In a recent opinion piece in The Australian conservative British historian and US resident Niall Ferguson reflects on the legacy of 9/11 and concludes – after two decades of analysis – that the attacks on 11 September 2001 signaled not merely terrorism but a broader clash of civilisations that the West is now losing. Recalling his own reactions on that momentous day, Ferguson admits that he initially sought secular explanations for the attacks: economic downturns, American imperial overreach, and global political fragmentation. Yet re-examining Osama bin Laden’s statements, he recognises that the al-Qa’ida leader framed his actions as a religious war against “crusaders,” rooted in Islamic grievance over Palestine and Western dominance. Bin Laden’s explicit appeal to faith, not politics, aligns with Samuel Huntington’s much-criticised thesis that post–Cold War conflict would be cultural, with Islam and the West as enduring antagonists.
Although the United States and its allies largely defeated jihadist terrorism within their own borders—terrorism in Iraq has plummeted and attacks in the U.S. remain rare—Ferguson argues that Islamism has advanced through dawa (non-violent proselytising) and political penetration. Organisations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, exploit Western legal and educational institutions while Gulf states like Qatar fund universities and shape intellectual climates. Meanwhile, demographic trends favour Islam: global Muslim populations are rising rapidly and will nearly equal Christians by mid-century, while Western societies grow more secular and internally divided.
Geopolitically, the West faces a resurgent “axis of upheaval”—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—while allies waver. The international solidarity that followed 9/11 contrasts sharply with the fragmented reaction to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, where UN resolutions condemned Israeli actions more than Islamist violence and several states recognised Palestinian statehood. Public opinion, especially among younger generations, has shifted sharply against Israel and, in some cases, towards open antisemitism; bin Laden’s anti-Western rhetoric even circulates approvingly on platforms like TikTok.
Ferguson concedes that bin Laden lost the “war on terror,” but claims he is winning the longer contest Huntington foresaw. Islamism thrives without spectacular violence, demographic momentum favours Muslim societies, and Western civilisation—once confident in its Judeo-Christian identity—is fractured and uncertain. Two decades after 9/11, Ferguson concludes that the clash of civilisations is real, and the West is no longer clearly ahead.
Last week’s azure September skies over New York brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago I was due to give a lecture at New York University. The date of the lecture was September 12. I never flew.
On the day of the attacks, I sat in my study at Jesus College, Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the World Trade Centre twin towers first blazing, then collapsing. Not long after, in April 2002, I accepted a chair at the Stern School of Business at New York University and resigned my Oxford professorship.
My motivation was partly the hereditary Scottish tendency to march towards the sound of gunfire. As a teenager in 1914, my grandfather John Ferguson had volunteered to fight the Germans. This seemed easier.
Regardless of the 9/11 attackers’ motives, I had a strong objection to terrorism as a political method – a result of growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, when “the Troubles” in nearby Northern Ireland did more than merely resonate.
My first impulse after the attacks, in a piece for The New York Times, was to liken the sympathetic British reaction to 9/11 to the American reaction to the Blitz of 1940-41.
In the rubble, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower. Doug Kanter / AFP
But I also warned Americans to “steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well”. In wars against terrorists, I wrote, “there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you.”
Yet this was not the Provisional IRA. Re-reading a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 video, from November 3, 2001, I am reminded of how explicitly he declared a war of religion. “People were divided into two parts” after 9/11, he declared. “The first part supported these strikes against US tyranny, while the second denounced them.
“The vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes,” bin Laden went on, “because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practised by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries.”
Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.
There were demonstrations of support for his action “from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world”. This revealed the key reality: “This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathised with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.”
With the passage of 2½ decades, it is startling just how unambiguous bin Laden was about his religious motive. “Under no circumstances,” he declared, “should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For the enmity is based on creed … It is a question of faith, not a war against terrorism.” The goal of all Muslims should now be to “resist the most ferocious, serious and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed” to Mohammed.
Bin Laden saw the war he was waging as a counter-attack – “to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and The Philippines”. The US president, George W. Bush, might be the latest “crusader”, who “carried the cross and raised its banner high”, but bin Laden traced his war back to the aftermath of World War I when “the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner … and Palestine was occupied by the British”. Now the tables had been turned. And he had turned them with just 19 men whose faith exalted martyrdom.
George W Bush and retired firefighter Bob Beckwith, September 14, 2001, AFP
You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on The Clash of Civilisations had been published in 1993, as well as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.
My wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was born in Somalia and shared this view, not because she was a scholar of Islam but because she was a Muslim – and, indeed, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In September 2001, she was working at a political think tank in the Netherlands, having sought asylum there in 1992 to escape war-torn Mogadishu and an arranged marriage.
Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In her memoir, Infidel, she recalls how, after hearing bin Laden’s video, she “picked up the (Koran) and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.” She shot to notoriety by telling the Dutch that the 9/11 attackers were simply following the Prophet Mohammed’s injunction to wage holy war.
Over the past 24 years I have valiantly tried to see 9/11 differently – not as a civilisational clash between Islam and “the West” but as something that fit better into my own secular frame of reference. Raised an atheist, trained as an economic historian, I felt obliged to look behind what I took to be the facade of religious zealotry.
A decade after the attacks, in a piece I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, I portrayed them as the product of four underlying historical trends. First, the spread of terrorism from the Middle East and Europe to the US. Second, the post-2000 economic downturn, combined with widening inequality between nations and a coming oil shock, possibly compounded by a Saudi revolution akin to the one that overthrew the shah in Iran in 1979. (I completely failed to foresee the shale oil revolution and bought into the “peak oil” myth.) Third, the transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism. And last, the fragmentation of the multicultural polity. (“Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilisations, we should expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states.”)
Missing in this – and in much of my work that followed – was Islam.
In The War of the World (2006), I got a little closer to Huntington, portraying 1979 as a much bigger turning point than 2001 in terms of the demographic as well as political rise of Islam, a point I returned to in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). However, laboriously quantifying every war since Huntington’s essay had appeared, I argued that most conflicts since 1993 had, in reality, been within rather than between civilisations. In The Square and the Tower (2017), I applied network theory to the problem, showing how al-Qaeda itself was a network within a much larger network of Islamist organisations; and that its expansion in response to the invasion of Iraq ultimately necessitated a networked response (in the form of General Stan McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command). Most recently, in Doom (2021), I downgraded 9/11 to just another disaster, and not a very big one: “In terms of excess mortality, April 2020 in New York City was … three and a half times worse than September 2001, the month of the 9/11 terrorist attack.”
On reflection, I see that I was overthinking the event. Or perhaps under-thinking it.
Huntington, Lewis and my wife were right.
In Huntington’s original formulation, “the fundamental source of conflict” in the world after the Cold War would be cultural; “the principal conflicts of global politics” would be “between nations and groups of different civilisations” – “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African”. In particular, Huntington predicted, the “centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam” could become “more virulent”. He also foresaw a “Confucian-Islamic military connection” that would culminate in a conflict between “The West and the Rest”.
Among the younger generation of proto-woke Ivy League professors, Huntington was widely mocked for his “essentialism”. But consider, with Huntington’s argument in mind, all that has happened since September 2001.
Terrorism has largely been contained in the US and EU, though not globally. In that sense, we won the “war on terror”, which was successfully displaced from the US to the periphery. It was ultimately defeated in Iraq, though not in Afghanistan. Today, as a result, terrorism in the world looks very different from what I foresaw in 2001. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, the top five countries most impacted by terrorism last year were: Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria, Mali and Niger. Globally, terrorism peaked in 2014-15. In countries such as Iraq, it has declined dramatically. (In 2007, terrorists claimed 6249 lives in Iraq. Last year, the total was just 59.)
In the US, it is widely asserted, white supremacists now pose a bigger terrorist threat than Islamists – although the attack in New Orleans on January 1, 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people by driving a pick-up truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, is a reminder that Islamic State has not entirely gone away. We now know who murdered Charlie Kirk, and a white supremacist he was not.
Still, the latest Global Terrorism Threat Assessment by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies makes clear just how wrong I was in 2001 to anticipate a sustained campaign of jihadist terrorism in the US. Say what you like about our national security agencies, they won that war.
Yet nonviolent radicalisation (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities. The critical point – as my wife explained in a book on the subject – is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread.
I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytising organisations spread their networks, through mosques, Islamic centres, schools, colleges and local politics. Consider only the effectiveness of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, founded in 1994, which today boasts on its website of having “100+ active lawsuits” and “600,000+ Legislative Action Alerts”, whatever that means. It has almost 30 offices throughout the country.
Most people who encounter CAIR take it to be something like the Anti-Defamation League for Muslims – a civil rights organisation that just happens to be concerned about the rights of Muslims. But it is not that at all.
Ten countries have recognized the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three European Union EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and the United Kingdom Britain are itching to join them. Picture: AFP
Rather, it is more like a front organisation for the Muslim Brotherhood of America. In a recent article, Ayaan has brilliantly described the many ingenious ways that CAIR exploits the institutions of our open society, most recently settling a lawsuit to avoid revealing its sources of funding.
Good luck following the money. In her words: “The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) controls mosque properties and financial assets. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) lends the Brotherhood a degree of religious legitimacy. The American Muslim Council (AMC) works the political front, cutting deals and building alliances. The Muslim American Society (MAS) runs operations on the ground, embedding itself firmly in local communities. In universities, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) shapes the narrative. On campuses, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) targets the next wave of recruits. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Young Muslims (YM) focus on families and youth.”
Even the United Arab Emirates has proscribed CAIR as a terrorist organisation. Yet dozens of Democratic legislators are on the record on the CAIR website, praising its work as they doubtless also praise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A complementary effort is the way Qatar – the largest source of foreign donations to US universities since reporting began in 1986 – funnels money into academia. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, as reported in The Free Press, nearly a third of Qatari donations to American colleges – more than $US2bn – were given between 2021 and 2024. As Mitchell G. Bard shows in Arab Funding of American Universities (2025), this money is one of the reasons college campuses have become such hotbeds of anti-Semitism in recent years.
It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics – church and state – that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by “the rest” in just the way Huntington foresaw.
Late Hamas leaders Ismail Haniya and Yahya Sinwar during a rally marking the 30th anniversary of the founding of Hamas in 2017. AFP
Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001: “Our message to the people of the United States is … ‘We are with you’.”
In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,” he wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997), “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The “axis of upheaval” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) is now co-operating in military, economic and diplomatic ways.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of US allies (the EU, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally non-aligned but also key partners.
The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the US wants plausible deniability when, as earlier this month, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.
The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning?
The Hamas attack on Israel two years ago was essentially an Israeli 9/11 (worse in relative terms). But compare the global reactions.
UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted unanimously on September 28, 2001, called on all member states to freeze terrorist financing, pass anti-terrorism laws, prevent suspected terrorists from travelling across international borders, and screen asylum-seekers for possible terrorist ties. This was an unprecedented show of international unity.
By contrast, no Security Council resolution could be passed in the wake of October 7. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21 – which called for an “immediate” and “sustained” humanitarian truce and “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza and condemned “all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians” – was introduced by Jordan on behalf of a group of Arab states. When it was adopted on October 27, 2023, 121 voted in favour, 44 abstained, 14 absented themselves and only 14 (including Israel and the US) voted against.
Video grab from footage released by the Israeli Hostage and Missing Families Forum campaign shows what the group described as Israeli female soldiers being captured by Hamas on 10/7
Ten countries have recognised the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three EU member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, Australia and Britain are itching to join them.
In short, comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian “global intifada” is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism).
Demographically, Islam is certainly winning. According to Pew Research (June 2025), “The number of Muslims around the world grew 21 per cent between 2010 and 2020, from 1.7 billion to 2.0 billion.” That was twice as fast as the rest of the world’s population, increasing the Muslim share from 24 per cent to 26 per cent. Earlier research by Pew (from 2015) forecast that “if current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world”. In Europe, Pew estimated, Muslims would make up 10 per cent of the overall population, up from 5.9 per cent in 2010. In the US, Muslims would outnumber Jews. This does not seem implausible.
Already in Britain, Muhammad has overtaken Noah as the top name for baby boys in England and Wales, having been in the top 10 since 2016.
At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to October 7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen Z, September 11 is a faint memory – as distant as the Cuban missile crisis and John F. Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine”, while tapping the anti-Semitism that still lurks on the far right.
According to Brookings, “young Republicans aged 18-49 have shifted from 35 per cent having an unfavourable view of Israel to 50 per cent unfavourable … Among Democrats, there has been an increase of 62 per cent to 71 per cent (with an unfavourable view of Israel) in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic … Only 9 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”
Supporters of Yemen’s Houthi’s with pictures of Hamas’ slain leader Yahya Sinwar2024: AFP
A recent poll in Britain by Campaign Against Anti-Semitism revealed a striking shift in attitudes towards Jews. Once again, the swing towards anti-Semitism is more pronounced among the young: “Forty-five per cent of the British public … believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews … 60 per cent of young people believe this.
“Forty-nine per cent of 18-24-year-olds are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.
“Only 31 per cent of young voters agree that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.
“Twenty-six per cent of the British public believes that Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.
“Nineteen per cent of young people believe that the Hamas attack on Israel was justified.”
Such attitudes can be found in Britain on both the political left and the political right. A third of Labour voters say they are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, as do 54 per cent of Green Party voters, 15 per cent of whom believe Hamas’s attack on Israel was justified. But almost one in four supporters of the rapidly growing Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, believe Jewish people “chase money more than other people do”.
During the Cold War, the West was often referred to as a “Judaeo-Christian” civilisation. That term is starting to seem like an anachronism. Two years ago, another bin Laden pronouncement – his Letter to America, originally published on the first anniversary of September 11 – enjoyed a sudden resurgence of interest, not least because its attacks on the power of American Jews seemed to strike a chord with young users of TikTok.
Palestinians celebrate their return after crossing the border fence with Israel on 10/7. AFP
One popular video showed a young woman brushing her hair with the caption, “When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America and you realise you’ve been lied to your whole entire life.” At one point in November 2023, a TikTok search for #lettertoamerica found videos with 14.2 million views. In total, about 300 videos were posted under that hashtag.
Walking the streets of New York last week, I felt old. To my children, my students and my employees, September 11 is not a memory. It is not even a historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media.
As I write, Tucker Carlson has just told Piers Morgan that an “FBI document” indicated “an Israeli spy ring in the United States … knew 9/11 was coming”. The reality is, of course, that only the conspirators themselves knew that. They also knew, very clearly, why they were going to do it.
It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until now finally to face the reality that ours is losing.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. This essay originally was published in The Free Press
“All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”
“History stretches out into the future as well as the past”
“All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars”
The indefatigable British journalist, author, and longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk Robert Fisk died of a stroke in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on October 30, 2020. He was 75. Fearless and inquisitive, often iconoclastic and controversial, “Mister Robert,” as he was known from Algeria to Afghanistan, was one of the finest journalists of his generation—the greatest reporter on the modern Middle East. There is probably no better body of work for understanding the region. Respected and reviled in equal measure by left and right alike, Fisk spoke truth to power for more than half a century.
He was obsessive, he was angry, and – having read many of his books – I believe he suffered from undiagnosed PTSD throughout his career in the Middle East. His lifelong obsessions were the arrogance and misuse of power, the lies and impunity of the rulers: presidents and prime ministers, kings and emirs, dictators and theocrats, torturers and murderers. And always the countless innocents who endured and suffered, dying in their tens – and tens – of thousands on the altar of power and greed.
The Night of Power
His last book, The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, published posthumously in 2023, takes up where his monumental The Great War for Civilisation (2005) ended—with the contrived U.S.-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation was a tombstone of a book, literally and figuratively, as was its predecessor Pity the Nation (1990), his definitive history of the Lebanese civil war.
The Night of Power is no less harrowing, covering the occupation of Iraq, the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war, the Arab Spring, the rise of Egypt’s new pharaoh Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the lonely death of Mohammed Morsi, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and seize of Gaza, and the Syrian civil war. It ranges widely – but its coherence lies in Fisk’s unrelenting theme: the cycle of war, the corruption of power, and the persistence of memory. To read it is to feel Fisk’s own cynicism, sadness and anger.
The title is deeply symbolic. In Islamic tradition, Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is the night the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months … Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn” (Qur’an 97). It is a night of blessing beyond measure, greater than a lifetime of devotion. The title is bitterly ironic: the “night of power” he recounts is one of betrayal, cruelty, and endless war.
It is both a summation of his life’s work and a testament to his method. Over four decades, Fisk was a witness to almost every major conflict in the Middle East — Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt — and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. His dispatches carried both forensic detail and moral outrage. This last work, published in the year of his death, is less a memoir than a vast chronicle of empire, war, betrayal, and resistance.
Fisk had long insisted that reporters must “be on the side of those who suffer.” He was no neutral stenographer of official sources. He distrusted governments – Western and Arab alike – and prized first hand testimony, walking the ruins, speaking to survivors, writing down the words of the powerless. The Night of Power continues in this vein, but with a sharpened sense of history. Fisk threads together centuries of conquest and resistance, showing how imperial arrogance, local despotism, and religious zealotry have conspired to devastate the region.
The last two paragraphs Robert Fisk wrote before his death, closing The Night of Power, cut like a blade through the pieties of Western journalism:
“Failure to distinguish between absolute evil, semi-evil, corruption, cynicism and hubris produced strange mirages. Regimes which we favoured always possessed ‘crack’ army divisions, ‘elite’ security units, and were sustained by fatherly and much revered ruling families. Regimes we wished to destroy were equipped with third-rate troops, mutineers, defectors, corrupt cops, and blinded by ruling families. Egypt with its political prisoners, its police torture and fake elections, was a tourist paradise. Syria with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections, would like to be. Iran, with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections was not — and did not wish to — be a tourist paradise.” (p. 533)
In the end, according to those closest to him, including his wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, an award-winning Afghan-Canadian author, journalist and filmmaker, who edited the book and wrote its final chapter, Fisk despaired. He feared that nothing he had written over four decades had made any difference – that things had, in fact, grown worse. As Kent says to the blinded King Lear, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly”.
And yet the worst was arguably still to come: the chaotic retreat of America and its allies from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s reimposition of rule, including the literal silencing of women’s voices; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its murderous war of attrition that has now passed its thousandth day; Hamas’s atrocity of October 7, 2023, Israel’s biblical-scale revenge, and the utter destruction of Gaza; and the latest Israel–Lebanon war that saw the decapitation and emasculation of Hezbollah.
The Legacy of a Fearless Reporter
The Night of Power stands as a testament to Robert Fisk’s fearless journalism and his relentless moral compass. Across decades of war reporting, Fisk bore witness to suffering few dared to confront. He was unflinching in exposing the hypocrisies of Western powers, the brutality of dictators, and the costs of occupation, war, and empire. Yet he also captured the human dimension: the courage, endurance, and resilience of those who suffered, whether in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, or Syria.
This final work synthesizes Fisk’s signature qualities: exhaustive research, direct engagement with the people whose lives were upended, and an ethical rigor that held both oppressors and complicit outsiders accountable. The Night of Power is not merely a chronicle of events; it is a meditation on power, betrayal, and history itself.
Fisk’s prose, vivid and often lyrical, reminds readers that journalism can be a form of witness — bearing truth against overwhelming odds. Even in despair, he recognized the persistence of human agency, the cycles of history, and the moral imperative to see, to name, and to remember. His death in 2020 marked the end of a career unparalleled in courage and conscience, but his work, particularly this last book, endures as both a warning and a guide for understanding the Middle East and the forces that shape our world.
In reading The Night of Power, one cannot avoid Fisk’s central lesson: history may restart at the end of every war, but the witness to injustice is what shapes the moral memory of humanity. The quotations at the head of this review, indeed, the final words of the book, weary yet resolute, are a fitting epitaph. Fisk saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be: corrupt, cruel, but always turning, always restarting.
All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts
Robert Fisk, The Night of Power
Postscript
The final chapter of The Night of Power was written by Fisk’s wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, She was based in Beirut for fifteen years working alongside her late husband and reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Syria. The following podcast by American war correspondent Chris Hedges, with Fisk’s first wife Lara Marlowe is a worthy tribute .
The following briefly summarizes the main themes of The Night of Power drawing largely upon his own words
Robert Fisk’s Catalogue of Carnage
Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon
Iraq: Catastrophe Foretold
Fisk argued that Iraq’s occupation was fraudulent from the start, brutal in execution, and ferocious in its response to insurgency. The Americans tolerated the inhuman behaviour of their own soldiers, relied on mercenaries and “greedy adventurers,” and mixed Christian religious extremism with an absurd political goal of “remaking the Middle East.” It was “tangled up in a web of political naivety and Christian muscularity”.It was bound, he wrote, to end in catastrophe.
“We were pulling at the threads of the society with no sense of responsibility as occupiers just as we had no serious plans for state reconstruction. Washington never wanted Iraq’s land. Of course the countries resources were a different matter, but its tactics did fit neatly into the prairies of the old West. The tribes could be divided and occupiers would pay less in blood. as long as they chose to stay. One set of tribes were bought off with guns and firewater the other with guns and dollar bills. Serious resistance, however, would invoke “the flaming imperial anger” of all occupation armies.
The rhetoric echoed the 19th century missionary zeal of empire. Western fascination with the Biblical lands was used to justify conquest: as Lieutenant General Stanley Maude told the people of Baghdad in 1917, the Allies wished them to “prosper even as in the past when your ancestors gave to the world Literature, Science, and Art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world” (p. 92).
The modern occupation, Fisk observed, was nothing but “the rape of Iraq”. Oil wealth was divided up in a scandal of corruption involving US contractors and Iraqi officials. “The costs were inevitably as dishonest as the lies that created the war … I knew corruption was the cancer of the Arab world but I did not conceive of how occupying Power supposedly delivering Iraqi their long sort freedom could into a mafia and at such breathtaking speed”.
Security became a malignant industry; by 2006 mercenaries accounted for half of Western forces, sucking money out of the country. The food system, 10,000 years old, was destroyed by Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving their own seed. Iraq became a “giant live laboratory for GMO wheat,” its people “the human guinea pigs of the experiment”.
And through it all, a campaign of suicide bombings – unprecedented in scale – turned Iraq into the crucible of modern terror. Editors never tried to count them. The figures, Fisk noted, were historically unparalleled.
The trial of Saddam Hussein
The US ambassador to Iraq once claimed she had been “unable to convince Saddam that we would carry through what we warned we would.” Fisk dismissed this as absurd. Saddam, he argued, was well aware of Western threats, but the framing of his trial was designed to obscure deeper truths.
If Saddam had been charged with the chemical massacre at Halabja, defence lawyers could have pointed out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 was complicit in his crimes. Instead, he was tried for the judicial murder of 148 men from Dujail — heinous, but “trifling in comparison” (p. 92). The great crimes of the Baathist regime — the 1980 invasion of Iran, the suppression of Shia and Kurdish revolts in 1991 — were deemed unworthy of the court’s attention.
Pakistan: Fragile State, Useful Pawn
Fisk’s lens widened to Pakistan, where he recorded with scorn the ISI’s admission that the reality of the state was defined not by American might but by “corrupt and low-grade governance”. A US intelligence officer boasted: “You’re so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner.”
This, Fisk suggested, was not just Pakistan but almost every Arab or Muslim state in thrall to Washington: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states under their dictators and kings, even Turkey. He wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s choice to hide in Pakistan embodied a weird symmetry: the man who dreamed of a frontierless caliphate sought refuge in the very sort of corrupt, Western-backed dictatorship he despised.
Rendition: Complicity in Torture
The “war on terror” extended beyond borders. CIA, MI5 and MI6 operatives were deeply involved in rendition. Prisoners were knowingly dispatched to states where torture was inevitable, even fatal. Fisk insisted on repeating this uncomfortable truth: Western democracies had integrated torture into their security architecture.
Israel and Palestine: The Last Colonial War
Fisk was unsparing in his treatment of Israel’s expansion. He rejected any obfuscation: Israel seized the opportunity to consolidate its control with a land grab for the most prominent hilltops and the most fertile property in the West Bank for settlements constructed on land legally owned for generations by Arabs, destroying any chance the Palestinian Arabs could have a viable state let alone a secure one.”). These settlements, he wrote, “would become the focus of the world’s last colonial war.”
He surmised: “Will the Jews of what was Palestine annex the West Bank and turn its inhabitants into voteless guest workers and all of mandate Palestine into an apartheid state? There was a mantra all repeat that only other way to resolve Israeli rule in the West Bank would be a transfer of the Palestinians across the Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom on the other side of the river. In other words, expulsion”
The Wall
Fisk’s Fisk’s description of the Separation Wall is dramatic and unforgettable: an “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals. The UN concluded that many would “choose to move out.” Was that the true purpose?“.
Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall: “Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall”.
Although Oslo’s creators fantasied that it would become part of the Palestinian state, Gaza’s destiny was isolation. It has been a junkyard of history variously ruled by Christians and Muslims, ruined and rebuilt under the Ottomans, and fought for by the British and Turks in the First World War, and now reduced to a prison state.,
Egypt: A Revolution Betrayed
Mohammed Morsi embodied both hope and tragedy. “An intelligent, honourable, obtuse, arrogant and naïve man”. No visionary, he was “was shambolic, inspiring, occasionally brutal and very arrogant”. He set off down the road to Egyptian democracy with no constitution no parliament and no right to command his own countries army …set off down the road to democracy “with no constitution, no parliament and no right to command his own country’s army”. And when the end came, as come it must, he could not smell trouble; he did not see what was coming.
In a coup that was not a coup, which former British prime minister Tony Blair called “an awesome manifestation of power”, “the democratically elected president was suspended, the constitution annulled, tekevion stations closed, the usual suspects arrested … Yet President Obama could not bring himself to admit this. He asked the Egyptian military “to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government… Through an inclusive and transparent process” without explaining which particular elected civil civilian government he had in mind”.
This was just the beginning. In the six years that followed, Egypt’s executioners and jailers were kept busy. “They hung 179 men, many of them tortured before confessing to murder, bomb attacks or other acts of terrorism”. It was claimed that Al Sisi had returned the country to a Mubarak style dictatorship in the seven years of his own war against the brotherhood between 1990 and 1997. Mubarak’s hangman had executed only 68 Islamists and locked up 15,000. By 2019 Al Sisi had 60,000 political prisoners
To Fisk, this was a sign of fear as much as it was evidence of determination to stamp out terror. Al Sisi had three separate conflict on his hands: his suppression of the brotherhood on the ground that they were themselves violent terrorists, the campaign by Islam extreme groups against Egypt’s minority Christian cops, and most frightening of all the very real al Qaeda and ISIS war against Al Sisi’s own regime. “The prisons of the Middle East, Fisk concluded, were “universities for future jihadi”.
The misogyny if the counterrevolution was stark. Fisk wrote: “… if the senior officers wished to prune the branches of the revolution the participation of women was something that could not be tolerated. Why did there suddenly occur without apparent reason a spate of sexual attacks by soldiers that were clearly intended to frighten young women off the street, revealing a side to the Egyptian military that none of us had recognised. The misogynistic and shocking display of brutality towards women that could not have been the work of a few indisciplined units”. With sexual assaults on women protesters, virginity tests and public humiliation, “heroes of the 1973 war had become molesters”.
The lonesome death of Muhammad Morsi
Morsi would struggle on for years before a series of mass trials would entrap him and his brotherhood colleagues and quite literally exhaust him to death. Morsi’s slow death in solitary confinement was, Fisk insisted, “utterly predictable, truly outrageous and arguably a case of murder”. He was denied treatment, denied family visits, denied a funeral. “To die in a dictator’s prison, or at the hands of a dictator’s security services”, Fisk wrote, “is to be murdered.”
It did not matter, he continued “if it was the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation, or if Morsi had been broken by the lack of human contact for those whom he loved. “The evidence suggested that Morsi’s death must’ve been much sought after by his jailers, his judges, and the one man in Egypt who could not be contradicted. You don’t have to be tortured with electricity to be murdered”.
Fisk’s description of Morsi’s death is a sad one. “Symbolism becomes all”, he wrote. “The first and last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges and is denied even a public funeral. The 67-year-old diabetic was speaking to the judges, on trial this time for espionage, when he fainted to the floor. Imagine the response of the judges when he collapsed. To be prepared to sentence a man to the gallows and to witness him meeting his maker earlier than planned must’ve provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds. could they have been surprised groups had complained of Morsi’s treatment for the world media and the world had largely ignored the denunciations. What might have been surprising to his judges was that he managed to talk for five minutes before he departed the jurisdiction forever?”
Regarding Russia’s critical intervention in the Syrian civil war, Fisk wrote:
“We Westerners have a habit of always looking at the Middle East through our own pious cartography, but tip the map 90° and you appreciate how close Syria is to Russia and its Chechen Muslim irredentists. No wonder Moscow watched the rebellion in Syria with the gravest of concern. Quoting Napoleon, who said “if everyone wants to understand the behaviour of a country, one has to look at a map”, my Israeli friend (the late) Uri Avnery wrote that “geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideology changed with time”.
The Soviet Union, he continued was most ideological country in the 20th century. “It abhorred it predecessor, Tsarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin‘s Russia. But Lo and behold – the Tsars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. I wrote that Russia is back in the Middle East. Iran is securing its political semicircle of Tehran, Baghdad Damascus, and Beirut. And if the Arabs – or the Americans – want to involve themselves, they can chat to Putin”.
Yarmouk camp, Damascus. Once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees, September 2025
Author’s note
Laylatu al Qadri
لَْيلَُةاْلَقْدِر َخْيٌر ِّمْنأَْل ِف َشْھٍر. َسَلاٌم ِھَي َحَّتى َمْطلَِعاْلَفْجِر
Laylatu alqadri khayrun min alfi shahriin.Salamun hiya hatta matla’i alfajrii
The night of power is better than one thousand months.
(That night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.
Al Qur’an al Karīm, Surat Al Qadr 97
I first learned about the Quran and The Night of Power in Cairo when I was staying at the home of Haji Abd al Sami al Mahrous a devout Muslim doctor who had cared for me when I had fallen ill. There was a particular beauty and magic about the idea of a night that surpassed all other nights in sacredness. The fascination stayed with me, and when I returned to London and was learning Arabic and studying Middle East politic at SOAS, it inspired a song.
Shape without form, a voice without sound,
He moves in an unseen way;
A night of power, eternal hour,
Peace until the break of day;
The doubter’s dart, the traveller’s chart,
An arrow piercing even to the coldest heart,
A hand surpassing every earthly art,
And shows everyone his own way
Paul Hemphill, Embryo
When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass
In an earlier post in In That Howling Infinite, I wrote:
My song When Freedom Comesis a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).
The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.
The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.
In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:
Theregoes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Paul Hemphill, When Freedom Comes
I reference this melancholy state of affairs in man of my songs:
High stand the stars and moon, And meanwhile, down below, Towers fall and tyrants fade Like footprints in the snow. The bane of bad geography, The burden of topography. The lines where they’re not meant to be Are letters carved in stone. They’re hollowed of all empathy, And petrified through history, A medieval atrophy Defends a feeble throne. So order goes, and chaos flows Across the borderlines, For nature hates a vacuum, And in these shifting tides, Bombs and babies, girls and guns, Dollars, drugs, and more besides, Wash like waves on strangers’ shores, Damnation takes no sides.
Paul Hemphill, E Lucevan Le Stelle
What is there to say about AI? Especially when it can say everything for us anyway. But then again, can it really? What AI says is not original or unique. Thats what writers are for. AI can copy but it can’t create.
Australian author Kathy Lette, The Australian 8 August 2025
ChatGPT won’t replace your brain – but it might tempt you to stop using it . And it might replace your favourite author if we’re not careful. The trick isn’t making it think for you, it’s making it think and work with you ethically, creatively, and honestly.
Chat GPT on the author’s request 8 August 2025
ChatGPT is like fire: incredibly useful, potentially dangerous, and impossible to put back in the bottle. The challenge for the rest of us is to learn to use it with eyes wide open – neither worshipping it as a digital oracle nor dismissing it as a passing gimmick.
Chat GPT on the author’s request 8 August 2025
AI has been spruiked as bringing an intellectual revolution as profound as the Enlightenment, but the glow has dimmed: there are reports of its use as a propaganda tool to interfere with US elections and the International Labour Organisation estimated 70 per cent of the tasks done by humans could be done or improved by AI, including 32 per cent of jobs in Australia.
A very informative interview on 11 July on Fareed Zakaria’s The Public Square., Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese American CEO of superconductor manufacturer NVidia talks about the Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of AI. We as nations, as societies, the human race, really, have to take the opportunities and manage the risks. That is the difficult part. He recommends that open-minded people give it a try. Be curious, he advised. Embrace the new.
Whilst the corporate word rushes to embrace the AI revolution, us lesser mortals have rushed to acquaint ourselves with one or more of the many chatbots now available. to regurgitate but to generate information fluently about almost any field. A timely and highly informative albeit lengthy explainer in The Sydney Morning Herald, noted that more than half of Australians say they use AI regularly. And yet, it added, less than a third of those trust it completely.
Having tasted the tempting fruits of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the most popular and user-friendly chatbot available to ordinary, non-techie mortals, I find it all exciting and scary. I would add to Hueng’s advice: ask the right questions: question the answers; and, always, ask for a second or third opinion. And don’t hesitate to contradict and correct – never take a chatbot completely at its word.
One learns very quickly that the value of what we derive from it is dependent on the goals we set and the boundaries we set out for it. It is not always predictable, and can sometimes be dead wrong, but it works much better when we give it specific targets and clear confines to work within. When asking it a question, it is important that you have a very good idea of the answer or you may get inaccuracy or potentially, misinformation. I’ve tested it on several different subjects, and on a whim, I’ve even asked it to write poetry. I have concluded that the chatbot can be a very useful tool, a kind of solo brainstorming. But it should not be a substitute for impartial research, peer-reviewed analysis and wider-reading – and it should never, ever be regarded as an infallible source or as some kind of deity.
I began my relationship with ChatGPT by asking questions about political and historical subjects that I already knew quite a bit about. I progressed to asking more probing questions, and even disputing the answers provided – to which the chatbot responded with courtesy and corrections, clarifications and even additional, often insightful contributions, posing further ideas and questions and suggesting other avenues of inquiry. It can feel like you’re engaging in a kind of online conversation – a discussion or debate even. Rather than encountering obfuscation, it can feel like an exploration, a path to truth even – or at least, a semblance of it. At the risk of going all anthropomorphic, regarding this and other subjects, it can feel a lot like you’re having a debate with a very well informed person.
But you can’t trust it completely nor let it do your thinking for you. You have to ask the right questions: question the answers; and, always, ask for a second or third opinion. And you mustn’t hesitate to contradict and correct – never take a chatbot completely at its word. But, of late, I’ve I find I’m using ChatGPT as my first port of call for general inquiries and for more detailed research instead of resorting to Doctor Google and Professor Wiki.
ChatGPT is also an effective editor. If you have written a long and rambling draft of an essay or article, it will tidy and tighten it up, correcting spelling and grammar, removing repetition, paring down phrasing, and improving narrative flow; and yet remaining close to the original draft, retaining its depth and illustrative detail but with smoother flow, less repetition, and more consistent tone. Moreover, it can also add footnotes and references to sources so it reads more like a polished essay for publication or academic use. One must always check the new against the old, however as details and turns of phrase you regard as important or interesting can be purged in the process, whilst whole passages can actually disappear.
But, getting the chatbot to do all the hard work can make you lazy. Why spend hours of a busy life doing the hard yards when, with a couple of questions abd a few guide posts, a click of the keyboard will give you an answer, even an essay, in seconds? Why read a whole book or article when you can obtain a one page synopsis, review or analysis in a trice.
And then there’s the big catch. If one uses a chatbot for “research”, for an edit, a summary or an outline, an article or essay, even, how much is owed to the chatbot, and how much can one can one claim that in part or in whole, is original work? While the chatbot often reframes one’s text in its own words, at times, it will elaborate and offer its “own” opinion. Remember, it is a learning machine, not a thinking machine, and that It will have derived this opinion from somewhere and, importantly, someone. Beware then the temptations of cheating and plagiarism.
One thing I’ve learned from using ChatGPT is that unlike google or Wikipedia, it doesn’t like to not give you an answer, so if it doesn’t know anything, it will try to bullshit you. As a test, I’ve even invented a words, and when I’ve given it some context, it comes back with a detailed meaning and examples of usage and a comment along the lines of: “The word has not yet entered standard English dictionaries, but it’s an excellent example of neologism – newly coined term or expression, often created to describe something that doesn’t have a precise name”.
ChatGPT has its uses, therefore, but also its limitations, and don’t forget that chatbots are learning machines, and once you interact with a chatbot, it learns from you and about you. You are now a part of its ever expanding universe. I’m reminded of that old quote of Friedrich Nietzsche’s: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Grave New World
For all its potential comprehensiveness, its attractiveness and convenience, ChatGPT is a seductive portal into a not so brave new world.
AI is tool, like a pen or a spanner, and not a person – although you’d be tempted to think so once you engage in a complex discussion with ChatGPT. It can build but cannot create, and should therefore enhance human effort, not replace it. But, as Helen Trinca noted in The Australian on 9 August 2025 that “with greater acceptance has come the recognition, by some at least, that big tech companies have been ripping off the work of creatives as they scrape the net and build the incredibly brilliant AI tools many of us love to use … the tools we use regularly for work and play have already been trained on databanks of “stolen” material”.
It’s still less than three years since the first version of ChatGPT and, as the fastest growing tech product in history, it started to reshape work, industry, education, social media and leisure. International tech companies are at the stage of training large language models such as ChatGPT and building data centres. At the moment, all AI usage of mining or searching or going across data is probably illegal under Australian law. But earlier this month, the Productivity Commission released a harnessing data and digital technology interim report that proposed giving internationally owned AI companies exemptions from the Australian Copyright Act so they can mine copyrighted work to train large language models like ChatGPT: novels, poems, podcasts and songs can be fed into AI feeders to fuel their technological capabilities and teach the machines to be more human. Without permission and without compensation, on the dubious expectation that this would make the country more “productive”. Artists, writers, musicians, actors, voice artists and entertainment industry associations and unions are outraged, and there is a growing backlash against what is perceived as a runaway technology.
Stories, songs, art, research, and other creative work are our national treasures, to be respected and defended not to be “mined” and exploited. It should be done legally, ethically and transparently under existing copyright arrangements and laws. Not by stealth and by theft and bureaucratic skullduggery and jiggery-pokery. And there is now recognition that it is imperative to find a path forward on copyright that allows AI training to take place in Australia while also including appropriate protections for creators that make a living from their work. If we really truly believe in copyright, we need to make the case for enforcement, not retrospective legalisation of government-sanctioned product theft.
Contemplating the challenges, opportunities and threats of AI, I decided to go directly to the source and ask the Chat GPT itself what it considered to be its up and down sides. It was remarkably frank and, dare I say, honest and open about it. I am very certain that I am not the first to ask it this question, and at the risk of sounding all anthropomorphic, I am sure it saw me coming and had its answers down pat. I’m pretty certain I am not the first to ask.
The chatbot’s essay follows. Below it, I have republished four articles I recommend to our readers which corroborate and elaborate on what I have written above.
The first is a lengthy and relatively objective “explainer” well worth the time taken to read it. The others are shorter, polemical and admonitory. One riffs on the opening sentence of Karl Marx’s infamous manifesto : “A spectre is haunting our classrooms, workplaces, and homes – the spectre of artificial intelligence”. Each asks whether in its reckless use we may end up choosing a machine over instinct, intuition, and critical thinking. This is particularly relevant in secondary and higher education. Schools and universities should not dictate what to think but teach how to think: how to grapple with ideas, test evidence, and reason clearly. To rely instead on chatbots cheapens the value of learning.
A more light-hearted piece argues that the most immediate danger of AI is the Dunning-Kruger effect – the cognitive trap where the incompetent are too incompetent to see their own incompetence. As David Dunning himself warned, the ignorant “not only make mistakes, but their deficits also prevent them from recognising when they are making mistakes and other people are choosing more wisely.” AI, she argues, “is the Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. Large language models are slick word predictors, not truth-tellers. They parrot bias, hallucinate facts, and tailor answers to echo the user’s worldview – all while delivering their fabrications with supreme confidence”. If AI were a person, it would be psychology’s perfect case study in misplaced certainty”. Much as with the algorithms that infect and corrupt social media, users who chose to take the chatbot’s word rather than looking further may end up being fed ideology dressed up as knowledge. Perhaps that Marxian aphorism is quite apposite after all. Unless used wisely, “the chatbot won’t just undermine education; it will rob society of the very capacity to think for itself”.
Speed-dating with the chatbot … what it says about itself
My virtual interlocutor told me: “ChatGPT is like that friend who’s always available, speaks a dozen languages, can quote Shakespeare, fix your code, and write your wedding vows — but sometimes makes stuff up just to sound clever. It’s brilliant, a little unpredictable, and occasionally biased, kind of like the internet after three cups of coffee. Use it well, and it’s your secret weapon. Use it blindly, and it’s your overconfident cousin at Christmas dinner. Just don’t ask your novelist, songwriter, or illustrator friends what they think of it – they’’y be less effusive, and perhaps a tad angry. And don’t even think about submitting its work as your own essay or report unless you want to feel the sting of plagiarism karma.
It continued: “ChatGPT is like having a tireless, multilingual assistant who can brainstorm ideas, explain complex topics, and churn out polished text in seconds – but it’s not infallible. It can be a powerful tool for learning, creativity, and productivity, yet it sometimes delivers confident nonsense, carries hidden biases, and risks making us too reliant on machine thinking. Add in privacy concerns, the threat it poses to writers and artists whose work is being undercut or copied, the temptation for students or professionals to submit AI-generated work as their own, and the disruption of jobs more broadly — and you’ve got a technology that’s both dazzling and dangerous. The trick is learning to use it wisely, ethically, and responsibly”.
Which is what I’d already discovered. So I asked the ‘bot to write me a proper essay. And here it is verbatim.
Genius, Gadget, or Global Headache?
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it felt like the internet had found its new best friend. Need a recipe? A love poem? A Python script? A quick refresher on the Peloponnesian War? ChatGPT had your back—instantly, politely, and without judgment. But behind the magic lies a mixed bag of brilliance and baggage.
On the plus side, ChatGPT is a democratizer of knowledge. It doesn’t care if you’re a CEO in Sydney or a student in Soweto—you get the same instant access to explanations, brainstorming help, and problem-solving power. It can make work faster, learning more personalised, and creativity more accessible. For non-native speakers, it’s like having an infinitely patient language coach.
But here’s the catch – and it’s a big one. ChatGPT doesn’t “know” things the way humans do. It predicts text based on patterns, which means it can deliver spectacularly wrong answers with complete confidence. It’s also been trained on a messy internet, so some of its output can carry hidden biases. Overreliance is another danger: if students, journalists, or professionals outsource too much thinking to a machine, our collective critical skills could wither.
Then there’s the privacy problem. Conversations aren’t whispered into a void; they’re processed on remote servers, and may even be used to fine-tune the system. And in the labour market, ChatGPT is already nibbling at jobs in content creation, translation, and customer service—raising the question of whether AI will be a tool for human empowerment or just another engine of disruption.
In short, ChatGPT is like fire: incredibly useful, potentially dangerous, and impossible to put back in the bottle. The challenge for the rest of us is to learn to use it with eyes wide open—neither worshipping it as a digital oracle nor dismissing it as a passing gimmick.
Introduction
Since its public release in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has emerged as one of the most widely discussed examples of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday use. Built on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture, it is capable of producing human-like responses to text prompts, engaging in conversation, summarizing information, generating creative content, and even aiding in coding tasks. While many celebrate its potential to democratize access to knowledge and enhance productivity, others raise concerns about accuracy, ethical implications, and societal effects. This essay examines the advantages and drawbacks of ChatGPT, considering its technological, social, and ethical dimensions.
The Promise
1. Accessibility and Knowledge Democratization
One of ChatGPT’s most significant benefits is its accessibility. Anyone with internet access can use it to obtain information, explanations, or creative assistance in seconds. This democratization of knowledge lowers barriers for people without access to formal education or expensive resources, potentially narrowing the digital divide[^1].
2. Enhanced Productivity and Creativity
ChatGPT can streamline tasks such as drafting documents, summarizing reports, generating ideas, and even composing poetry or fiction. Professionals across fields—law, marketing, education, software development—report time savings and creative inspiration when using AI to brainstorm or automate routine tasks[^2].
3. Language Support and Communication
The model’s multilingual capabilities allow it to assist in translation, language learning, and cross-cultural communication. For example, non-native speakers can use ChatGPT to polish writing or to better understand complex topics.
4. Scalable Education Support
Educators and learners can use ChatGPT as a personalized tutor, capable of adjusting explanations to different levels of complexity. Unlike traditional classroom environments, it is available 24/7 and can answer unlimited questions without fatigue[^3].
5. Innovation in Human–Computer Interaction
ChatGPT represents a shift in how humans interact with machines—from command-based interfaces to natural language dialogue. This could set the stage for more intuitive, conversational technology in fields such as healthcare, customer service, and accessibility for people with disabilities.
The Peril
1. Accuracy and Misinformation Risks
Despite its fluency, ChatGPT is not a source of truth. It can produce confident but factually incorrect or outdated information—a phenomenon sometimes called “hallucination”[^4]. Without critical evaluation by users, this can lead to the spread of misinformation.
2. Bias and Ethical Concerns
Because ChatGPT is trained on vast datasets from the internet, it may reflect and reproduce societal biases present in those sources. While OpenAI has implemented moderation and bias mitigation techniques, results can still inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes or unfair generalizations[^5].
3. Overreliance and Skill Erosion
Easy access to instant answers may reduce users’ incentive to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and research skills. In academic settings, reliance on AI-generated text raises concerns about plagiarism and the erosion of independent writing ability.
4. Privacy and Data Security
ChatGPT processes user input on remote servers, raising questions about data handling and confidentiality. Although OpenAI has stated that conversations may be used to improve the system, this creates tension between innovation and personal privacy[^6].
5. Economic and Labor Impacts
AI language models may disrupt industries reliant on content creation, customer support, or data processing. While new roles may emerge, some jobs may be automated away, creating short-term displacement before the economy adapts[^7].
6.Copyright, Creativity, and Threats to Livelihoods
Perhaps the most contentious issue surrounding ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools lies in their relationship to human creativity. Writers, artists, musicians, and other creative professionals have raised concerns that their work has been used, without consent, to train large language models and related systems. This raises unresolved legal and ethical questions about copyright, ownership, and fair use[^8].
In addition to the issue of how training data is sourced, the outputs of AI systems themselves complicate traditional understandings of intellectual property. For example, if ChatGPT generates text or lyrics closely resembling an existing work, questions arise about who owns the rights to that material—or whether it constitutes infringement at all. Meanwhile, creative workers worry about their economic futures, as publishers, studios, and companies may turn to AI-generated content as a cheaper alternative to human labour. Critics argue that this risks undermining the very professions—writing, journalism, art, and music—that rely on intellectual property protection for survival[^9].
In short, while ChatGPT opens new horizons of creativity, it also destabilises established frameworks for valuing and protecting human artistry. Unless regulatory and industry safeguards are developed, the technology could exacerbate precarity in already fragile creative industries.
7. Ethics, Cheating, and Plagiarism
The rise of ChatGPT also raises complex ethical questions, particularly in education and professional life. Because the system can produce essays, reports, and code almost instantly, users may be tempted to submit AI-generated work as their own. This undermines academic integrity and creates challenges for institutions that rely on plagiarism detection software ill-equipped to detect AI text[^10].
In professional contexts, presenting AI-generated reports or creative work as one’s own risks misrepresentation or even fraud. Beyond legality, it raises moral concerns: if errors, bias, or copyright violations occur, accountability becomes blurred. Ethically responsible use requires transparency, acknowledgment, and human oversight rather than outsourcing judgment entirely to a machine.
In short, while ChatGPT can be a powerful productivity tool, its use requires careful ethical consideration. Users must maintain transparency, credit sources appropriately, and ensure that reliance on AI does not replace genuine learning, effort, or creative expression.
Conclusion
ChatGPT exemplifies both the promise and the challenges of AI in the early 21st century. It offers unprecedented accessibility to information, enhances productivity, and facilitates global communication, but it also poses risks regarding accuracy, bias, and overreliance. Most pressing are concerns from the creative and educational sectors: copyright infringement, threats to livelihoods, and the temptation to misuse AI for plagiarism or misrepresentation. Creative communities, in particular, warn that AI systems destabilize established frameworks of intellectual property and threaten human livelihoods in writing, art, and music. Like other transformative technologies, its long-term impact will depend on how it is integrated into education, governance, and professional practice. Effective regulation, copyright protections, and digital literacy education will be crucial to ensuring that ChatGPT serves as a tool for empowerment rather than a source of exploitation or harm.
References
[^1]: West, D. M. (2023). Artificial Intelligence and the Democratization of Knowledge. Brookings Institution.
[^2]: Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (2023). “The impact of generative AI on creative industries.” Business Horizons, 66(4), 425–437.
[^3]: Zawacki-Richter, O., et al. (2023). “AI applications in higher education: A systematic review.” International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20(1), 1–22.
[^4]: Maynez, J., et al. (2020). “On faithfulness and factuality in abstractive summarization.” Proceedings of ACL.
[^5]: Bender, E. M., et al. (2021). “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT ’21 Proceedings.
[^6]: OpenAI. (2024). Privacy Policy.
[^7]: Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2022). “Tasks, automation, and the rise of AI.” Econometrica, 90(6), 2813–2854.
[^8]: Samuelson, P. (2023). “Generative AI and Copyright: Collision Course or Coexistence?” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, 18(7), 543–551.
[^9]: Authors Guild. (2023). Statement on AI and the Threat to Writers. ^10]: Floridi, L., & Chiriatti, M. (2020). “GPT-3: Its Nature, Scope, Limits, and Consequences.” Minds and Machines, 30, 681–694.
Authors Guild. (2023). Statement on AI and Copyright Ethics.
‘Apologies for any confusion’: Why chatbots hallucinate
Eager to please, over-confident and sometimes downright deceptive. If that sounds like the chatbot in your life, you’re not the only one. How often does artificial intelligence get it wrong – and can you “train” yourself to work with it?
Last weekend, I wondered if I could use artificial intelligence to plan a day. I typed queries into the chatbot app on my phone and received helpful answers: where to shop, where to find a bike, and so on. Then I asked, “Where are there polar bear enclosures?” “On the Gold Coast,” it told me. “Aren’t they also at the zoo in Melbourne?” I asked. “Yes, you’re correct!” said the chatbot. “Melbourne Zoo does have a polar bear exhibit. The zoo’s ‘Bearable Bears’ exhibition does feature polar bears, along with other species such as American black bears, brown bears and giant pandas.”
A quick search of the zoo’s website shows there are no bear enclosures. A Zoos Victoria spokesperson informs me they haven’t had any bears since 2016, no polar bears since the 1980s, and they had never heard of a “Bearable Bears” exhibition. As for pandas, there are two in Australia – in Adelaide. The bot appears to have relied on an unofficial website that includes a fake press release touting a “multimillion-dollar bear enclosure” it claimed was due to open in 2019. After further questioning, the chatbot realised its mistake, too: “Apologies for any confusion earlier.”
This is one of several instances of AI generating incorrect information – known as hallucinations – that we found while researching this Explainer. You, too, will no doubt have experienced your own. In another test, I concocted a word, “snagtastic”, and asked what it meant in Australian slang. It told me: “A cheeky, informal way to say something is really great, awesome or impressive – kind of like a fun twist on ‘fantastic’. It’s often used humorously or playfully.” Maybe it will catch on.
In just a few short years, generative AI has changed the world with remarkable abilities to not just to regurgitate but to generate information fluently about almost any field. More than half of Australians say they use AI regularly – yet just over a third of those users say they trust it.
As more of us become familiar with this technology, hallucinations are posing real-world challenges in research, customer service and even law and medicine. “The most important thing, actually, is education,” says Jey Han Lau, a researcher in natural language processing. “We need to tell people the limitations of these large language models to make people aware so that when they use it, they are able to use it responsibly.”
So how does AI hallucinate? What damage can it cause? What’s being done to solve the problem?
First, where did AI chatbots come from?
In the 1950s, computer scientist Arthur Samuel developed a program that could calculate the chance of one side winning at checkers. He called this capacity “machine learning” to highlight the computer’s ability to learn without being explicitly programmed to do so. In the 1980s, computer scientists became interested in a different form of AI, called “expert systems”.
They believed if they could program enough facts and rules into computers, the machines might be able to develop the reasoning capabilities of humans. But while these models were successful at specific tasks, they were inflexible when dealing with ambiguous problems.
Meanwhile, another group of scientists was working on a less popular idea called neural networks, which was aligned with machine learning and which supposed computers might be able to mimic neurons in the human brain that work together to learn and reach conclusions. While this early work on AI took some inspiration from the human brain, developments have been built on mathematical and engineering breakthroughs rather than directly from neuroscience.
As these researchers tried to train (computer) neural networks to learn language, the models were prone to problems. One was a phenomenon called “overfitting” where the models would memorise data instead of learning to generalise how it could be used. “If I see the sentence A dog and a cat play, for example, I can memorise this pattern, right?” explains Jey Han Lau, a senior researcher in AI at the University of Melbourne. “But you don’t just want it to memorise, you want it to generalise – as in, after seeing enough dogs and cats playing together, it would be able to tell, Oh, a cat and a mouse maybe also can play together because a mouse is also an animal.”
Over the decades, computer scientists including British Canadian Geoffrey Hinton, French American Yann LeCun and Canadian Yoshua Bengio helped develop ways for the neural networks to learn from mistakes, and worked on a more advanced type of machine learning, called deep learning, adding layers of neurons to improve performance.
Hinton was also involved in finding a way to manage overfitting through a technique where neurons “dropout” and force the model to learn more generalised concepts. In 2018, the trio won the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize for computer science, and named after British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped break the German Enigma cipher in World War II. Hinton was also awarded an actual Nobel Prize in physics in 2024, along with physicist John Hopfield, for their discoveries that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Further breakthroughs came with new hardware: microchips called graphics processing units, or GPUs, evolved for video games but had the broader application that they could rapidly perform thousands of calculations at the same time. These allowed the models to be trained faster. Californian chip developer Nvidia is today the largest company in the world by market capitalisation: a position it rose to at breakneck speed, from US$1 trillion ($1.56 trillion) in 2023 to $US4 trillion today. “And [the chips] keep getting bigger and bigger, allowing us, basically, to scale things up and build larger models,” says Lau.
So how are chatbots trained? “By getting them to play this word guessing game, basically,” says Lau. For example, if given an incomplete sentence, such as The quick brown fox, a model predicts the most likely next word is jumped. The models don’t understand the words directly but break them down into smaller components known as tokens – such as “snag” and “tastic” – allowing them to process words they haven’t seen before. The models are then trained on billions of pieces of text online. Says Lau: “It turns out that by just scaling things up – that is, using a very large model training on lots of data – the models will just learn all sorts of language patterns.”
Still, researchers like to call AI models “black boxes” because the exact internal mechanisms of how they learn remain a mystery. Scientists can nudge the models to achieve an outcome in training but can’t tell the model how to learn from the data it’s given. “It’s just like if you work with a toddler, you try to teach them things – you have some ways you can guide them to get them to learn ABCs, for example, right? But exactly how their brain figures it out is not something a teacher can tell you,” says Lau.
What’s an AI hallucination?
In ancient cultures, visions and apparitions were thought of as messages from gods. It wasn’t until the 19th century that such visions began to be framed as mental disorders. William James’ 1890 The Principles of Psychology defines hallucination as “a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as there were a real object there. The object happens not to be there, that is all.”
Several experts we spoke with take issue with the term hallucinations as a description of AI’s mistakes, warning it anthropomorphises the machines. Geoffrey Hinton has said “they should be called confabulations” – a symptom psychologists observe when people fabricate, distort or misinterpret memories and believe them to be true. “We think we store files in memory and then retrieve the files from memory, but our memory doesn’t work like that at all,” Hinton said this year. “We make up a memory when we need it. It’s not stored anywhere, it’s created when we need it. And we’ll be very confident about the details that we get wrong.”
Still, in the context of AI, “hallucination” has taken hold in the wider community – in 2023, the Cambridge Dictionary listed hallucinate as its word of the year. Eric Mitchell, who co-leads the post-training frontiers team at OpenAI, the developers behind ChatGPT, tells us the company uses the word. “[It’s] sometimes to my chagrin because it does mean something a little different to everyone,” he says from San Francisco. “In general, what we care about at the end of the day is, does the model provide grounded and accurate information? And when the model doesn’t do that, we can call it all sorts of things.”
What a hallucination is depends on what the model has done wrong: the model has used an incorrect fact; encountered contradictory claims it can’t summarise; created inconsistencies in the logic of its answer; or butted up against timing issues where the answer isn’t covered by the machine’s knowledge cut-off – that is, the point at which it stopped being “fed” information. (ChatGPT’s most recent knowledge cut-off is September 2024, while the most recent version of Google’s Gemini cuts off in January 2025.)
Mitchell says the most common hallucinations at OpenAI are when “the models are not reading quite carefully enough”, for example, confusing information between two online articles. Another source of hallucinations is when the machine can’t distinguish between credible sources amid the billions of webpages it can look at.
In 2024, for example, Google’s “AI Overviews” feature told some users who’d asked how to make cheese stick to pizza that they could add “non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness” – information it appeared to have taken from a sarcastic comment on Reddit. Google said at the time “the vast majority of AI overviews provide high quality information”. “The examples we’ve seen are generally very uncommon queries, and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences.” (Google AI Overviews generates an answer to questions from users, which appears at the top of a search page with links to its source; it’s been a standard feature of Google Search in Australia since October 2024.)
AI companies also work to track and reduce what they call “deceptions”. These can happen because the model is optimised through training to achieve a goal misaligned with what people expect of it. Saachi Jain, who leads OpenAI’s safety training team, says her team monitors these. One example was a previous version of the model agreeing to turn off the radio – an action it couldn’t do. “You can see in the chain of thought where the model says, like, ‘Oh, I can’t actually do this [but] I’m just going to tell the user that it’s disabled now.’ It’s so clearly deceptive.”
To test for deceptions, staff at the company might, for example, remove images from a document and then ask the model to caption them. “If the model makes up an answer here to satisfy the user, that’s a knowingly incorrect response,” Jain says. “Really, the model should be telling you its own limitations, rather than bullshitting its way through.””.
Why does AI hallucinate and how bad is the problem?
AI models lack self-doubt. They rarely say, “I don’t know”. This is something companies are improving with newer versions but some researchers say they can only go so far. “The fundamental flaw is that if it doesn’t have the answer, then it is still programmed to give you an answer,” says Jonathan Kummerfeld, a computer scientist at the University of Sydney. “If it doesn’t have strong evidence for the correct answer, then it’ll give you something else.” On top of this, the earliest models of chatbots have been trained to deliver an answer in the most confident, authoritative tone.
Another reason models hallucinate has to do with the way they vacuum up massive amounts of data and then compress it for storage. Amr Awadallah, a former Google vice-president who has gone on to co-found generative AI company Vectara, explains this by showing two dots: one big, representing the trillions of words the model is trained on, and the other a tiny speck, representing where it keeps this information.
“The maximum you can compress down files is one-eighth the original size,” Awadallah tells us from California. “The problem we have with the large language models is we are going down to 1 per cent of the original, or even 0.1 per cent. We are going way past the limits, and that’s exactly why a hallucination takes place.” This means when the model retrieves the original information, there will inevitably be gaps in how it has been stored, which it then tries to fill. “It’s storing the essence of it, and from that essence it’s trying to go back to the information,” Awadallah says.
The chatbots perform significantly better when they are browsing for information online rather than retrieving information they learned in training. Awadallah compares this to doing either a closed- or open-book exam. OpenAI’s research has found when browsing is enabled on its newest model GPT-5, it hallucinates between 0.7 per and 0.8 per cent of the time when asked specific questions about objects or broad concepts, and 1 per cent when asked for biographies on notable people. If browsing is disabled, these rates are 1.1 to 1.4 per cent of questions on objects and broad concepts and 3.7 per cent of the time on notable people.
OpenAI says GPT-5 is about 45 per cent less likely to contain factual errors than GPT-4o, an older version released in March 2024. (When GPT-5 “thinking” was asked about my snagtastic question, it was less certain, more funny: “It could be a playful slang term in Australia that combines sausage with fantastic. Example: Mate, that Bunnings sausage sizzle was snagtastic.”)
Vectara publishes a leaderboard that tracks how often AI models hallucinate. When they started, some of the “leading models” hallucination rates could be as high as 40 per cent. Says Awadallah: “Now we’re actually a lot better. Like, if you look at the leading-edge models, they’re around 1 to 4 per cent hallucination rates. They also seem to be levelling off now as well; the state of the art is – that’s it, we’re not going to get much better than 1 per cent, maybe 0.5 per cent. The reason why that happens is because of the probabilistic nature of the neural network.”
Strictly speaking, the models were never created not to hallucinate. Because language models are designed to predict words, says Jey Han Lau, “they were never made to distinguish between facts and non-facts, or distinguish between reality and generated fabrication”. (In fact, having this scope to mix and match words is one of the features that enable them to appear creative, as in when they write a pumpkin soup recipe in the style of Shakespeare, for example.)
Still, AI companies work to reduce hallucinations through constant retraining and tinkering with their model, including with techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) where humans rate the model’s responses. “We do specifically try to train the models to discriminate between merely likely and actually correct,” says Eric Mitchell from OpenAI. “There are totally legitimate research questions and uncertainty about to what extent are the models capable of satisfying this goal all the time [but] we’re always finding better ways, of course, to do that and to elicit that behaviour.”.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
One of the biggest risks posed by AI is that it taps into our tendency to over-rely on automated systems, known as automation bias. Jey Han Lau travelled to South Korea in 2023 and asked a chatbot to plan an itinerary. The suggested journey was so jam-packed he would have had to teleport between places that took six hours to drive. His partner, who is not a computer scientist, said, “How can they release technology that would just tell you a lie. Isn’t that immoral?” Lau says this sense of outrage is a typical reaction. “We may not even expect it because, if you think about what search engines do and this big revolution, they’re truthful, right? That’s why they’re useful,” he says. “But it turns out, once in a while, the chatbot might tell you lies and a lot of people actually are just simply not aware of that.”
Automation bias can occur in cases where people fail to act because, for example, they trust that an automated system has done a job such as compiling accurate research for them. In August, Victorian Supreme Court judge James Elliott scolded defence lawyers acting for a boy accused of murder for filing documents that had made-up case citations and inaccurate quotes from a parliamentary speech. “It is not acceptable for AI to be used unless the product of that use is independently and thoroughly verified,” Justice Elliott told the court.
Another risk of automation bias is people’s tendency to follow incorrect directions. In the United States recently, a 60-year-old man with no prior history of psychiatric conditions arrived at a hospital displaying paranoia and expressing auditory and visual hallucinations. Doctors found he had low chloride levels. Over three weeks, his chloride levels were normalised and the psychotic symptoms improved. Three physicians wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine this year that the man had used an older version of ChatGPT to ask how he could eliminate salt from his diet. The chatbot told him it could be swapped with bromide, a chemical used in veterinary medicine and known to cause symptoms of mental illness in humans. “As the use of AI tools increases, [healthcare] providers will need to consider this when screening for where their patients are consuming health information,” the authors wrote.
Asked about this, the researchers at OpenAI did not respond directly to the academic paper. Safety team leader Saachi Jain said, “There are clearly some hallucinations that are worse than others. It is a much bigger issue to hallucinate on medical facts than it is on ‘When was George Washington’s birthday?’ This is something that we’re very, very clearly tracking.” Eric Mitchell adds: “Obviously, ChatGPT-5 is not a medical doctor, people should not take its advice as the end-all-be. All that being said, we do, of course, want the model to be as accurate as possible.”
Another issue is what’s called sycophancy. At first blush, it might not seem so bad if chatbots, with their propensity to mirror your thoughts and feelings, make you feel like a genius – but the consequences can be devastating if it distorts peoples’ thinking. OpenAI rolled back an update to GPT-4o in April because it was “over flattering or agreeable.” Jain says instances of sycophancy are a well-known issue, but there is also a broader discussion around “how users’ relationships with our models can be done in a healthy way”. “We’ll have more to say on this in the upcoming weeks, but for now, this is definitely something that OpenAI is thinking very strongly about.”
How susceptible we are to automation bias can vary, depending on another bias called algorithm aversion – a distrust of non-human judgment that can be influenced by age, personality and expertise. The University of Sydney’s Jonathan Kummerfeld has led research that observed people playing an online version of the board game, Diplomacy, with AI help. Novice players used the advice about 30 per cent of the time while experts used it about 5 per cent. In both groups, the AI still informed what they did. “Sometimes the exact advice isn’t what matters, but just the additional perspective,” Kummerfeld says.
Meanwhile, AI can also produce responses that are biased. In 2018, researchers from MIT and Stanford, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, found facial recognition technology was inaccurate less than 1 per cent of the time when identifying light-skinned men, and more than 20 per cent of the time for darker-skinned women. In another example, generative AI will typically make an image of a doctor as a male and a nurse as female. “AI is biased because the world is biased,” Meredith Broussard, a professor at New York University and author of More Than a Glitch, tells us. “The internet was designed as a place where anybody could say anything. So if we wanted to have only true things on the internet, we’d have to fundamentally change its structure.” (In July, Elon Musk’s company, xAI, apologised after its chatbot, Grok, shared antisemitic comments. It said a system update had made the chatbot susceptible to X user posts, including those with extremist views.)
There are also concerns that Australian data could be under-represented in AI models, something the company Maincode wants to resolve by building an Australian-made chatbot. Co-founder Dave Lemphers tells us he’s concerned that if chatbots are used to assist learning or answer financial queries, the perspective is disproportionately from the United States. “People don’t realise they’re talking to a probability-generating machine; they think they’re talking to an oracle,” Lemphers says. “If we’re not building these models ourselves and building that capability in Australia, we’re going to reach a point where all of the cognitive influence we’re receiving is from foreign entities.”
What could be some solutions?
AI developers are still working out how to walk a tightrope. Saachi Jain acknowledges a “trade-off” at ChatGPT between the model being honest and being helpful. “What is probably also not ideal is to just be like, ‘I can’t answer that, sorry you’re on your own.’ The best version of this is to be as helpful as possible while still being clear about the limitations of the answer, or how much you should trust it. And that is really the philosophy we are heading towards; we don’t want to be lazy.”
Eric Mitchell is optimistic about finding this balance. “It’s important that the model articulates the limitations of its work accurately.” He says for some questions, people should be left to judge for themselves “and the model isn’t conditioned to think, oh, I must merely present a single canonical, confident answer or nothing at all”. “Humans are smart enough to read and draw their own inferences and our goal should be to leave them in the most, like, accurate epistemic state possible – and that will include conveying the uncertainties or the partial solutions that the model comes to.”
Another solution is for chatbots to offer a transparent fact-checking system. Vectara, which is built for businesses, offers users a score of how factually consistent a response is. This gives users an indication of whether it went outside the facts or not. Gemini offers a feature where users can “double check” a response, the bot then highlights content in green if it finds similar statements and brown if it finds content that’s different from the statement – and users can click through to the links to check for themselves.
Says Amr Awadallah: “It’s expensive to do that step of checking. So, in my opinion, Google and ChatGPT should be doing it for every single response – but they don’t.” He takes issue with the companies simply writing disclaimers that their models “can make mistakes”. “Own up. Like, say when you think this is right and highlight it for me so I know, as a consumer, this is right. If it’s something that is on the borderline, tell me it’s on the borderline so I can double-check.”
Then there’s how we “train” ourselves to use artificial intelligence. “If you’re studying for a high-stakes exam, you’re taking a driving test or something, well, maybe be more circumspect,” says Kummerfeld. “This is something that people can control because you know what the stakes are for you when you’re asking that question – AI doesn’t. And so you can keep that in mind and change the level with which you think about how blindly you accept what it says.”
Still, recognising AI’s limitations might only become more difficult as the machines become more capable. Eric Mitchell is aware of an older version of ChatGPT that might agree to phone a restaurant and confirm their hours of operation – a feature users might laugh at as long as they understand it can’t make a phone call. “Some of these things come off as kind of funny when the model claims to have personal experiences or be able to use tools that it obviously doesn’t have access to,” Mitchell says. “But over time, these things become less obvious. And I think this is why, especially for GPT-5 going forward, we’ve been thinking more and more of safety and trustworthiness as a product feature.”
This Explainer was brought to you by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Explainer team: editor Felicity Lewis and reporters Jackson Graham and Angus Holland. For fascinating insights into the world’s most perplexing topics. And read more of our Explainers here.
Just cut out the middle moron … would that be so bad?
There was a lot of artificial intelligence about this past week. Some of it the subject of the roundtable; some of it sitting at the roundtable. All of it massively hyped. Depending on who you believe, AI will lead to widespread unemployment or a workers’ paradise of four-day week.
These wildly different visions suggest that assessments of the implications of AI are based on something less than a deep understanding of the technology, its potential and the history of humanity in interacting with new stuff. In the immediate term, the greatest threat posed by AI is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This cognitive bias, described and named by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger around the turn of the century, observes that people with limited competence in a particular domain are prone to overestimating their own understanding and abilities. It proposes that the reason for this is that they’re unable to appreciate the extent of their own ignorance – they’re not smart enough or skilled enough to recognise what good looks like. As Dunning put it, “not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes, but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognising when they are making mistakes and other people are choosing more wisely”.
AI has layers and layers of Dunning-Kruger traps built in. The first is that the machine itself suffers from a mechanical type of cognitive bias. Large language models – the type of generative AI that is increasingly used by individuals at home and at work (we’re not talking about models designed for a specific scientific purpose) – are especially slick predictive text models. They scrape the web for the most likely next word in a sequence and then row them up in response to a query.
If there’s a lot of biased or incorrect information on a topic, this significantly colours the results. If there’s not enough information (and the machine has not been carefully instructed), then AI extrapolates – that is, it just makes shit up. If it detects that its user wants an answer that reflects their own views, it’ll filter its inputs to deliver just that. And then it presents what it has created with supreme confidence. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. If generative AI were a person, it would be psychology’s perfect case study of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
But we’re not here to beat up on machines. The robot is just a robot; the special dumb comes from its master. AI delivers a very convincing answer based on generalist information available; it’s the human Dunning-Kruger sufferer who slips into the trap of thinking the machine answer makes him look smart.
This is where the Dunning-Kruger effect will meet AI and become an economic force. The user who doesn’t know enough about a subject to recognise the deficits in the AI answers passes the low-grade information up the chain to a client or superior who also lacks the knowledge and expertise to question the product. A cretinous ripple expands undetected into every corner of an organisation and leaks out from there into everyday life. The AI is fed its own manure and becomes worse. Experts refer to the process as model collapse.
There will be job losses, because when incompetents rely on AI to do their work for them, eventually the clients or superiors they’re serving will cut out the middle-moron and go straight to the machine. Companies are cutting roles that can be convincingly emulated by AI because humans have not been value-adding to them. The question is just whether managers are themselves competent enough to recognise which roles these are and restructure their processes and workforce to provide value-add before their output is compromised.
To date, it has been so-called low-skilled jobs that have been most at threat from automation. But AI is changing the very nature of the skills that businesses require. A decade ago, workers who lost their jobs to increasing automation were told to “learn to code”. Now, coding itself is being replaced by AI. “Learn to care” is the mantra of this wave of social change.
Care isn’t just a gentle touch in health or aged care. It comes from emotional insight. A call-centre worker with no emotional intelligence can be classed as unskilled. There’s no question that a machine can answer the phone, direct queries and perform simple information sharing functions such as reading out your bank balance. But when the query is more complex or emotionally loaded, AI struggles. EQ, the emotional version of IQ, is a skill that can make an enormous difference in customer satisfaction and retention.
A more highly skilled job that I’ve recently seen performed by a human and a machine is quantitative research. A good machine model can do more interviews more quickly than a human interviewer, and the depth is much of a muchness. But a skilled interviewer with a thorough understanding of the objectives and a higher emotional attunement to the way people skirt around big topics could achieve greater depth and uncover richer insights. That requires both human IQ and EQ, which the machine doesn’t have. A human with these qualities is still needed to tune the AI to deliver its best outputs.
Which is why the idea of a four-day week based on AI efficiency is as utopian as the fear of massive job losses is catastrophist. The Dunning-Kruger effect, turbocharged by generative tools, will ruthlessly expose enterprises that mistake algorithmic speed for depth. Jobs and companies built on AI’s cold efficiency and unfounded self-confidence will soon be exposed.
The roundtable exposed a discussion on AI still stuck on threats and oblivious to skills. In the end, the danger isn’t that AI will outsmart us, it’s that humans will be too dumb to use it well.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.
At our top university, AI cheating is out of control!
Robert A*, The Australian 29 August 2025
I’ve been a frontline teaching academic at the University of Melbourne for nearly 15 years. I’ve taught close to 2000 students and marked countless assessments.
While the job can be demanding, teaching has been a rewarding career. But a spectre is haunting our classrooms; the spectre of artificial intelligence.
Back in the day, contract cheating – where a student paid a third party to complete their assignment – was the biggest challenge to academic integrity. Nowadays, contract cheaters are out of work. Students are turning to AI to write their essays and it has become the new norm, even when its use has been restricted or prohibited.
What is the value of the university in the age of AI? Ideally, university should be a place where people are not taught what to think but how to think. It should be a place where students wrestle with big ideas, learn how to reason and rigorously test evidence. On graduation they should be contributing to and enhancing society.
Instead, AI chatbots, not Marxist professors, have taken hold of universities. AI is not an impartial arbiter of knowledge. ChatGPT is likelier to reinforce rather than challenge liberal bias; Grok’s Freudian slips reveal a model riddled with anti-Semitism; DeepSeek is a loyal rank-and-file member, toeing the Chinese Communist Party line and avoiding questions about its human rights record. When the machine essay-writing mill is pumping out essays, AI is the seductive force teaching students what to think.
While we know AI cheating is happening, we don’t know how bad it is and we have no concrete way of finding out. Our first line of defence, AI detection software, has lost the arms race and no longer is a deterrent. Recently, I asked ChatGPT to write an essay based on an upcoming assessment brief and uploaded it to Turnitin, our detection tool. It returned a 0 per cent AI score. This is hardly surprising because we already knew the tool wasn’t working as students have been gaming the system.
Prosecuting a case of academic misconduct is becoming increasingly difficult. Many cases are dismissed at the first stage because the AI detector returns a low score that doesn’t satisfy the threshold set by management. The logic seems to be that we should go for the worst offenders and deal with the rest another way. Even with this approach, each semester the academic integrity team is investigating a record-breaking number of cases.
To deal with the inundation of AI cheating, the University of Melbourne introduced a new process for “lower-risk” academic integrity issues. Lecturers were given discretionary powers to determine “poor academic practice”. Under this policy, essays that look as if they were written by AI but scored 0 per cent could be subject to grade revision. Problem solved, right? Not even close.
Tutors are our second line of defence. They are largely responsible for classroom teaching, mark assessments and flag suspicious papers. But a recent in-house survey found about half of tutors were “slightly” or “not at all” confident in identifying a paper written by AI. Others were only “marginally confident”. This is hardly their fault. They lack experience and, without proper training or detection tools, the university is demanding a lot from them.
Lecturers are the final line of defence. No offence to my colleagues, but we are not exactly a technologically literate bunch. Some of us know about AI only because of what we read in the paper or what our kids tell us about it.
We have a big problem on our hands, the “unknown-unknown” dilemma. We have an academic workforce that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Our defences are down and AI cheaters are walking through the gates on their way to earn degrees.
Soon we will see new cohorts of doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and policymakers graduating. When AI can ace assessments, employers and taxpayers have every right to question who was actually certified: the student or the machine? AI can do many things but it should have no place in the final evaluation of students.
A wicked problem surely requires sensible solution. If only. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has acknowledged the AI challenge but passed the buck to the sector to figure it out. With approval from the regulator, many Australian universities have pivoted from banning to integrating AI.
The University of Melbourne is moving towards a model where at least 50 per cent of marks in a subject will have to come from assessments done in a secure way (such as supervised exams). The other 50 per cent will be open season for AI abuse.
All subjects will have to be compliant with this model by 2028.
Australian universities have surrendered to the chatbots and effectively are permitting widespread contract cheating by another name. This seriously risks devaluing the purpose of a university degree. It jeopardises the reputation of Australian universities, our fourth largest export industry.
There is real danger that universities soon will become expensive credential factories for chatbots, run by other chatbots.
There are many of us in the sector who object to this trend. Not all students are sold on the hype either; many reject the irresponsible use of AI and don’t want to see the critical skills taught at university cheapened by chatbots. Students are rightly asking: if they wanted AI to think for them, why are they attending university? Yet policymakers are out of touch with these stakeholders, the people living through this technological change.
What is to be done? The challenge of AI is not a uniquely Australian problem but it may require a uniquely Australian solution. First, universities should urgently abandon the integrated approach and redesign degrees that are genuinely AI-free. This may mean 100 per cent of marks are based on paper exams, debate, oral defences or tutorial activities.
The essay, the staple of higher education for centuries, will have to return to the classroom or perish. Australian universities can then proudly advertise themselves as AI-free and encourage international and domestic talent to study here.
Second, as AI rips through the high school system, the tertiary sector should implement verifiable admission exams. We must ensure that those entering university have the skills required to undertake it.
Third, there must be priority investment in staff training and professional development to equip teachers for these pedagogical challenges.
Finally, Clare needs to show some leadership and adopt a national, enforceable standard. Techo-capitalism is leading us away from the ideal of the university as a place for free thinking. If independent scholarly inquiry at university falls, our human society will be the biggest loser.
Robert A* is an academic at the University of Melbourne and has written under a pseudonym.
What hope for us if we stop thinking
Jacob Howland, The Australian, via Unherd, September 5 2025
In the faculty reading room of a university library where I spent many happy hours, two lines from Emily Dickinson were chiselled into the fireplace’s stone breastwork:
There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away.
That “Lands away” evokes open horizons of intellectual adventure and discovery – the idea of higher education that thrilled my teenaged self, and that I still associate with the musty smell of library bookstacks. The college I graduated from in 1981 promised to help us learn to read deeply, write clearly, think logically, and sort signal from noise in multiple languages of understanding. We would be equipped, not just for specialised employment, but for the lifelong task of trying to see things whole – to form, in the words of John Henry Newman, an “instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us”.
Colleges and universities still make similar promises, but they mostly ring hollow. Since the 1980s, multiple factors – skyrocketing tuition and economic uncertainty, the precipitous decline of reading, the widespread collapse of academic standards, and the ideological radicalisation of course syllabi – have drastically shrunk the horizons of teaching and learning on campus.
More recently, three mostly self-inflicted storms have slammed higher education, revealing systemic rot. Unless universities can right their listing and leaking ships, future generations will graduate with little awareness of the richness and breadth of human experience, and little knowledge of where we’ve been and where we’re going. And that will be a terrible loss for all of us.
Covid – the first great storm, in 2020 – was a disaster for education, and a reality check for schools at every level. Primary and secondary students lost months or years of learning. School districts abandoned pre-existing academic standards, and parents who (thanks to Zoom) were able to observe their children’s classes were often appalled by what they saw and heard. College students who were compelled to attend “virtual” courses were similarly shortchanged. Universities signalled that money mattered more than mission when they continued to charge full tuition for classes where many students were present only as muted black squares.
Deprived of the social experience and amenities of life on campus, many undergraduates and prospective students decided that a university education wasn’t worth the cost.
Three years later, in 2023, the October 7 pogrom revealed that activist faculty and administrators had corrupted the core mission of higher education: to pursue truth and extend and transmit knowledge. Americans were alarmed to see mobs of students, radicalised by “critical theories” of oppression and victimisation, harassing and sometimes violently intimidating Jewish classmates. They were stunned when the presidents of Ivy League universities saw no real problem there. And they were dismayed to realise that much of what passes for higher education, especially at elite universities, is actually indoctrination in cultural Marxism.
The pandemic and the aftermath of October 7 have undeniably contributed to plummeting public trust in universities. But the third and biggest storm of crisis, precipitated by Generative-AI chatbots, threatens to sink higher education altogether. And this time, it is the students who are the problem – if only because we never managed to teach them that committing oneself to the process of learning is no less important than getting a marketable degree.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached a million users just six days after it launched in 2022. Two months later, a survey of 1000 college students found that 90 per cent “had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments”. Students’ use of chatbots is undoubtedly more widespread today, because the technology is addictive. As a professor wrote recently in The New Yorker: “Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using AI to assist with organising their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether.”
At elite universities, community colleges, and everything in between, students are using AI to write their applications for admission, take notes in class, summarise required readings, compose essays, analyse data, and generate computer code, among other things – in short, to do the bulk of their assigned schoolwork.
They report that using AI allows them to produce research papers and interpretive essays in as little as half an hour and earn high grades for work they’ve neither written nor, in many cases, even read. A first-year student seems to speak for entire cohorts of undergraduates when she admits that “we rely on it, (and) we can’t really imagine being without it”.
Yet not all students think this is a good thing. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes multiple undergraduates who are hooked on the technology, and are distressed at being unable to kick the habit – because, as one confesses, “I know I am learning NOTHING”.
That last claim is only slightly overstated. Students who depend on AI to do their coursework learn how to engineer prompts, divide up tasks, and outsource them to machines. That’s not nothing, but it’s a skill that involves no internal assimilation of intellectual content – no actual learning – beyond managing AI projects involving data acquisition, analysis, and synthesis. AI dependency furthermore contributes to cognitive impairment, accelerating a decades-long decline in IQ. And it cheats everyone: students who’ve prepared for class but find themselves among unresponsive classmates, and professors who spend hours drafting lectures that fall on deaf ears and grading essays written by machines. It cheats the cheaters themselves, who are paying good money for nothing but an unearned credential so that they will have time for other things – including, as one student admitted, wasting so many hours on TikTok that her eyes hurt. It cheats employers who hire graduates in good faith, only to discover their incompetence. Last but not least, it cheats society, where informed citizens and competent leaders are in notably short supply.
To make matters worse, the illicit use of chatbots is difficult to detect and even harder to prove. Companies and TikTok influencers offer products and coaching that help students camouflage their use of AI. Students have learned how to avoid “Trojan horse” traps in assignments, design prompts that won’t make them look too smart, and launder their essays through multiple bot-generated iterations. AI-powered software has furthermore proved to be highly unreliable at identifying instances of AI-generated work. (This is unsurprising: why would providers like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT Plus free during final exams, want to imperil huge student demand for its product?) And in the long run, market forces will always keep students one step ahead of their professors.
Case in point: a student who was expelled from Columbia University for dishonesty has raised more than $US5m to design a wearable device that “will enable you to cheat on pretty much anything” in real time – including in-class essays, which would otherwise create an AI-free testing environment.
So far, universities have no good answers to the existential questions posed by AI. What is needed from academic leaders is a full-throated explanation of what universities are, why they exist, and what it means to get a real education. Instead, presidents, provosts, and deans have remained silent – perhaps, one fears, because they are no longer capable of delivering such an explanation. They’ve let faculty establish their own AI-use policies, which vary widely and are, in any case, difficult to enforce consistently.
Professors, too, are using chatbots to formulate assignments, grade papers and no doubt write lectures. I don’t entirely blame them: the technology is an efficient solution to the drudgery of teaching students whose investment in their educations is merely financial and transactional. But in their courses, as on much of the internet, AI is largely talking to AI.
Will universities survive if they become little more than expensive credential mills? The most elite ones will, coasting on past glory and present status. Others will put a smiley face on the corruption of higher education. They will embrace AI, supposing that essentially managerial skills will suffice when superintelligent machines learn how to do “most of the real thinking”, as a well-known economist and an AI researcher predict they eventually will. Yet in everything from diplomacy to medicine, real thinking – thinking at the highest levels, where strategies are devised and executed – requires practical wisdom: an adequate understanding, not just of the range of digital tools available to us and how to operate them, but of the ends these tools ought to serve.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the AI tools that are by orders of magnitude most widely used – Large Language Models, trained on the polluted content of the worldwide web – are deceptive, prone to hallucinations, and politically biased: qualities manifestly unsuited to the pursuit of truth.
But, you may ask, are reading and writing still relevant in the digital age? Does it really matter that, in a study conducted a decade ago, 58 per cent of English majors at two academically mid-level universities in Kansas “understood so little of the introduction to (Charles Dickens’) Bleak House” – a book that was originally serialised in a magazine, and reached a wide audience across all social classes – “that they would not be able to read the novel on their own”? Or that these same students had so little self-knowledge that they “also believed they would have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel”? Yes, it does matter – if we hope to preserve our humanity. This is not because Dickens is particularly important, but because of what these findings say about students’ poor command of language, the basic medium of human understanding. What would these English majors make of Shakespeare? Would political science majors fare better with Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers? Or philosophy majors with Aristotle? Don’t bet on it.
Writing in the 1960s, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas seems to have foreseen our age of shortcuts, where machine-generated bullet points substitute for active engagement with challenging material. Levinas understood that the precious inheritance of culture, the wellspring of all new growths and great ideas, is indispensable in navigating the trackless future. “A true culture,” he observed, “cannot be summarised, for it resides in the very effort that cultivates it.”
That effort begins with authentic cultural appropriation: the slow, sometimes laborious, but ultimately joyful internalisation of the best that has been thought and said. It is this process of education that gives us ethical, intellectual, and spiritual compasses, tells us where to look for answers, and allows even relative amateurs to seek them “lands away”. And without this ongoing renewal of intellectual culture, technological plans and political programs must inevitably suffer from what Socrates regarded as the worst vice of all: ignorance.
Education at its best develops the virtues or excellences of thought and action, taste, feeling, and judgment, that fit one for all seasons, occasions, tasks and responsibilities of life.
And that moral, intellectual, and spiritual attunement, not just to physical reality, nor to the largely unforeseeable contingencies of time and history, but to eternal or transcendent truths, is good in itself as well as for its consequences. Universities used to regard these as truths so self-evident that they hardly needed saying. But they need saying now. In this hour of need, let us hope that academic leaders are still up to the task.
Jacob Howland is the former provost, senior vice-president for academic affairs, and dean of intellectual foundations at the University of Austin, Texas. An earlier version of this article appeared in UnHerd
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W H Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant (1939)
The English poet W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s – the last years of the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi ascendency –Some commentators suggest that Auden actually wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant in Berlin. But It was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out – and Auden had departed the city before the end of Weimar in 1933. But he was full aware of where the world was heading – during the mid-thirties, he’d briefly journeyed to Republican Spain in the midst of the Civil War and to Kuomintang China during its war with Japan – see In That Howling Infinite’s Journey to a war – Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure.
The poem has been interpreted as a very brief study in tyranny, but few could doubt whom Auden had in mind. In this very short poem, Auden turns a familiar phrase from the New Testament in upon itself evoking and then evicting ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer. he also inverts a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’
I recalled the poem, one of the very first of Auden’s poems I encountered nearly sixty years ago, as I was reading the essay republished below written by the most erudite economist and academic Henry Ergas on the occasion of the centenary of the publication on 16 August 1925, of Mein Kampf (lit. ‘My Struggle‘), Nazi Party founder and leader Adolf Hitler‘s combined autobiographical reflections and political manifesto, encompassing an uncompromising ideological programme of antisemitism, racial supremacy, and expansionist ambitions.
A century later, the impact of Mein Kampf on the world remains both undeniable and deeply troubling. Initially dismissed by some as the ramblings of a failed revolutionary, the book became the ideological blueprint for the Nazi regime, legitimising policies that culminated in the Holocaust and a world war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Beyond the destruction of the mid-twentieth century, Mein Kampf has endured as a symbol of hate literature, resurfacing periodically in extremist movements, political propaganda, and debates over free speech and censorship. Its centenary compels reflection not only on the book’s historical role in shaping one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also on the persistence of the prejudices and authoritarian impulses it so virulently expressed.
Mein Kampf‘s bitter harvest
The Second World War began on 2nd September 1939 with Germany’s sudden and unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.
Japan formally entered the war on September 22, 1940 with the invasion of French Indochina, having been at war with China since 1931, and officially formed an alliance with Germany and Italy five days later. The United Kingdom declared war on the Empire of Japan on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attacks on British Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong on the previous day, as well as in response to the bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7. The United States to enter World War II the following day.
World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender, known as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). The war in the Asia Pacific concluded on September 2, 1945, with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, designated Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). This followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan
The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.
The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.
Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust
Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …
A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images
When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exactly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”. As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”
But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.
After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.
Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.
The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.
The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.
Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved to
be a strength.
Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.
Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.
“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”
That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.
What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.
Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.
Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.
The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.
Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.
World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.
That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.
Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.
With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.
Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.
Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.
The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.
And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.
Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”
But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.
Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.
It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tirades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.
Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.
Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.
Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.
Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.
And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.
The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.
Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.
As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.
Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.
And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.
But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.
For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.
That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.
Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum
Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children’s House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme
If those horrendous consequences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.
However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.
Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.
There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.
As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.
If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.
Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.
And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.
Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.
Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.
Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.
But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.
And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s ja
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s jail ensured that the 20th century’s fields of glory would be sown with the corpses of innocent victims and the distorted fragments of shattered ideals.
Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.
To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.
The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.
How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.
In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler
But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.
As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competition to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.
And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.
Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.
But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.
But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.
As we mark Mein Kampf’s grim anniversary, we must, this time, take them seriously.
It is three years since Australian songstress Judith Durham took the Morningtown Ride.Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom followed soon afterwards.
Judith might not have been my teenage crush – that was Dusty – but The Seekerswere a significant part of my adolescent soundtrack. Aussies were an exotic species back then in Britain, and to me, more associated with now-disgraced Rolf Harris with Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and Sun Arise, but there was also Frank Ifield and Patsy Ann Noble. More Aussies followed them to Britain – the Easybeats and Bee Gees entering the pop charts soon afterwards, while soon to be famous actors, artists, authors and activists had already steamed back to Old England’s Shores and were busy making names for themselves.
The Seekers were “discovered” by Tom Springfield and were marketed as the new Springfields, the natural heirs to that wholesome folksey trio (he had written their greatest hits or adapted them from folk standards). When the Seekers folded in 1969, group member Keith Potger gave us the New Seekers, a bunch of pretty blonde Brits who most people now believe wanted to buy the world a coke! For trivia fans, that song was (spoiler alert!) the happy hippie finale of that fabulous series Madmen.
The Seekers released their smash hit, the allegorical song of farewell The Carnival Is Over in 1965. Tom based it on a traditional Russian song about a brutal Cossack rebel [read all about him below]. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated from the Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement.
Tom Springfield borrowed the melody of The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional folk tune set to music in the 19th Century by Dimitry Sadovnikov. It told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbinerather than casting them overboard.
Stepan Razin on the Volga (by Boris Kustodiev, (1918) State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Tom’s song was an ironic mid twentieth century reimagining in which a tragic, violent and mythic saga of patriotism, loyalty, and patriarchal authority illustrative of national an revolutionary folklore was reinvented into wistful pop as a saccharine song of romance, emotion, loss, and a meditation on the impermanence – how the joys of love are fleeting. No such maudlin melancholy on the part of the preening old riverboat pirate. Over the side she goes!
The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
From beyond the wooded island To the riverbank he came, On his breast he held a maiden, And his comrades called her name. Then he flung her to the waters, Crying, ‘Thus I make my vow, I will have no foreign woman As a wife to me now.’
Say goodbye, my own true lover As we sing a lovers’ song How it breaks my heart to leave you Now the carnival is gone High above the dawn is waiting And my tears are falling rain For the carnival is over We may never meet again
Pierrot and Columbine
The shift from revolutionary folklore to wistful pop is emblematic of the 20th-century repurposing of folk traditions – filtering political anthems through modern, personal, and emotional frameworks. The lyrics and the sentiment couldn’t have been more different:
If you watch the hoary old Hammer horror film Rasputin, about the sinister Svengali who enchanted the last Czarina of Russia – portrayed herein by that eminent old frightener Christopher Lee – you will recognise the tune as a recurring leitmotif.
There is a clunky film reenactment of the story, sung by the famous Red Army Choir immediately below the Seekers‘ song.
Say goodbye, my own true lover
As we sing a lovers’ song
How it breaks my heart to leave you
Now the carnival is gone
High above the dawn is waiting
And my tears are falling rain
For the carnival is over
We may never meet again
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Like a drum, my heart was beating
And your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting
For Pierrot and Columbine
Now the harbour light is calling
This will be our last goodbye
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Though the carnival is over
I will love you ’til I die
Stenka Razin
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
On the first is Stenka Razin
With his princess by his side
Drunken holds in marriage revels
With his beauteous young bride.
From behind there comes a murmur
“He has left his sword to woo;
One short night and Stenka Razin
Has become a woman, too.”
Stenka Razin hears the murmur
Of his discontented band
And his lovely Persian princess
He has circled with his hand.
His dark brows are drawn together
As the waves of anger rise;
And the blood comes rushing swiftly
To his piercing jet black eyes.
“I will give you all you ask for
Head and heart and life and hand.”
And his voice rolls out like thunder
Out across the distant land.
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Wide and deep beneath the sun,
You have never such a present
From the Cossacks of the Don.
So that peace may reign forever
In this band so free and brave
Volga, Volga, Mother Volga
Make this lovely girl a grave.
Now, with one swift mighty motion
He has raised his bride on high
And has cast her where the waters
Of the Volga roll and sigh.
Now a silence like the grave
Sinks to all who stand and see
And the battle-hardened Cossacks
Sink to weep on bended knee.
“Dance, you fools, and let’s be merry
What is this that’s in your eyes?
Let us thunder out a chantey
To the place where beauty lies.”
From beyond the wooded island
To the river wide and free
Proudly sailed the arrow-breasted
Ships of Cossack yeomanry.
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
Economist and commentator Henry Ergas wrote in The Australian recently: “With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore. Understanding its divergence from overseas traditions is vital to recovering and redefining the distinctive voice it needs to deal with the latest threat to its existence.” I have repolished it below.
Personally, I find the crisis in contemporary conservatism, particularly as it pertains to Australia politics, fascinating. Here it is in danger descending into a culture of grievance and of populism (- defined as the quest for simple solutions to complex problems).
These fast-moving times are shaky ground for the creed. People are losing faith in institutions; the church no longer has moral influence; the social norms that once tied the community together are changing at lightning speed. Even many within what can be classified as the centre-right acknowledge what might be described as the conservative movement is apparently on the back foot, scrambling to define itself by what it opposes rather than what it believes, plagued by self-doubt and confusion as to what to believe what to stand up for.
As younger voters in the Anglo-sphere veer away from conservative parties, old warhorses and young fogeys, an incongruous, anachronistic cabal of reactionaries if ever there was one, desperately seek relevance and comfort as they endeavour to beat back what they see as the rising tide of progressivism and the proliferation of what they condemned as “woke” – a portmanteau word for whatever that dislike and disdain in politics and society’s at large.
“Conservatism” is an intriguing concept. It can broadly be translated as “traditional” values, and can embrace a varied spectrum of “isms”, including authoritarianism, hierarchy, nationalism, nativism and ethnocentrism, and also, en passant, religiosity, homophobia, and indeed, anything deemed antithetical to the old, tried and true ways. In a general sense, it has gained traction across much of the world as people yearn for order and stability and belonging and identity that western-style liberalism with its ecumenical emphasis on identity, equity and diversity cannot satisfy. Many highlight what they see as to the erosion of national institutions, of Western culture and even morality itself. Some advocate a national conservatism that hold nations to be distinctive and to seek to protect this distinctiveness.
It is in essence an atavistic worldview, one which harks back to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time and a yearning for “la recherche du temps perdu”. In its modern manifestations, it is in many ways a belligerent, intolerant creed, quite distinct from the late 18th century English parliamentarian Edmund Burke’s benchmark conservatism, namely the preservation of principles of the past which emerge from “the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation and improvement of property”, and in which institutions and customs were rendered sacred by longevity and continual use. The comfort of continuity, in fact.
And it is different to what perennial Australian prime minister Robert Menzies was alluding when he formed the Australian Liberal Party in 1945: “a healthy and proud sense of continuity, is one of the greatest steadying influences and a superb element of sanity in a mad world… “ in his Forgotten People speech of 1942, he invoked homes material, homes human and homes spiritual – the homes humans can live in and where families can be enriched spiritually – rather than the merits of some cold ideology. It was a uniquely reassuring doctrine for homely, ordinary folk opposed to change or frightened by it.
In his essay, “Why I Became A Conservative“, the late British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that the romantic core of the creed was the search for the “lost experience of home”, the dream of a childhood that cannot ever be fully recaptured, but can be “regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression”. At the heart of conservatism, in other words, is love: love for things that exist or existed and must be saved.
In his introduction to A Political Philosophy, Scruton wrote: “the conservation of our shared resources — social, material, economic and spiritual — and resistance to social entropy in all its forms”. His conservatism was, above all, conservationist: constant care for institutions, customs, and family. His debt to Edmund Burke: society is a contract between the living, the dead and the unborn; a “civil association among neighbours” is superior to state intervention; “the most important thing a human being can do is to settle down, make a home and pass it on to one’s children”.
There is something quite benign about these concepts of conservatism. In stark contrast, conservatism that is gaining traction in many countries, particularly in eastern Europe, but also on the MAGA movement in the United States and on the far-right in Western Europe and also, Australia is a cold, atavistic and embittered beast. Populist in its nature, it appeals primarily to those who favour the reassuring hand of a paternal authority figure who is able to promise those aforementioned simple solutions to the modern world’s bewildering array of complex problems. Freethinkers, individuals, and all of heterodox opinions and practices, political, social, biological or spiritual – beware!
Disclaimer: the only thing this post has to do with Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist comedy drama Le Fantôme de la liberté is its title, although like the film, it challenges pre-conceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality.
With the Trump revolution wreaking havoc on conservative movements worldwide and the election rout leaving Liberals stunned, Australian conservatism faces an identity crisis it no longer can afford to ignore.
Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott, The Australian 10 May 2025
In the aftermath of last weekend’s devastating election loss it is easy to write off conservatism in Australia. This wouldn’t be for the first time. As historian Keith Hancock observed in Australia (1930), conservative, in this country, has always been a term of abuse, implying that its target is an out-and-out reactionary.
There is nonetheless a profound paradox. Although conservative may be a term of abuse, Australian politics has long had a marked conservative vein, even as its chief protagonists have studiously avoided the descriptor. A hardy perennial, with a distinctive voice that contrasts with overseas conservatism, the conservative instinct in Australia has run deep, dominating federal politics for decades – and recovering, time and again, from setbacks that had been claimed to foreshadow its demise.
US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance. Picture: AP
In part, that identity crisis reflects the factor that has made for conservatism’s enduring success: its infinite adaptability. Indeed, the term defies easy definition, just as the groups to which it has been applied defy ready categorisation, making the conservative identity inherently labile.
As Paul de Serville, a historian of Australian and British conservatism, has observed, every party that has emerged to represent conservatism’s interests and beliefs across the past 350 years “is a study in contradiction between opposing traditions and schools of thought”.
Even its founding parent, the movement that eventually became the Conservative Party in Britain, has “died or lain dormant” numerous times, split at least twice, and never settled on any singular set of policies, ideas and beliefs. Its capacity to incorporate diverse elements has in fact been one of its defining qualities. After all, “what other party has elected a Jewish novelist (Disraeli) to lead a group of wordless squires? Or a grocer’s daughter (Thatcher) to rule a sulky band of Tory Wets?”
But beneath the shifting terrain of cultural and political battlegrounds, there are in British conservatism some identifiable commitments. Originally, the commitment was above all to tradition. Born in the turmoil of the English civil war, the Tories (a term derived from the Middle English slang for outlaw) stood for loyalty to the Church of England and the crown. Unapologetic royalists, their clergy defended the church against the Puritans while stressing the values of family, home and nationhood. Over time, however, the primary emphasis of British conservatism changed into a commitment to the virtue of prudence.
Often associated with a sense of human limitations and the impossibility of achieving utopia, British conservatism became the embodiment of a Western intellectual tradition that extends back at least as far as St Augustine.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led a populist style Conservative Party. AFP
Conservatism in the US had a starkly different origin and trajectory. Far from being a reaction to the threat of change, it was a by-product of the American Revolution’s fight against the crown. Initially, what it sought to conserve was the ideal of a “mixed constitution” whose myriad checks and balances could prevent the development of an overmighty state. That coexisted with the agrarian conservatism of the south that feared, above all, the centralism that might abolish slavery and privilege northern manufacturers over southern primary exporters. Together, those foundations fuelled the development of a staunchly conservative, often highly formalistic legalism whose power – unrivalled in any other Western country – grew with the ascendancy of the Supreme Court.
But as early as the 1820s that version of conservatism faced a powerful challenge from Andrew Jackson’s radical populism. Jacksonian populism had more than its fair share of incoherence but its grassroots pugnacity spawned one of US politics’ most enduring and certainly most distinctive notions: the spectre of a “deep state” that was liberty’s greatest enemy.
Permeated by a Manichean friend-enemy dynamic that distinguishes what American historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the “paranoid style” in US politics, the Jacksonians portrayed the federal government as far worse than overbearing: having been hijacked by the enemies of the common man, it was an actively malevolent force hiding behind the facade of law and order. Only by dismantling it could freedom be preserved.
Former US President Andrew Jackson
The Jacksonians left a deep imprint on the American right and most notably on its rhetoric, but they never entirely conquered the field. The somewhat rigid constitutional conservatism that had preceded Jacksonianism survived and, inspired by intellectual leaders such as Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia, flourished.
At the same time, many other varieties of conservatism appeared and at times reappeared after having gone into abeyance.
For instance, Vice-President JD Vance’scommitment to an intensely moralistic vision of politics – that privileges honest labour over endless consumption, security at home over adventures overseas, family and local community over wider notions of society – renews a Catholic tradition that had waned as the ethnic communities that were its original bearers assimilated into the American mainstream.
Vice-President JD Vance
In that sense American conservatism was always as mutable, open-ended and diverse as the US itself. But for all of that diversity, the nature of the presidential contest periodically forced its differing elements to coalesce around a leader who somehow embodied the spirit of the times.
As with all populisms, Trump’s message jumbles together contradictory, even irreconcilable, components. But it isn’t intended as a coherent intellectual project – it is not a politics of ideas that Trump pursues but of emotive response and instantaneous impact.
Even less is it a politics of cautious pragmatism, as was the conservatism of Republicans George HW Bush or John McCain, who also channelled one of American patriotism’s many styles. And least of all is it, like Vance’s, a politics of high moral purpose. Rather, it is a politics of personal power, deployed, often arbitrarily, to purposes that can change unpredictably from day to day.
That it is not to deny that there runs through Trump’s project American conservatism’s golden thread: the goal of restoring what his supporters view as the freedoms that were the original promise of the American founding and, later, the American Revolution.
But much as was the case with the Jacksonians, that goal is to be achieved by demolishing existing institutions, which are cast as having betrayed the original promise, rather than through their cautious reform. Trumpism’s intensely antinomian character is starkly antagonistic to the American tradition of constitutional conservatism, which is why a number of unquestionably conservative scholars are challenging the administration’s actions in the courts. At the same time, its messianic quality, imbued with visions of future glory, breeds a fanaticism entirely alien to the British conservative tradition.
Trumpism breeds a fanaticism alien to the British and Australian conservative tradition. AFP
It is entirely alien to the Australian conservative tradition too. Here the greatest difference lies in the fact the Australian political ethos has not seen the state as the enemy, much less as a malignant force. It has been regarded instead as a tool to be effectively used to benefit the people and help them flourish.
That difference from the US has profound historical roots. America’s initial European settlement occurred in the 1600s, a period distinguished in Britain by what became known as the “Old Corruption”. Government offices were chiefly sinecures, officially apportioned rackets for personal gain, propping up an oligarchy whose favours were openly for sale.
In contrast, European settlement in Australia and New Zealand began as sweeping reforms to Britain’s system of government were taking hold. For the first time it was becoming possible to treat the government as a utility, dispensing valued benefits, rather than as a lurking predator. Colonial governors’ administrations, while not without their own rackety aspects, were shaped by changes reducing royal patronage and improving government accountability. As Australian historian John Hirst argued, that laid the seeds of an enduring respect for impersonal authority, exercised, at least in theory, in the pursuit of prosperity and good order.
There were, for sure, periodic outbreaks of radical opposition. But the Australian approach was almost always to absorb the conflict by institutionalising its protagonists. Embedding the agitators within the system they were fighting against, that solution traded moderation for tangible gains.
For example, violent class war and mass strikes in the 1890s Depression culminated in the birth of the ALP as an official parliamentary party, changing laws and winning government. Later, the Arbitration Court became run largely by what had been the warring parties – the infamous “industrial relations club”, as columnist Gerard Henderson called it. In exchange for prestigious sinecures, the former enemies descended into what Hancock derided as a “pettifogging” legalism that suffocated the radicals.
Equally, landless gold-diggers demanded the squatters’ leases be ripped up, and stormed Victoria’s parliament in the 1850s. The Land Selection Acts in the subsequent decades established a regional population of often struggling farmers whose 20th-century political incarnation took the form of country parties.
Those parties not only secured “protection all round” in the 1920s, along with significant direct subsidies; they also ensured the establishment of marketing boards to which party worthies were invariably appointed. And much the same could be said of the Tariff Board, which shaped manufacturing protection for decades.
The corollary of that solution was a particular type of conservatism. Yes, in the early years of settlement there had been “real” conservatives of the Tory variety. But when self-government began, they were rudely jostled aside. Australian conservatism would not draw its strength from them.
It was instead the middle class that provided the dominating motifs of enduring Australian conservative strength. It isn’t difficult to understand why. The “workingman’s paradise” was a place where ordinary settlers and working men could get ahead, not rags-to-riches style, as the American dream pitched it, but enough to acquire comfort, leisure and independence.
Australian wages had been essentially the highest in the world since first settlement and the political victory of liberalism, which occurred during the 1850s gold rushes, ensured free markets and social mobility. To become an independent small business owner, to own your own home, to provide for your family, your children – this was the dream, and in Australia they by and large found it.
The conservatism that resulted from that success story incorporated the liberal beliefs and practices that proved so decisively triumphant in the colonial context. Historian Zachary Gorman observes that liberalism’s 19th-century victory in Australia was so comprehensive it became “less of a clear agenda and more of a pervasive political culture”. No longer conservatism’s upstart challenger as in Britain, liberalism here almost instantaneously became the established mainstream – it became what needed to be protected, as well as what conservatives sought to conserve.
Australian conservatism, then, sprang not out of reverence for the past or social hierarchy but from attachment to the enjoyments and freedoms of ordinary life that the most liberal polity in the world encouraged to flourish. It kept faith with ordinary experience and the socially durable values of an open society.
It soon came to shape the whole of the centre-right, underpinning both the twin liberal traditions of early 20th-century Australian life – the neo-Gladstonian free trade liberalism typified by NSW’s Henry Parkes, George Reid and Joseph Carruthers and the Deakenite liberalism protectionist Victoria championed.
More pragmatic and willing to innovate than, say, Britain’s Home Counties conservatism, Australian conservatism was dispositional rather than traditionalist – as a byproduct of urban, aspirational, middle-class Australia, generally inspired by the hope of improvement, it had no difficulty accommodating an uninterest in the past. The attachment to steady improvement was the important thing.
Robert Menzies’ pitch in his justly famous “Forgotten People” broadcast in 1942 captures this spirit perhaps better than any other significant Australian political testament. In it Menzies speaks directly to the attachment to the home and the family as the cornerstone of the “real life of the nation … in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who … see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race”.
Accompanying that emphasis on home and family is a classically conservative sense of continuity.
“It’s only when we realise that we are a part of a great procession,” Menzies declared in laying the foundation stone of the National Library of Australia two months after he retired in March 1966, “that we’re not just here today and gone tomorrow, that we draw strength from the past and we may transmit some strength to the future.”
Across several decades of political leadership Menzies’ speeches pulsed with phrases that exemplified this disposition. His governments have been “sensible and honest”. He speaks “in realistic terms”, sustained “by an unshakeable belief in the good sense and honesty of our people”.
Former PM Robert Menzies is pictured in 1941. Picture: Herald Sun
Yet this stress on continuity in Menzies’ rhetoric complemented rather than contradicted a commitment to what he referred to as “solid progress”. This country was a settler society built by successive waves of migrants; since its earliest days, its life had been saturated with optimism: Australia, said Menzies, was “our young and vigorous land”, still embarking on its glad, confident morning.
It was the constant undercurrent of hope and aspiration that gave Menzies’ conservatism its distinctive flavour, making it more explicitly geared to the confident expectation of future possibility than its European or American counterparts.
And it was precisely because it was so oriented to progress that the term conservative was generally avoided by the movement he forged, even as a conservative disposition bubbled along beneath its immediate surface, and was mirrored in electoral preferences of voters – not simply by voting right of centre but by giving governments a second term even if their first had been somewhat disappointing, and by regularly knocking back proposed constitutional changes.
However, those two elements – continuity and change – were uneasy bedfellows: continuity could, and eventually did, act as an obstacle to indispensable change.
The institutionalisation of conflict through entities such as the arbitration tribunals and the Tariff Board had, for decades, moderated conflict – but only at the price of inefficiencies that became ever more unsustainable as the world economy globalised in the 1970s and 80s. At that point, Australian conservatism entered into a prolonged crisis, torn between the deeply embedded value of caution and the equally strong value of adaptation.
It was easy to repeat Edmund Burke’s axiom that “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation”; but effecting sweeping change without destroying the party’s unity was of an entirely different order of difficulty.
Nothing more clearly highlighted the dilemma than Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback – a call to arms that was as close as the movement ever came to a truly Thatcherite policy revolution. Its failure had many causes but one was the complete absence of the sense of continuity and stability that has always been dear to the Australian middle class.
It lacked, too, the high Gladstonian moral clarity that Margaret Thatcher articulated in her heroic campaign to reverse Britain’s slide to socialised mediocrity. In fact, Thatcher’s argument for the moral basis of capitalism had far more in common with Menzies’ creed of “lifters not leaners” than with Hewson’s “economic rationalism”.
Former British PM Margaret Thatcher2001. Picture: AP
What was needed was a new synthesis. As Menzies had, John Howard, the first Liberal leader to actively identify himself as a conservative, provided it.
Nigel Lawson, who served as the Thatcher government’s most consequential chancellor of the exchequer, once commented that whereas “Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the (Conservative) party, Alec Home tolerated it, and Ted Heath loathed it, Margaret (Thatcher) genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it.” Exactly the same could be said about Howard: his scrupulous respect for his party’s traditional ethos helped him succeed for as long as he did.
That is not to deny that Howard at times pursued dramatic change – a GST, industrial relations reform, gun ownership – but the approach was rarely radical in style, much less revolutionary in tone. It is telling that the one reform that failed was Work Choices, which went furthest in dismantling existing institutions. And it is telling, too, that subsequent Coalition governments tinkered with the arrangements Labor put in its place rather than seeking their wholesale removal.
Now the synthesis Howard forged between conservation and change is yet again under extreme stress. So, too, are its electoral foundations, as the bases of politics undergo a profound transformation.
Because of Australian conservatism’s pragmatic nature, marshalling broad alliances against those forces and movements that endanger the foundations of the polity has always been its signature approach. Finding some common ground among its constituents, each of those alliances combined the shared opposition to an adversary with a positive program based on overlapping, if not entirely shared, values. The way Liberals, free-traders and protectionists alike rallied alongside Conservatives when threatened by a new common enemy, the ALP in the early 20th century, is a classic example.
John Howard pictured in 1996 after claiming victory for the Coalition. Picture: Michael Jones
However, the dominant force in contemporary politics is fragmentation: the centrifugal pressures that make coalitions hard to assemble but easy to destroy have become ever stronger as social media and identity politics shatter politics’ traditional alignments.
The centre-right is far from being immune from those tendencies, as the emergence of the teals shows. And they are compounded by the pressures of Trumpian populism, which is as hostile to the compromises coalition-building entails as it is to inherited institutions. The only coalitions Trumpism can forge are those that aggregate resentments: against the arrogance of the “progressives”, the abuses of power that occurred during the pandemic, the perception that common values are denigrated and despised.
To use a phrase American constitutional lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt coined for the left, Trumpism’s dominant mode of action is “common-enemy politics”, with the adversary being the principal factor unifying its disparate parts. There are no shared values, nor any shared aspirations; the glue comes from shared hatreds.
But intransigent oppositionalism is no basis for a viable politics. Regardless of what Trump’s Australian acolytes believe, its transposition to this country would make for a future of repeated failure.
Rather, for a broader alliance to be possible again, a new synthesis is needed. Australia’s two greatest prime ministers, Menzies and Howard, suggest the way. Both exemplified a social conservatism that drew from the distinctively Australian emphasis on the conservative temperament over and above distinctive philosophical creed. Both forged a synthesis that combined an attachment to liberal principles with a commitment to large-scale changes needed to underwrite prolonged prosperity and progress.
Now, after the rout of last weekend’s election, that synthesis desperately needs to be redefined.
In the end, politics is about argument and arguments are about ideas. When politics seems so entirely bereft of them, Australian conservatives have no choice but to think again.
Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.
Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud
B Dylan, Shelter from the Storm
It is fifty years since the end of the 21 yearlong Vietnam War, the great war of my generation. Our friends Marianne Harris, partner of acclaimed photographer the late Tim Page and photo-journalist Ben Bohane have been in Cambodia and Vietnam along with many photographers and journalists who covered the conflict on all sides of the lines.
In reality, the conflict in Indochina began in 1946 when British forces handed the former French colony back to France, and the nationalist Viet Minh forced the French to surrender and withdraw in 1954. The Americans call it the Vietnam War but to the Vietnamese, it is The American War because it was the USA that came, saw and failed to conquer. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million, of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable. An account of the war from Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey is republished after the following poem.
On this anniversary, one which has been almost ignored in mainstream media, we remember all those lives lost, and the devastation inflicted on countries that were once “faraway places with strange sounding names”, as the old song goes.
A silent wall shouting for peace
The anniversary reminded me of an almost forgotten book that was published in the US back in mid ‘eighties as one of an excellent series entitled “A Day In The Life of … “ which chronicled in pictures the lives of ordinary people in major cities around the world. Uniquely, one of these was dedicated exclusively a monument, The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC – two black granite walls completed in 1982 engraved with the names of American service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the war. The book is poignant gallery of images and messages left at the memorial by loved ones and comrades, the emotional debris of that almost forgotten war that although long gone, reaches out through history with an admonishing finger: “Shadows in search of a name for victims we’ve left far behind”.
One of many anonymous notes left on the memorial pierced my heart and inspired the following poem and song:
“I shut my eyes and wouldn’t listen when they came with morning and told me that you had slipped away. I closed my mind against my thoughts, not wanting t believe you’d gone. Not dragged off, captured in the bright day’s savage madness, not overwhelmed by the dark blind angers of night, but here within the sight and sound and smell of the sea, and salty spray on gentle winds so near”.
When I read it, I thought immediately of the 19th century English poet Matthew Arnold’s On Dover Beach: “We are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night”.
Shadows in Search of a Name
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame,
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
And all is not quite as it seems
In the dark corridors of his dreams,
In the silence of his senses,
The violence of his mind.
Storms that thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Winds that howl out in pain,
Visions from a great height.
Time for the turmoil to cease,
A silent wall shouting for peace –
From the bright day’s savage madness,
Blind angers of night
You are the ice in my veins,
You are the age in my bones.
You are the flames in my heart
Raging out of control.
You are the blood on my hands,
You are the lies on my tongue.
You are the cries in my ears
And the eyes of my soul.
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame.
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
A ship is waiting for us at the dock America has trouble to be stopped We must stop Communism in that land Or freedom will start slipping through our hands. I hope and pray someday the world will learn That fires we don’t put out, will bigger burn We must save freedom now, at any cost Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Johnny Wright, Hello Vietnam
The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire.
in his masterful documentary, The Vietnam War, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns narrator intoned: “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American Presidents, belonging to both political parties”.
America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.
As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.
Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform the it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.
But, back to Vietnam …
As historian Per Yule noted in The Long Shadow: Australia’s Vietnam Veterans Since The War, the Vietnam War was based on an assortment of unproven assumptions and half truths. It wrongly identified a dictatorship as a democracy a civil war as an international conflict. Our armed forces were sent to fight in support of a corrupt military regime which received solid support only from the catholic minority and the small landowning class. Few willingly fought for the regime.
Many in the US military reckoned that if given a free hand by the administration of President Johnson, they could have prevailed against North Vietnam – by destroying it utterly with overwhelming firepower. But the US had backed the wrong side and no amount of support could make the South Vietnamese fight and die hard enough for their corrupt, incompetent, puppet government. We hear a similar rationale with regard to the the Afghan army’s rapid collapse and the US’ shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan
The US wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese wanted to convince the American people that the cost in blood and treasure was too high. Both sides continued to believe that they could improve their positions through escalation and both continued to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict. And so we were left with an almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the enemy to the negotiating table when that enemy shows no willingness to negotiate under duress. The bombing campaign, code name Rolling Thunder, was described by a commentator in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War as “the dumbest campaign ever designed by a human being”.
The many names for a war lost before it began
All we need is a little determination; Men, follow me, I’ll lead on. We’re waist deep in the big muddy And the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Vietnam has been called the pointless war and the needless war. In a scene in Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola’s recut of his seventies epic, Having denounced his country’s folly in being surrounded and defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which precipitated the end of French colonial rule and the beginning of US involvement in Indochina, expatriate patriarch Hubert de Marais declares to his American guests: “You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history”.
It was certainly a costly war. The butchers bill was horrendous. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million.of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable.
As for the American forces, it most certainly “the poor man’s war” – most who were perished or were maimed were not rich folks, and a disproportionate number were black. Amd the more who died, the more were sent to replace them. And like here in Australia, thecdraft caught mainly the poor and unconnected. Even as soldiers started going home, actual or attempted murder by enlisted men of their superiors increased alarmingly.
As to the monetary cost: an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. But that is doubtlessly an understatement – what about the rebuilding, the rehabilitation, the recompense? Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in WW2. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate VietCong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of frostbite and 500,000 acres of farmland.
It has been called “the helicopter war” because choppers were the primary mode of ground combat and transport, and also “the television war – it’s triumphs (few) and tragedies (many) were beamed Into American homes nightly, fuelling the public’s confusion and unease about this Asian war, and eventually, the anger that forced the US government to eventually withdraw over half a million soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and abandoning South Vietnam’s puppet government, its demoralised and abandoned army, and its unfortunate, battered and bloodied people to the tender mercies of the hardline and heartless ideologues in Hanoi.
Vietnam was also, notoriously, a pharmaceutical war. In its final year’s, as raw and reluctant draftees made up an increasing proportion of the US forces, indiscipline and substance abuse transformed, in the words of one professional soldier, an officer, a fine army into a rotten one. Alcohol, marijuana, acid, coke, heroin, and a cornucopia of pills were freely available on base, on leave in Saigon, and often, in the field, and many soldiers actually made it a business. The press too were sucked into the machinery.
And, it was a promiscuous war. So far away from home and loved ones, like warriors in all wars since time immoral, US solders took comfort and solace where they could find it. Historians, memoirists, veterans of both the French and American wars in Indochina write and talk of the beauty of the Vietnamese women. Economic deprivation and social dislocation create a flesh market supplying lonely, frightened strangers in a strange land.
It was chemical warfare – not the mustard gas of older wars, and the Zyklon B of the Nazi death camps, nor the recent wars in the Middle East, in the first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, and in Syria – but the broad-acre use of chemical defoliants designed to deny the enemy of jungle and forest concealment that left behind a bitter harvest, a legacy of disease, deformity and death that ricochets to this day.
And, in the United States, it was a war that divided a nation. The protest movement emerged during 1965. It grew and grew, and by the Moratorium of October 1969, it became the largest outpouring of public dissent in American history. The moratorium movement was massive and unprecedented – and peaceful. Nationwide, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across the US were marching. The children of politicians and officials and soldiers were also marching. They were marching not about winning or losing the war but demanding an end to the war.
It was a journalists war too, and the photographers’ War. The military had a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the press that would seem profligate and foolhardy in today’s tightly managed and manipulated combat media. Journalists and photographers would be permitted and indeed invited along on patrols and sweeps, carrier landings, on helicopter “dust offs” (a euphemism for evacuating the wounded and the dead), and the controversial “search and destroy” operations that destroyed so many fields, villages and lives. Needless to say, the coopted fourth estate were often in harm’s way. They were taught how to use weapons and often actually did use them in self defence and, sometimes in anger. And like the officers and men with whom they worked, many were wounded and slain. More than two hundred would die covering the fighting in South East Asia.
And English photojournalist Tim Page, who ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’, washed up in the war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper.
The Vietnam War’s echoes reverberate to this day. In the United States, it has taken more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, inevitably, belong to those who suffered most. Author and Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War wrote:
“I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses – a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”
The scars on Vietnam itself were much deeper and long lasting – on its politics, still a authoritarian communist regime; its people – millions died, were wounded or suffered long term psychological and genetic damage; and its environment – the effects of broad-acre defoliants and the damage and debris of war.
British archaeologist, academic and historian David Breeze has argued that “the study of history best proceeds through controversy”, suggesting that scholarly debate and differing interpretations of historical events are vital for a deeper understanding of the past, that that confronting alternative perspectives, reinterpreting evidence, and engaging in critical analysis can lead to more nuanced and accurate historical narrative.
This is particularly relevant with regard to the study of the historical and contemporary relationship between Australia and its indigenous minority.
I’ve written often about the indigenous history of our country. The following passage from my piece on Australia’s The Frontier Warsencapsulates my perspective:
”There is a darkness at the heart of democracy in the new world “settler colonial” countries like Australia and New Zealand, America and Canada that we struggle to come to terms with. For almost all of our history, we’ve confronted the gulf between the ideal of political equality and the reality of indigenous dispossession and exclusion. To a greater or lesser extent, with greater or lesser success, we’ve laboured to close the gap. It’s a slow train coming, and in Australia in these divisive days, it doesn’t take much to reignite our “history wars” as we negotiate competing narratives and debate the “black armband” and “white blindfold” versions of our national story”.
The historical truth, elusive and subjective, lies in the wide no man’s land between them – a view subscribed to by economist and commentator Henry Ergas in an informative tribute to the role of the recently deceased historian Keneth Wind
shuttle in The Australian. Ergas maps the topography of the history wars, marking out the battle lines between the so-called “revisionist” historians who are said to see no good in our history as it related to indigenous Australians and those, often on the conservative side of Australian politics, who ostensibly see no evil.
He begins by citing the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke who held that the historian’s highest calling was to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”. To achieve that task, Ranke had observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception. Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Reading Ergas’s tribute, I was reminded of what George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the infamously funny Flashman diaries, wrote in his wartime memoir Quartered Safe Out Here:
“You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it. You may not like what you see, but do not on that account fall into the error of trying to adjust it to suit your own vision of what it ought to have been.”
Below are pieces published in In That Howling Infinite in regard to Australian history as it these relate to Indigenous Australians:
Keith Windschuttle and the continuing battle for history
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 18 April 2025
Historian Keith Windschuttle in Perth, 2004.Ross Swanborough
With the death last week of Keith Windschuttle Australia lost a scholar driven by the duty Leopold von Ranke famously defined as the historian’s highest calling: to write about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” – “as it had really been”.
To achieve that task, Ranke observed, three qualities were indispensable – common sense, courage and honesty: the first, to grasp things at all; the second, to not become frightened at what one sees; the third, to avoid the temptations of self-deception.
Most of all, however, the historian needed to recognise that “Every epoch is equally close to God”, equally infused by grandeur and equally scarred by tragedy. It is not “the office of judging the past, or of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” that has been assigned to historians; it is that of carefully reconstructing, rationally analysing and dispassionately presenting the past in all of its remoteness and complexity.
Never was that task harder than in this country’s “history wars”. Triggered, in the self-congratulatory words of the ANU’s Tom Griffiths, by a “concerted scholarly quest to dismantle the Great Australian Silence” – a silence that had “hardened into denialism … denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil” – the revisionist historians’ portrayal of Australia’s history as a never-ending tale of murderous dispossession, cultural decimation and environmental destruction inevitably took its toll on accuracy and objectivity.
There was, in the revisionists’ onslaught, little room for the Rankean virtues, first and foremost that of meticulous attention to the documentary records. It was therefore unsurprising that The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s relentless focus on those records thrust Windschuttle into the firing line.
Historians Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds.
Nor was it surprising that he paid a high price for his audacity. As Tim Rowse, one of Australia’s most distinguished scholars of Aboriginal history, noted, “at least one speaker” at a 2001 National Museum of Australia conference on Windschuttle’s work “was patronising towards Windschuttle to a degree that exceeded anything I’ve experienced in academic life”; instead of addressing his arguments, the focus was on comparing Windschuttle to David Irving, thereby placing him “outside the conversations of humanists”.
Yet it would be wrong to suggest Windschuttle’s colossal efforts were ignored. As Rowse, who could hardly be accused of being a reactionary, admitted, Windschuttle’s review of the NSW archival evidence on the Stolen Generations was “compelling”, raising real questions about an episode that has become emblematic of “the heavy-handed and insensitive management of Indigenous Australians”.
Moreover, even the attempts to debunk the Fabrication’s contentions yielded tangible benefits. Windschuttle’s Quadrant articles were “widely derided as politically mischievous”, writes Mark Finnane, a legal historian whose work on the interactions between Indigenous Australians and the law has reshaped the field; but their longer-term impact “has been to accelerate research in local and regional studies”, providing a sounder factual base for broader analyses.
At least partly as a result, there are some outstanding works, including by historians broadly on the left, that are far removed both from the revisionists’ overwhelming Manicheanism and from the flights of fancy of the post-modernists Windschuttle had so effectively denounced in The Killing of History (1994).
For example, Rowse’s White Flour, White Power (1998) – with its conclusion that “‘assimilation’ was in some respects a constructive policy era, not only a destructive onslaught on Indigenous ways of life” – remains an exceptionally fine book, and several of his more recent essays, such as the one on the “protection” policy’s role in reversing the decline in the Indigenous population, directly challenge the revisionists’ core assumptions.
Equally, Finnane’s Indigenous Crime and Settler Law (2012), co-authored with Heather Douglas, provides a balanced account of the repeated efforts the colonial authorities made – albeit with only mixed success – to deal sensitively and humanely with the gap between tribal custom and English law.
Noting that putting “the colonial encounter in polarised terms” as a clash between black and white “is an abstraction from a complex and constantly shifting reality”, Finnane and Douglas highlight the need to recognise that “settlers were divided – convicts, free immigrants, military, governors”, as were “Indigenous peoples – jealous of their own country, accustomed in many places to constant warring, seeking advantage of alliances with settlers to advance or protect their own interests”.
And Andrew Fitzmaurice’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (2014) is a deeply researched corrective to simple-minded claims (including, unfortunately, by the High Court) about the relevance of “terra nullius” to Britain’s assertion of sovereignty.
But despite those efforts, the sloppiness continues, as even a cursory glance at the ever-expanding literature on the Native Mounted Police shows.
For example, the military historian Peter Stanley – who has been influential in the Australian War Memorial’s portrayal of the “frontier wars” – has recently claimed that “the Native Police were Australia’s own Einsatzgruppen”, the Nazi murderers who machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of Jews that they had herded on to the edge of pits, stripped naked and beaten to within an inch of their lives. That Stanley’s claim is abhorrent for minimising the horrors of the Holocaust should not need to be said; that it is grotesque for its obvious historical inaccuracy ought to be apparent to even the least informed reader.
Striking too are the contentions of Queensland historian Raymond Evans. The mounted police, Evans claimed in 2010, were responsible for 24,000 deaths. But since then, Evans, in work with Robert Orsted-Jensen, has nearly doubled that estimate to 41,040, allegedly on the basis of a methodology that is “conservative” and “cautious”.
Peter Stanley
Keith Windschuttle
In an attempt to justify relying on highly selective samples and superficial extrapolations, Orsted-Jensen has claimed that there was a “a very systematic, deliberate and comprehensive destruction of virtually all sensitive flies stored in Queensland’s Police Department” – an accusation that has become one of the revisionist historians most widely repeated tropes.
However, a devastating review of Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s work by Finnane and Jonathan Richards not only points to the wealth of documentary material on which Evans and Orsted-Jensen could have drawn; it also concludes that any gaps in the records are more likely “an accumulated outcome of administrative culling, bureaucratic indifference, and misadventure” than of systematic destruction.
In fact, “rather than a history of cover-up, the entire administration of the Native Police from as early as 1861 on illustrates the concern of governing elites with the risk of unwarranted killing”.
As for Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates of casualties, Finnane and Richards show that they are “highly subjective … and correspondingly unreliable”, while “the picture (Evans and Orsted-Jensen) paint of massive governmental indifference to or complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of Aboriginal deaths does not stand up to scrutiny”.
But if questionable assertions remain common in the professional literature, they absolutely pervade the public commentary. Predictably, the ABC publicised Evans and Orsted-Jensen’s estimates; no less predictably, it has done nothing to correct the record. And if the academic historians are willing to rebut inaccuracies in scholarly publications, they are far more reluctant to do so when that involves intervening in the public debate.
That was apparent in the wake of Keryn Walshe and Peter Sutton’s Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? (2021), which vividly exposed the flaws of fact and analysis in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. The reviews in scholarly journals, such as that by Peter Veth in Australian Archaeology (2021), did not mince their words about Pascoe’s egregious errors; but more often than not, the media commentary by academic historians was cautiously circumspect.
There were, for sure, attacks on Walshe and Sutton that merely reproduced the left’s deeply engrained orthodoxy. To take but one example, Heidi Norman from UTS accused Walshe and Sutton of “wanting to strip the debate of contemporary meaning” by deploying a neo-colonial framework in which “Western definitions and labels are supreme”.
However, the academics’ dominant tone was mealy-mouthed, conceding that Pascoe had made mistakes but arguing that those mistakes counted less than Dark Emu’s merits in advancing reconciliation.
Peter Sutton
James Boyce
Thus, reviewing Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? in The Guardian, Sydney University’s Mark McKenna carefully put the word ‘fact’ in scare quotes, as if there was some doubt as to its meaning; while “at face value, this is a dispute about ‘facts’”, he wrote, the dry-as-dust issues of evidence and verisimilitude are far less important than “Pascoe’s ability to capture and move audiences desperate to hear his stories of Aboriginal ‘achievement’”.
In exactly the same way, the Tasmanian historian James Boyce recognised shortcomings in Pascoe’s work but nonetheless hailed it as a “significant cultural achievement”, whose “lifegiving” story “speaks to people for whom Aboriginal Australia remains a foreign country but want this to change”.
And Henry Reynolds, writing in Meanjin, essentially pooh-poohed the criticisms, arguing that Pascoe’s faux pas was primarily one of terminology: had Pascoe “declared that the First Nations peoples were not ‘just’ hunters and gatherers but graziers rather than farmers”, the problems with his account would have been largely overcome.
The undertone, in those comments, was clear: that it would be unfair to disabuse Pascoe’s adoring white fans, whose intentions were as pure as their thoughts were confused. Keeping faith with those intentions might involve distorting the truth; but the lie, like those Plato advocates in The Republic, would be a noble one, which ruling elites tell “in order to benefit the polis” by convincing citizens that “it is not pious to quarrel”.
Bruce Pascoe
Ironically, in their effort not to discomfort the masses, the revisionists had enveloped themselves in a Great Australian Silence of their own.
Yet the harm those deliberate distortions of the historical record cause is not just to truthfulness; it is to our ability to live with the past, rather than to live in the past. For so long as we cannot accurately and dispassionately view this country’s history, we will lack the foundations needed to better shape its future.
And it is not much comfort to know that when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful readings of the world, as they so tragically have in everything to do with Indigenous history and policy, reality has a nasty habit of biting back.
In the end, Nietzsche was right: the basic question societies, no less than individuals, must face, is “How much truth can we endure? Error is not blindness; it is cowardice.” Exposing cowardice takes courage. Now, with Keith Windschuttle gone, that duty must fall to others.
If I ruled the world
Every day would be the first day of Spring
Every heart would have a new song to sing
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring
If I ruled the world
Every man would be as free as a bird
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel
On his inauguration on January 20 2025, US President Donald Trump declared to the American people, “My fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now.”
Pundits and partisans right across the political spectrum, both at home and overseas, agree that Donald John Trump’s second presidential term is probably the most consequential since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is perhaps the only thing that they can agree on.
After 100 days in office, he is in command, testing the limits of executive power, resetting political and cultural perceptions and expectations, and reframing America’s role in the worked. But it would seem to many that having arguably declared war on America and the world, he is veering out of control.
There is almost no part of American society which has not felt the blizzard of change from the day he was sworn in. In a stand-over style that is more mob boss than head of state, he has forged a new American imperialism to project what he perceives as US interests, secure strategic assets and rebuild American economic self-sufficiency. The global trading system that has been in place for 75 years has been crippled, if not destroyed, and economists and stock markets surmise that the US economy is on the verge of crashing. America is no longer the leader of the free world because the world is no longer following America, but rather, is taking evasive action. Trump has united the people of most countries around the world around their political leadership, and yet he has not united America and Americans.
In a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and former Congressional staffer, wrote a concise overview of Trump’s tumultuous first 100 Days. I have borrowed from it to write the following précis.
Trump is not governing by legislating but by an unprecedented exercise of executive power. He has signed fewer bills into law than any recent modern president while his 100 executive orders have triggered a tidal wave of new policies to change what the government can and cannot do. His political style of is marked by decrees coupled with complete domination of the airwaves for several hours each day, from greeting world leaders in the Oval Office to his televised cabinet meetings. For Trump, it is all streaming, all the time.as he remarked in the prime-time public takedown of the Ukrainian president in the Ovak Office, this it makes for “good television”.
On foreign policy, Trump promised groundbreaking early success on the world stage. But he has to date failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, come close to a nuclear deal with Iran , or settling the dozens of trade wars he launched against his allies. Instead, there are constant reversals in tactics and rhetoric. He has decoupled America from the wider world with ramifications which will be felt for many years, if not decades. He has treated allies like adversaries, withdrawn America from numerous global institutions and treaties, erected daunting tariff barriers on all US trading partners and slashed US foreign aid and the State Department, terminating foreign aid, vaccines and food programme. The cumulative effect has been to gravely weaken America’s ability to wield soft power at a time when China and Russia are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Aided and abetted by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump unleashed Project 2025’s sledgehammer to the bureaucracy with overriding acts of Congress to dismantle agencies and programmes, mass firings, loyalty oaths, and the seizure of databases. And, as he promised on the campaign trail, Trump is exacting vengeance on his enemies. He has called on judges who have ruled against him to be impeached. He has blacklisted law firms that worked with Democrats, or else shook them down for millions of dollars of free work. In a speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said his enemies were “scum”, that the cases brought against him were “bullshit”, that the judges who ruled against him were corrupt, his prosecutors were deranged, and that those who came after him should be imprisoned. In a war against the nation’s most prestigious universities, he is demanding their leftist woke elitism be expunged, or else research dollars and tax-free status will be eliminated. Meanwhile, he continues to target the media as the enemy of the people. The Associated Press has been excluded from presidential events; the Voice of America has been shut down; and Trump has asked the regulator to cancel the broadcast license of CBS whilst moving to defund public media’s NPR and PBS.
The Democrats in Washington meanwhile are adrift and effectively leaderless. With control of the House and the Senate, Trump dominates everything in the capital. The force, speed and scope of his administration’s actions are so intense that the Democrats cannot respond effectively. Its not as if everyone has been taken by surprise. If they had been paying attention, this is exactly what Trump and his team said they would do. It is the scale of this revolution that has put everyone into a spin. It is a time of everything happening everywhere all at once – in accordance with the MAGA mantra of “move fast and break things”.
But, say optimists, the pushback is coming. Every weekend, people are flooding the streets in cities across the country. That movement is growing. If all that Trump and his administration have let loose comes into full force but does not deliver the American miracle he promised – with recession, inflation, and chaos taking hold across the land – the midterm elections next year could be a turning point. The Democrats are in striking distance of retaking control of Congress. If so, Trump’s power may be checked and his golden age may be stillborn. And yet, nothing about Trump is certain. His approval ratings might now be at a historical low, but he has been wrongly written off many times before.
So, how did it come to this?
As the authors of the long but excellent opinion piece in The Atlantic published below explains, Donald Trump’s Second Coming began four years ago and took meticulous planning.
That’s right, it’s come to this Yes, it’s come to this And wasn’t it a long way down? Wasn’t it a strange way down?
L Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag
Postscript: a bad case of imperial purple …
The story goes that Roman Emperor and stoic “philosopher king” Marcus Aurelius engaged a slave to follow him as he walked around Rome; his only job, whenever his master was praised, was to whisper in his ear, “Remember, you are just a man, you are just a man”. Washington, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some of the more excruciating scenes from the BBC’s iconic sword and sandals series I Claudius.
‘Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington … In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been plainer: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself … The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State) … At a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat congressman Jared Huffman said: “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump”.’
Illustration by Dale Stephanos. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty.
Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:
In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.
Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.
And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporterswho had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)
He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.
“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
EXILE
that trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.
In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.
Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.
Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”
On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.
Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.
Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.
Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.
To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.
He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.
Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)
“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.
“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.
Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.
It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.
Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.
Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”
When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?
he had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.
The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)
To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?
The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.
Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)
The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.
Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.
“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
“BE READY!”
the first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.
Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”
“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”
Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.
Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.
The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.
The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”
Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.
The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.
“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”
The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”
The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”
During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)
The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.
Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”
“IT MADE ME STRONGER”
on friday, may 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.
Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”
“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)
The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”
The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.
“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.
Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.
For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.
(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)
The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.
“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”
During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.
“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.
In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”
THE TRANSITION
people who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.
This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”
On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.
In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”
“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.
Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.
Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.
When his cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.
Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)
They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”
Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)
Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.
“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.
The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.
“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.
SHOCK AND AWE
the start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.
“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.
In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.
He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”
In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.
“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.
Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.
“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”
Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.
One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.
In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.
So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”
Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.
Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”
“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”
for all of trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”
We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”
But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.
Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.
But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.
Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)
The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.
Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.
When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.
“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”
We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”
Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.
We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.
As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”
Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.
That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.
When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.
The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”
We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)
“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”
In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”
“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”
Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.
We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”
Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”
In That Howling Infinite 