Parks Department to restore the rink for good reason—here was a Hamiltonian bureaucracy endeavoring to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses served to render government incompetent. And the resulting gridlock wasn’t just a black eye for public institutions. It cleaved an opening for a figure like Trump.

Over the past half century, progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the “party of government”—into an institution that almost instinctively seeks to cut government down. Progressives are so fearful of establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer to tighten rather than loosen their grip on authority. The movement discounts whatever good the government might do in service of ensuring that it won’t do bad. And that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.

Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective. But for progressives, that reality can quickly become a distraction. They can’t control the MAGA agenda—but they can offer a more palatable alternative. If the progressive agenda is going to have a chance—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—progressives will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, progressives are too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why they so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Their cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.

Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, both sides in any given debate—those who want to change things and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. But the car remains in place.

The political effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.

Ordinary people who experience the morass of inept bureaucracy will, like the New Yorkers frustrated with Mayor Koch’s inability to restore Wollman Rink, be tempted to turn to someone with the individual moxie to get the job done. That was Donald Trump’s appeal in the mid-1980s, and he employs the same basic rationale as an iconoclastic politician on the national stage. But it’s not just that unrepentant Jeffersonianism doesn’t work. Ordinary people aren’t monolithically averse to power. They don’t want public authority abused, but they know that progress is impossible without leadership. And insofar as the subtext of contemporary progressive ideology is that anyone wielding power is in the wrong, the movement alienates itself from voters who might otherwise support its agenda.

This is the crux of the political argument for rebalancing progressivism’s Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses. The movement supports growing government so that it can take a stronger hand in protecting the vulnerable. But then progressives excoriate government as a captured tool of the patriarchy. Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism, or calling out conservative bigotry, or attacking the figures eager to steer the country toward fascism. There’s no storming the barricades in support of a healthy balance between contradictory impulses. And so progressives typically retreat into reflexive anti-conservatism.

Criticizing your adversaries is not, in and of itself, a terrible political strategy. When the other side supports unpopular ideas—separating children from their parents at the border, limiting women’s bodily autonomy, stripping away environmental protections, cutting Social Security and Medicare—there’s little downside to drawing the public’s attention to its agenda. But for progressives, there’s danger in that appeal. A movement consumed by exasperation over how so many people could have voted for Trump, or supported his agenda, or excused his conduct after losing in 2020, will be less inclined to correct its own errors. If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.

[Read: The perception gap that explains American politics]

There is, of course, an authentic and powerful reason for progressives to worry about making government hum. A government that operates expeditiously—a public authority with fewer guardrails—will inevitably be used not only to serve progressive desires but to pursue conservative ends as well. Any change that would have made it easier for the Obama administration to identify well-intentioned “shovel ready” projects in 2009 and 2010, or for clean-energy companies to build transmission lines through Arkansas and Maine, or for developers to build affordable housing in New York and California, might well have opened the door for someone else to build a legion of coal-fired power plants or gentrify minority neighborhoods.

But that’s a risk progressives today need to take, a bargain they need to accept. A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism. Voters are drawn to figures like Donald Trump not because public authority is too pervasive, but because government can’t deliver. His refrain that the “deep state” has sold the ordinary citizen out—that insiders are constantly making “bad deals” on the nation’s behalf—lands, in no small part, because voters have witnessed the incompetence. Lionizing government and then ensuring that it fails is a terrible political strategy. The movement needs to change course not only because it’s bad policy, but because it’s bad politics as well.

That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

This Presidents’ Day, spend time with stories on what everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard, how invisible habits drive your life, America’s “marriage material” shortage, and more.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About Tulsi Gabbard

Other than raw ambition, only one through line is perceptible in a switchbacking political career.

By Elaine Godfrey

How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days

He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.

By Timothy W. Ryback

Growing Up Murdoch

James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire

By McKay Coppins

History Will Judge the Complicit

Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president? (From 2020)

By Anne Applebaum

Invisible Habits Are Driving Your Life

The science of habits reveals that they can be hidden to us and unresponsive to our desires.

By Shayla Love

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage

Adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be.

By Derek Thompson

Five Books That Offer Readers Intellectual Exercise

Each of these titles exercises a different kind of reading muscle so that you can choose the one that will push you most.

By Ilana Masad

From the Archives

In 1895, the future 26th president of the United States offered a critique of the spoils system and argued in favor of a nonpartisan and rigorously vetted civil service. “The government cannot endure permanently if administered on a spoils basis,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote. “If this form of corruption is permitted and encouraged, other forms of corruption will inevitably follow in its train.”

Culture Break

Fabio Lovino / HBO

Watch. Can anything satisfy the guests of The White Lotus? In the new season (streaming now on Max), the rich tourists want more, and more, and more, Hannah Giorgis writes.

Read. Imani Perry’s latest book, Black in Blues, examines the intersections between the color blue and the Black experience.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.

The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.

The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.

Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.

In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.

Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.

These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.

The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.

The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.

Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”

Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.

The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment, particularly in clean-energy technologies.

In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.

Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.

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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”