The dam is one of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century. But the Afsluitdijk was not really the work of the twentieth century. It was the final stone in a wall a thousand years long.

Long before the Romans reached the mouth of the Rhine, the people who would become the Dutch were pushed northward. The high ground of the continent was already taken; the forests of the interior held by tribes who had no interest in sharing them. What remained was what no one else wanted. The great delta where three rivers met the sea, a flat soaking sponge of peat and salt marsh and tidal flat, half land and half water, scrubbed twice a day by the tides. These marshlands were uninhabitable. The Frisians inhabited them.

They began, more than two thousand years ago, by raising mounds. They piled clay and dung and refuse into great low hills — terpen, the Frisians called them; wierden, the Saxons — and on these little artificial islands they built their longhouses and grazed their cattle and waited out the floods. There are more than a thousand of these mounds still rising from the fields of Friesland and Groningen, some of them fifteen feet high, the bones of their builders still buried in their flanks.

The first dikes were small things — earthen walls thrown up around a single field, a single pasture, to keep the salt out long enough for a crop to grow. By the eleventh century, ring-dikes encircled whole villages. By the twelfth, dikes ran for miles along the rivers, joined together, became continuous. The drowned land behind them was reclaimed acre by acre. By the late Middle Ages, the Dutch had bent the windmill to the work of drainage, and now they were not merely walling out the sea but pumping it back, draining lakes that had stood since the last ice age, exposing the rich black bottom-mud and turning it into farmland. The Beemster, drained in 1612, is still a perfect grid of fields thirteen feet below sea level, its dairy cattle grazing where herring once swam.

By the time the Dutch Republic was the wealthiest nation in Europe, perhaps a fifth of its territory had been made by hand. The country existed because it had been built. God schiep de wereld, maar de Nederlander schiep Nederland. God created the world, but the Dutchman created the Netherlands. The nation was a continuous act of self-creation by a people believing themselves to be chosen by God.

But the sea took back what it could. The Zuiderzee itself was a wound — once a freshwater lake called Lake Flevo, fringed by peat bog and farmland, until in the storm of 1170 the North Sea broke through the dunes and began to devour the land. Each generation lost more. The St. Lucia’s flood of 1287 drowned somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand people in a single night, one of the deadliest natural disasters in European history outside the plagues, and when the waters receded the Zuiderzee had its modern shape: a great salt arm reaching deep into the country, nearly two thousand square miles of ocean where there had been pasture and peat.

It was the Frisians who named it. Zuiderzee — South Sea — may seem a misleading name for a body of water in the north of the country. But the Frisians lived along its top edge, and to a man standing on the dunes of Friesland looking out at the enormous, tempestuous body of water that fed on his coast, the water was to his south. Men are provincial animals.

The towns along its new coast — Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Stavoren — grew rich on its herring. They also grew used to its rage. The All Saints’ Flood, the St. Elizabeth’s Flood, the Christmas Flood of 1717 that killed fourteen thousand in a single night across the northern provinces. The Zuiderzee was a waterwolf — the old Dutch word for a body of water that fed itself by eating land. For seven hundred years the Dutch tolerated it because they could not imagine an alternative. To close the Zuiderzee would mean building a dam across an open sea — twenty miles of wall through tides that ran at five knots, in water sixty feet deep in places, on a foundation of soft marine clay that would swallow stone. It was the equivalent, in scale and difficulty, of throwing a causeway across the English Channel. Men had contemplated such a feat before. Hendrik Stevin had sketched one in the seventeenth century; others had followed in every generation since. None had been built. Nowhere in Europe — nowhere in the world — had any people closed a stretch of open sea this wide, this deep, this fast.

Cornelis Lely was born in Amsterdam in 1854, the son of a paper merchant. He studied to be an engineer, came up through the Society for the Reclamation of the Zuiderzee, and by his early thirties was the leading expert on the inland sea. In 1891, at the age of thirty-six, he submitted to the Dutch government a complete plan: a great enclosing dam from the North Holland coast to the Frisian shore, the inland body to be drained gradually into freshwater, and four enormous polders to be reclaimed from its bed. Lely proposed building a new province out of ocean.

The government rejected it. It was too expensive. The fishing towns along the Zuiderzee — Volendam, Marken, Urk — would lose their livelihoods. The agricultural lobby did not want more farmland flooding the market.

Lely went into politics to realise his vision. He became Minister of Water Management three separate times — in 1891, in 1897, in 1913 — and each time he pushed his plan, and each time it was deferred. The dam he had designed at thirty-six was still on paper when he turned sixty.

In January 1916 a winter storm broke through the Zuiderzee dikes in a dozen places, drowning villages along the inland coast and a chunk of the country around Amsterdam. The flood killed only nineteen people, but it killed them in places that had thought themselves safe, and the political resistance to Lely’s plan collapsed almost overnight. In June 1918 the Zuiderzee Act passed the States General. Lely was sixty-four years old. He had been waiting twenty-seven years.

Construction began in 1927. Four enormous work-yards were thrown up along the chosen line and from each, gangs of men began to push out into the open sea. They had to invent the work as there was no precedent to copy. Dredges scooped boulder clay from the bottom of the Zuiderzee itself, so that the dam was built from the bed of the sea it was to close. Barges then dumped the clay in two parallel lines along the planned route, sand was poured between the lines, and a second layer of clay was laid over the top to seal it. Beneath it all, sunk on the soft marine floor, lay great mats woven from osier — the supple willow Dutch farmers had been cutting for baskets since the Middle Ages — weighted down with basalt boulders. It was the only foundation the engineers had found that would not slowly disappear into the mud.

The fleet was an entire navy of construction. Twenty-seven dredges, thirteen floating cranes, a hundred and thirty-two barges, eighty-eight tugs. To build the middle of the dam they built work-platforms first — two artificial islands, Kornwerderzand and Breezanddijk, raised out of the open sea solely to give the men somewhere to stand. By the time the work was done, the dam contained roughly thirty-seven million cubic metres of clay and sand. Fourteen Great Pyramids of Giza, dropped into the Zuiderzee.

Around ten thousand men passed through the camps; five thousand worked the line on any given day — Frisians, Hollanders, men from the depressed peat towns of the east, men with no other work in a country sliding into depression. They worked through gales that washed entire sections of fresh-laid embankment back into the sea. They worked in winter, faces black with frostbite under their woollen caps, and in summer, swarmed by midges off the mudflats. They lived in barracks on barges and rafts and on the dam itself as it grew, surrounded by water on all sides, building the land that would house them.

Shipworm — the marine mollusc the Dutch called paalworm, the pile-worm — ate through the willow mat base, and the galvanised steel wire holding the bundles together had been chewed away by salt. The foundation was failing under the dam they had built on top of it. Barite was imported from Germany to replace the rotten willow. Whole stretches of the floor were rebuilt in deep water, in winter, while the men above kept dumping clay.

The dam was finally closed on 28 May 1932 at a place called the Vlieter, eight miles east of the North Holland shore. The last gap was perhaps fifty metres wide. On either side, the dam stood finished. Through the gap the tide ran like a river, four knots, five knots, in and out twice a day, the last living artery of the Zuiderzee.

The engineers had waited for slack water — the moment between tides when the current pauses and the sea forgets which way to run. Two columns of barges loaded with boulder clay converged on the gap from either side, watched by a row of film cameras strung along the new dam, and dumped their cargo at once into the narrowing channel. The water boiled and foamed and could not get through. In a few minutes it was over. The Zuiderzee was sealed.

Lely had died three years earlier at seventy-four. A statue of Cornelis Lely stands now at the western end of the dam, looking out over his works, the great apogee of Dutch contest against the sea.

You’re telling me you haven’t watched Australia’s Blood Meridian, starring Guy Pearce and written and scored by Nick Cave?

SPOILERS

A shoot out in a whorehouse. Its fiends scrambling frantically as bullets pierce its tin shed walls, the arrows of light illuminating the whores and their criminal customers within. The cops have ‘em.

So begins The Proposition, the agents of light descending on their demonic prey. Milton's war in heaven relocated to a tin shack in Queensland, the rebel angels caught mid-rut.

“What fresh hell is this?” says the captain of this victorious vanguard, sweating profusely as he stares out across the hot plains. He has been sent on a civilising mission from above. But how does one civilise hell, he wonders. He must drag the lower provinces into the light by force, and the force will blacken him.

The equivocal hero of our tale is Charlie Burns, played by an emaciated outback Guy Pearce. In the whorehouse he is caught with his beloved younger brother. In exchange for Mikey’s life — who will otherwise hang on Christmas day — our captain offers him a proposition. To find and kill his older brother, the rapist and mass murderer Arthur Burns.

This is the condemned nature of our hero’s quest. A life for a life. Redemption at the point of Cain’s stain. To strike down his guilty older brother to save his imbecile younger one. Cain killing Cain to save Abel.

Arthur Burns is a Judge-like monster from Blood Meridian. Eloquent, erudite, demonic. He will finish your poem before garroting you. He recites Yeats at sunset from a rock above the plains, a fallen angel addressing the void. Arthur in his hill fort is Satan on Niphates’ top, surveying Eden, soliloquising. Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell. He will rape a pregnant woman before murdering her and her family. He has read more than you have. He has thought more than you have. He has killed more than you have. A vampire at the firehose of life.

But Arthur is not the Judge. The Judge is too nihilistic for Cave, too invulnerable. The Judge cannot be killed because the Judge is not a man. He is the war that rides forever, dancing naked in the saloon at the end of history. Arthur has a soft spot. He is tethered to the earth. He's a brother, and only a brother can kill him. Cave believes in the wound. He believes love is the door through which death enters. The Judge has no door. Arthur has a door, and his brother walks through it at sunset with a pistol.

Arthur has built a kingdom in the hills, a Pandæmonium of one, and he sits in it reciting verse and watching the sun set, and his brother climbs up to him and the kingdom ends.

The land these figures stalk is the epic vastness of Australia, her burnt-out trees and sandy gullies. Above them countless stars. The living are half-dead. Flies swarm the dead and the half-dead alike. The cops are made of the same grit-mutt stuff as the fiends they hunt. (The cops joke-fantasise about ravaging their boss captain’s wife; a dark prophecy the fiends fulfil.) The desert is this country’s grim theology. A landscape that does not care, reducing men to insects crossing a pan.

The Proposition is stuffed with Australian blacks. Blacks are cops and criminals, free and wild, hunters and hunted. They are the only people in the film who seem to belong to the country rather than be punished by it. Just men like everyone else. Or whatever passes for men in these hellish ravines.

The captain’s wife is Eve, tending her English garden in this barren hell. She is desperately lonely in this flimsy oasis. What hubris — the idea that you can plant a rose bush in a furnace and expect it to bloom without watering it with blood. She insists on Mikey’s flogging. She demands vengeance and tastes of the red blood of Mikey’s back and the red blood of the lash, as Eve of the apple. She faints. Eve too is in the end repulsed by her sin. Their Garden is overrun. She is punished.

There is a kind of twisted justice meted out in these parts. When the imbecile Mikey is flogged to death, our good captain knows death will fly to them on wings of vengeance. It was not his doing, but he will bear its justice. Just as Mikey bore theirs. And so on Christmas day, as they wear the trappings of a far away land, a half-forgotten heaven in England, the captain and his wife pray. She says grace. For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. A dark sense of humour, as they are suddenly descended upon by ravenous demons.

As the demons scourge and rape, our strange hero enters. No more, Charlie Burns says, as he shoots Arthur and his lackey. They stumble out. He sits beside his older brother at the setting of the sun as he bleeds to death. No more.

She was looking at one of the most important building blocks of human civilisation.

It would take a decade for anyone to understand what Hilda Petrie had found. In 1916, the British Egyptologist Alan Gardiner sat down with the inscriptions and noticed that one sequence of symbols kept repeating. If you assumed each symbol stood for a single consonant sound and if you assumed the sounds corresponded to the Semitic names for the objects the symbols depicted, then that repeating sequence spelled out a word: b-ʿ-l-t. Baalat. The Lady. A title for the goddess Hathor, who was worshipped at the temple beside the mines.

Gardiner had cracked it. These were not Egyptian writings at all. They were the work of Semitic-speaking people — foreigners in Egypt. It was an alphabet.

For over a thousand years before those scratches were carved, the great civilisations of the ancient world had writing. The Egyptians had hieroglyphs. The Mesopotamians had cuneiform. The Chinese had their ideograms. These systems were fantastically complicated. Egyptian hieroglyphics used over a thousand distinct symbols. Some represented sounds, some represented whole words, some modified the meaning of other symbols, and the rules for which was which were labyrinthine. To become literate in hieroglyphics required years of training. This meant that writing belonged to a tiny elite — the scribes, the priests, the palace bureaucrats. If you were a farmer, a soldier, a miner, a craftsman, you could not read. You lived and died in a world where the written word was locked behind a wall of expertise.

The alphabet destroyed that wall. With twenty-two symbols, you could write anything. Any word in your language, any name, any prayer, any contract, any story. A bright child could learn the system in weeks. And because the symbols represented sounds, not meanings, the system was portable — speakers of other languages could adapt it to their own tongues with minor modifications.

And the alphabet happened only once.

From those scratches on the rocks of Sinai came the Phoenician alphabet, and from the Phoenician came the Greek, and from the Greek came the Latin and the Cyrillic, and from the Aramaic branch came Hebrew and Arabic and the scripts of Persia and India and Tibet and Thailand and Mongolia. Every alphabet on earth.

Writing itself was invented several times independently — in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in China, in Mesoamerica. Human beings, separated by oceans and millennia, converged on the idea of using symbols to record language. But the alphabet — the radical insight that you could represent all of human speech with a small set of symbols for individual sounds — that idea occurred to one group of people, in one place, at one time. Never before. Never again, independently. The concept was so profoundly non-obvious, so alien to every existing practice of writing, that in the entire history of our species, across every civilisation on every continent, it only came to one people at one time.

The infinite, unknowable God chose language as His medium — the one form of creation that is both bounded and boundless. A finite number of sounds. An infinite horizon of meaning. The God of Israel created an infinite universe from a finite act of speech. The human mind, made in that image, generates infinite thought from finite words. The alphabet gave humanity a grammar of creation. It made this shared architecture visible for the first time.

At Sinai the infinite God spoke to a finite people in finite words. Those words were written down in letters carved on stone. The archaeological record tells us that at this place — Sinai — among this people — Semitic labourers in Egypt — the alphabet emerged. The technology and the theology are mirrors of each other. It not only enabled the written Bible, it is the very shape of revelation.1

It took three millennia from the invention of the alphabet to the mass production of the written word with the printing press. Gutenberg's revolution was not in language itself but in its distribution. The alphabet had made writing possible for everyone; the press made reading available to everyone. Until then, the written word lived in the extraordinarily expensive scroll and codex collections of the very wealthy. Then, everywhere.

Today, for the first time since the printing press we are living through a revolution in the technology of language. Large language models take a finite set of elements, learn the patterns of their combination, and from those patterns generate new meaning without limit. The alphabet allowed humans to turn thoughts into symbols. AI devoured our symbols and is now turning them back into thoughts.

When God breathed life into Adam, the Targum says he became a ruach memallela — a speaking being. Language was the mark of the divine image in humanity. If a machine can now wield language too, what remains of that image?

“And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.”

— Moby Dick

When Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, stumbles through a magic door into Christmas Town he stands in the snow and looks around at this bright, warm, incomprehensible world.

What’s this? What’s this? There’s colour everywhere.

He has no word for “presents” or “snow” or “cheer”. He knows fright, he knows screams, he knows the artistry of the macabre. And now he’s standing before a world that operates by a completely different grammar. Before this world he is illiterate.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is the greatest film ever made about cultural illegibility. Its hero is one of the best Nietzschean Supermen we get on screen. Jack is great because he cannot help but reach for what lies beyond his ken. And the film’s genius is leaving those two worlds unbridged. Jack fails to understand Christmas Land. He is, in the end, a creature of Halloween. We are what we are. And look how drawn we are to men who reach for more.

In his gorgeous opening lament, Jack is not tired of being great. He is tired of being great at something he has completely mastered. Halloween is solved. There is nothing left to discover within its walls. The ghoulish citizens adore him, the scares are immaculate, the whole operation runs like freshly cut guillotine. And because it is solved, it is dead to him. This is the ache of the man who stands at the precipice of the world he has conquered. Napoleon in Egypt, staring at the pyramids of a civilisation whose hieroglyphs he could not read. Cortez at the edge of Tenochtitlan, confronted by a golden city on a lake. Alexander weeping because there are no more worlds to conquer.

—

Everything Jack sees in Christmas Town is distorted in translation. The presents wrapped under trees are enigmas. Snow is “white things in the air.” He may as well be speaking in a Zizekian or Borat accent: his jaunt parodies the immigrant experience.

Back home, Jack dissects Christmas. He pulls ornaments apart. He reads. He measures. It doesn’t work. He ends up more confused. The ornaments yield no secrets on the dissection table. The candy cane, sliced open, reveals nothing about why it makes children smile. You cannot reverse-engineer someone else’s civilisation from its artefacts.

The Skeleton King enlists the Halloween Town citizens into making presents. Yet everything they produce is an abomination — shrunken heads for gifts, a severed hand poking out of a box, a snake eating the Christmas tree. His own supervision is misguided too — no, he complains about a bit of roadkill being wrapped as a gift, It's been dead for much too long; try something fresher.

Yet the gifts Jack delivers to children are genuine treasures in Halloween Town. A shrunken head is a masterwork of his civilisation’s art. He is not giving junk. He is gifting the cultural equivalent of gold, frankincense and myrrh. His abominable followers are doing Christmas as they understand it. They have applied their own aesthetic vocabulary to someone else’s celebration and produced something that would make the recipients scream — which is exactly what Halloween is supposed to do. They have succeeded perfectly by their own standards while failing catastrophically by their adopted culture’s.

This is the immigrant community that has adopted the festivals of the host country and produced something that looks, to the natives, uncanny. It is what happens when a civilisation tries to absorb another’s institutions wholesale: you get the forms without the meaning. The Christmas tree with a snake in it. (Ironically, what is Christmas itself if not some abominable offspring of Christian conquest and old pagan lore?)

That the whole thing is the work of a Jew — the brilliant and nominatively determinative Danny Elfman — is itself another act of cultural bastardry.

Comedy but also tragedy runs through Nightmare. Good intentions, cultural enthusiasm, genuine generosity, even love for the other culture — none of it is sufficient. Cultural illegibility can give rise to horrors. You can adore Christmas and still deliver nightmares to its children.

Jack’s transformation is deeply personal. There is a scene where Jack stands before his mirror and dons the Santa Claus outfit. The red suit, the white trim, the hat. He puts it on and looks at himself. What does he see? A skeleton in a red suit. Bones where the belly should be. A rictus grin where the rosy cheeks should be. The dissonance is garish but invisible to him. But Sally sees it. She tells him it’s all wrong, he’s forgotten himself, he’s the Pumpkin King. He barrels on. The Great Man’s will is not so easily deflected.

This is the immigrant looking at himself in the costume of the host culture. The new suit that doesn’t quite fit. The adopted mannerisms that ring slightly false. The forced cheer of someone performing a festival they did not grow up with.

Sally is literally Dr. Finkelstein’s creation — his Bride, stitched together from parts, who has walked away from him. The man cannot even control his own created woman. Now Jack is trying to create Christmas — to manufacture it from parts, like Finkelstein manufactured Sally. He has taken the components (the tree, the gifts, the sleigh, the costume) and stitched them together. But the created thing has a will of its own. His Christmas escapes and becomes a nightmare.

You cannot stitch a civilisation together from parts and expect it to live. The form of the thing is not the thing. The suit is not the man.

—

The Mayor of Halloween Town wears a literal badge that says MAYOR, pinned to him like a participation trophy. He has two faces — one happy, one panicked — that rotate depending on his mood. When Jack disappears and things go sideways, the Mayor drives around in his hearse-car with a megaphone, crying:

I’m only an elected official here, I can’t make decisions by myself!

Democracy in Halloween Town is literally two-faced and impotent. The Mayor is an event coordinator. A middle manager. He exists to implement the vision of the sovereign. Democracy is insufficient to the demands of governance. You need a King.

And the King in Jack is the apex of their civilisation’s purpose. Legitimacy flows from his mastery, not from their votes. After all, what does it matter how a goon with an axe lodged in his head votes? You’re telling me you would like the regime to take into account the preferences of a goon with an axe lodged in his head? (Have you met the average voter?)

The villain of Nightmare is Oogie Boogie. He is the fascist alternative. A big sloppy sack who, when you tear him open, is nothing but bugs — the collective masquerading as a singular will. He has his thugs: Lock, Shock, and Barrel, who are children — the stormtroopers are kids playing dress-up. The childlike impulse to beat the crap out of your opponents.

Oogie Boogie is Jack’s twisted mirror image. Where Jack’s authority is rooted in actual supremacy, Oogie’s is rooted in menace. Where Jack wears a perfectly tailored suit, Oogie is a shapeless sack. Where Jack commands through charisma, Oogie commands through fear. He is what sovereignty looks like when it is unmoored from excellence — power as pure threat, form without content, a populist blob with a gambling addiction.

Nightmare’s political spectrum runs: legitimate monarchy (Jack, Santa Claus) > incompetent democracy (the Mayor) > fascist populism (Oogie Boogie). The two monarchs — one of Halloween, one of Christmas — are the only legitimate sovereigns. And they recognise each other as equals.

—

Jack’s escapade fails. He is shot out of the sky. His goons might enter Christmas Land with impunity and even run amok and kidnap its king. Christmas Land is slow to respond. But its orderliness is mistaken for weakness. Eventually its residents wise-up. It has an army. It has cannons that blast Jack out of the sky. Christmas Land acts with All-American delay and force.

When Jack is shot out of the sky he crash-lands in a cemetery — right back where he started, right where he was walking under the moon in the opening, pining for something more. He is broken. His suit is singed. His sleigh is destroyed. His great project lies in ruins.

And then he rises. And sings:

All I ever wanted was to bring them something great.

What the heck, I went and did my best. And by God, I really tasted something swell. And for a moment, why, I even touched the sky.

This is not a Christian redemption arc. He does not flagellate himself. He does not seek forgiveness from the people he wronged. He does not renounce ambition. What he does is remember what he is. “I am the Pumpkin King!” he cries. He was always the Pumpkin King. The Santa suit was a costume. The Great Man tried to become something he was not.

Unlike, say, in Breaking Bad, where Walt is vanquished at the altar of his hubris, Jack is not punished for wanting Christmas. He simply recognises that his greatness lies where it always did: in the thing he was made for.

Jack returns home. He defeats Oogie Boogie. He rescues Santa Claus. He realises he loves Sally — the quiet, thoughtful creature who saw through his delusion and loved him anyway.

And then it snows in Halloween Town.

Santa, restored to his rightful throne, sends a small gift back: snow. A light dusting of the foreign, falling softly on the familiar. Halloween Town’s citizens look up in wonder. They catch snowflakes on their tongues. It is beautiful and strange.

This is the film’s final word on cultural exchange: it can be valuable, but only when it falls lightly. Only when it arrives as a gift from one sovereign to another — monarch to monarch, each secure in his own domain. Not as immigration, not as conquest, not as wholesale adoption. As a gentle visitation. Snow on skulls.

Jack and Sally stand on the hill, silhouetted against the full moon. He is the Pumpkin King and she is the Bride who chose her own groom. Below them, their town — their town — wears a thin, temporary dusting of someone else’s beauty.

He will visit with Santa, his fellow king. They will drink whatever kings drink and joke about the burdens of sovereignty. But Jack will not try to be Santa again. He will remain the Master of Fright, in his own land, under his own moon, with snow melting on his bones.

Also excellent timing with this wonderful Tyler Cowen interview with Paul Gillingham, author of the just-ordered Mexico: A 500-Year History. Gillingham has a very charming quirk where amidst his Irish accent he will do that very Mexican thing of say No? in a Mexican accent in affirming his own point.

I’ve been visiting Mexico for 20 years, and more frequently over the last decade since marrying a Mexican. I’ve road-tripped through the Yucatán and Quintana Roo, and spent time in Mexico City and Querétaro, among other places—admittedly a narrow aperture for such a big and diverse country. But it’s enough dots to sketch a few lines, and to get a feel for the relative trajectories of Mexico and my home country, Australia.

Mexico has always felt intense. For a young man out of rule-obsessed Australia, the chaos can be exhilarating. Everything is fundamentally negotiable. You can just do things.

On my most recent trip, however, those same qualities registered differently. I saw the chaos as less empowering and more dysfunctional. This shift says as much about my own life arc—moving from a risk-seeking young man to an early-middle-aged father—as it does about the state of the country. “Anything is possible” reads very differently to a young single man compared with a father of four young kids.

I thought I’d share some observations from over the years.

Mexico is culturally, economically, and ethnically hierarchical. This hierarchy has deep roots, stretching back through both indigenous and Spanish social structures. Given such stratification, one would expect low socioeconomic mobility—and for the most part, that expectation holds. Class is “sticky” here.

Yet there is a puzzle: the outsized success of newer immigrant groups over the past century, particularly from the Lebanese and Jewish communities. Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is of Maronite Lebanese descent, and the same pattern appears across Latin America—from business elites to heads of state, such as El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele (who is of Palestinian descent).

If class is fixed, how did these newcomers succeed? Mexico doesn’t value abstract merit as the West tends to do. No apparent school-to-university-to-career pipeline exists. Instead, the country rewards tight in-group capital: family cohesion, internal trust, and ethnic credit networks. A healthy distance from the local indigenous-white caste logic helps newcomers, too. With a status illegible to traditional Mexican castes, they can carve out their own destinies.

These groups arrived with merchant traditions and intra-marriage habits that function as portable infrastructure. They don’t need the Mexican state to work because they effectively have their own internal state.

Status illegibility enables status arbitrage, most visibly in relationships. People marry foreign partners who would otherwise sit well outside their dating market at home. I’ve seen upper-class Mexicans marry thoroughly ordinary Australians—and vice versa—because the foreigner is harder to place within familiar status frameworks. In a sometimes comical twist, many white Mexicans simply read white Australians as upper-class by default.

This kind of arbitrage applies to cross-cultural unions generally. Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård writes about how he can’t read a Swedish woman’s status by her clothes. Swedish customs are illegible to him. If even Swedish and Norwegian customs are mutually unreadable, then the range of who you can be in a place truly foreign is wider than you think.

It’s hard to make good money as an employee in Mexico. In Australia, there is a relatively high floor: a salary can sustain a middle-class life. Mexico has no such floor. Wages are low, and the labor pool so vast that employment offers little upside. Equity is the only serious path to wealth.

The opportunity to build a business is real. One Spanish woman I spoke with in Mexico City told me it was far easier to start a company there than in her native Europe. An industrial equipment–rental owner showed me machinery he had imported from India—far cheaper than what is available in the U.S. or Australian markets, where environmental standards are tighter. The Mexican market is huge, the general chaos is high enough that you can “just do things,” and the regulatory touch is . . . negotiable.

Entrepreneurship in Mexico often involves “innovating” in the regulatory environment as much as in the marketplace. Corruption takes many forms and has become an industry of its own. One sub-sector of that industry, born from a quirk of Mexico’s tax system, is particularly illustrative.

The facturera industry is the manufacture of invoices from fake companies. It’s used for tax avoidance and money laundering, and ChatGPT tells me that it accounts for as much as 2 percent of Mexican GDP. Ironically, the money laundering bit means paying taxes on otherwise untaxed income. These middlemen invoice-manufacturers sit at the center of a network that spans legitimate businesses and government officials.

Mexico City cargo cults the practices of wealthier places. Bike lanes adorn terrible roads for cycling. I met a few families who insist on separating their recycling from their trash, despite there being no recycling collection. And some curious status markers are peculiarly local: high-end restaurants often offer cuts of “kosher” meat. This meat may be purchased from a kosher supplier, but it’s not kosher in any meaningful sense (e.g. the restaurant is not kosher-certified). The dish signals quality and status in its association with the wealthy Mexican Jewish community.

The single greatest test for state capacity isn’t a space program or high-speed rail; it’s drinking water on tap. Providing safe, reliable water to millions of households requires boring, consistent competence and coordination across decades. It requires a state that can plan beyond the next election cycle and a citizenry that trusts the infrastructure.

Mexico fails this test. The country’s bottled water industry is the largest per capita in the world. It’s the total outsourcing of a public good to private entities. Once you build an entire economy around 20-liter garrafones, try building a public system to replace it. It’s too late—the incentives are broken. Beyond the ongoing financial cost, abundant potable water is a symbol of functionality and order, like houses of worship. The same logic applies to the sewerage system (can it handle flushing toilet paper?).

I’ve spent a bit of time in South Africa, and I often find myself it with Mexico. Both countries boast huge capital cities, gorgeous coastlines, and stunning natural attractions. Each country has massive pools of under-employed labor, leading to “make-work”—like men waving you in and out of car spots for a tip. Each society is divided into ethno-classes. The Mexican elites were smart enough to avoid legal apartheid, which has saved the country from U.S. approbation. But the economic and other informal divisions are just as sharp.

Consider the language of service. In Mexico, the standard call for a waiter is joven —literally, “young man.” In South Africa today, you’re probably not brave enough to call anyone “boy.” In France, garçon (boy) is harmless. In Mexico, I can’t bring myself to call a 50-year-old server joven. Maybe it’s the Australian in me. I just say amigo. That said, native women at shop counters will call me joven, so perhaps it’s less racially tinged than I first assumed.

In Mexico, as in South Africa, many amenities we’d consider public in Australia are often privatized: security, play areas, health care. The rich live behind fortifications. Even the middle class often live within gated communities.

Security is privatized in other ways, too, in Mexico. Every meaningful restaurant and nightclub pays a fee to its regional cartel. And it matters whether you are stopped by state police, federal police, or the army.

The ability of a state to maintain public goods and social order is surprisingly contingent. Perhaps state capacity is a foundational thing, hard to retrofit onto broken incentives. Once a society normalizes private provision of order, it’s incredibly hard to claw back. You need a broadly vested elite, upfront. Which is the opposite of how ethno-classist states like Mexico and South Africa are born.

Comparing the distribution of land in Mexico and Australia is instructive in revealing each country’s social architecture. In Australia, after the landed gentry (“squatters”) swallowed up vast swaths of territory in the 1860s, the government implemented reforms to redistribute land to smaller yeomen—albeit with mixed results. Mexico, by contrast, came early to be dominated by large landowners, the latifundistas. Though the country experienced wars and revolutions in reaction to its ethno-oligarchic economic and political order, many of these imbalances have persisted. The two paths have left distinct legacies in Australian and Mexican attitudes toward equality and hierarchy.

In Mexico, again as in South Africa, cheap labor means that household help is abundant. Even middle-class families can often afford staff. Some households have generational, live-in employees who become part of the family fabric; others rely on more transient help. This abundance of inexpensive labor means that childcare is available almost everywhere—shopping centers, restaurants. (One wonders whether this helps support fertility rates.)

At times it feels as if Australia is reaching for some of these benefits but cannot quite bring itself to grasp them. The country has one of the highest foreign-born shares in the world, yet it structurally avoids the large-scale use of immigrant labor in domestic service. Australians may want abundant help, but they also insist on equality. There remains a deep cultural aversion to the servant-class model. Still, as property prices rise, immigration continues, and the wealth gap widens between long-established Australians and newer arrivals, greater social rifts may emerge.

Both South Africa and Mexico suffer from brain drain: the brightest tend to go to the U.S. or some other land of opportunity. But pessimism lies thicker in South Africa. The decline is palpable. Cape Town, a cousin and once-peer of Sydney, feels forsaken. Mexico just feels stagnant, in a shoulder-shrug way. This feeling seems to say: sure, much has improved, and more might improve, but it will probably be eaten up by the corruption.

That said, a striking feature of travelling around South Africa is the endless, gorgeous pockets you’re tempted to buy land in. A beautiful homestead, perhaps in the shadow of some great mountain; acreage with wild game. You see much less of that in Mexico.

Mexico’s economy mirrors its social stratification. Two distinct economies exist side by side: one for the wealthy, often at least as expensive as what we find in Australia, and another—more affordable and more informal—for ordinary Mexicans.

Food runs the gamut from street vendors to high-end supermarkets, some fancier than anything in Australia. The same is true of medical services: you can obtain top-tier care on demand, but it will cost you. For everyone else, it’s a dog’s-breakfast public health system. Australia, by contrast, tends to offer a much narrower band of outcomes—generally ranging from fine to good—apt for a nation where mediocrity is a virtue.

Prices in Mexico seem to have skyrocketed over the last decade. I suspect this reflects both a weaker “Pacific peso” and the broader convergence of global capital. Is it good or bad for Australia that we now appear less expensive by comparison? It feels bearish for us, as if our “First World premium” were evaporating.

The idea that in Mexico “you can just do things” applies broadly. Sanborns, for example, combines a restaurant with a department store. Or consider KidZania in Mexico City—a bizarre theme park where children roleplay as workers in places like Amazon warehouses or pharmaceutical factories (they love it!). The whole enterprise is branded, a kind of hyper-capitalist fever dream. Perhaps more room is available to experiment with new formats when rent and labor are cheaper.

If Australia sits on the fringes of empire, Mexico lies at its feet. When the U.S. Treasury targeted a large Mexican bank last year with accusations of money laundering, it was a stark reminder of where sovereignty ultimately lies. The United States erased a Mexican financial institution overnight.

Mexico’s once-robust manufacturing sector has been ceding ground to China for some time. I met a former clothing manufacturer who watched his business evaporate in the 2000s as production shifted to China. The rise of the Chinese auto industry now feels like the next looming shock. Chinese cars are already everywhere in Mexico.

One thing that feels more alive than ever is Mexican culture. Music is a great example. There is a popular, cross-class, and entirely unironic appreciation for Mexican megastars—Luis Miguel, Alejandro Fernández, Thalía. With a distinctly national flavor, these performers fill stadiums. In Australia, by contrast, musicians tend to be either global (AC/DC) or niche (Nick Cave). They are rarely coded as distinctly “Australian.” We don’t really have a national pop culture that everyone—from the billionaire to the taxi driver—sings along to without irony. Mexicans will absolutely sing along to Juan Gabriel. Mexico’s culture is operatic. It is a telenovela writ large.

Maybe John Farnham is an exception, but I’m clutching at straws. Perhaps it’s an Anglo thing: folk or national music has always been a little too on the nose for the English tradition. American music now dominates the airwaves in many countries, and while it is certainly present in Mexico, Mexicans do not appear ready to give up their affection for their own musical traditions.

Urban design, or its lack thereof, can be grim in Mexican cities. Outside the old Spanish colonial centers, the landscape often becomes a jagged concrete jungle. If this is a YIMBY paradise—where anyone can build anything—count me out. Querétaro’s mass middle-class housing developments rival Soviet Khrushchyovkas in their ugliness. Still, perhaps they would look different in a country with four times the GDP per capita.

Then again, look at Tulum. They’ve essentially doubled the size of the tourist strip in a decade. Tulum is the perfect adult’s playground. It’s what Byron Bay would be if we were allowed to do things in Australia. But Tulum is better understood as an extension of New York City than a part of Mexico. It’s a walled garden for the global elite, with just the right amount of Mexican chaos.

And then there are the small things. The everyday machismo that still dictates social interactions (only men pay in group situations). The fact that raw chickens are yellow because of their feed (marigold petals). The chili on fruit and salt in beer—the Mexicans are correct about this, by the way (and you can do it, too).

And the food. Tongue and cow head street tacos. Menudo (tripe soup) is the most underrated dish in Mexico. Why is it a hangover cure and a breakfast staple like its tripe soup cousin in Georgia (xashi) and Vietnam (pho)? And who first thought to combine clams and tomatoes to make Clamato, a national drink in Mexico?

I love the guerito and gallo nicknames streets vendors have for my kids. (My youngest really does strut like a plucky little rooster). There are endless natural sites to visit. A niche personal favorite is the cave of the hanging serpents—but be prepared for blind snakes gulping down bats inches from your face.

The girl in the stars-and-stripes mini-skirt leans out.
She elicits the sympathy of the entire world by revealing
The touching forethought of a sudden matching thong.

…

I am a small god made of terracotta, trembling on a pedestal,
Interred in a maelstrom of sound.

Look what the little clay god has found, neatly folded!
A jumbled bundle of young black bones,
Secured by a teeny half-digested thong.

— Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song

Nick Cave is Australia’s John Milton, and The Sick Bag Song is our Paradise Lost. Its epic form and lyricism are not the story of the Fall, but of a godling flittering about the vast American continent amidst its ghosts and detritus, lonely, masturbating in hotel rooms. Pretzels the size of severed heads. High grass prairies. The ghosts of the Cheyenne. A black girl in a stars-and-stripes mini-skirt and matching thong who stalks and winks at you.

Across this land Cave takes the form of many things. He is a deity on stage. He resists the liver spots that glare in the brutal bathroom light, lacquers his black hair atop his “multi-storied forehead”, and transforms into any number of decrepit gods past: Elvis Presley’s belly rolled up a hill in Sisyphean futility; a Johnny Cash overdose; a Patti Smith hellscape.

Or maybe The Sick Bag Song is our Beowulf, and Cave its lost storyteller. Where in Beowulf our hero seizes the giant-forged sword in Grendel’s mother’s lair and swings it in an arc to break through the bone-rings of her neck — “severed it entirely, toppling the doomed house of her flesh” — Cave might rather do the same to his own forehead. But in The Sick Bag Song Beowulf’s great dragon is reduced to a small one Cave finds beneath a bridge. He doesn’t battle it, but instead examines its sexual organ, and carries its corpse to the river to lie with his drowned gods.

Cave is a mythmaker. For him all memory is myth, the stories we tell ourselves about the past are fraught and unreliable, and so why let them stale, why not inflate them with grandeur, insert new heroes and others’ tales? He inflates the barren world he fled in regional Australia with the grandeur of mythology. He comes from Wangaratta, a town I only know of because a pretty girl I once met was somehow related to a murder-suicide there. The misbegotten ghosts of his Wangaratta youth stalk him.

Part of the magic of The Sick Bag Song is that Cave’s lyricism is unconstrained by music. He can be a lot in interviews, but he pulls it off — he is Nick Cave after all. His central conceit is blasting through Australia’s allergy to tall poppies. The hero Australia deserves. He’s a singular individual, inflected with Christianity and grandeur, a rare combination, both marginalised by Australian society. And yet his grandeur and self-mockery are inseparable. It’s Cave himself who inverts the epic poem genre into some smaller Australian grotesquerie. But then there are moments where his lyric bravado cracks into something raw. His son’s death is still ahead, but loss is everywhere in his work. Desire. Loneliness. We forgive the godling his posturing.

Cave’s inversion of the epic poem is very Australian but it could still only be written among the ruins of a grand America, scrawled across the back of sick bags flying around on tour. Australia’s own epic is yet to be written. Voss’s star-spangled desert night and Aborigine-suckled dingo pups was a step in this direction, unfulfilled. Mr Inbetween points to the bodies buried across the vast outback, and the contours of our yearning, but shrinks from the epic. Australians are allergic to the epic. Our continent still waits for its epic tale to do it justice.

Of course, you must listen to the audiobook where Cave reads it himself. Hear him remember another man’s dreams or inspect his ageing face before roaring onstage, immortal.

In the wake of the great shearers’ strike of 1891 — after the defeat and arrests, and the mounted infantry dispersed the camps — William Lane decided there was no hope for workers in Australia. He would build a new society somewhere else. A white, socialist utopia. Nueva Australia — a New Australia in Paraguay.

To understand what drove two hundred and twenty Australians to board a ship for a jungle on the other side of the world, we must first understand what happened at Barcaldine.

By January 1891, the Queensland outback was as close to civil war as colonial Australia ever came. The pastoralists — the squatters, men who owned country the size of small European nations — had announced wage cuts and demanded shearers sign individual contracts that would break the unions. The shearers refused. Strike camps sprang up across central Queensland: at Clermont, at Hughenden, at Barcaldine, where up to a thousand men camped in tents arrayed in military rows along the south bank of Lagoon Creek. Many were armed. The Brisbane Courier asked whether “the industrial Armageddon” was about to be “fought in the heart of Australia.”

The colonial government’s response was overwhelming. More than two thousand soldiers and police deployed to the wool districts. Artillery pieces and mounted infantry took up positions near the strikers’ camps. In late March, police swept through the camps and arrested the strike leadership. Thirteen union leaders were convicted of sedition and conspiracy at Rockhampton and sentenced to three years’ hard labour on St Helena Island prison, in Moreton Bay. By May, the camps were full of hungry, penniless men. The strike was broken. The squatters had won.

Lane had watched all of this from Brisbane, where he edited The Worker, the union-funded newspaper that had become the voice of the movement. He was thirty years old, an English immigrant who had come to journalism through poverty and odd jobs across three continents — Bristol to Canada to Detroit to Brisbane. He was small and intense, an orator with what contemporaries called an American twang, a teetotaller so committed that he had once got himself deliberately arrested as a drunk to expose the conditions in Brisbane’s lock-ups. He wrote under a dozen pseudonyms. His novel, The Workingman’s Paradise, published under the name John Miller, sold copies to raise funds for the families of the imprisoned strike leaders.

The defeat of 1891 convinced Lane that reform within Australia was impossible. The capitalists controlled the state; the state would always crush the workers. The only solution was to leave — to create, somewhere else entirely, a society built from first principles. He announced the formation of the New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association. Each male member was required to contribute a minimum of sixty pounds — equivalent to perhaps eight thousand dollars today — representing the sale of their homes, their savings, everything they had. In return, they would receive a share in a new civilisation.

The rules Lane drafted for this civilisation were uncompromising. “It is right living to share equally because selfishness is wrong,” he wrote. “To teetotal because liquor drinking is wrong; to uphold life-marriage and keep white because looseness of living is wrong.” No alcohol. No fraternising with non-whites. No private property. The colony would be “genuinely democratic and co-operating,” with “all labour in common for the common good.” It would be the brotherhood of English-speaking whites.

Paraguay had reasons of its own to welcome these dreamers. A generation earlier, the country had launched itself into a war against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay — the War of the Triple Alliance, which lasted from 1864 to 1870 and became the bloodiest conflict in the history of Latin America. When the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López was finally killed by Brazilian troops in 1870, his country was devastated. The war had killed somewhere between half and two-thirds of the total population. By some estimates, 90% of males of military age had perished. A postwar census found 221,079 people remaining: 106,254 women, 86,079 children, and 28,746 men. Four women for every man. The government was desperate for settlers — anyone who would come, who would work the land, who would repopulate the emptied countryside.

Lane’s scouts negotiated a grant of nearly half a million acres of fertile country, free of cost and without taxes, in the interior south-east of Asunción.

On 16 July 1893, two hundred and twenty Australians boarded the Royal Tar at Mort Bay in Sydney. The ship had been built for cargo, not passengers, and had to be extensively modified to accommodate the emigrants. The manifest recorded men, women, and children from across the eastern colonies — Queensland bushmen and shearers predominated, but there were also urban workers, idealists, and at least one suspected police informant. Among them was Hugh Blackwell, one of the strike leaders who had been arrested at Barcaldine, looking for a fresh start after his release from prison. There was George Birks, an Adelaide chemist who had sold his shop on Rundle Street to contribute to the common fund. There were families—the Hoares from South Australia with their children, the Kempsons with four young ones, the Thomas family with six. Men who had lost the strike and lost hope. Women who had watched their husbands come home defeated.

A farewell gathering was held at the Sydney Domain. The chair was taken by Chris Watson, a young union organiser who would, eleven years later, become Prime Minister of Australia — the first Labor prime minister anywhere in the world. Watson spoke of the workingman’s paradise to be established in the hinterland of tropical America. William Holman, who would himself become Premier of New South Wales, also addressed the crowd.

The voyage took sixty-eight days. They sailed south, rounding New Zealand, then fought through the storms of Cape Horn — the most dangerous passage in the world — before turning north up the Atlantic coast of South America to Montevideo. There they transferred to a riverboat and began the long journey inland, up the Río de la Plata, up the Paraná, up the Paraguay, a thousand miles into the heart of the continent. They arrived at Asunción on 22 September 1893. From there, a train took them to Villarrica, and then bullock carts carried them the final distance to the site of the colony, where the countryside looked, some of them said, like the Darling Downs back home.

But the Darling Downs it was not. The land was rough, uncleared. They had no common language with the Guaraní-speaking locals. Many of the colonists, it turned out, were urban idealists or what some called misfits and malcontents — men who had never cleared land in their lives. John Alfred Rogers wrote home: “there are several people here barefooted and without a shirt to their back and very often an empty belly.”

Lane’s rules were strict, and he enforced them with the zeal of a prophet. The ban on alcohol was tested quickly. On Christmas Day 1893, several men visited a nearby Guaraní village, obtained liquor, and returned to the settlement drunk and fighting. Lane called in the Paraguayan police and expelled them. A visiting British diplomat assessed Lane as “remarkably deficient in the tact and human sympathy so necessary in a leader of men.”

Tensions arose too about labour and women. Some colonists, men who had paid their sixty pounds and crossed an ocean, began to suggest that if this was to be a workers’ paradise, they might hire cheap local labour — the very kind of exploitation they had supposedly left behind. Others began to fraternise with Guaraní women, which Lane treated as the ultimate betrayal of the colour line.

A second boatload of emigrants arrived from Adelaide in early 1894. The factional fighting intensified. By May 1894, less than eight months after the founding, Lane had had enough. He and fifty-eight loyalists split off to form a second settlement called Cosme, seventy-two kilometres further south, on the banks of the Pirapó River. The remaining two hundred and seventeen colonists at New Australia abandoned socialism, asked the Paraguayan government to dissolve the cooperative, and divided the land into private holdings. Some drifted away — back to Australia, or to sheep stations in Patagonia, or into the Paraguayan interior.

Mary Gilmore, who would later adorn the ten dollar note, reached Cosme in January 1896. After helping the movement from Australia, she resigned from teaching in late 1895 and sailed to Paraguay to join Lane’s experiment.

Lane held on at Cosme for five more years, watching his second utopia fail more slowly than the first. Crops failed and colonists starved. His own health broke down. In 1899, exhausted and disillusioned, he resigned the chairmanship and sailed away with his family, first back to Australia, then to New Zealand. In Auckland, he reinvented himself as a conservative. He became editor of the New Zealand Herald, the establishment paper, and wrote under the pseudonym “Tohunga” — the Māori word for prophet. The radical socialist of the 1890s became an Empire loyalist, an ardent conscriptionist during the Great War. When he died in 1917, aged fifty-six, of bronchitis and a heart condition, the Australian labour press was divided between those who remembered what he had once been and those who could not forgive what he had become.

Lane never spoke of Paraguay again.

But something survived. Two thousand people in Paraguay still carry surnames like Wood, McLeod, Murray, and Kempson. They are cattle ranchers now, not communists. Some have become quite wealthy landowners, employing the very kind of labour their great-grandparents once refused to hire. They speak Spanish and Guaraní.

There are very few examples of good marriage on TV or in film. Plumbing the depths of marital dysfunction is a rich vein of creation. A Faustian pact binds Tony and Carmela’s marriage in the The Sopranos, where every marriage is fatally compromised except that of Johnny Sack and Gini, who are more a punchline than a fleshed-out marriage (excuse the pun). In Breaking Bad, marriage is a vice grip that Walt escapes then hijacks. Hank and Marie’s marriage is close to platonic but it is infertile and dies with him. Mad Men is in love with the aesthetic of philandering and the archetype of the boredom-broiled housewife. Fleishman is in Trouble peers into the horrorshow of divorce.

But for Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the All-American undercover Soviet spy couple of The Americans, marriage turns out to be the bedrock of all things. Their marriage is born a fraud, a cover, arranged from above. It is under constant pressure. They spend days, nights, weeks apart. They even hit ‘pause’ on their marriage, Philip moving out to a grimy motel. Part of their job is to sleep with informants. Philip even marries an FBI secretary in a sham marriage, which Elizabeth attends as his fake sister. Elizabeth falls in love with a black communist collaborator, going to him when pregnant with Philip’s child. They have deep ideological disagreements — Philip eventually quits their spy practice. And yet, in the end, their marriage is all that’s left. As their cover unravels and the world they knew for decades collapses, they are forced to abandon their son. Their daughter abandons them. They are left with absolutely nothing but each other. Their world burns to a cinder, leaving only their covenant at its core. The earth breaks upon their marriage.

The Jennings’ marriage begins not with love but with duty. It thrives because it’s explicitly an unchosen obligation, and it is our unchosen obligations that define us. Their marriage is assigned by the Soviet state, a bureaucratic arrangement between two agents who barely know each other. Modern culture assumes marriage begins with love and only later discovers obligation. The Jennings’ marriage runs in the opposite direction. Obligation comes first — loyalty to the mission, loyalty to the partner — and love slowly grows out of it. What begins as a fraud becomes a covenant. It’s a fantastic irony. The Soviet state accidentally creates a stronger marriage than does modern Western society. The system that produces sham identities and lies ends up producing a real covenant while the free, romantic American marriages around them are mostly fragile.

Life as a spy mirrors that of a marriage. A lifetime commitment. An imperceptible future beyond an idealistic initiation. Only the vaguest, theoretical conception of the challenges that lie ahead. A constant performance — for others, for your children, for each other.

Their marriage survives these slings and arrows because their marriage is hard, because marriage is hard. But because The Americans begins with the premise that their marriage is a cover, it spends less time documenting its pitfalls than its promise. The subterranean tenderness that builds over time. That dwells in the knowing glance, in a long silence. How intimacy and love can grow from duty. Sprigs flowering around cold rails. The all-consuming nature of a fight with a spouse followed by the tenderness of reconciliation. Joint suffering over children, work. That thing where wives sometimes just know what their husbands need, how they grasp them in a moment of vulnerability and love them despite whatever feuding might trail them. The Jennings’ small acts — gestures, looks — of marital love are the sparks that sustain the show. In the final episode of Season 5, Elizabeth tells a young protege that he will fail in the spy business without a partner. She could have been talking about life. You need someone to get through the vicissitudes of life. And there is no institution formidable enough for that task than marriage. The Americans is a story about marriage dressed up as a spy thriller. The show’s heart isn’t into all the Soviet plot machinations. The tribulations of Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage is the beating heart of the show.

That, and friendship. Noah Emmerich makes for a superb Stan Beeman, their lonely FBI neighbour. Surely the greatest friendship heartbreak on TV. “I would have done anything for you Philip,” he tells Philip in their final confrontation, and I dare you not to choke up. They were best friends, ruse or no ruse. (Funny that Emmerich plays the fake best friend in the greatest film of fakery, The Truman Show.) It’s in these moments that the show reaches the heights of TV, Beeman left standing alone, his silhouette against an empty car park, stewing in his heartbreak, without his best friend, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms strumming in the background.1

The Americans is also surprisingly ambitious in its form. Lured into watching a show about an American-as-apple-pie couple with a big secret, you end up watching a show half set in Russia and in Russian. An underappreciated forerunner to Shōgun, a genuine American masterpiece that’s somehow largely in Japanese.

Like all shows about people in middle life The Americans is about the crises of middle life. Dealing with kids growing up. Raising them in a foreign land, and figuring out how to impart what matters about your own culture — inevitably to some degree of failure. Marital turbulence. Career anxiety. The Jennings just have to deal with spy issues too, like fake second marriages and coups and handling stolen bioweapons.

What happens when the mask becomes the face? The Jennings really do become an American family. Their kids are American. Breaking up with or being dumped by a fake girlfriend turns out to suck as much as the real thing. The fake becomes the real. What is fake and real anyway? There is just what we do in this world. A fake marriage turns out to be indistinguishable from a real marriage. A fake travel business takes as much work and is as prone to failure as a real travel business. A fake friendship contains the same love and potential for loss as a real one. Take Philip’s fake second marriage to Martha, the FBI secretary. She stays loyal to him even after she uncovers the ruse. And he stays loyal to her. In an effort that strains credulity, they whisk all-American Martha out of the US and away from all she’s ever known to start again in the Soviet Union. This would be laughable in The Sopranos universe, where she’d have been lucky to get a bullet to the back of the head. Philip’s devotion to her, pushed to the limits of what he can do, is apparent to even Elizabeth, who in a rare moment of vulnerability tells him she understands if he would rather stay with Martha. But no. Philip’s ultimate loyalty lies with Elizabeth, his fake-cum-real wife.

And then there’s Keri Russell, who plays Elizabeth Jennings. They could have just called it the Keri Russell Show. Probably the greatest female lead in television history, although I may just be smitten by the line of her neck. She’s mesmerising. Tough as guts. Reminds me of my wife. Elizabeth is an apt paean to the wife. In her many guises she is fun, sexy. But she is most mesmerising in stillness. A stern, pained, or loving look. A thousand words in a glance. In the same way horror closeups of Elizabeth Moss’s horror-face augmented the horror of Gilead in A Handmaid’s Tale, Keri Russell’s steely wife’s love is the north star to every lost boy. She embodies the show’s idea of marriage — discipline, loyalty, and endurance. Something to hold onto in a harsh world.

The Americans doesn’t pull its punches. Senseless murders, sexual escapades, rapes, dismemberments — there is an endless procession of gore and titillation. And yet its range is far more limited than its predecessor, The Sopranos. Everyone in The Americans is too competent. Too nobly intended even. Adverse selection rules everything in The Sopranos. Its thugs brutalise everyone around them out of malice and incompetence in equal measure — that’s part of the general tragedy, the decay in everything. The Sopranos is a Great American tale, spanning farce and piercing insight into the human condition: fatherhood, marriage, civilisational decline, all through the eyes of New Jersey mobsters. The Americans dabbles in darkness but doesn’t really descend into it. Things seldom go to plan, Elizabeth tells her apprenticed daughter. But mainly they kind of do. How much competence can we really believe in the state security services of an indolent late-stage Soviet Union, or a decadent Reaganite FBI? But that competence is necessary for the tension of the show. Beside The Sopranos, which wallows in its darkness, The Americans is pristine.

The Americans is relentlessly anti-Soviet. Our hero agents kill innocents. Characters recall evils committed by Soviets to each other. A KGB’s officer’s mother was imprisoned at a camp and sold herself for food. Elizabeth was raped. I recall only one moment in the entire show where there is an honest compliment paid to the USSR. A dissident — who hates the Soviet Union — says, America has food and money but it’s not so easy to be happy. He misses his street, his home, his friends. That’s the only moment in six seasons the show pushes back on Reaganite America. Easy to be sympathetic with that posture. But wouldn’t it have been more powerful for the show to undermine some of America’s sheen? The Wire was set 15 years later. Show the real streets of Baltimore — the Jennings live in DC! But that kind of moral exploration (nihilism?) lies outside of the show’s narrow aperture.

The show deftly gets at deep cultural fissures through cultural misunderstandings. Reagan’s assassination attempt is immediately perceived by the Soviets as a military coup. Obvious to a Soviet cynic, absurd to an American. American crop testing to create bug resistant wheat is misconstrued by the Soviets as a pest to cause mass famine. The show correctly gleans a cynical glint to the Soviet eye; suspicion where it is unjustified, and a projection of its own vast malice.

The ending is satisfying and emotionally intense, but the emotional nadir of the show comes late in the penultimate season. Our heroes are asked to hunt down a Nazi collaborator, living under false pretenses in the US. Their righteous crusade becomes morally muddied. Turns out their collaborator had been sixteen. Her family had been shot around her. The Germans got her drunk and made her shoot Soviet prisoners. She had made a decent life since — the American dream. Philip hesitates and Elizabeth guns her down, along with her loving American husband. It’s a brutal scene. Even the Soviets’ righteous crusades become grotesque abortions.

The emotional thread that runs through the series is the couple’s slow disenchantment with their mission. They’re constantly running into ‘are we the bad guys’ dilemmas. Like their disguises, their little evils decorate the show. Knifing dissidents and leaving them to be found by their young son. Encouraging a dissident’s teenager to suicide. Seducing an underage daughter of a CIA operative. Innocents killed as collateral damage. They try to steelman their revolutionary zeal and their communist comrades, but it’s difficult, especially by the 1980s when the Soviet functionaries themselves are stripped of most idealism and are soaked in cynicism. They see the opulence in the America around them, and compare it to the scarcity back home. Once they could have excused this for the terrible burden shouldered by the Soviets during the Great Patriotic War. By the late Soviet era that excuse rings hollow. One dissident they ‘befriend’ complains constantly about the lack of freedoms and other evils that travailed him in the USSR, grating against their idealisation of life back home. As their faith in communism frays, their faith in their marriage grows. It’s too late for them to stay in America. But back home where they end up — unbeknownst to them ahead of total collapse — they have each other.

The Americans steps up its music game in the last season, and especially the last episode. Just like The Sopranos nailed its ending with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, U2’s With or Without You plays to the Jennings’ final moments in America as their family and their world unravels. Are they allowed to just claim a banger like that? Almost cheating, frankly. Between the couple and their abandoned children, between them and the dying USSR, they can’t live with or without any of it.

The Americans dissolves the line between real and fake, but not the line between meaning and a joke. “You made my life a joke,” Stan tells Philip in their final confrontation. “My life was the joke,” Philip responds. Philip and Elizabeth fought for a hollow cause, for false masters. They lost their children, who will now hate them as they pick up the pieces of their lives. (“You’re a whore,” her daughter tells Elizabeth, the full extent of her mother’s professional philandering dawning upon her.) What was it all for? What is any of it for? What’s left? Each other. They still raised their two kids to adulthood. “They'll remember us. They're not kids anymore. We raised them,” Philip tells Elizabeth in the final scene. And the friendship with Stan? Despite everything, it was real. Not everything is eternal. Broken things can have had meaning too.

Over the last few years I’ve been reading Australian history. Historians, essayists, memoirs, novels to try and understand who we are, how we got here, the nature of the issues we face.

I’ve been astounded by the richness of our history and the prose of our historians.

Over summer I read Neville Meaney, a great historian on Australian security concerns and identity and more. And I’ve shared his provocations in a loose series over recent weeks (here, here, and here).

The White Australia policy arched over a 60 — 70 year period when our colonies were forged into a nation in Federation and two World Wars. We were thoroughly British — literal British subjects, the idea of a separate Australian citizenship utterly alien — and then we weren’t. We tiptoed from being a consciously white British nation with a near exclusive British immigration policy to one with a more open migration policy. And that trickle became a flood until today, where we have one of the highest rates of foreign born populations in the developed world, twice the rate of the US.

And we act today as if this always was. That this is the word of God and that all sorts of people from far away lands must fall upon this earth like rain.

We have no cultural memory of White Australia. Before then may as well be before the Flood. We do not recall White Australia other than in distant admonition. It’s our antebellum sin.

And as explored in this series, the truth is more sensible, less scurrilous, and more ennobling of the men who made this nation.

Our change in posture mid-century was abrupt. Historians have tended to glide over this change, either in a Whig gesture to the winds of progress, or they have offered up reasons that aren’t that compelling upon closer examination.

Was it merely some inevitable economic or cultural entanglement with Asia? Economic and cultural engagement happens all the time without being coupled with migration.

Was it a return to liberal roots? Too essentialist. We contain multitudes.

It’s been difficult to pin down, yet the reason has been staring us in the face.

Over the last century, the defining force of Australian political and cultural has been American hegemony. When the US hopped, we jumped. Our sails have blown with the American hurricane.

Partly, this is no secret at all — it’s very much an explicit part of our nation’s narrative. We made an explicit security decision to fall under America’s security umbrella. This is well trodden stuff. We also feel the flood of American cultural dominance every day in the music we listen to and the TV we watch. But we don’t quite appreciate how total the socio-political dominance has been. Observing American dominance to the extent I will here is, I believe, a unique contribution. (If it’s not unique, I’m sure someone will yell at me for it.)

Total American dominance is the massive, redacted centre of Australia’s story over the last century.

The extent of this dominance is missing in explicit readings of our history because it flatters no one in this country. Not our so-called intelligentsia, provincial yet proud. Not our politicians, pretenders to agency. Not our historians, who centre Australian interests and actors. Not leftists, who are inflamed by the example of local activists and the moral arc of history, nor rightists who explain our actions in terms of our own traditions or character or philosophies (are you a Gladstonian or Disraeli conservative?).

We want to believe that our moral actions as a country have been a function of local courage and conviction, of great moral actors and awakenings in this land. Not merely functions of imperial mimicry. Yet our moral heroes tend to be grafted awkwardly in retrospect, and when they were sailing in the right direction it was on the currents on American empire.

We are not alone. Much of Europe — and other peoples — could probably tell a similar story. But Australia’s political mimicry has arguably been particularly intense. And this is a story about Australia by an Australian, one almost entirely elided by Australian historians, as much as I love them.

This is the story of Australia over the last century: American FOB, American mimic.

***

This statement, made three weeks after Pearl Harbor, is often treated as Australia’s geopolitical coming-of-age — its declaration of independence from Britain and pivot to the United States. But the pivot had already begun thirty-three years earlier.

On 20 August 1908, sixteen American battleships steamed into Sydney Harbour, their hulls painted white to denote peace. One quarter of Australia’s entire population — over one million people — turned out to see the Great White Fleet during its three-week visit to Sydney, Melbourne, and Albany. A public holiday was declared. A week of parades, balls, concerts, and sporting events followed. Buildings were illuminated at night. The crowds were rapturous.

The visit was not on Theodore Roosevelt’s original itinerary. Prime Minister Alfred Deakin had invited them directly, bypassing London — an extraordinary breach of imperial protocol for a dominion that still considered itself thoroughly British. Deakin told Roosevelt that “no other Federation in the world possesses so many features [in common with] the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia.”

What was Deakin playing at? The same thing the Australian founding fathers had been anxious about since Federation: Japan’s rising naval power and Britain’s indifference to it. Japan had defeated Russia in 1905, a European Great Power humiliated by an Asian nation for the first time in modern history. The British, focused on Europe, brushed off Australian concerns about the Pacific. Japan was, after all, a British ally — they had fought together in the Great War. The British maintained a small squadron in Sydney — one that could be recalled at any time — and considered that adequate.

Deakin disagreed. The Great White Fleet’s visit was his way of making a point: that Australia needed to think about its own defence, and that there was another great power in the Pacific who might be interested in helping. The visit gave Deakin the political capital to establish an Australian navy. It also heralded a wholesale strategic shift toward American shores.

The Australian founding fathers turned out to be exactly right about Japan. The British dismissal of the Pacific theatre led directly to the catastrophe of Singapore’s fall in 1942. More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured; over 7,000 would die as prisoners of war. The defensive strategy Australia had invested in for fifteen years was in ruins.

It was in this context that Curtin published his famous statement. Churchill was furious. Roosevelt was “astonished” — and privately displeased.

But Curtin was ahead of both of them. He defied Churchill’s direct orders to divert Australian troops to Burma, insisting they return home to defend Australia. When American General Douglas MacArthur arrived and told Curtin bluntly that America had “no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia” and viewed it merely as “a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese,” Curtin didn’t flinch. He knew Australia needed America more than America needed Australia. That asymmetry would define the relationship ever after.

The ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951. Australia would back its big ally in war. Australian troops served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But not only did Australia support America in its wars. Australia introduced conscription for the Vietnam War, something Billy Hughes lost two referenda over during WWI. And we were so supportive and early in George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ that we got our own special class of US visa. Australia did everything it could at every stage to demonstrate Australian fealty.

But the relationship went deeper than just security. Australia didn’t just align with American military power.

Australian political and cultural commentators tend to tell the story of Australian social evolution with reference to internal factors: Australian history, Australian actors, Australian preferences.

But the reality is we quickly followed American socio-political trends. This is the defining feature of Australian political evolution for the last century.

Consider the legislative timeline:

• The US passes its Civil Rights Act in 1964. Australia holds its referendum on Aboriginal race powers in 1967 and passes a Racial Discrimination Act in 1975.

• The US passes the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, ending racial quotas. Australia dismantles White Australia from 1966–1973.

• The US passes Title VII (1964) and Title IX (1972) on sex discrimination. Australia passes its Sex Discrimination Act in 1984.

• The US passes the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Australia passes the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992.

• Obergefell v. Hodges legalises same-sex marriage in the US in 2015. Australia legalises it in 2017.

Even our great Snowy Hydro scheme, which began construction in 1949, was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the decade before.

I knew a couple at university who got married in Australia only after Obergefell and read from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion at the wedding. The tentacles of empire run deep in this land.

The 1967 referendum may be the centre-piece of Australia's civil rights mythology — our Selma, our March on Washington. In popular mythology it’s confused for having granted Aboriginal people the vote or citizenship (they had both already). The referendum was an amendment to the Commonwealth's race power, granting the federal government authority to make laws on the basis of race. In a cosmic irony, it was a move away from colour-blindness. The referendum gave Canberra the constitutional machinery for racial discrimination. This too is in line with the American cultural revolution at the time. As writers like Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania have pointed out, the Civil Rights Act became the legal foundation for affirmative action, disparate impact doctrine, and a vast apparatus of mandated racial consciousness. The Australian version didn't even bother with the facade. We wrote the race power directly into the constitution. The mimicry was faithful, in both the divergent mythologies of racial equality and realities of racial preference they created.

There is one striking counterexample to the mimicry. The High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992 — which overturned terra nullius and recognised native title — may be considered a distinctly Australian development.

But even then, look closer and the imperial scaffolding reappears. Justice Brennan’s lead judgment explicitly invoked international law as the lever for change, writing that it was contrary to “international standards” and “fundamental values” to maintain a discriminatory rule denying indigenous people rights to their land. The key legal precedent was not Australian but Canadian — Calder v British Columbia (1973), in which the Supreme Court of Canada first recognised that aboriginal title predated colonisation. Ron Castan QC, lead counsel for the Mabo plaintiffs, was frank about this: asked how much he’d drawn on Australian legal experience, he replied that he’d essentially just laid Calder before the High Court and told them it was all there. And the case itself only survived because of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 — the very legislation that sits in our timeline as a downstream product of the American Civil Rights Act. When Queensland tried to legislatively extinguish Meriam native title mid-case, the High Court struck the legislation down as inconsistent with the RDA. Without the American civil rights movement, there is no RDA; without the RDA, there is no Mabo. The chain of imperial transmission holds.

Australia’s land acknowledgements are a genuine cultural export. Canadians didn’t adopt land acknowledgments widely until after 2015, and in America they’re still a punchline. This is a local liturgy, born of local identity anxieties, that have escalated in strange ways over the last decade or so.

American socio-political dominance is not a conscious decision. It’s the water we swim in. Race has been the defining cultural rubric for the United States since its 1960s cultural revolution. It did well for Australia to go along with that. The new imperial zeitgeist demanded racial enlightenment, and Australia provided it.

In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of Australians took to the streets in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. They chanted I can’t breathe. They held moments of silence for George Floyd. They demanded an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody, grafting American rhetoric to local conditions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against importing “things happening in other countries.” He was ignored. The protests proceeded. The signs read Black Lives Matter.

The Sydney protest was organised jointly by the Indigenous Social Justice Association and the Anticolonial Asian Alliance — a name that could only have emerged from American academic discourse. Each new iteration of the gay flag and acronym is quickly downloaded from American HQ.

Or consider Obama. In 2008, 64% of Australians wanted Obama to win, against 14% for McCain. By 2012, 80% wanted Obama re-elected, against 9% for Romney. When Obama finally visited Australia in 2011 the reception was ecstatic. Obamamania, the press called it. One journalist noted that “in Australia, an Obama speech still packs the kind of punch it did in the United States in 2008. It’s as if he were still seen in the haze of can-do hype that has worn off in the cities of America.”

Australia was more excited about Obama than America was.

I suspect most Australians believed we are protected by a First Amendment. (We aren’t.)

Australia changed after the 1950s because America changed. Australia took its cues from the imperial centre. This has been true since the Great White Fleet steamed into Sydney Harbour in 1908, and it remains true today.

Australian security anxiety runs deep. A sense of British flakiness led to Federation. Following Federation, Australia asked the US to extend its Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific, which it declined. Australia has never felt the requisite institutional confidence to take an independent security posture, much to the frustration of Australian security analysts like Hugh White and Sam Roggeveen, who deftly chart what such a course might look like. Our current defense posture is total subsumption into the American military machine, and Australian political and media actors struggle to explain it. Because it makes no sense unless one understands Australia’s defence posture as an American forward operating base.

Our geopolitical anxiety is so acute we feel not only must we be supportive of our sponsor’s military exploits, but also that we quickly follow its cultural transitions. We must not be culturally illegible to our sponsor.

Australia is an outpost of American empire, as it was once an outpost of British empire. We are a sub-imperial power. A forward operating base. A FOB. And as a result, Australians absorbed American preoccupations, American vocabulary, American culture wars, and American moral frameworks. Our most iconic developments in governance and culture have been American mimicry.

Rothfeld inventories the liberal vibe:

chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word ‘nuance,’ glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting.

She argues that post-liberalism’s appeal is fundamentally an aesthetic aversion rather than an intellectual one. People aren’t reasoning their way out of liberalism. They’re getting bored out of it.

Rothfeld yearns for a Riefenstahl of liberalism.

Sunstein takes the hit with grace. He offers two responses. The first is that liberalism has no aesthetic — it’s about freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law, and if you want spiritual nourishment, look elsewhere. This has all the thumos of a castrated newt. I’m reaching for my state-sponsored euthanasia kit already. Reminds me of what my friend’s Soviet dad once told me when weighing career choices: interesting? If you want interesting, bang your head against a wall.

The second, which he clearly prefers, is that Bob Dylan is liberalism’s Riefenstahl. Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone is its animating energy, a celebration of freedom and openness.

Grim.

I like Dylan as much as the next guy, but reaching for a sixty-year-old rock song to answer ‘what does liberalism look like in 2026?’ proves exactly the point Sunstein is trying to refute. When the best aesthetic defence of your civilisational project is a track from 1965, you are not winning the argument. You are conducting its dirge.

The closest liberalism has come to a Riefenstahl in the last thirty years is Aaron Sorkin — the walk-and-talks, the soaring monologues, the fantasy of government as a workplace drama staffed by the smartest people in the room. Obama was Sorkin’s aesthetic made flesh: eloquent, composed, radiating a surety that the adults were in charge.

But the Sorkin aesthetic is part of the problem, not the answer to it. It was an aesthetic of competence, not of purpose. It celebrated the machinery of governance without ever being clear about what the machinery was for. And when the hopey-changey thing curdled, the aesthetic had nowhere to go. It ended in Gavin Newsom: a slimy suit with big white shiny teeth.

I’m sympathetic to Rothfeld, and agree that much of post-liberal anxiety stems from aesthetic and spiritual disappointment.

But there is more to the liberal aesthetic than Sunstein allows. Or there used to be.

Liberalism’s aesthetic bankruptcy is not a permanent condition. Salad bowls and rectangular glasses are not the natural expression of liberal commitments, the inevitable flowering of freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law. This would confound history’s liberals.

Rothfeld gestures to this. She invokes Trilling, she eulogises the Partisan Review, she distinguishes the humanist liberalism of Isaiah Berlin from the technocratic liberalism of a Matthew Yglesias. She knows liberalism once had texture. But her diagnosis remains, at bottom, Rawlsian. She accepts the procedural framework and asks how to make it beautiful. Her answer is intellectual pluralism — citizens as agents, arguing as equals, the crackling variegation of the Partisan Review. It's an attractive vision. But it mistakes the symptom for the disease. The Partisan Review was not beautiful because it modelled good procedure. It was beautiful because the civilisation that produced it still believed it was building something. The pluralism was a byproduct of confidence, not a substitute for it.

Liberalism did have an aesthetic, and for long stretches of the modern era, it was magnificent.

Think about what liberal civilisation actually built. The civic architecture of the New Deal: the WPA murals, the public libraries with their marble reading rooms, the Tennessee Valley dams that combined industrial ambition with genuine grandeur. Go back further. The self-portrait of a confident British civilisation in Turner and Constable. The Royal Navy patrolling the high seas against slavery. The great Victorian liberal institutions — the museums, the railways, the parliamentary buildings — were not exercises in procedural neutrality. They were assertions of confidence.

Go further still. The Enlightenment gave liberalism neoclassicism — an aesthetic that consciously reached back to the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy. Liberals once believed that free societies should look like they had inherited the earth. When Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello and the University of Virginia, he wasn’t being listless. He was building a visual argument for self-governance.

We need not go so far afield from music and art either. It's instructive that Sunstein reaches for Dylan, arguably the voice of 1960s America's cultural revolution from which Sunstein's sensibilities likely emerge. If we're looking backward, the truer candidate for liberalism's Riefenstahl is Norman Rockwell — the image of an American protestant orderliness, and all the individual ruggedness and loneliness it entails. Rothfeld considers Rockwell and dismisses him. She sees him as conservative. But the ease with which today’s liberalism disowns Rockwell is itself a symptom of its emaciation. A liberalism confident enough to claim him — to recognise in his work the texture of the free society it had actually built — wouldn't need to.

The question, then, is not whether liberalism has an aesthetic. The question is when and why it lost one.

Liberalism’s aesthetic collapse tracks its transformation from a project into a procedure.

A liberalism that is building things — extending the franchise, electrifying the backcountry, constructing a welfare state, winning a world war — naturally produces beauty. It does so because it has two things that are prerequisites for any serious aesthetic: confidence and purpose. The New Deal murals are beautiful because the people who commissioned them believed they were doing something great. The post-war civic buildings are handsome because the civilisation that built them thought it deserved handsome buildings.

Something happened — you can date it roughly to the mid-1970s, though the intellectual roots go deeper — when liberalism stopped thinking of itself as a project with substantive goals and started thinking of itself as a set of procedures for managing pluralism. The shift was partly philosophical (Rawls, with his veil of ignorance, explicitly designed a liberalism that refused to endorse any particular vision of the good life) and partly political (the exhaustion of the Great Society, the stagflation crisis, the turn toward deregulation and market mechanisms as neutral arbiters).

This procedural liberalism actively selects against beauty. Beauty requires discrimination. It requires someone to assert that this facade is better than that one, that this public square deserves ornament and that one doesn’t, that some ways of arranging human life are more dignified than others. Procedural liberalism is constitutionally allergic to these judgments. It has convinced itself that any assertion of aesthetic hierarchy is a kind of coercion, that telling people some things are more beautiful than others is uncomfortably close to telling them how to live, which we must never under any circumstances do — anymore.

And so you get the built environment of late liberalism: the glass apartment blocks, the mixed-use developments, the open-plan offices. Ruthlessly optimised for function and neutrality, scrubbed of any quality that might suggest someone, somewhere, had made a judgment about what a good life looks like.

Rothfeld’s salad bowls are the logical endpoint of a philosophy that has decided the highest virtue is not imposing your taste on anyone.

This transition from project to procedure is also marked by a psychological shift from determinate optimism to indeterminate optimism. Liberalism once said: we shall build a great civilisation for our people! And now it whimpers: everything’s going to be okay?

One reason I suspect Sunstein struggles to reach for the muscular aesthetic of a bygone liberalism is because it wasn’t his textbook liberalism. You might call it a constrained liberalism. Liberalism was often contained within race nationalism or male dominance, assuming free society worked when it was run by and for landed white men. In the US, Woodrow Wilson, a giant of liberal politics, was all-in on a white America. In Australia, Frederic Eggleston, one of Australia’s great public intellectuals and an important liberal of his day, believed Australia’s Anglo-Saxon homogeneity was essential to its liberal democracy. These were broadly representative of their movements at the time. Liberalism for one’s people — defined as a racial civilisation — is arguably the oldest, and most generative kind of liberalism. That liberalism extended an island nation to dominate the world. That liberalism built America. That liberalism united Australian colonies into Federation. Today’s liberalism exists in the effete meanderings of public radio or the abstract philosophising of university professors.

The problem about the post-liberal aesthetic — the tradcath vibe, the muscular nationalism, the classical architecture mandates, the solemn invocations of beauty, order, and hierarchy — is not that they’re entirely nostalgic. All new movements and traditions borrow from the past, and in the process of returning, the best end up creating something new. The problem is that they have so far failed to be generative. They have not created great industry or built libraries or cities. They have barely slithered out of their corner of Twitter.

So what’s the answer? If I’m right that liberalism’s aesthetic problem is a function of its transformation from project to procedure, then the solution is obvious: start building again.

Not building in the narrow sense of construction, though that too. Building in the sense that the New Dealers and the post-war liberals understood it — as the physical and cultural expression of a civilisation that believes it is doing something worthwhile. A liberalism that was building high-speed rail, and nuclear power stations, and beautiful public housing, and great civic institutions would not need to reach for Bob Dylan to answer the question “what does liberalism look like?” It would point out the window.

There’s a reason Ezra Klein has discarded his low-T Ira Glass aesthetic, grown a beard, and written Abundance to wake liberalism from its stupor.

The Abundance people aren’t wrong, they’re just missing the aesthetic dimension, which is Rothfeld’s real insight. It is not enough to build things. You have to build things that are beautiful. You have to be willing to say that some buildings are better than others, that some public spaces are more dignified than others, that a train station can and should be a work of art (I am a big Sydney Metro fan).

When America’s founding fathers debated what image should be cast on the Great Seal of their new republic, Benjamin Franklin proposed Moses parting the Red Sea, Pharaoh overwhelmed by the waters, with rays from a pillar of fire reaching to Moses. Thomas Jefferson proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. These were not men afflicted by procedural modesty. They reached for the most grandiose imagery available to them because they believed they were doing something worth commemorating grandly. That instinct — the confidence to assert that your civilisation deserves magnificent symbols in the image of your tradition — is what liberalism has lost.

For a new aesthetic, liberalism need only recover what the FDRs and Robert Moses of yesteryear already had: the willingness to make judgments, to assert that some things are better than others, and to build accordingly. They weren’t in tension with American liberalism. They were its fullest expression.

There are Riefenstahls among us for those with eyes to see. Liberalism can elevate them to its needs. It need only will it.

Until then, enjoy your salad bowl.

“One of the lessons which it teaches us is that science is annihilating space, and that as progress and development proceed, that isolation which surrounds Australia, and which has been to some extent its protection, is rapidly disappearing—that the time has gone by when Australia could proceed ‘forgetful of the world and by the world forgot.’ We are daily being brought closer to those great movements which may tend to disturb that of other countries. Australia has undertaken a peculiar mission, and one which has never before been attempted—the mission of establishing a western civilization amidst Oriental surroundings. There is no need to be an alarmist, but if history teaches us anything at all, it teaches that where racial feeling is aroused, friction sooner or later must result. We all hope that Australia will never know anything but peace. At the same time, I am unable to shut my eyes to the fact that ‘East is East and west is west, and never the twain shall meet’.”

— Senator E.D Millen, NSW, 1908

“Australia is and always will be a British nation”

— Sydney Morning Herald, 3 March 1954

Australians ceased to proclaim themselves white and British, ideas that had become anachronistic and embarrassing. The world that had supported them had disappeared. Circumstances beyond Australia’s control had eroded their meaning. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s almost all the remaining links with the imperial age were severed. Appeals to the British Privy Council were ended, imperial honours were replaced with an Australian honours system and instead of God Save the Queen, Advance Australia Fair became the national anthem. ‘British subject’ was dropped from Australian passports. By 2000 the monarchy was the only surviving symbol of Australia’s earlier allegiance to the British national ideal.

— Neville Meaney, ‘Australia and Japan’, ‘Australia and the Wider World’, 2001

White Australia was foundational to Australian Federation in 1901. Then in the 1960s, Australia fumbled out of it. Australia’s subsequent embrace of multiculturalism has been more or less popular. By the 1990s Australians distanced themselves from the idea of Australia being British or white.

Perhaps rather than a sudden fumbling enlightenment, or an economic or cultural entanglement, the dismantling of White Australia was a return to form — a reactivation of Australia’s core classical liberal tradition that had been suppressed by sixty years of acute geopolitical anxiety.

Despite Australia’s birth as a dumping ground for convicts, it was surprisingly liberal. Convicts were granted a freedom unheard of in Britain. Convict or gaoler — scarce food was rationed equally to all men and thieves hanged regardless of status. The regime’s posture towards the natives was deeply enlightened — to the point where the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, refused to retaliate when speared in the shoulder. A pragmatism settled in, one borne of hostile natural conditions. Just getting along.

As well as its birth, Australia’s maturation was also steeped in liberalism. Australian colonies gained self-government in the 1850s at the peak of British classical liberalism. The increasing numbers of free settlers brought with them not only British culture but the new ideals of the time as embodied in the Chartist and Utilitarian movements.

Why did Australia embrace a White Australia in the 1890s? A confluence of reasons: it was the local manifestation of rising nationalism across the world; the rise of China and then especially Japan following its defeat of Russia, a Great European empire, in 1905; and the perceived shrinking of the world and Australia’s natural moats by technologies such as the steamship and the telegraph. Australia’s sparse population across the continent and her suspicion that Britain would be too tied up in Europe in the event of war left her feeling vulnerable. All this led Australians to embrace a virulently race-based nationalism. A posture that was impressively generative, one might add, having resulted in Federation.

White Australia began in legislation against Chinese prospectors attracted to the gold rushes, and found itself perfected in its fears of Japanese invasion in WWII — which, too often overlooked, proved perfectly prescient. Japan did ultimately bomb Australia, sink its ships, and enslave and kill her men. Australian history is taught in a way that mocks Australia’s founding fathers for their anxiety around the ‘Yellow Peril’. But, whilst tinged with racial enmity, it was predominantly a geopolitical concern — that turned out to be correct. Not only was it correct, but it was the inconvenient and courageous stance to take at the time. Japan was an ally of the British — of which Australia was a political and cultural limb — and fought on the side of the British during WWI, and the British consistently brushed off this threat, focusing instead on the European theatre. Hence the subsequent catastrophe of the Fall of Singapore in WWII. The Australian founding fathers were exactly correct in seeing through the flimsiness of this relationship.

With respect to the Chinese gold diggers, there is considerably more nuance than first meets the eye. Neville Meaney has this to say in his essay Australia and Japan:

With the influx of large numbers of Chinese following the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria these apprehensions took on a palpable form. By the end of the 1850s there were some 42,000 Chinese in Victoria and 15,000 in New South Wales; that is, the Chinese comprised one in seven of the Victorian and one in fourteen of the New South Wales adult male population. The European miners, resentful at having to compete with the celestials, often resorted to violence to expel them from the diggings. But the diggers could not easily reconcile their Chartist belief that ‘all men are born with free and equal rights’ with their demand that the Chinese be excluded from the goldfields. At the hearings of an 1854 Victorian Royal Commission one of their leaders maintained that this principle did not apply to the Chinese because ‘they were not civilised’. When it was pointed out that they regarded themselves as highly civilised and the question was asked as to who was to judge civilisation, the miners’ representative could only offer the ethnocentric answer that the whole of European history and history of parts of Asia has shown us as to what is civilisation.

European Australians had difficulty in accepting this argument. Though the three most affected colonies, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, did pass discriminatory laws, they did so only after fierce debate and with some reluctance. The legislation was neither general nor absolute and these measures applied to the Chinese and no other Asians. And they did not exclude Chinese. They limited the number who could be landed from any one ship and levied poll and residence taxes on those who did enter the country. Within a few years, as the Chinese population began to decline, all these discriminatory statutes were repealed. These Acts did not represent the acceptance of a racially based definition of society. They were a liberal era’s pragmatic response to a particular problem of social order.

(My emphasis.)

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation of 1894, which provided for reciprocal residency rights between Japanese and British citizens, raised the question of Japanese immigration to Australia. Britain let its colonies decide whether to adhere to it themselves. Australia said no. This was a direct trigger for Federation and for the White Australia policy. In the 1880s the Japanese came to dominate Queensland pearl-diving and to work as indentured labour in North Queensland, and Australian workers rejected this.

So the White Australia policy arose from a general and conflated fear of Asian migration and invasion.

Later at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 Prime Minister Hughes refused to accept Japan’s proposal to include a racial equality provision in the League of Nations Covenant. Frederic Eggleston, one of Australia’s great public intellectuals and a political figure and liberal of the time, noted he had been unhappy with the Australian leader’s stand. He wrote in the The New Statesman that racial tolerance was a time-honoured tradition of liberalism. Yet he supported the White Australia policy. He did so because he attributed Australia’s democratic success to “the purity of [its] Anglo-Saxon base,” and that it would need more homogeneity, not less, as it grew in order to prosper democratically. He did not want to replicate the racial conflict that arose in the US.1

The official journalist for the Australian Imperial Force in WWI, CEW Bean, wrote that the Australian soldier “knew only one social horizon, that of race.” He believed it was for their British race that Australians fought in WWI. As Neville Meaney writes in Australia and Japan:

They gave themselves such names as the King and Empire Alliance, the Old Guard, the New Guard, the White Guard2 and the League of National Security. Though there was among their numbers some who were disenchanted with parliamentary government and sympathetic with the Italian fascist movement, most professed – insofar as they had a coherent ideology – a desire to defend against Bolshevik revolutionaries and Irish republicans Australia’s allegiance to the British empire and to the British tradition of constitutional monarchy.

Sir John Monash, the Jewish Australian hero general of WWI, was approached to head up an authoritarian regime in Australia. Monash rejected this and wrote “the only hope for Australia is the ballot box, and an educated electorate.” Australia’s reactionary elements never really threatened Australia’s liberal roots.

Once Japan was defeated and trade with Asia replaced the pre-eminence that Britain once held, and once Britain turned her back on her colonies in favour of European integration, Australia had no alternative but to excise its British soul and return to the universalist (and very British) classical liberal ideals with which she was birthed.

In this telling, White Australia was a six-decade nationalist aberration, peaking with global nationalist sentiments, in an otherwise classical liberal polity. Even at its most virulently racist, it resisted the worst violence and political turmoil of reactionary polities elsewhere at the time.

This answers the question I previously posed — why did the White Australia policy end? And the answer might just lie in Australia’s deep liberal roots. There is nothing more Anglo than universalism, and so being so racially particular just didn’t jibe with the Australian character.

This also explains why it’s so asymmetrical with other nations like China and Japan that were quick to be offended at Australia but you will notice are much more racially homogenous. It’s because they don’t have this liberal tradition. It’s an Anglo thing. You wouldn’t get it.3

A more honest if muddling reality is probably that Australia’s liberal tradition and its reactionary elements have lived side-by-side from birth, as they lived side-by-side in Britain. Hence Eggleston's simultaneous liberalism and support of a White Australia. But it’s difficult to understand the shape of Australian history, and its crucial White Australia period that covered Federation, WWI, and WWII, without understanding how it emerged from and was constrained by its deep liberal tradition.

This the Americans built over ten years and three presidencies.

But before the Americans could build the canal, they had to build the largest artificial lake on earth, flooding an entire river valley to lift ships over mountains. Before they could build the lake, they had to rid the isthmus of pestilence, eradicating yellow fever from a region where it had reigned for three centuries. Before they could eradicate the fever, they had to control the land — which meant staging a revolution, peeling Panama away from Colombia in a single bloodless day.

And before any of it — before the lake, before the eradication of fever, before the coup — they had to succeed where the greatest builder of the age had failed. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of Suez, had tried to cut this canal. By 1889 he had spent a decade and $287 million of French savings. He had buried twenty-two thousand men in the jungle earth. And he had accomplished nothing but ruin.

The man who had made the world smaller had sought to cut it in half. Within two years of his triumph at Suez, while Europe still rang with his name, Ferdinand de Lesseps turned his gaze westward — to the dark, fever-haunted jungles of Central America. If he could slice through the sands of Egypt, why not the spine of the New World? In 1879, at the age of seventy-four, he convened an international congress in Paris and, through the sheer gravitational force of his reputation, secured approval for a sea-level canal through the Isthmus of Panama.

The American engineers in attendance — men who had actually surveyed the terrain — knew it was madness. They had spent years tramping through the mosquito clouds and the sucking mud, taking measurements, losing colleagues to fever. They knew the Chagres River, that treacherous serpent that could rise forty feet in a single night of rain. They knew the Culebra Cut, where the mountains slid endlessly, back into any hole you dug. One of them, Adolphe Godin de Lépinay, chief engineer of the French Department of Bridges and Highways, stood before the congress and proposed the only sane solution: dam the Chagres, create a lake, and lift ships over the divide with locks. It was, almost to the metre, the plan the Americans would eventually build. The congress voted him down. De Lesseps wanted a sea-level canal — just as at Suez — and de Lesseps got what he wanted.

What followed was an apocalypse.

The French arrived in 1881 with their mahogany furniture and their Parisian confidence. They found a green hell. The jungle grew so fast that a path cleared at dawn would be impassable by dusk. The rains fell in walls of water, turning excavation sites into lakes overnight. The Chagres, unbound by any dam, regularly flooded the workings. And above all, silent and invisible, came the mosquitoes.

They did not know that the Aedes aegypti carried yellow fever in its bite, or that the Anopheles hummed with malaria. The French doctors, trained in the miasma theory, believed disease rose from freshly turned earth, from noxious jungle vapours. To beautify their hospital at Ancón, they set potted plants around the wards, each pot resting in a saucer of water to keep the ants away. They had built, with loving care, breeding factories for the very creatures that were killing them. Three out of four men who entered that hospital never left.

The workers — mainly black men drawn mostly from Jamaica, Martinique, and Barbados by wages that dwarfed anything the Caribbean could offer — died in their thousands. In the wet seasons of 1882 and 1883, thirty to forty men perished every day. A train ran each evening from the work camps to the cemetery at Mount Hope, its cars brimming with coffins, so many that the living came to call it the funeral express. The dead were often buried in the clothes they wore, stacked in mass graves, their names lost to the jungle. By the time the French abandoned the isthmus in 1889, twenty-two thousand men had been swallowed by the earth they had tried to move.

And the money vanished with them. De Lesseps had raised over 1.4 billion gold francs from eight hundred thousand investors: shopkeepers, widows, country priests, retired soldiers. It was the greatest financial mobilisation in French history, and it evaporated into the swamps of Panama. The company declared bankruptcy in February 1889, having spent $287 million and excavated barely a third of the required earth. The stock was worthless. The canal was a ditch. The scandal that followed — the Panama Affair — brought down ministers, implicated over a hundred members of the French parliament in bribery, and sent Gustave Eiffel himself to trial. De Lesseps and his son Charles were convicted of fraud. The old man, now eighty-eight, was spared prison. He died in 1894, stripped of his glory, his name synonymous with catastrophe.

What remained in Panama was a landscape of mechanical corpses: dredges rusting in stagnant pools, locomotives sinking into the mud, excavators frozen mid-bite like the fossils of some industrial extinction. The jungle was already reclaiming them, vines threading through boilers, trees splitting the rails. For fifteen years, the wreckage sat in the rain, a monument to hubris.

Then came the Americans.

They arrived with a colder, more Protestant kind of will. Theodore Roosevelt, that grinning engine of national ambition, had decided that the United States needed a canal, and he would not be denied by a Colombian senate that refused to ratify a treaty on American terms. In November 1903, with American warships conveniently stationed off both coasts, a small group of Panamanian businessmen with the tacit approval of Washington staged a revolution. It lasted a day. The Colombian troops who landed at Colón found themselves stranded when the American-controlled railroad declined to provide trains. The USS Nashville discouraged any thoughts of marching. Panama declared independence on November 3rd; the United States recognised the new republic three days later; within a fortnight, a canal treaty was signed granting America sovereign rights over a ten-mile-wide strip in perpetuity.

The Americans knew what the French had learned in blood: that Panama was not Suez. The flat desert of Egypt had required only patience and picks; Panama demanded conquest of a continent. But they also knew what the French had not—that the enemies were not the mountains but the mosquitoes.

In 1904, William Crawford Gorgas stepped off the steamer at Colón. He was a slight, courteous Alabaman, the son of a Confederate general, and he had done something that everyone said was impossible: he had rid Havana of yellow fever. Walter Reed and Carlos Finlay had proved that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was the vector; so Gorgas exterminated it, draining every puddle, oiling every cistern, fumigating every room, screening every window. In eighteen months, yellow fever — the scourge that had killed more American soldiers than Spanish bullets — disappeared from Cuba.

Now he would do the same in Panama, but first he had to fight his own government. The Isthmian Canal Commission’s leadership thought him a crank. Mosquitoes? They demanded that he focus on cleaning the streets, burning rubbish, the old miasma protocols. They cut his budget, mocked his methods, recommended his dismissal to the president. But the president gave the doctor whatever he wanted.

Four thousand sanitation workers descended on the isthmus. They drained swamps and ditches by the hundreds of miles. They oiled every pool of standing water with a thin film of petroleum that suffocated mosquito larvae. They screened every building, quarantined every fever case, fumigated entire cities. The hospitals, once charnel houses, were emptied of their potted plants. The little saucers of water disappeared. By the end of 1905, yellow fever cases had plummeted. By late 1906, the last canal worker to die of yellow fever caught the disease — and after that, nothing. The ancient plague that had beaten the French, that had emptied ships in Caribbean harbours for three centuries, was gone from the Zone. It took eighteen months.

Now the building could begin.

The Americans did not attempt a sea-level canal. They had read de Lépinay’s proposal, studied the French surveys, understood the Chagres. They would dam the river, flood an entire valley to create the largest artificial lake on earth — Gatun Lake, twenty-four miles across, covering villages and forests and the ghosts of French machinery — and lift ships eighty-five feet above sea level through a staircase of locks. They were to rearrange the earth.

The locks were the key. Each chamber stretched a thousand feet long and a hundred and ten feet wide — dimensions that would define the maximum size of oceangoing ships for the next century. The walls rose in concrete cliffs, fifty feet thick at their base, reinforced with enough steel to build a navy. The gates, monstrous double-leafed doors that would hold back an ocean, weighed hundreds of tons apiece, their leaves sixty-five feet wide and up to eighty-two feet high — taller than a six-story building, yet so precisely balanced on their hollow steel frames that a single forty-horsepower motor could swing them open. Nowhere on earth had concrete been poured on such a scale; nothing comparable would be attempted until the Hoover Dam two decades later. The steel for the gates and machinery came from Pittsburgh, where entire foundries were given over to the canal. Pennsylvania became, briefly, an extension of Panama.

And the labour that built it was an empire of its own. At the peak of construction, forty-five thousand men worked the Zone, a polyglot army drawn from forty nations. The spine of the workforce came from the British West Indies: Barbadians, Jamaicans, men from St. Lucia and Grenada who crossed the Caribbean on crowded steamers, riding on deck like cargo, chasing the same dreams the French had peddled a generation before. Roughly fifty thousand West Indians passed through Panama during the American decade, a quarter of Barbados’s entire population.

Nothing could have prepared them for the Cut. The men who arrived from Barbados and Jamaica — many from villages where the loudest sound was the wind in the cane and where a donkey cart was the most complex machine — stepped off the trains into something closer to the underworld than any place on earth. The Culebra Cut was a canyon nine miles long and three hundred feet deep, and it was never quiet. Dynamite charges detonated every few minutes, concussions rolling through a man's chest. A hundred trains a day hauled the shattered earth away. Steam shovels the size of houses groaned and swung their loads, their iron jaws biting five tons at a gulp. The noise was so total that men working side by side communicated by hand signal; a shout couldn't carry three feet. And through it all hung the smoke and the red laterite dust, until the sun was just a pale disc in a brown sky. The men who swung the picks and loaded the cars worked inside this machine twelve hours a day, their bodies vibrating with the noise, building a thing that would outlast them all.

But the Americans wanted more. The West Indians were cheap but, the engineers complained, not always efficient. One engineer described a scene where two West Indians would load a wheelbarrow with debris to load it onto the head of a third West Indian who would carry it away. And so recruiters fanned out across Europe, and found, in the valleys of Galicia and the Basque Country and Asturias, a different kind of labourer. Over eight thousand Spaniards — Gallegos, Basques, Asturians — signed on for Panama, paid twice the wage as the West Indian for three times the output. Such discrepancies also reflected the racially segregated working conditions and racial attitudes of the time.

The Culebra Cut — later renamed for the engineer who broke his health directing it, David Gaillard — was the crucible of the enterprise. For nine miles, the canal had to slice through the mountains that formed the spine of the Americas. The French had lowered the Cut’s floor by perhaps three feet in 1886. The Americans lowered it by twenty feet in a single year, then did it again, and again, blasting and shoveling and hauling until they had moved nearly a hundred million cubic yards of rock and clay and mud. The slides never stopped. The walls of the Cut were not solid rock but a treacherous composite of volcanic clay and shale that, when soaked by the endless rains, turned to something like wet soap and slid into the channel, burying steam shovels, swallowing entire work trains. The engineers widened the cut, gentled the slopes, dug and re-dug the same ground. Men died under those slides, buried before they could run. The work went on.

On August 15, 1914, the SS Ancon made the first official transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It slipped through the locks, crossed the lake, threaded the Cut, and emerged into the Pacific — a journey of fifty miles, completed in nine hours and forty minutes. They had cut a month and a half and eight thousand miles from a ship’s journey from New York to San Francisco. The canal had come in under budget, and finished a year ahead of schedule. It was the largest, most expensive engineering project in the history of the world, and it had succeeded.

But the world had other concerns that August. On the very day the Ancon made its crossing, German cavalry was riding through Belgium. The opening of the Panama Canal — the supreme achievement of the Progressive Age, the proof that man could bend continents to his will — passed almost unnoticed. The great powers had other ditches to dig now, other mud to die in. The Western Front would consume the same species of young men who had sweated in the Culebra Cut, but in numbers that dwarfed any canal.

The canal would reshape global trade, redraw the strategic maps, make and unmake fortunes. But the age that built it — that confident, muscular, casually brutal era of great works and great men — was already passing into the smoke of the Somme.

It began with a combination of forces that would, a century later, seem strikingly familiar: the vast wealth of Middle Eastern potentates, the fanatical devotion of a retail investor base, and, at the center of it all, a man possessed of an indefatigable, almost pathological will. It was a saga of disruption on a planetary scale, driven by a figure who treated reality as something to be negotiated rather than obeyed. Not Elon Musk, this was Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the world he intended to disrupt was the very spine of the earth: the Isthmus of Suez.

De Lesseps came from a family that treated the impossible as a kind of inheritance. His uncle Barthélemy had sailed with La Pérouse around Cape Horn to Kamchatka, then had crossed the whole of Siberia by dog sled alone in winter to present himself to Louis XVI at Versailles dressed as a Kamchatkan. He was a national hero overnight. His subsequent career survived imprisonment in Turkey and the retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Moscow. Ferdinand grew up nourished on these tales of heroic triumphs. By the time he entered the French consular service and was posted to Egypt, he had been soaked in ambition and self-belief.

De Lesseps' opportunity came in the form of a friend, Mohammed Said. To understand Said the man, one must first understand the boy. He was a creature of pathetic isolation, a “fat, unattractive, and friendless” child, sequestered within the gilded cages of the Egyptian court of Mehemet Ali. In that court, weight was a sign of lethargy, and the young prince was forced into brutal regimens of exercise to curb his girth. But there was one man who offered the kindness the boy’s own father withheld: de Lesseps, then a young French vice-consul. De Lesseps provided the companionship and even the secret snacks a lonely prince craved.

By 1854, the boy had become the Viceroy. He was no longer a trembling child but a “walleyed mountain of a man,” a gargantuan figure who consumed life with a terrifying intensity. He was a ruler of whims and fire, a man who amused himself by forcing his pashas to carry lighted candles through chambers of gunpowder as a test of nerve. De Lesseps knew the moment had come. He travelled to Egypt, bringing his own mahogany furniture, his quilted silk, and his very own ice to chill the desert heat.

On the morning of November 13, at a desert command post outside Alexandria, the two men met. The air was thick with the scent of ten thousand soldiers and the dust of Bedouin cavalry. Said was in top spirits, eager to mark his reign with a monument that would outlast him. He asked for an idea. De Lesseps waited for a sign. And then, in the cold predawn of the following morning, as he stood before his tent wrapped in a red dressing gown like some ancient patriarch, he saw it: a rainbow, vivid and searing, arcing across the sky from the darkness of the West to the light of the East. It was a “token of a covenant”, De Lesseps wrote in his diary.

Before the assembled generals, he mounted his horse and leapt over a high wall — a bit of imprudence that was, in fact, a calculated stroke of political genius. To the pashas, a man who could ride like that was a man who could be trusted. By sunset, the Suez Canal — a dream that had defeated pharaohs—was settled. No one asked how much it would cost.

If the birth of the project was a matter of desert rainbows and galloping horses, its realisation was a brutal, fifteen-year odyssey of sheer, unadulterated will. De Lesseps was not an engineer; he was not a financier; he was a man who possessed what Jules Verne would later call the “genius of will.” He fought against the British Empire and the geography of the planet itself. For ninety-nine miles, the desert stood as a barricade of prehistoric clay and shifting silt between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea — the only obstacle between Europe and Asia that wasn't a months-long voyage around the Cape of Africa. There was no water. To even begin the work, de Lesseps had to first conjure a freshwater canal out of the Nile, a gargantuan preliminary task involving thousands of laborers just to keep the army of excavators from dying of thirst in the heat.

In the north, at Port Said, there was no natural harbour, only a shallow, treacherous shoreline. De Lesseps’ engineers had to invent a way to manufacture stone where none existed, casting 25,000 enormous blocks of artificial concrete — each weighing twenty-two tons — and plunging them into the Mediterranean to create a two-mile breakwater. In the center of the Isthmus lay the Serapeum, a massive plateau of hard, compacted sand and rock that rose like a wall against the Mediterranean’s progress.

Whole stretches of freshly dredged canal would refill overnight, erased by wind-driven sand that poured back into the cuts. Crews of Egyptian fellahin returned at dawn to find days of labour undone. In the summer of 1865, cholera swept the camps so fast that there were not enough workers left standing to carry the dead for burial in the desert. Estimates of the total killed across the decade range from twenty thousand to over a hundred thousand; the Suez Canal Company kept no reliable count. Men were plentiful, and Egypt seemed inexhaustible.

When the British, desperate to sabotage the project, successfully pressured the Sultan to abolish the corvée — the system of forced Egyptian labor — the project teetered on the brink of collapse. Thousands of men vanished from the pits overnight. De Lesseps pivoted. If men were taken from him, he would build machines. He oversaw the deployment of a new kind of industrial army: colossal, custom-built steam dredges and long-chambered elevators that could lift 2,000 cubic meters of earth in a single day. These were the monsters of the nineteenth century, mechanical titans that groaned and hissed as they clawed the canal out of the desert floor, moving a total of 75 million cubic meters of earth — enough to build a wall around the entire coast of France.

This mechanical miracle was fueled by a different kind of power: the savings of the French people. When the smart money of the London and Parisian banks turned their backs, de Lesseps went to the public. He bypassed the institutions and spoke directly to the small shopkeepers, the country priests, the retired soldiers. He sold them not just stock, but a share in a national crusade. These twenty-five thousand small investors provided an initial 200 million francs, creating a base of stakeholders whose loyalty was to the man. When the Rothschilds wanted 5% for handling the subscription, he told them he would hire an office and do it himself.

For fifteen years, de Lesseps was everywhere at once — Egypt, London, Constantinople, Paris — coaxing and flattering. He faced the scorn of the English Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, who called him a swindler and a fool. He faced the technical dismissal of Robert Stephenson, builder of the Britannia Bridge, who pronounced the scheme preposterous from the floor of Parliament. De Lesseps, whose English was terrible, responded by hanging a French flag from his hotel window on Piccadilly and giving eighty speeches in a single month across the British Isles. “They never achieve anything who do not believe in success,” he said.

The cost was astronomical. By the time it was finished, the project had nearly put Egypt into bankruptcy. Mohammed Said had died, replaced by Khedive Ismail, who was even more beneficent and even more reckless. De Lesseps claimed he had no interest in making money. “I am going to accomplish something without expediency, without personal gain,” he once wrote. At any time he could have sold his precious concession and realised a fortune, but he never did; his driving ambition was the canal itself, “pour le bien de l’humanité.”

November 17, 1869, was the day of his transfiguration. Ismailia was a mirage made flesh — a town conjured from the sand, complete with hotels, palaces, and a town square where six thousand guests from across the globe gathered. The Khedive had spared no expense. He built a Cairo opera house and commissioned Verdi to write Aïda. He imported five hundred cooks and a thousand waiters from Europe. On the deck of the imperial yacht, Aigle, de Lesseps stood beside his cousin, the Empress Eugénie. Behind them steamed the Emperor of Austria, British ironclads, and Russian sloops — fifty ships in all, moving through the desert under a “dreamlike resplendence,” Eugénie remembered.

For the next eight months, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was Europe’s reigning hero. The Empress presented the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. The Emperor hailed his genius. And in a final flourish of his irrepressible vitality, in celebration of his great victory, at the age of sixty-four, de Lesseps married a stunning French girl of twenty who would bear him twelve children.

Few men had ever been so vindicated while they lived. Lord Palmerston was in his grave, and the new British Prime Minister, Gladstone, was forced to bestow upon de Lesseps the Grand Cross of the Star of India. He had become a new thing under the sun — the entrepreneur extraordinaire. He possessed the genius of will, a stubbornness so absolute it bordered on the divine. He had outworked the engineers, outmaneuvered the diplomats, and outlasted his enemies, proving that in the theater of history, a single man's will, backed by the gold of princes and the faith of the common man, can reshape the very surface of the earth.

What no one yet understood — least of all de Lesseps himself — was that the same faith, applied to a different geography, would soon bury twenty thousand men in the jungle and drown the savings of a nation in the mud.

In 1948 Hatikvah became Israel’s unofficial national anthem (it was officially sanctioned in 2004). Famously, the anthem speaks of a Jewish soul that yearns towards Zion.

Australia adopted ‘Advance Australia Fair’, its current national anthem, in 1977. Prior to that Australians sang ‘God Save The Queen’ at official events. Australians handily voted for ‘Advance Australia Fair’ over more distinctly local alternatives ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Song of Australia’.

Why did Australia adopt a new anthem in 1977?

Because Britain in 1973 turned its back on Australia and its other colonies. The UK entered the European Economic Community in 1973, the predecessor to the European Union, and so abandoned ‘Greater Britain’. Australians had little choice but to relinquish their symbols of Britannia.

Australia found it difficult to let go of this part of its identity. In 1977, Britishness had been essential to Australianness for well over a century. In 1885 the Premier of New South Wales sent a military contingent to assist Britain in its war against the Mahdi of Sudan, arguing that ‘We do not stop to question, we only know that British blood — Australia blood — has been shed…” — the two being identical. In 1947, 65% of Australians in a Gallup poll said they’d prefer to keep British citizenship over a new Australian citizenship. Australian citizenship as a concept was introduced only in 1949.1 Prior to that, no Australian parliament had considered it necessary — being a British subject was entirely satisfactory. In 1906 the High Court stated that “We are not disposed to give any countenance to the novel doctrine that there is an Australian nationality as distinguished from a British nationality.” Australia was, in the words of Reverend W.H Fitchett, “the very happiest example of the colonising genius of the British race.”

And so despite Britain’s unreciprocated loyalties, and despite having decided to move on and choose an anthem for themselves, Australians chose the most British-flavoured anthem of all. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ was written a century earlier, in praise of Australia’s own Britishness at a new zenith of Australia’s white consciousness. What is less known about this anthem, is that just like Israel’s Hatikvah, it too claimed a soul for Australia:

Britannia then shall surely know

Beyond wide oceans’ rolls

Her sons in fair Australia’s land

Still keep a British soul.

It claimed a British soul for Australia. For Australia had a British soul, at least for most of its history. And at the moment Australia charted its own course after the abandonment of its mother, Australians nevertheless chose the anthem that was written at British Australia’s peak. Except it cut out the stanza about its soul.

Australia has tended to veil this essential quality to Australianness ever since. Australians, if anything, have felt embarrassed by it.

There is something poignant about the opposite courses Israel and Australia took in the middle of the twentieth century. Both felt betrayed by Britain. One leaned into its nation’s soul, the other excised it. Australians have not yet found a substitute.

And someday we'll all be together once more
When all the ships come back to the shore
Then I realize something I've always known
I still call Australia home.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for schmalz. But last night I watched the Bondi massacre memorial event at the Opera House and scrapped the (excellent) piece I had planned for today and decided to reflect on it instead.

Hearing memories about the dead from their loved ones was beautiful and brutal. “I am now a widow,” says an older lady. The new identity hadn’t yet quite settled.

Rabbi Ulman spoke well as usual. The mere presence of the wounded cops, shot defending our community, was moving. A Jewish lad who was shot caring for a policeman was discharged straight from hospital to play and sing at the event. Ani Ma’amin always gets me (you have not lived until you have watched it sung by an assembly hall of kids, including your own). Chris Minns has the best speech writer in the land (if you read this, please reach out!). Albo’s apology was graciously given and graciously received.

Both the Premier and the Federal Leader of the Opposition claimed back the Opera House that night following the debacle that occurred there after October 7 2023 (it took two years… but we got there).

The overwhelming sense of the night was one of reconciliation. Ulman nailed it when he thanked Australians:

I want to express my gratitude personally and on behalf of our community to every Australian who sent a letter, laid a flower, waited in line to donate blood, or gave financial support to the bereaved. You did not just offer comfort, you restored our faith in humanity.

And then:

I have never been a prouder Jew, and I have never been a prouder Australian.

Never been a prouder Australian. The event ended with ‘I Still Call Australia Home’1 — exactly right. Despite the Haredim on stage, the Hebrew prayers, the Jewishness: it ended in a visceral Australianness.

Not a day goes by I am not grateful to my parents for leaving everything they knew to come to this great land, and for Australia affording us that opportunity. My uncle one night after he arrived to this country woke up in a sweat and was so relieved to be here he ran out into his backyard and just hugged his big plum tree.

Blessings cover this land like jacaranda petals. Cycling through Willunga in South Australia, its rolling paddocks shimmering like golden cat fur. Bright pink flowering gums on our street. The glee that comes up like sickness when stepping onto Freshwater beach for a morning surf. Bondi heaving at sunset. And at nightfall, a giant menorah stands still, its candles lit against the dark. It’s impossible not to love this land.

In a moment of crisis in investment banking, a former colleague once told me that if he lost his job, he could always go back to Byron Bay. He was a country boy, and all the gold a career in the big smoke had to offer was just cream on top. He could always just go back. (He’s now head of the region.) I think about that sometimes, because when I reflect on the lives my grandparents’ families lived and the unspeakable things they went through, no matter what happens, if you live in Australia, you’ve already won. Whatever happens is all upside.

I caught up with a Lebanese mate the other night. His uncles all share the same birthday: 26 January. They came to this country, and just registered their date of birth as Australia Day. Birthday cakes every Australia Day BBQ. They never went back. They just love this country.

There’s no place in the world I’d rather live. I still call Australia home.

Happy Australia Day.

Ten years after George H. W. Bush’s end-of–Cold War speech, his son, George W. Bush, led the United States into wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. When those conflicts wound down after twenty years, a decrepit President Joe Biden oversaw a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, handing the Taliban a total victory and leaving the United States exhausted and its confidence shaken.

Over the same period, a decade-long cultural revolution in America spilled across the world. A global pandemic exposed systemic fragilities and upended social norms. A second Donald Trump presidency emerged—snatched from the wings of fate, nearly ended by an assassin’s bullet, and secured against the collective will of institutional America. Meantime, China quietly built the world’s largest cities and moved from a backward, low-value economy to the technological frontier, positioning itself as a genuine rival to American hegemony.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has already been tumultuous. And now a new technology has emerged—one that has put a genie into every pocket. A few years ago, that genie could answer questions, win at Go, and sketch a passable picture. Today, it is the smartest person you know on almost any subject: offering near-instant feedback on your work, personal advice, app-building, sales and customer management, Excel modeling. Tomorrow, it will do far more.

Artificial intelligence has triggered what may be the largest capital-expenditure boom in history, with hyper-scalers spending hundreds of billions in 2025 and committing trillions more, even building proprietary energy sources as governments struggle to keep pace. It has propelled technology giants to multitrillion-dollar valuations. It is a new dawn. To borrow from George H. W., it may be “the biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives.” How will AI reshape society?

Why should AI reshape society at all? Because major technological leaps have always transformed how people organize, live, and work. The stirrup enabled brutal imperial expansion and conquest. The cannon, shipbuilding, and deep-sea navigation opened the world to global empires. The printing press helped trigger the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. Modern communications and transport loosened local bonds, scaling familial loyalty up to the nation-state. Railways brought unprecedented mobility—and a wartime rigidity that helped doom a generation in the First World War. The atomic bomb arguably sustained great-power peace for nearly 80 years.

What, then, will AI bring? Prophecy may be for charlatans, but we can hazard a guess.

1. Unprecedented Scale

We already live in a world of multi-trillion-dollar companies. We are approaching the era of the trillion-dollar man. Elon Musk may be the highest-leverage individual in history, presiding over a multi-industry hydra that is reshaping space, mobility, communications, media, biotech, and AI. Yet Musk himself belongs to a pre-AI era. What individuals can now create with the genie from their pocket will push great men to heights previously unimaginable. Call this elite hyper-agency: the collapse of distance between will and action at a global scale.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European empires reached their zenith. Armies, privateers, and corporations like the East India Company ruled millions with thousands. In the twentieth century, vast trading houses, oil majors, and industrial conglomerates spanned the globe. But the central story of the twentieth century was national power: its eruption into world wars, the rise of nuclear-armed superstates in the Cold War, and, ultimately, an American colossus astride the world.

The twenty-first century has seen the rise of technology giants. Soon, those giants—and others—will dwarf their present scale, commanded by a select few.

Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because markets are costly: when the friction of contracting, coordination, and supervision exceeds the cost of hierarchy, activity moves inside the firm. For two centuries, that logic governed scale. AI collapses transaction costs, blurring, and in some cases erasing, the boundary between market and organization.

The result is a bifurcation of power. Some entities will scale far beyond historical limits, coordinated by systems rather than managers. Others will fragment into individuals and small groups wielding institutional-grade capabilities without institutional morass. The middle will wither.

Will ten-trillion-dollar firms and trillion-dollar men dissolve nation-states? Probably not. States, too, will grow more powerful, armed with new tools of surveillance, automation, and robotics. We have already seen how quickly Silicon Valley and Seattle adapt to shifting political winds, bending to new masters. As governments harness these sectors, their power will also grow.

2. The Tower of Babel: cultural homogenization + deep personalization

The twenty-first century has brought cultures together into a Great Global Homogenization. Not only place but time has flattened as well. Each decade of the twentieth century had a distinct vibe; today, far less so. Everything blends into a single cultural mush.

Why? The smartphone is now nearly universal. Through its screen, we see one another constantly, drawn into a shared global online realm. That realm has been largely American in character, shaped by U.S. technology giants. Outside of states such as China, Russia, and South Korea, which maintain their own digital ecosystems, this represents the greatest cultural flood in history. We all inhabit the same platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Google.

This process will only accelerate. Creators will work in any language and reach audiences larger than ever, as AI seamlessly translates content into each reader’s or viewer’s preferred tongue. In this sense, we have rebuilt the Tower of Babel: a single global community spiraling skyward in hubris.

Yet this apparent restoration masks a deeper fracture. We may share a language, but we no longer share a reality. AI can bridge tongues, even as it personalizes truth, placing each individual in a private cubicle of the Tower, ensconced in their own algorithmic filters. In this fragmented landscape, the ‘shared’ information stream dissolves into thousands of bespoke hallucinations. Institutional authority erodes, replaced by a narrow circle of personal trust: we no longer believe what is reported, only what is vouched for by the few human voices we still recognize as real.

3. The rise and rise of positional goods

Alongside elite hyper-agency, we will see mass passivity. We will be wealthier. We will have more leisure. But where will it go? We are unlikely to feel much better off.

In parts of the West, the work week has already effectively been reduced to four days. Thursday nights are for eating out; Fridays are nominally for “working from home.” Gambling on stocks and sports will continue to increase, AI porn and video games will consume more time. Man will grow even more neutered: fertility rates will stagnate, crime will fall, and life for many will slip further into passive consumption.

Beyond this surplus of ‘leisure,’ where will the fruits of increased wealth go? As with much of the last century’s productivity gains, they will flow into positional goods. A house in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs or Manhattan is priced less by its cost of construction than by the scarcity of the asset. There are only so many harbor homes and only so many views of Central Park. These markets are governed by zero-sum status competition. (Think also elite private school fees.)

Expect, then, the continued inflation of status-signaling goods: luxury items above all, and none more so than prime property. Today’s extreme prices will look like a bargain tomorrow. In less desirable regions, by contrast, prices will fall as population decline takes its toll.

4. Broad, low-level conflict

With the end of Pax Americana, local conflicts will become more common. Many wiser heads on China than me, but I doubt there will be a U.S. war with China. It is not obvious that even the Taiwanese want to fight over Taiwan, given their modest defense spending—2.4 percent in 2025, albeit with plans to increase—and increasingly fractious internal politics. China depends on U.S. consumer markets to keep its factories running and employment high; the United States, in turn, depends on China for critical component inputs across key industries.

And whilst global economic integration was hailed as rendering war impossible prior to 1914, today is not 1914. Nor is it 1939. Then, societies had an abundance of young men they could send to war, animated by ideas of glory and new ideologies. One reason the Soviet army ultimately defeated Germany was its capacity to replenish losses with sheer numbers. These days, young people are scarce, and rulers are old. Regimes across the world want the young to care for expanding elderly populations, not to die in foreign wars. Putin’s miserly conscription during the invasion of Ukraine may reflect this constraint. China cannot afford to lose a generation of only-children. The United States is deeply reluctant to send more boys on overseas misadventures—the Venezuelan operation was a regional affair and required no boots on the ground.

Conflict is likely to remain regional, with governments increasingly focused inward. Virtual realities will grow more dominant, making narrative control ever more critical. The cost of cyber operations and low-level drone attacks will fall dramatically, and we should expect many more of them. But the cost of defense will fall, too.

5. The end of privacy

The flip side of AI agents taking your calls, completing tasks for you, and personalizing purchase decisions with greater precision than ever before is that AIs will know every externally knowable thing about you. By extension, governments and security services will seek this information, as will bad actors. This won’t necessarily be dystopian. This future will manifest itself differently based on each society’s cultural norms and the way they evolve. Some societies will be far more intrusive, with government intervention by default—in China: “People are doing, the sky is watching”—while others will find new data and privacy protection equilibria.

In practice, many knowledge workers will find that their managers can see exactly how many emails they send, calls they take, or hours they spend faffing about on Substack. Not because of sinister intent, but as an incidental by-product of AI-agent ecosystems. And most of us will probably shrug and carry on.

6. The collapse and reconstitution of moral agency

AI intensifies questions of moral agency. In the 1990s, it was chic to bash big business for controlling our minds through advertising—think Naomi Klein’s No Logo or body-image advertising concerns. In the 2010s, a moral panic broke out around social-media algorithms—people were willing to conflate controlling our feeds with controlling our minds. AI will intensify this social concern as it nudges us with ever more granular personalization and acts in the real world on our behalf.

For most of history, agency and accountability were tightly coupled: you chose, you acted, and you bore the consequences. Modern bureaucracies strained that link; Adolf Eichmann’s “banality” was in the distance between his participation in bureaucratic machinery and the final slaughter of millions. AI threatens to sever it altogether. We are entering an age of delegated agency, in which outcomes are overseen by humans who did not meaningfully choose them and often cannot explain them.

The result will be widespread moral de-skilling. Judgment, restraint, and responsibility will atrophy when systems are always on hand to decide and justify on our behalf. When things go wrong, we will blame the models.

A new and deeper class divide will emerge—not rich versus poor, but deciders versus delegators. The elite will reserve human judgment for themselves; the mass public will live inside automated choice architectures optimized for fairness, compliance, and risk minimization. Human discretion will become a luxury good.

As institutional responsibility dissolves, authority will reappear in personal form. People will place their trust in founders, leaders, prophets, and strong executives willing to own their decisions. Our spiritual malaise will deepen. Comfort will rise, friction will fall, and meaning will thin. In a world where choice is outsourced and failure is padded away, people will search—politically, aesthetically, and religiously—for ways to feel responsible again.

7. Rise of prophets

Notwithstanding George W. Bush’s evangelical America and the threat of radical Islam, religious feeling in the West has declined over the past few decades, though it has arguably reappeared in the cultural excesses of the last ten years.

As fertility falls, communities with strong pro-fertility cultures (such as the Amish and Haredi) will make up a growing share of the population. These technology-skeptical groups will form the counterweight in a barbell world opposite our AI-first society. Unplugged communities will proliferate, taking advantage of lower house prices in depopulated regions. And in an age of selective trust and digitally immersed, passive masses, new religions and cults will emerge.

They have been relatively quiet in recent decades. But frontiers tend to produce new faiths. The American frontier gave rise to Mormonism; in New Zealand, a Māori ‘people of Israel’ emerged. The new virtual frontier will likewise launch prophets and charlatans alike, each offering cures for a spreading spiritual malaise. For some, AI itself will become the prophet.

And who knows—perhaps we are living through the age of the Moshiach.

8. Some things won’t change

Some things are eternal.

You will want to cultivate a rich inner life. An AI can read and write anything, but it can only do it for you in the most superficial sense—it cannot know or feel for you. It cannot delight in a new vein of knowledge for you. It cannot be curious about the miracle of creation on your behalf.

You will want to feel intimacy with another person—in the flesh. To flirt and fumble. To love. Virtual realities will not be an adequate substitute for the vicissitudes of life.

You will want to look after your body. Feel the spray of ocean water against your face. The sweat of a hard workout. The aliveness in an active self.

You will want to have children. Especially in a world that will be increasingly hostile to them. An AI will not be able to feel the satisfaction of teaching your children for you. Of dancing with your daughter. Of watching your boy score a goal. This is the great long trade of the twenty-first century. Your children will inherit the earth relatively more than any prior generation.

Had I read this essay first, my own piece on Australia fumbling for an identity would have been better.

I looked up Meaney after he came recommended by Hugh White. I regret to discover he died in 2021 in Adelaide. I’d love to have spoken to him.

In his essay, Meaney traces the arc of White Australia. How it was foundational to Australian Federation, and how that broad political consensus then dissolved. The same men and institutions that embraced White Australia also dismantled it. There was no battle of a righteous few. As Meaney notes:

There can be no plausible Whig history of progress which can link that past with this present. There are no heroes who from the beginning of ‘White Australia’ fought against great odds and so brought us to this point…

Meaney begins with a powerful portrait of just how heartfelt the White Australia sentiment was. Australia’s de Tocqueville, Charles Pearson, predicted the rise of the ‘coloured’ races against their European imperial masters, and how they would inevitably need to be treated on an equal footing. And yet even he resented his own prophecy:

Thus after predicting the rise of the ‘coloured’ races he had to admit that, ‘Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think that we shall have passed away before that day arrives.’

For him it was a question of preservation of the West:

For him the Australians were guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher civilisation. And in this context, “The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes, and which Englishmen at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience.”1

Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmond Barton, did not think that “the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality.”

Australia’s second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, and perhaps its most intellectual, wrote:

We here find ourselves touching the profoundest instinct of individual or nation — the instinct of self-preservation — for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake.

Following World War II, Australia’s famous External Affairs Minister Dr Evatt, wanted to establish a series of Australian bases to its north in the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, and French New Caledonia to prop up weakened European administrations. Post-War anti-colonial movements kiboshed this proposal. And whilst Australia softly supported such movements, Australian immigration took a boost under the ‘Populate or Perish’ mantra, and became more strictly white than ever before.

This took a sudden turn in the late 1960s. South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth of Nations and the UN adopted a ‘Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’. There was a new bipartisan zeitgeist under the new Prime Minister Harold Holt, following the long and more traditionalist Menzies reign. Why the change? Holt said:

Australia’s increasing involvement in Asian developments, the rapid growth of our trade with Asian countries, our participation on a larger scale in an increasing number of aid projects in the area, the considerable number of Asian students receiving education in Australia, the expansion of our military effort, the scale of diplomatic contact, and the growth of tourism to and from the countries of Asia which made it desirable for Australia to review its immigration procedures.

What is odd about this — isn’t it a non-sequitur to acknowledge all of the above and to then insist on non-white immigration? Plenty of countries engage with other countries without accepting their immigrants.

Note the requirement is entirely asymmetrical. There is no demand for European immigration to Asian countries. The presumed flow of demand runs in only one direction. It is assumed that Australia is an advanced and desirable civilisation where the world aspires to migrate, and that the Asian nations above her are not. Perhaps there is an underlying accommodation to a perceived threat: if Australia did not let some prospective Asians in on her own terms, they would force their way in on theirs. Nevertheless, surely it’s not simply a question of immigration but of demographic composition. Australia demanded of herself that it become less British, less white so as to avoid awkward conversations with its neighbours. And yet there is no equivalent demand of them. It was preposterous then and it’s preposterous now to demand that China, India, Vietnam, Japan become less Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese.

This fundamental question, the true underlying why, the essence of what drove the Anglo nations alone to abandon racial homogeneity, is unasked and unanswered by Meaney.

One might read this as a national sacrifice. To enter a new covenant — the Global Liberal Order under an America acutely attuned to questions of race — one must sacrifice the old idol (British homogeneity). And so as Australia pivoted from Britain to America, it laid its founding principle at the altar of its new god.

The Holt government’s new policy was not felt as a break. It was presented as an evolution. Truth is, it was a muddle. Meaney continues:

Yet both government and opposition stressed that these reforms were not a deviation from or a rejection of past policy. As the prime minister expressed it, Australia’s ‘basic policy has been firmly established since the beginning of our Federation’… The minister for immigration assured the house that ‘the basic aim of preserving a homogeneous population will be maintained’… Settlers had to be assimilated. They had to ‘fit in’. They had to be absorbable. Since this objective assumed an essentially mono-cultural, if not absolutely monochrome, society, it meant that Australians still viewed their nation as a community sharing one heritage of language, law, religion and mores, that is, a predominantly White British Australia…. Bill Snedden, Minister for Immigration in 1968, anticipating an alternative that was beginning to creep up on the country, asserted that the new immigration policy was certainly not a policy which is directed towards the creation of a multi-racial society.

(My emphasis.)

At the same time Australia established language departments to study Japanese and Indonesian at its universities to better prepare its military and intelligence services in potential conflicts with them.

The end of the Vietnam War soothed Australia’s fears: Asia seemed much too divided to pose a threat. The Whitlam government publicly repudiated the White Australia policy. The percentage of non-Europeans in Australia rose from 0.5% in 1947 to 2.5% in 1984. Under the Hawke government Asian migrants came to represent a third of the total intake. Today around a third of Australians have non-European origins and around half of Australians have non-Anglo-Celtic origins. Holt’s toe-dip reforms set off an avalanche.

A series of government reports touted the importance of learning an Asian language and considering Australia as an Asian nation. I recall this sentiment even in my youth through the ‘90s. They turned out to be largely false. It’s the hangover from this era that Hugh White was recently waxing lyrical about.

One of Meaney’s concluding comments:

It is clear that while new national and international circumstances, especially the end of ‘White Australia’ and the changing perceptions of Asia, have led to the abandonment of the ideal of a homogeneous British ‘White Australia’, all attempts to redefine the contemporary nation have been ad hoc and confused and have failed to produce a satisfactory substitute.

I could not have put it better myself, a very nice summary of my piece Fumbling for An Australian Identity.

Meaney first published his essay in 1994. He could not have predicted the huge run Aboriginal identity has had in this country over the last decade, which seems to be about a collective yearning for a national identity and to plug the gap Britishness left behind.

It’s bizarre that even in a clinical detailing of the dismantling of the White Australia policy, it all just looks like a big vibe shift. As I’ve written before, I suspect it’s to do with America. The cultural revolution there in the 1960s changed what was acceptable across the empire. A White Australia policy was just too KKK-coded for our Yankee pals, and it was too out of kilter with the liberal zeitgeist in the imperial capital. (As examples of ethno-classist counterpoints, Indian caste, Gulf Arab citizen exclusivity, Han supremacy, and white Mexican industrial dominance are not so easily legible to American racial sensibilities and all persist to this day.)

Universal liberalism became synonymous with progress and modernity, replacing the racial purity of the prior century. To explicitly aspire to remain white became gauche, backwards, provincial. Australia wanted to keep up with polite New England society, not be dismissed as an Alabama.

It also wouldn’t do to have an Anglo lieutenant implicitly subordinate an unaligned-Third World whose hearts and minds the US was fighting a Cold War for.

Maybe that’s the most Australian thing of all. Just not thinking about it too much, awkwardly getting on to get along.

My Brilliant Friend is about the frenetic mimesis of female friendships, the humiliation of writers, the impotence of tracked study, and the overwhelming power of beauty, money, sheer physicality, and agency over words.

There is much to appreciate in Elena Ferrante’s first novel in her Neapolitan series. There is perhaps no greater portrait of mimesis in literature. Agency as the sole defense against mimesis. The uneven intensity of memory and experience is delivered in a charming patter of youthful Italian and ‘dialect’ audible even to a reader in English. The outsized, monstrous effect of ideas and words from near-history (monarchy, communism, fascism) and the people that lie on the periphery of the familiar (like the strange neighbour you had as a child). The irresistible power of a woman’s beauty. But most ironic of all is how one of the greatest literary authors of the 21^st century totally denigrates the written word and the writer in her great literary work.

Ferrante chuckles at herself often enough: through her child protagonist’s eyes a woman a little over 30 is old and a writer must be rich:

Evidently his father, although he had written a book of poems, was not yet wealthy.

No, writing will not bring you riches. Writing does not even make you better. In fact, Ferrante says, writing can be a trap, its lure a lie.

The book’s sole author is Donato Sarratore, a sexual predator who mangles a widow’s mind and molests our underage protagonist Elena. He writes poems and a book, which seems wildly romantic and idealistic and successful to Elena until that fantasy careens into the older man’s sexual approach, and is left pathetic as he desperately begs for her affections, promising poems, threatening suicide. The grand writer is reduced to a disgusting worm.

Our two girl friend protagonists, Elena and Lila, are initially enthralled by books and stories. They represent an intellectual, economic, and status ladder out of their backward little town, out of the vortex of village gossip in which they’re stuck. Elena, our narrator with no sense of self or agency, defines herself exclusively through the prism of such aspirations:

I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print.

The narrative structure hammers her lack of agency endlessly: Elena describes their world, Lila commands it from its centre.

As Elena acquires Italian and Latin and Greek at school, so Lila, working instead in her father’s shoe shop, teaches herself all that and more. Even if knowledge is real, school is fake. But then Lila drops even the learning. She stops reading. The scrawny intelligent street tough blossoms into the most beautiful girl in town. Writing their own Little Women is a fantasy of youth that dissipates with first contact with the physicality of early womanhood.

something had begun to emanate from Lila’s mobile body that the males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving.

Men in their town are violent and rowdy, but they are reduced to nothing, totally at the mercy of Lila’s beauty. Life is too full of vitality, yearning, lust, the impossible physicality of being for books. Books are for the poor and ugly.

Books and study are forgotten, relegated to irrelevant dark corners when it is time to try wedding dresses and to look upon beauty. A woman’s superior beauty defeats other women and enslaves men. Beauty even enthralls a father, not sexually, but with its sheer magnetism, manifesting in pride. A beautiful woman need only speak to “shape” a man. She makes him anew with the Word as in the moment of Creation.

It is the physicality of beauty and early womanhood that crowds all else out. Even when Lila writes, it is the physicality of her script itself that manifests something essential, just as the physical writing of the Torah itself is holy.

Beauty often shines in a monied gloss. The beautiful inhabit an alternate reality where only they exist. They do not condescend to the ugly, to the poor; they simply do not see them.

It was like crossing a border. I remember a dense crowd and a sort of humiliating difference. I looked not at the boys but at the girls, the women: they were absolutely different from us. They seemed to have breathed another air, to have eaten other food, to have dressed on some other planet, to have learned to walk on wisps of wind. I was astonished. All the more so that, while I would have paused to examine at leisure dresses, shoes, the style of glasses if they wore glasses, they passed by without seeming to see me. They didn’t see any of the five of us. We were not perceptible. Or not interesting. And in fact if at times their gaze fell on us, they immediately turned in another direction, as if irritated. They looked only at each other.

Boys begin at a young age to try and capture something of the magic they sense in girls. In awkward, jagged words and gestures they approach girls, appeal to them, dissipate in humiliation. Later they acquire the tools to hunt properly; charm perhaps, violence also, but most of all money.

Ferrante presses on this unhealing wound for writers everywhere. Writers are neither rich nor beautiful. She herself may be the greatest literary author on earth, but she does not wield an iota of the power of a town beauty. It is total defeat for the literary person, the bookish person, the aspiring poetess. You think that way lies fame, or money, or charisma, or immortality, or a glimpse of the divine? No, you dag. You are nothing before the blossoming youth. Your rich inner life is cope for a lack of physicality. The sun and the sea and a momentary taste of flesh, however fleeting, will always defeat the bookish compensatory life.

In Ferrante’s universe, beauty, despite its potency, is nevertheless instrumental: it culminates in marriage, before wilting either with age or destruction by man with pregnancy:

I had never seen her naked, I was embarrassed. Today I can say that it was the embarrassment of gazing with pleasure at her body, of being the not impartial witness of her sixteen-year-old’s beauty a few hours before Stefano touched her, penetrated her, disfigured her, perhaps, by making her pregnant…

So marriage remains at the peak of this world. Work, intelligence, bookishness — these will never fill the marriage shaped hole. This is a shockingly transgressive message.

I felt with vexation that, that day, my success in school consoled them not at all, that in fact they felt, especially my mother, that it was pointless, a waste of time. When Lila, splendid in the dazzling white cloud of her dress and the gauzy veil, processed through the Church of the Holy Family on the arm of the shoemaker and joined Stefano, who looked extremely handsome, at the flower-decked altar—lucky the florist who had provided such abundance—my mother, even if her wandering eye seemed to gaze elsewhere, looked at me to make me regret that I was there, in my glasses, far from the center of the scene, while my bad friend had acquired a wealthy husband, economic security for her family, a house of her own, not rented but bought, with a bathtub, a refrigerator, a television, and a telephone.

Beauty’s transience grants it a chaotic power. Beauty burns hot and fast. Lila’s beauty is terrifying precisely because it attracts men who will destroy it. Pregnancy, marriage, violence — these are the costs beauty extracts.

If My Brilliant Friend is an inside study of female mimetic desire and rivalry and how it reaches its apotheosis in the physical blooming of youth’s beauty, Lampedusa’s The Leopard can be read as the flipside: the decay of a man whose engagement with and conquest of such beauty is long behind him. In The Leopard, old men like old empires have little left but nostalgia. They’re exhausted. Where once they conquered, now they only dream of former glories, former beauties they could once claim. My Brilliant Friend looks upon a beauty from a girl friend’s perspective, The Leopard from a lustful man’s beyond his prime. My Brilliant Friend stares at the sun from the perspective of a lesser rival star; The Leopard stares at it from the perspective of the sullen moon banished to cold death.

Beauty can be defeated. In the final pages, Elena confesses the impotence of her studies. She is unable to escape the web of small town relationships and the mimetic pull of her eternal friend Lila. We are at the culmination of this beauty’s maidenhood: her wedding. She is the centre of the universe. Elena is but one of the constellation of people unable to escape her orbit. But there is one who escapes. Whose movements are not slaves to mimetic determinism, who is able to escape the force that keeps everyone else in obeyance.

Studying was useless: I could get the highest possible marks on my work, but that was only school… Nino could do anything: he had the face, the gestures, the gait of one who would always be better. When he left it seemed that the only person in the whole room who had the energy to take me away had vanished.

Nino, the outsider. Dressed like a schlub. Slinking out of the wedding without even meeting the bride. Yes, it’s still his physicality that is the centre of his power (not his mind or bookishness) — his face and gestures and gait — but it is not his beauty. It is his break from mimesis. He doesn’t care. He’s not bound by town gossip (“he used the word “literature” to be critical of anyone who ruined people’s minds by means of what he called idle chatter” — another dig at writers). He was not enslaved to a young woman’s beauty. He had broken away from his father, his town. He was Abraham leaving his father’s people to found a nation of his own. This, here, is the true power at the centre of all things: agency.

Ferrante’s agency is not exclusively masculine. The entire story pulsates around Lila, whose agency is more charismatic and powerful to us, the blind reader, than her beauty. She leans into her bestowed beauty and the money of the man she uses her beauty to ensnare; but these games are precarious for a woman, full of “pleasure-fear”. Lila is at her most powerful when she doesn’t care. She is not driven by the same mimetic desires as her friends, who are deranged by them.

She seemed as usual to have no need of male attention. We, instead, out in the cold, in the midst of that chaos, without that attention couldn’t give ourselves meaning.

Whereas Elena is constantly flailing to define herself through the prism of another — Lila, Sarrotere, Nino — Lila’s force of will is her utter indifference. Her independence, her agency. “She knew how to be autonomous whereas I needed her,” knows Elena. While the bookish Elena uses language to draw lines around her life, Lila’s agency is so intense that it threatens to dissolve the very margins of her being. She’s always at risk of being consumed by her world’s raw, unmediated physicality.

Beauty is a local monopoly. Every instance of beauty projects its own total uniqueness and total dominance. This projection of monopoly is beauty’s greatest trick — for beauty is totally ubiquitous. Every suburb or town has a local beauty. The beautiful woman you pass might be the most beautiful woman you have ever seen, and you will in that moment completely forget that this might happen several times a day. Agency breaks free from beauty’s monopoly. Lila becomes queen of the town, wielding her beauty to marry it with money. Nino escapes the town altogether.

Ferrante doesn’t actually despise writing or writers. She’s written a great novel. And she deserves to poke fun at herself and her literary audience. Her irony is novel in today’s dour age. As is her warning that writing is not redemptive. In our age of writers and artists insisting on the most banal kind of didactic activism, that might be her most transgressive statement of all.

I’m finishing up a few weeks in Mexico. I’ve been visiting Mexico for 20 years, and more often for the last 10 years since I married a Mexican. I’ve mainly driven around Yucatan and Quintana Roo and visited Mexico City and Queretaro, plus other tidbits. That’s a pretty narrow aperture given how big and diverse Mexico is. So the below observations are limited accordingly.

1. Mexico is culturally, economically, and ethnically hierarchical. This has deep cultural roots going back to both native and Spanish social structures.

2. You would expect low socio-economic mobility given the high stratification. And there is — class is super sticky. But new-ish immigrant groups have done very well over the last century, such as the Lebanese and Jewish communities. (I am a Maronite appreciator.) What does that say about the opportunity available in such a society?

3. To answer my own question, perhaps Mexico rewards tight in-group capital (family, trust, ethnic networks) more than abstract merit. Diaspora ethnic groups succeeded because they arrived with merchant traditions, internal credit, intra-marriage, and distance from indigenous caste logic.

4. (Bit tangential but ‘distance from indigenous caste logic’ is underrated in other ways. You can ‘arb’ status cross-culturally, ie. find a mate that would be out of your league in your own country offshore, because your status is illegible to him/her in theirs. For example, I know a few upper class Mexicans that married Joe Blow Aussies, but would have never dreamed of doing that in Mexico. I have also seen the other way — a strapping Aussie lad finds a Mexican or Asian girl that would be of middling social status in her home country, but is fine for Australia where such things are illegible. It’s a bit funny in the case of (white) upper-class Mexicans, who implicitly misread all Aussies as ‘upper class’ based on ethnicity. This applies to many cross-cultural matches.)

5. It’s very difficult to make good money as an employee. Equity is ~the only path to wealth. The opportunity to build businesses is real. A Spanish woman who started a business in Mexico City told me it’s much easier than in Europe.

6. I suspect the market is big enough and the general chaos high enough that you can just do things.

7. I used to really love Mexico’s high chaos / high agency mix. You can basically do whatever you want. This trip more than ever I’ve just noticed the general dysfunction. It’s always been there, but it’s less ‘third world chic’ and more ‘just sucks’ to me now. This probably maps to my own life arc from young single man (risk-seeking) to early-middle age dad (more risk averse). The ability of a state to maintain public goods and social order is surprisingly hard and probably path dependent on a bunch of things. Probably broad-based state capacity is a foundational thing, hard to retrofit onto broken incentives. Once a society normalises private provision of order, it’s incredibly hard to claw back. You need a broadly vested elite, upfront. Which is extremely difficult (impossible?) in an ethno-classist state like Mexico (and South Africa).

8. I always think of South Africa here. South Africa is a more extreme Mexico: more crime, more dysfunction, less opportunity, similar broad ethno-class divides. The Mexican elites were smart enough to not implement legal apartheid. That said, if I had to choose, I’d live in Cape Town over Mexico City. Although Cape Town is probably declining in a way Mexico City is not. Probably unsurprising given I love Sydney, and Cape Town is Sydney’s forsaken cousin.

9. Other Mexico / South Africa common-isms — the guys who wave you in and out of parking spots for a tip. And the Mexican call for a waiter is joven — ie. young man. In France this is not condescending (garçon). In Mexico it feels between garçon and boy, as once used in South Africa. A bit jarring for an Aussie, I just say amigo. I cannot call a 50yo server joven. (Although native women at a shop counter will call me joven, so it’s not as racially or class-tinged as I first assumed.)

10. Public goods like roads and cleanliness and security are poorly maintained. The rich privately maintain such goods, living behind endless fortifications.

11. Even the middle class can afford household staff and live within gated communities (depending on city).

12. There are different tiers of household staff. There is “generational, live-in, part of the family” staff and there’s “miserable, comes by daily, replaceable” staff.

13. Cheap-ish help means there is childcare available everywhere — in shopping centres, restaurants. I wonder if this has any appreciable impact on fertility rates? Same with no rules around car seats.

14. The single greatest test for state capacity is drinking water on tap. It requires boring competence and coordination across decades. Mexico’s bottled water industry is enormous — #1 per capita in the world. Try building a new system around that. It’s another example of public goods outsourced to private individuals (bottled water over a public water system). Beyond a bare financial comparison, abundant potable water is a paean to state capacity, a symbol of functionality and order — like houses of worship.

15. After tap water, probably a sewerage system that can handle toilet paper. (PS. ATM fees here are egregious.)

16. I enjoy the (often racially tinged) Mexican cat calling for my kids. Guerito. Gallo. My 1.5yo does indeed look like a strutting rooster. And is very fair.

17. It goes without saying these nicknames are a one-way street.

18. Flaco and gordito are other charming Latin American-isms.

19. I enjoy Mexico’s very deep machismo.

20. Mexico is covered in amazing and under-visited natural sites and pre-colonial era ruins. It helps to have a local guide. Local guides love the movie Apocalypto by Mel Gibson.

21. There are two parallel economies — one for the rich and one for the poor. The one for the rich is at least as expensive as Australia.

22. Pricing can be lopsided. A$10/hr for a nanny on NYE, A$30 per tequila shot at a hot nightclub.

23. Prices overall way up over last few years. US even more so, so may be an Australian dollar / economy thing? Is it good or bad for Australia that Australia seems less expensive relative to these countries? Feels bearish. Adios, First World Premium? Convergence of global capital?

24. For kids, Kidzania in Mexico City is a bizarro theme park (?) where they get to play as different kinds of workers: Amazon warehouse workers, car rental assistants, radio presenters, pharma manufacturers, and so on. Branded! I can only hope and presume that the brands (e.g. Amazon) actually sponsor the place. Totally bizarre. Kids like it. The Aztlán Parque Urbano in Chapultepec is a great theme park. Better rides, easier queues, more affordable than anything I’ve been to in Australia. Miniature shopping centres with little trolleys for kids to push around and collect plastic foodstuffs are another popular type of kids play centre across Mexican cities.

25. Mexico is covered with US fast food franchises in a way Australia is not. I’d be super interested in their unit economics. Prices seem similar. Cheaper labour, cheaper real estate, similar revenue? Or something else?

26. Rich Mexicans love TVs. Throughout their homes and restaurants.

27. Mexico City is not a morning city. No city is a morning city like Sydney is a morning city.

28. Every meaningful restaurant and nightclub in Mexico has to pay off the regional cartel.

29. It matters whether you are stopped by state police, federal police, or the army.

30. Queretaro has a nice and large old town (that looks exactly the same as other colonial town squares) but is otherwise an awful looking city: a jagged concrete jungle. It’s growing and its mass middle class housing developments rival Soviet khrushchyovkas in their ugliness.

31. There is no such thing as urban design in Mexican cities, beyond the old planned Spanish city centres. If this is YIMBY paradise — count me out! But maybe would look different with 4x the GDP per capita?

32. There seems to be a pretty big corruption industry called factureras. Invoices from fake companies are manufactured and sold for two purposes: money laundering and avoiding taxes. Ironically, the former is to pay tax. ChatGPT tells me this accounts for 1 – 2% of Mexican GDP. It’s an entire industry of corrupt officials, fake invoice vendors, and real company customers that arises from a quirk of Mexico’s tax system. Probably another example in favour of equity over employment.

33. In Mexico City they built a giant tower, Estela de Luz, that would light up for the bicentenary. It was 2 years late (missed the bicentenary), 3x over budget, and doesn’t work. It’s now a giant monument to corruption.

34. I’ve seen a few cyclists in Mexico City. Looks like suicide.

35. There are a few cycling paths around now. Feels like cargo cult modernity. Like recycling. I’ve been to at least one Mexican household where they separate recycling — and there is no recycling collection. It’s pure psycho-modernity. At least in Australia we have an entire national system of recycling that’s collected. It serves zero purpose, but is sufficiently abstracted from the household that the householder can pretend.

36. The meteoric rise of the Chinese auto industry titan is presumably catastrophic for Mexico’s large car manufacturing industry. There are Chinese cars everywhere here already.

37. Australia feels on the fringes of empire, Mexico feels at its feet. I’m sure this is no news to Mexico watchers, but the US treasury blew up a large Mexican bank last year by accusing it of money laundering. I’d love to know the real story, which seems entirely political. Ie. why this bank, why now.

38. Mexicans really like Mexican music, and especially their mega pop stars. Sure there is plenty of American music around. But there is a popular, cross-class and unironic appreciation for Mexican megastars like Luis Miguel, Alejandro Fernández, Thalía, Juan Gabriel. Many (most?) of the megastars are from Mexico’s white upper crust. They are very clearly ‘national culture’ coded. The US has this in spades obviously — it’s the water we all swim in. Thailand and Russia clearly have versions of this. Australia doesn’t really? I don’t mean Australian musicians — AC/DC, INXS, Nick Cave, etc. They are great but aren’t Australiana in the same way. Maybe John Farnham is a kind of equivalent for Australia, where people might sing along to it in bars. But his hit song You’re The Voice has around 250m listens on Spotify. Mexico has a kaleidoscope of equivalents with 500m - 1bn views for their top hits (I’ve been into this track). Such music is considered kitsch or dated in Australia. A lot of the Mexican stuff fills stadiums and is really very charismatic. It reflects Mexico’s broader operatic culture — everything tends to be grandiose, a telenovela writ large. I am a Mexican music enjoyer!

39. Socialist flirtation runs deep — going back to hosting Trotsky, sympathies with Bolivar, anarchist graffiti, etc — but feels like a hangover from the last century rather than anything serious. Like how there are still social distancing signs around from the COVID era.

40. When I first came to Mexico in 2007, there were a lot of redundant roles e.g. handing out paper towels in bathrooms for a tip. There is still abundant make-work, but seems far less over 20 years.

41. There is very low general social trust. Don’t leave kids alone. Assume drivers will be unsafe. And so on.

42. Mexicans really love flan. And Maggi sauce.

43. Raw chickens in Mexico are yellow because of their feed (!).

44. Cancun is hurricane-proof. E.g. powerlines are below ground. I suspect because it’s a new creation. Not sure how it is in Queensland, which is also hurricane-prone. In Sydney, we get a power outage ~annually from heavy rains knocking out powerlines. Why aren’t more of our powerlines underground? I suspect Sydney is too sprawling and it would be too expensive. But would it be?

45. Tulum is what Byron Bay would be if we were allowed to do things in Australia. Genuinely impressive that they’ve ~doubled the size of Tulum with development over last decade. Tulum is best understood as an extension of NYC more than a part of Mexico.

46. Menudo, or Mexican tripe soup, is probably the single most underrated Mexican dish. A dish that binds Mexicans and Georgians, who have xashi (which I make and love). Interesting that these dishes (also like pho) are universally breakfast dishes. And hangover dishes! An odd global convergence. Why can’t these be evening dishes like other soups?

47. Clamato is such a bizarre concept. Who first thought to combine clam with tomato juice into a mixer? Powerful.

48. The Mexicans are right to put chili sauce on fruit and salt into beer.

49. There is this funny phenomenon where at high end restaurants and steak houses there will be a cut of meat labelled KOSHER. It’s much more expensive than the other cuts. It shows how integrated Jewish sensibilities are with elite Mexican culture in Mexico City. This cut of meat is obviously not kosher in any meaningful way. It may be purchased from a kosher butcher, but it is not served in a kosher kitchen from a certified vendor. It signals elite status. It’s fundamentally idiotic, as it serves no religious purpose and is almost certainly a worse culinary experience for a much higher price. A pure example of conspicuous consumption in dining.

50. Mexican goods and services are high variability. They match the social structure. Food ranges from street vendors to high end super markets, fancier than any in Australia. Same with medical services: you can have top-tier health services on demand, but it will cost you. For everyone else there’s a dog’s breakfast public health service. Australia tends to have a far narrower band of ‘fine to good’ outcomes. Apt for a nation where mediocrity is a virtue.

51. My Spanish sucks. It used to be comfortably conversational. It’s decayed over a decade to loser gringo status. Upsetting! I can feel the plasticity declining.

52. Mexicans don’t wear shorts. Granted it’s winter. But it’s been hot. I’ve been in shorts and I’ve been the only one, unless I go to gringo areas. It’s a broader cultural thing. Coastal cities wear more shorts. Australia is all coastal cities.

53. On 2 January I experienced my first earthquake. 6.5 magnitude at its centre, weaker where I was in Mexico City. All our phones went off with a warning. I think I heard a window rattle. Powerful.

54. Trotsky was a Tinder-fish-profile-pic bro:

Yaacov Levitan was killed at the Bondi Massacre. Our sons are friends and classmates. He leaves behind a wife and 4 kids. I would be deeply grateful if you would contribute directly to his family here.

I have never asked for any payment or a donation before. I am asking this once.

For donations of any size, I will give you a shout out in a future post.

For donations >A$300 I will give you a 1 hour video call.

For donations >A$1,000 I will try and write a kvetch of your choice — subject to appropriate discourse and it falling within my circle of competence — happy to discuss first.

Just give directly and send me proof and we’ll sort something out.

See Kvetching & Books 2022, 2023, 2024

Well that was a miserable end to the year.

On 1 November I wrote:

You don’t want to wait for an illness or some other calamity to strike you or a loved one to realise how good you have it. And besides — at least you’re not on the Eastern Front.

For some, it may as well have been the Eastern Front.

My most popular post this year (and ever) was Ambitious Australia. An uncharacteristically optimistic kvetch perhaps, there’s a lot of pent up energy for high agency, big vision optimism for Australia.

This was followed by my chat with Tyler Cowen, then my recent spicy take on male inadequacy, then my take on WWII’s Eastern Front (that was a brutal rabbit hole). Somehow my piece on Helen Garner’s memoir and the movie Conclave did good numbers, the latter (I am told) in Catholic group chats.

I’ve noticed my Australia essays having an impact on discourse (e.g. on Abul Rizvi and Australia’s bureaucracy, Australian identity, and political stirrings). They’re a mix of reaction and a culmination of a couple years of Australian history reading. I find it odd that US institutions occasionally reach out for me to write for them and Australian ones never do. I know you guys read this :)

This year I wrote a few pieces that I decided would be best left in my drafts folder. One is ‘Sabra and Shatila was a Stitch Up’, but feels too niche and curmudgeonly even for me. Another is ‘Immigration is a Choice’ but I made my point clear enough in my Bondi massacre piece.

I wrote two more pieces on daughters. I met someone the other day who called my writing wholesome, which was a nice change. You should watch Mr Inbetween.

I published 29 pieces in 2025 vs 24 in 2024. Overall subscriber growth has been steady. I’ve never charged and don’t intend to. Thanks for sharing pieces.

What’s next? I have an advance draft of a very long deep dive on New Zealand history, with contrasts to Australia and US. I got a little overexcited about New Zealand, which really has a deeply fascinating and unique story. A couple essays on Breaking Bad. Otherwise I always have a dozen or so drafts ready to go. Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about writing right now. Feels a bit obscene to start posting about Breaking Bad given what’s going on. Let’s see what 2026 brings.

Got through lots of books this year — partly because I turned the default speed up to 3x from 2x for audiobooks.

Hold your loved ones. I wish you peace and prosperity for 2026.

Australia

• A History of Australia — by John Malony

• Australia — by W. K. Hancock

  • Very hard to get a copy of, first half is excellent, second half obsolete.

• From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories — by Mark McKenna

• How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 — by Helen Garner

• Quarterly Essay 98: Hard New World — by Hugh White

  • Under-commented on that Hugh White explicitly calls out Australia’s Chinese population as a risk factor in any conflict with China.

• Australia: A History — by Tony Abbott

  • He did a surprisingly good job. It’s a little boomer Liberal talking points vibe (e.g. free markets and immigrant nation stuff). I’m low-key jealous — I’d have written a different history, but good on him for using his post-PM time to write this.

The Americas

• Truman — by David McCullough

  • The accidental president? An ordinary man in an extraordinary position? The contrast between FDR and Truman is underrated. FDR really did do an Alexander the Great, leaving an iron-grip presidency without a political heir. Then again, Truman did oversee the implementation of the Marshall Plan, established NATO, and navigated the Berlin embargo without getting into nuclear war.

• Lincoln — by David Herbert Donald

  • Under-appreciated how looney his wife was. No wonder he had such titanic patience.

• Daniel Patrick Moynihan — by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (ed. Steven R. Weisman)

  • “Asked why he gave all his musicals Irish names, George M. Cohan said ‘The Jews come anyway.’”

  • “It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content will rise 25% by 2000…This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet.” (1969. Lol.)

  • ““On Thursday, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, looking her radiant best, threw 20,000 Trade Union leaders into prison.” I am reliably informed that it was this painful duty, plus the upcoming even more explosive concern [atomic bomb test] which prevented her accepting Harvard University’s most recent request that she give the commencement address and receive a citation for services to peace and freedom.”

• The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 — by Robert Middlekauff

  • Idea for Trump? “[E]very woman who attended the ball was presented with a fan prepared in Paris, with ivory frame, and when opened displayed a likeness of Washington in profile.”

• The Federalist Papers — by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay

• Alexander Hamilton — by Ron Chernow

• Cuba — by Ada Ferrer

  • Annoying style.

• In the Arena: a Memoir of Defeat, Victory and Renewal — by Richard Nixon

  • I find the idea of presidential disgrace fascinating. A man can reach the highest peaks, accomplish much, and still end his days embittered. Also see Menachem Begin.

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York — by Robert A. Caro

• American Zion — by Benjamin Park

• My Life and Work — Henry Ford

  • “There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity of work. Nature has seen to that. Idle hands and minds were never intended for any one of us. Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing.”

New Zealand

• Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States — David Hackett Fischer

• The Penguin History of New Zealand — by Michael King

Israel

• The Sword of Freedom — by Yossi Cohen

• Ben Gurion: Father of Modern Israel — by Anita Shapira

• Jabotinsky: A Life — by Hillel Halkin

• Warrior: An Autobiography — by Ariel Sharon (with David Chanoff)

  • I could not put this down.

• One State, Two States — by Benny Morris

  • Clinical evisceration of the two state delusion

• The Pity of It All — by Amos Elon

  • Deserves its good reputation.

• Arabs — by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  • (Yes this doesn’t really fit in this category.) Disappointing. Too meandering, low insight density.

• Six Days of War — by Michael B. Oren

  • Genuinely thrilling to read.

• The Six-Day War — by Guy Laron

  • A good political counterbalance to Oren’s work, but his underlying case isn’t convincing.

• Lioness — by Francine Klagsbrun

• Jerusalem — by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Scripture / Religion

• God: A Biography — by Jack Miles

  • Read this in one sitting (a long flight). Exceptional. I think about Job’s defeat of God often, and of this sublime passage every few weeks:

  • “Nothing in nature looks like cloud by day and fire by night except a volcano. The depth of the Lord God’s compelling but contradictory power is well evoked by the extraordinary image of a volcano brought into a tent… The volcano has come to live in the tent because the tent was built by the volcano’s friend.”

• Job: A New Translation — by Edward L. Greenstein

• How to Read the Bible — by James L. Kugel

• Confessions: A New Translation — by Augustine (Peter Constantine translation)

  • Unfortunately found this unbearably tedious.

• God and Politics in Esther — by Yoram Hazony

  • One of my very favourite books. Yoram Hazony is one of the most insightful writers alive today. He packs profound insights on the human condition into restrained, lyrical prose. I would have him write a book on every book of the Bible. His asides on the nature of marriage, the pride of men, the taking of property as an assault on the spirit, are magnificent.

• The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture — by Yoram Hazony

• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious — by Ross Douthat

• The Thirteen Petalled Rose — by Adin Steinsaltz

  • Unfortunately uncompelling.

• My Rebbe — by Adin Steinsaltz

• Rebbe — by Joseph Telushkin

• Faith, Hope and Carnage — by Nick Cave, Seán O’Hagan

  • Nick Cave is such an unusual figure. He breaks every Australian mold. He is the opposite of tall poppy: bombastic and self-projecting in the extreme. His music and philosophy is deeply Christian. He can be a bit much. But then again, his music can be top shelf. And his son did die.

WWII / Eastern Front / Russia

• The Gulag Archipelago — by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

• Berlin — by Antony Beevor

• Russia’s War — by Richard Overy

• Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East — by David Stahel

• Blood Red Snow — by Günter K. Koschorrek

• D-Day — by Antony Beevor

• The Boys’ Crusade — by Paul Fussell

  • Fussell is seriously underrated. More on audiobook please!

• When Titans Clashed — by David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House

• War on the Eastern Front — by James Lucas

• Kiev 1941 — by David Stahel

• On a Knife’s Edge — by Prit Buttar

• A Small Town in Ukraine — by Bernard Wasserstein

• The Story of Russia — by Orlando Figes

• The Forgotten Soldier — by Guy Sajer

Fiction

• Stoner — by John Williams

• King Lear — by William Shakespeare

• Bleak House — by Charles Dickens

  • Unfortunately didn’t love this. Meandering?

• My Brilliant Friend — by Elena Ferrante

• The Netanyahus — by Joshua Cohen

Other

• The Journalist and the Murderer — by Janet Malcolm

• Abundance: How We Build a Better Future — by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

• Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life — by Agnes Callard

  • Not for me.

• The Technological Republic — by Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska

  • Too late, too shallow, written by ChatGPT?

• The Persian Expedition — by Xenophon

  • The Greeks really did like their boys.

• The Future of Truth — by Werner Herzog

• The Origins of Efficiency — by Brian Potter

  • Did you know women’s menstrual cycles can affect chip production?

• Trillion Dollar Coach — by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

  • More a tribute than a handbook. Skip.

• Breakneck — by Dan Wang

• Against Interpretation and Other Essays — by Susan Sontag

  • Is anyone more overrated than Sontag? A poor man’s Camille Paglia. Her voice is incredibly annoying and low insight density.

• Good to Great — by Jim Collins

  • Aged poorly?

• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — by René Girard

• Conservatism — by Yoram Hazony

• The First Salute — by Barbara W. Tuchman

• Super Agers — by Eric Topol

• Spice — by Roger Crowley

  • Enjoyed the detail on Magellan’s brutal journey. Overall not as good as Crowley’s Conquerors, which is riveting.

• The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean — by David Abulafia

• Music — by Ted Gioia