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Leaders | Project 1897

America has an imperial presidency

And in Donald Trump, an imperialist president for the first time in over a century

Jan 23rd 2025

WHAT WILL Donald Trump do next? A decade after he became the Republican front-runner, it is still the urgent question. In a distracted era Mr Trump has an unmatched genius for grabbing attention. And for reimagining presidential power. His second inauguration took place in the Capitol’s Rotunda, the same spot where four years earlier his supporters had punched police officers in the face. The power he used to pardon the Capitol rioters on January 20th was originally designed to bring the nation together: to pardon political opponents, not the president’s supporters (or members of the outgoing president’s family). But that was the convention, not the law, and with Mr Trump in power, conventions are over.

Historians talk about the long 19th century ending in 1914. Precisely when the 20th century ended is, in this sense, debatable. But it is over. Mr Trump is still constrained by some of America’s oldest institutions, including federalism and the courts. But he has thrown off many of the recent ones. The governance reforms after Watergate no longer apply. The consensus that America should be a benign superpower, born out of the ashes after 1945, has gone, too. And Mr Trump wants more: to see America unleashed, freed from norms, from political correctness, from the bureaucracy and, in some cases, even from the law. What’s left is something old and new, an ideology from the railroad era mixed with the ambition to plant the flag on Mars.

Out of the 19th century comes the idea that the frontier should always be expanding, including by seizing other countries’ territory. “We’re taking it back,” Mr Trump growled of the Panama Canal, in his inaugural speech. America must be “a growing nation”, he added, one that “increases our wealth, expands our territory”. Although this might reflect a passing enthusiasm, presidents have not talked like that for a century. The only one of his predecessors Mr Trump spent any time on in the speech was that “great president” William McKinley, whose term began in 1897. Mr Trump is not a reader of presidential biographies. He is not about to make bimetallism the issue of the day (though both he and the first lady do now have their own competing currencies). But it was a revealing choice.

McKinley was an imperialist, who added Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico to American territory. McKinley also loved tariffs, at least at first. Before he was president, he pressed Congress to pass a bill to raise them to 50%, a level exceeding even Mr Trump’s (admittedly hazy) plans. He was also backed by the commercial titans of the time: J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller both donated about $8m in today’s money to his campaign.

The new “golden age” Mr Trump envisions thus resembles the Gilded Age, at least superficially. Mr Trump wants to be as unencumbered by 20th-century norms as McKinley was. But the 21st-century presidency is much more powerful. Project 1897 is combined with Project 2025.

McKinley governed when the federal government had 150,000 employees, many fewer than the new Department of Government Efficiency could ever dream of. By contrast Mr Trump’s executive branch directly employs 4.3m people, including 1.3m men and women in uniform. The president has at his disposal the mightiest military force ever assembled. As a share of GDP, the federal government spends nine times more than it did in the 1890s. In order to fight two world wars and end racial segregation in the 20th century, the executive branch accumulated more and more power. Writing about this in the 1970s, Arthur Schlesinger described this presidency as “imperial”. It was meant as a slur: the modern America didn’t do empire. Yet now it has an imperial president who spies enemies to conquer not only abroad, but at home, too.

Mr Trump means to turn the presidency’s immense power inward as well as outward, to dominate America as no other president has since the second world war. Politics is in his favour. As America has become more partisan, passing laws in Congress has become harder. The new president showed in his first term that, when Congress is evenly divided, the threat of impeachment no longer works as a practical restraint.

This long power shift away from Congress has left the court and the executive in charge. Key rules on abortion, climate change, affirmative action, campaign finance and free speech have been set by the president or the justices. It was the Supreme Court which decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts which, say, means that any meme coins launched by a president before he takes office won’t trouble the emoluments clause.

That sets up a clash between Mr Trump and his felt-tip pens on one hand and the judges and their gavels on the other. As the new administration tests how far it can stretch the law—deploying the army against “invading” immigrants, or turning the Justice Department against Mr Trump’s foes—court battles are inevitable. Mr Trump appears to relish the prospect. His executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship is flagrantly unconstitutional and so likely to be struck down. But if it is, Mr Trump will claim that the robe-wearing elites are thwarting the will of the people who elected him. His supporters will rally round—and he will pick another fight.

Today’s McKinley in a state of Denali

Mr Trump is not unusual in wanting to extend the power of the executive—many ambitious (and some great) presidents have done so. Neither is he sure to win. The courts are not the only obstacle. Try as he might to disrupt and intimidate the bureaucracy, it is supremely good at delay. States and cities run by Democrats will resist him. He will have to contend with divisions in his team, with his own character, and with reality.

Mr Trump has proved adept at tearing down the old order, but it is unclear what will replace it. The hope is that he will keep his vows to make America’s government more efficient, its economy more vibrant and its borders secure. But a far worse outcome is also plausible. Either way, America’s remaining checks and balances are about to be tested.■

United States | Silk ties

Ross Ulbricht, pardoned by Donald Trump, was a pioneer of crypto-crime

His dark website, the Silk Road, was to crime what Napster was to music

Promises keptPhotograph: Free Ross Ulbricht

Jan 23rd 2025|CHICAGO

There cannot be many international crime leaders inspired by “The Princess Bride”, a cult children’s fantasy movie released in 1987. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road, the very first dark-web drug-trading network, certainly was. When users signed up for the website, which went live in 2011, they were greeted by a message from the founder, “Dread Pirate Roberts”, the hero of the film, explaining how the site worked. Shielded by Tor, which hides website servers, and using bitcoin to make payments, users could order all manner of goods and services without revealing personal information.

The combination of the two technologies, Tor and cryptocurrency, allowed the creation of something like an Amazon Marketplace, only for illegal drugs. Users could anonymously order parcels to their homes, without ever having to encounter a scary drug-dealer in person. Dread Pirate Roberts was its delightful outlaw organiser. Until, of course, in 2013 the Silk Road was shut down by FBI agents and Mr Ulbricht, then 29 years old, was arrested in the science-fiction section of a San Francisco public library. In 2015, after a four-week trial, he was convicted of various offences and sentenced to life in federal prison. And that is where he sat until January 21st, when Donald Trump pardoned him.

“The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponisation of government against me,” wrote Mr Trump on his social-media platform, Truth Social. The president, who has mused about executing drug-traffickers, said that two life sentences were a “ridiculous” punishment. He was also honest about his reason for the pardon. It was, he said, in honour of America’s libertarian movement, “which supported me so strongly”.

The pardon exemplifies Mr Trump’s brand of transactional politics. He originally promised to commute Mr Ulbricht’s sentence at the Libertarian Party’s national convention last May. In exchange, many of the party’s supporters voted tactically for Mr Trump over their own candidate in November. Promises made, promises kept. And yet the way in which Mr Ulbricht’s cause was taken up by libertarian voters is also revealing. As Dread Pirate Roberts, he represented a type of internet anarchism that has, with the rise of cryptocurrency, grown hugely influential.

Mr Ulbricht was caught because of a stupid mistake—he posted his own email address using an account he had used to promote the Silk Road. And yet in the case against him, prosecutors suggested he was also a violent criminal who had paid a hitman to take out an informer. What they did not reveal was that the supposed hitman was in fact a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Carl Mark Force IV, who was using his knowledge of the case to extort bitcoin from Mr Ulbricht. The informer and his murder were fake. Mr Force and another agent, Shaun Bridges, later pleaded guilty to corruption offences.

Mr Ulbricht’s supporters use this to argue that their man was unfairly punished. According to a commentary posted on the “Free Ross” website, which operates with the support of his family, Mr Ulbricht “is a peaceful first-time offender”. Or as Angela McArdle, the chairwoman of the Libertarian National Committee, put it after his release, Mr Ulbricht was a “political prisoner”, and “one of our own”. The Silk Road, she argued, was a libertarian project, all about “economic independence”.

That is a stretch. When Mr Ulbricht was arrested, the government seized 144,000 bitcoin he had accumulated in commission on drug trades, then worth around $30m (and rather more now). He may not have killed anyone, but Mr Ulbricht was arguably the first serious cryptocurrency criminal. The Silk Road was to organised crime a little like what Napster was to the music industry. Had he not been caught, Mr Ulbricht would plausibly be a billionaire by now.

Nowadays, not only are dark-web markets still thriving, but bitcoin is also used as a means of money-laundering for more offline drug-dealing. Ransomware, a type of extortion dominated by Russian crime groups, would be impossible without it. “Cryptocurrency is foundational to modern cybercrime,” says Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank. In “The Princess Bride”, Dread Pirate Roberts is revealed to be more than one man. The moniker shifts from one pirate to another. Mr Ulbricht is free again. But he is no longer Dread Pirate Roberts; now they are everywhere. ■

United States | Lexington

America really could enter a golden age

Donald Trump would need to build on its strengths, and subdue his own weaknesses

Illustration: David Simonds

Jan 21st 2025

Maybe you are in the habit of applying a hefty discount to claims by Donald Trump; no one could blame you. But he really does have the chance to lead America into the golden age he proclaimed in his second inaugural address. Historic circumstances, political dynamics and his own audacity could also enable him to achieve the legacy he wants as “a peacemaker and a unifier”. His party has fallen into lockstep; his adversaries at home are confounded and enervated, and America’s opponents abroad are preoccupied with their own troubles. Mr Trump has battled for ten years against anyone he perceives to have crossed him. His most formidable adversary still standing is probably himself.

As he assumes office again, Mr Trump has embarked on a marketing offensive, a familiar routine, albeit this time with a twist: rather than having to persuade people something is grander than it is—that the Trump Tower in Manhattan has 68 floors rather than 58—he has to assign himself credit for things that are truthfully better than Americans may yet realise. America’s economy is the envy of the world. America is already exporting record amounts of gas and oil, and its biggest obstacle to pumping more is global demand. But Mr Trump’s declaration in his inaugural address of a “national energy emergency” may help him vault to the head of the kind of parade celebrating American glory that poor President Joe Biden lacked the wherewithal to summon.

Similar gamesmanship explains Mr Trump’s inaugural commitment that Americans would now “be able to buy the car of your choice”, which was equally true under Mr Biden (and equally untrue for those who chose a Ferrari but could not afford one), and his pledge to use troops to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country” at the southern border, where arrests for illegal crossings are below the level when Mr Trump left office.

Yet Mr Trump’s initial executive orders are meant to do more than gild the lily. In some cases they call for drastic action, particularly on immigration. As with Mr Trump’s promises of tariffs and his exhumation of “manifest destiny”, no one knows how far he may go with his deportation initiative. But there is also a bigger, more hopeful possibility: could his showy crackdown be part of a grand plan for the golden age?

In Mr Trump’s first term some of his aides saw the potential of linking enhanced border security to broader reform of America’s immigration system. For all his harsh oratory about immigrants, Mr Trump has sometimes sounded sympathetic, particularly about people brought as children. Last October, he told the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal he had a practical reason for his tough talk about illegal immigration: “The nicer I become, the more people that come over illegally.” (The Biden administration learned that lesson to its sorrow.) But, Mr Trump said, “We have a lot of good people in this country, and we have to do something about it.” In general, said Mr Trump, who is married to an immigrant, and not for the first time, “I want a lot of people to come in, but I want them to come in legally.”

Mr Trump tries to win over any room he walks into, and that may explain his comments to the Journal’s editors. But he may also recognise that he has amassed more credibility with immigration hardliners than any president in memory, and thus has an opening to achieve what his recent predecessors could not. Comprehensive immigration reform has eluded presidents since 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed into law heightened border security along with an amnesty for almost 3m people in America illegally.

Other grand, bipartisan bargains are possible for Mr Trump. He has not displayed interest in the kind of far-reaching tax reform that Reagan achieved, but in his first term he showed a flash of ambition for the sort of gun-safety legislation that polls show a majority of Americans want. “It’s not going to be talk like it has been in the past,” he told grieving parents and students after a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 people at a Florida high school in 2018. “It’s been going on too long, too many instances, and we’re going to get it done.” He scolded Republican lawmakers for being “scared” of the National Rifle Association (but then, after talking to NRA officials himself, backed off).

Such deals at home would realise Mr Trump’s vision of being a unifier. His opportunities to prove himself a peacemaker, extending America’s golden aura beyond its shores, await not in Panama but in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where war may have wearied America’s allies but has surely weakened its adversaries, Russia and Iran. The test for Mr Trump is whether he can insist on fair deals for Ukraine, and for the Palestinians.

With malice toward some

From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Reagan, presidents who accomplished great things appear more as unifiers in the eyes of history than they did in those of their contemporaries. They were all dividers, too. They were also subjected to vicious criticism and even violent attack.

But Mr Trump has yet even to hint at the grandeur of spirit that those presidents brought to the job. The petty partisanship of his inaugural address, along with his pardons of even violent January 6th convicts, bodes poorly for the chances that he will ever overcome the weaknesses likely to cast a shadow over what could be a golden age: self-pity, a flickering attention span, a vulnerability to flattery and a reverence for strongmen. “Trump’s sense of aggrievement reinforced his penchant for seeking affirmation from his most loyal supporters rather than broadening his base of support,” General H.R. McMaster concludes in “At War With Ourselves”, his memoir about his time as Mr Trump’s national security adviser during the first term. “Trump’s indiscipline made him the antagonist in his own story.” And in America’s. ■

The Americas | The last round

Can Brazil’s left survive without Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva?

Brazil’s current president, a titan of the Latin American left, has no apparent heirs

Photograph: Ricardo Stuckert

Jan 23rd 2025|São Paolo

Since leaving hospital in December, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula (pictured), has cut a smart figure. Brazil’s president has taken to wearing a Panama hat to hide deep scars from two emergency brain surgeries. They were carried out to halt bleeding in his brain that followed slipping in the bathroom and banging his head. Lula, who is 79, has been in good spirits. He recently joked that he could live until 120. His Workers’ Party (PT) insists that he will run again in Brazil’s next presidential election, in 2026.

There is less certainty behind the scenes. On January 20th O Globo, a national newspaper, reported that Lula had surprised his cabinet by telling them that he would not run again unless he is in good health. The Workers’ Party has been thrown into a frenzy. He is the party’s only popular figure. Its base has shrunk as the Brazil in which it was forged has changed. Once an industrial powerhouse built upon a unionised, largely Catholic workforce, today Brazil relies on high-tech agriculture and gig workers who flock to evangelical temples. As Lula’s star fades, the party he built, which dominates Brazil’s left, faces “an identity crisis”, says Celso Rocha de Barros, the author of a book on the PT.

Lula’s remarkable life-story and personal magnetism have helped him connect with voters in ways most politicians can only dream of. Born to a poor family in Brazil’s drought-prone north-east, he eventually moved to São Paulo, where he worked his way up from shoe-shine boy to lathe operator and later leader of the country’s metalworkers’ union. He is the first Brazilian president to be elected to three non-consecutive terms. Barack Obama once called him “the man”.

The man

During his first two terms, from 2003 to 2010, Chinese demand for Brazilian commodities rocketed. The state oil firm, Petrobras, discovered huge reserves of crude oil. This helped to fund an expansive welfare programme and reduce poverty.

Then Lula’s luck ran out. Commodity prices fell, and in 2014 the PT was engulfed in a corruption scandal. Construction firms had been paying kickbacks to Petrobras executives and politicians, including many from the PT. In 2017 it caught up with Lula, and he was sentenced to nine years in jail (his conviction was later overturned). All the while, the PT conducted vicious campaigns against any potential rival to Lula, maintaining his control of the party.

The corruption scandals dented Lula’s reputation, but he remains a giant of Brazilian politics. After his release he regained the presidency from Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, in 2023. Fernando Morais, Lula’s biographer, describes him as “a buffalo”, gruff, disciplined and energetic. He has shrugged off concerns about his age by hinting that he has a lot of sex with his wife, who is 21 years his junior. A poll of over 8,500 Brazilians taken between December 4th and 9th suggested that Lula would beat any rival in 2026. Yet a slim majority of Brazilians also said he should not run again. This year “things are going to get messy” as candidates jockey for Lula’s blessing, says Mr Morais.

Top of the list of potential successors in the PT is Fernando Haddad, the finance minister. Mr Haddad is considered a pragmatist, and a rare government voice that upholds fiscal continence. Yet this has drawn the ire of the PT’s base. His cerebral background—he has degrees in law, economics and philosophy, and wrote a doctoral thesis on “historical materialism”—makes him something of a hard sell. As the PT’s presidential candidate in 2018 he was walloped by Mr Bolsonaro, who rode an anti-establishment wave to power.

The PT could yet plump for a popular minister or governor from the north-east, its stronghold. Both options are fraught. Camilo Santana, the education minister, is gaining ground but still lacks name recognition. Rui Costa, the former governor of the biggest north-eastern state, has had a bumpy ride as Lula’s chief of staff.

That leaves possible heirs to left-wing leadership from outside the PT. For a while Guilherme Boulos, a 42-year-old socialist congressman, seemed to be Lula’s likeliest successor. He rebelled against his well-to-do family at university, moved into a squat, and became the leader of an organisation that helps homeless people. Although he embraced Brazil’s poor, they have not embraced him. In October he ran to be São Paulo’s mayor, and lost by almost 20 points to the dull right-wing incumbent.

Power couple

Tabata Amaral, a congresswoman from São Paulo and a young rising star of the left, does not yet appear to possess sufficient political heft. She also ran in São Paulo’s mayoral race but received just 10% of votes. Her partner, João Campos, the mayor of Recife, the capital of Lula’s home state of Pernambuco, may have a better shot. In October he was re-elected mayor with almost 80% of the vote. Both are 31, and so open to charges of inexperience.

When Lula is not on the ballot the PT is fragile, and right-of-centre parties dominate. The number of municipalities with PT mayors has fallen from 624 in 2012 to 252. Its base has shifted from the south-east, the manufacturing heartland, to the north-east, where many people rely on government aid. That is a liability, since right-wing governments have also embraced handouts. “The PT used to depend on the organised poor,” says Mr Barros. “Now they depend on the disorganised poor.” As Lula prepares to bow out, the movement he built may struggle to outlast him. ■

Asia | Banyan

How to end the nightmare of Asia’s choked roads

The middle classes love cars but hate traffic

Illustration: Lan Truong

Jan 23rd 2025

INCHING THROUGH Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s megalopolis, Banyan recently had a back-seat view of one of Asia’s monstrous traffic jams. His driver lived in Kota Kinabalu, a sleepy city far away across the water in Malaysian Borneo. So good was business in Kuala Lumpur that he flew in for weeks-long work stints. It seemed clear that much of the money is made sitting nearly stationary on Kuala Lumpur’s incongruously named expressways.

Successful cities pack economic activity into dense areas. This produces welcome “agglomeration effects”, but when the agglomeration happens by moving about by car, roads snarl up.

Traffic jams are a scourge. Lost time hurts productivity. There is a human toll on health, both mentally and in terms of air pollution and road safety. Asian cities are world-class for traffic. Of the top 20 slowest-moving cities ranked by TomTom, a navigation service, 12 are in Asia—a mark of fast growth and mismanaged urban development.

The fix is no mystery. Cities with good traffic make private cars less desirable to own and use. Singapore has punishingly expensive ownership quotas, as well as congestion pricing. Tokyo has fees and tolls, and tough limits on parking space. Both cities also have world-class public-transport systems, and housing built near stations.

Yet elsewhere in Asia, politicians are shy about penalising car ownership because it clashes with growing middle-class aspirations. The car is a potent symbol of status and freedom. Nor do governments want to hurt domestic carmakers employing millions. Across much of Asia, car sales in recent years have been on a roll.

So politicians opt to build more roads instead. Two lanes tacked on to the Kuala Lumpur-Karak expressway will let an additional 2,800 cars an hour whizz by, its developer boasts. In India, new lanes will soon be added to Kolkata’s eastern bypass. In the Philippines, the previous president’s pledge to “Build! Build! Build!” and the incumbent’s promise to “Build Better More” mean more car-centric infrastructure. In many parts of Asia, politicians and their cronies skim money off the top of road projects—another incentive to build.

Yet expanding road infrastructure alone nearly always fails. Drivers end up driving more and moving farther from the city centre. The city sprawls, but congestion is little changed. Car-centricity is self-reinforcing, Walter Theseira of the Singapore University of Social Sciences points out. More space for roads and parking means less for greenery and for people on foot.

Many Asian cities have reached a point that serves no one well. Wanting to protect the middle class undermines fairness instead. Car commuters lose time, respiratory health and their sanity. The rich are not immune, but can better insulate themselves: drivers are hired and, in cities like Cambodia’s Phnom Penh, obscenely big and showy SUVs are acquired to serve as mobile offices and entertainment rooms. Pedestrians, especially the poor, are cut out entirely from many benefits of city life and suffer most of the risks of traffic, in terms of fumes and accidents. In Phnom Penh they don’t even have the pavements, because the SUVs have parked up on them, engines running, while the boss is at lunch.

Asian cities are not doomed to gridlock. In the 2000s Seoul made ambitious changes. Bus routes were redesigned, and congestion charges, low-emission zones and voluntary no-driving days curbed demand. Traffic speeds rose by up to four-fifths. Elsewhere, the idea of congestion pricing is doing the rounds again, notably in Bangkok. Jakarta has pondered a Singapore-style congestion toll for years, having failed with milder measures. (One such, “three-in-one” carpooling lanes, led to a cottage industry of “jockeys” being paid to sit in cars, and was scrapped.) This year Hanoi will launch a pilot programme restricting high-emissions vehicles in some areas. In the Philippine city of Baguio, north of the capital, Manila, a proposed $4 congestion fee has sparked controversy, even though other fixes have failed.

The risks for politicians are real. Baguio’s proposed fee led to criticism that it would favour the rich; the mayor rushed to clarify that “nothing is final yet.” But the criticism gets it backwards. Easing traffic makes a city fairer. What is more, cities that have enacted congestion pricing see public support for it rise over time, as people see the improvements with their own eyes. More politicians should take the gamble.■

China | Matters of opinion

How (un)popular is China’s Communist Party?

As the economy falters and the social compact frays, Xi Jinping wants to know

Photograph: Getty Images

Jan 23rd 2025

China’s announcement on January 17th that its economy had grown by an estimated 5% in 2024, right on target, was greeted with widespread disbelief on the country’s social media. “It feels unreal—everything around me seems so bleak,” wrote one netizen. “The folks at the statistics bureau worked hard,” said another. On Weibo, a microblogging platform, more than 240 comments were posted below state television’s summary of the GDP news. Only a handful remained visible, suggesting that most had failed to meet the account’s strict censorship standards. Amid high youth unemployment and a property-market slump, cynics abound.

The government prefers a different spin. Last year “social confidence was effectively bolstered and the economy recovered remarkably,” it said in a statement about the economic data. This achievement was “particularly” the result of “timely” stimulus measures, it declared. There is some truth in this. The economy did pick up late in the year, partly helped by a state-subsidised trade-in scheme that caused sales of household appliances to leap by 39% year on year in December. But the public remains unenthused. Following three years of harsh (and, by the end, widely resented) pandemic restrictions, and two subsequent years of economic malaise, China’s social compact is under pressure. For many, the better life they had expected in return for acquiescing to Communist Party rule is not materialising.

The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, may wonder whether a warning he gave in 2014, less than a year and a half after he took power, is gaining relevance. “The ancient Roman historian, Tacitus, proposed a theory that when public authority loses credibility, no matter what it says or does, society will view it negatively. This is the ‘Tacitus trap’,” he told officials. “Of course, we have not reached this point, but the problems that exist are indeed serious…If we were ever to reach that day, it would endanger the party’s ruling foundation and governing position.”

Even now there is little evidence that the party is tottering. But the danger of falling into a Tacitus trap clearly haunts it. The term was invented by a Chinese scholar, Pan Zhichang, who wrote about it in 2007. It took off after Mr Xi borrowed it. In China, books and academic literature referring to the trap have since proliferated. It is often mentioned alongside two other potential pitfalls that Chinese officials fret about. One is the “middle-income trap” (so-named by Indermit Gill of the World Bank and Homi Kharas, now of the Brookings Institution). It describes how, having enjoyed rapid growth, some countries fail to become rich. The other is the “Thucydides trap”, a term coined by an American scholar, Graham Allison, which is about the risk of war between a rising power and the prevailing hegemon.

A possible reason why Mr Xi appears more hesitant to talk about the Tacitus trap than the other two dangers is that it could invite uncomfortable comparisons between him and the unpopular Roman emperor, Galba, about whom Tacitus was writing. (Galba was murdered after a few months in power.) But Mr Xi does highlight the dangers of regime collapse, often referring to the fate of the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Communist Party distanced itself from the people and became a privileged bureaucratic group that only safeguarded its own interests,” he told provincial leaders in 2021. Keeping the public on side clearly matters to him.

Poll watchers

The importance to the party of public opinion is reflected in the energy it expends on trying to gauge it. Local officials often commission opinion polls to assess citizens’ views of their policies. They use the public’s “satisfaction level” when conducting officials’ performance reviews. China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, last month began soliciting opinions online about what the prime minister should say in March in his annual report to the legislature (don’t bother suggesting faster economic growth: another year at around 5% is very likely to be the target he sets).

Given that the party controls news media, officials pay particular attention to online comments—even as censors (or algorithms) delete those they don’t like. Classified digests of hot topics on social media, and others summarising petitions submitted to the government by aggrieved citizens, circulate among bureaucrats. This intensive monitoring of public opinion is part of what China trumpets as its “whole-process democracy”—a form, it says, that is better than the Western kind.

Amid the current economic gloom, officials regard such efforts as all the more important. They are keen to learn, not least, of public complaints that could cause social unrest. Local governments often prefer to satisfy workers’ demands rather than risk the spread of strikes. Officials have been putting pressure on companies to make sure wages are paid in full before the country celebrates the lunar new year on January 29th. Grumbling about arrears, especially among construction workers, often triggers protests in the run-up to the holiday.

But a serious souring of the public mood may be difficult for the government to monitor effectively. Fearing repercussions if they speak out, people censor themselves online, or find roundabout ways to express their views. The government appeared to be blindsided by scattered small-scale protests against covid-19-related lockdowns late in 2022, some of which involved rare demands for political freedom and Mr Xi’s resignation. These may have hastened the scrapping of the zero-covid policy, but the ensuing crackdown on dissent may also have made it harder for officials to read the public mind (in recent months they have silenced several economists who have dared to express pessimism). Foreign pollsters struggle, too. They are forbidden from carrying out opinion surveys in China without domestic Chinese partners, who have become increasingly wary of getting involved.

Early in Mr Xi’s rule, those looking for clues to China’s long-term stability found food for thought in another foreign work, Alexis de Tocqueville’s book “The Old Regime and the Revolution”, published in 1856. It became a bestseller in the country after Mr Xi’s anti-corruption chief, Wang Qishan, recommended it. The message many readers took from this work was that reformist regimes face danger after a period of prosperity if they fail to meet rising public expectations. Chinese officials clearly agree that the classics of the West contain disturbing lessons. ■

Middle East & Africa | Africa v big tech

Three big lawsuits against Meta in Kenya may have global implications

One was prompted by the murder of an Ethiopian professor

Illustration: Lehel Kovacs

Jan 23rd 2025|NAIROBI

As soon as the posts appeared on Facebook, Abrham Mearag feared they would be a “death sentence” for his father. A civil war was raging in Ethiopia and Mr Abrham’s father, a chemistry professor, was of the wrong ethnicity in the wrong place at the wrong time. His name, photo and place of work all appeared on Facebook in October 2021, along with allegations that he was affiliated to rebels fighting the Ethiopian government. Mr Abrham reported the posts to moderators at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, in a desperate attempt to get them taken down. But his pleas were ignored—and on November 3rd 2021 his father was murdered.

On January 29th Kenya’s high court will decide whether it has jurisdiction to hear a $2.3bn case brought against Meta by Mr Abrham and two others. The group claim that Facebook’s algorithms amplified hateful speech which directly led to real-world harm, including the death of Mr Abrham’s father. Since the moderators vetting Facebook’s Ethiopian content were based in Kenya, the plaintiffs argue, the company ought to be sued there. The lawsuit is the third to be brought against Meta in Kenya. They all concern the invisible army of moderators used by tech firms to cleanse their platforms of violent or illegal content. Together the cases illuminate the grim reality for low-paid African workers of the global tech boom. And they raise an important question: can big tech be sued in African countries, and thus others?

In each case Meta argues that it cannot be held liable in Kenya because it is registered in America. Like other big internet platforms, the firm outsources content moderation to third-party contractors. Around 100,000 people worldwide work for companies such as Sama, the local contractor hired by Meta until 2023 to screen African-language content. Working like this meant tech firms could hire cheap English-speakers in places such as Kenya, and avoid the costs of incorporating there. They also believed doing so would shield them from potential litigation overseas.

The laws they are a-changin’

That no longer seems to be true. In the two other cases brought against Meta in Kenya, former employees accuse Sama and another contractor of, inter alia, unlawful termination and forced labour. They also allege that sifting through graphic content without adequate psychiatric support seriously damaged their mental health. “You are forced to watch, you cannot skip,” says Robel Kahsay, one of 186 former Sama workers taking the company to court. Among the horrors which live “rent-free” in Mr Robel’s mind is the image of his cousin’s bloodied corpse in Ethiopia’s civil war, which he encountered on the job. Sama denies failing to provide sufficient mental-health services. It says they were (and remain) available on site from licensed professionals at all times. Meta argues that it should not face charges since it did not hire the workers directly.

In 2023, however, a Kenyan judge concluded that Meta was, in fact, their “true employer”. That opened the door to other lawsuits against any of the big tech firms working with third-party contractors in Kenya. In a similar case involving 10,000 content moderators in California, Meta agreed to pay $85m in compensation for failing to protect the litigants from mental-health harm. But this is the first time Meta could be “significantly subjected to a court of law in the global south”, notes Amnesty International, a rights group. The company is appealing to Kenya’s supreme court.

Mr Abrham’s lawsuit demands not only compensation but also changes to Facebook’s algorithm to make it less potentially deadly. Though Mr Abrham’s father was murdered in Ethiopia, Meta’s terms of service require any claims to be filed in America. At home, American internet companies are usually protected from liability for content disseminated through their platforms. “It doesn’t matter where the company is registered, the actual action which caused the harm took place in Kenya,” says Mercy Mutemi of the Kenyan law firm representing the plaintiffs in all three cases. But there are few precedents elsewhere. Lawsuits brought against Meta for its alleged role in spreading hate speech during the Rohingya genocide in 2017 have stalled in courts in Britain and America.

Faced with potential damage to its reputation in Africa, an important and growing market, Meta might settle. But given today’s politics, it could “ignore a court ruling it doesn’t like,” says Eugenia Siapera of University College Dublin. Donald Trump’s return has boosted America’s tech titans. This month Meta announced that it would stop fact-checking content on Facebook, which could prompt it to rethink how it does moderation in Africa. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s ceo, said recently that he hoped to work with Mr Trump “to push back on governments around the world”.

Mr Zuckerberg has an ally in Kenya’s president, William Ruto. Mr Ruto wants to promote Nairobi, its capital, as a tech hub. Meta has already shifted its content-moderation work out of Kenya to an undisclosed location in Africa, so the president has less bargaining power. (A spokesperson for Meta cited “the security of our clients” and ongoing litigation as reasons for the lack of transparency.) Anxious not to lose out on investment and jobs, Mr Ruto has rushed to pass a bill which would make it even harder to sue the biggest tech firms. Kenya’s government faces an impossible choice, says Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute: “bad jobs or no jobs.” ■

Middle East & Africa | The world’s first WhatsAppocracy

Government by social media in Somalia

Cheap data, social media and creativity are filling in for an absent state

Illustration: Lehel Kovacs

Jan 23rd 2025|ADDIS ABABA

Thirty years ago, making a phone call from Somalia meant crossing the border into better-connected Kenya or Ethiopia. Yet by 2004 the lawless nation had more telephone connections per capita than any other east African country. Today, the Somali state is still fragile: insecurity is rife and government services are poor. But mobile data in Somalia is cheaper than in Britain, Finland or Japan—and the signal is good, too. Jethro Norman, a Mancunian anthropologist who does research in Somalia, says he gets better mobile coverage in some of the remotest parts of the country than he does in Manchester.

How has dysfunctional Somalia managed to develop such an outstanding telecoms network? The answer lies in the state’s very weakness. Three decades of chaos and conflict have forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis to flee their country. Those who have stayed depend on them: the diaspora sends home around $2bn a year, roughly double the government’s budget. An extensive phone network was needed to handle those vast remittance flows. In Somalia’s radical free market, the invisible hand did the rest. The upside of a lack of government is that there is no need to pay for licences or to bribe corrupt officials to get the job done.

If telecoms flourished at first in the absence of the state, cheap internet is now helping to replace it. A recent research paper by Mr Norman shows how clan-based WhatsApp groups are increasingly being used to crowdsource capital from “investors” in the diaspora, and then to co-ordinate the building of schools, hospitals and roads with the money that is raised.

Social media is filling in for the failing state in other ways, too. WhatsApp groups serve as virtual courts, for instance, where clan elders, rather than corrupt or distant judges, resolve disputes. These online groups have revenue-raising powers; members are required to make monthly contributions, which are then used to offer payments if someone is short of money, or as a kind of health insurance to pay if they or a family member are ill. Those who do not pay are blocked from the groups.

The rise of this WhatsAppocracy is not without its flaws. Hate speech that deepens clan conflict is common, particularly among the diaspora. And WhatsApp groups can raise money to buy guns as well as schools. Still, for now, governance via WhatsApp seems to beat rule by warlords. Somalis are making do with what they have.■

Europe | Charlemagne

Europe faces a new age of gunboat digital diplomacy

Can the EU regulate Donald Trump’s big tech bros?

Illustration: Peter Schrank

Jan 23rd 2025

In an era dominated by tech giants worth trillions of dollars, no European firm started from scratch in the past 50 years is today valued at more than a mere hundred billion (Spotify, a music-streaming service based in Sweden, hovers around the mark). The absence of entrepreneurial vigour is a recurring source of frustration for European politicians in search of economic pep and tax receipts. With no local corporate tech titans to berate into creating jobs, German chancellors, French presidents and their like have had to grit their teeth as they beseeched one visiting American bro after another to consider setting up a research facility, artificial-intelligence (AI) hub or gigafactory in their country. As both sides posed for the obligatory selfie, it could be hard to tell who had the upper hand: the elected leaders, or the globally known plutocrats with net worths bigger than most EU countries’ budgets? At least, the politicians could tell themselves, even the mightiest Amazons or Facebooks of the world would have to follow European laws as a condition of doing business there.

It turns out that this may be an imposition too many for the world’s techies. Even before their bosses flexed their political muscles by snagging prime seats at the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th, a refrain could increasingly be heard that the European Union’s nagging regulations are an annoyance that some of them would rather not abide by. Newish EU rules designed to ensure that digital markets do not turn into cosy monopolies, to limit the spread of harmful bilge on social networks and to regulate AI are increasingly being painted as a Euro-ploy standing in the way of Trumpian plans to make America great again (again). Europe is already dreading the prospect of a trade war with its biggest commercial partner by far, not to mention the future of its decades-old security guarantee from America as war rages in Ukraine. If Mr Trump orders Europe to ease up on American tech firms to please his new corporate chums, can his demands be resisted?

Tech firms have three gripes about EU regulation. The first concerns its enforcement of antitrust rules, which has long been more stringent than America’s (bar a burst of hyperactivity under the Biden administration). This has resulted in a slew of fines on Apple, Alphabet and the like; throttled their acquisition drives; and even raised the prospect that some firms may be broken up. Another gripe is that Europe insists content that would be illegal offline is also illegal when posted on a social network, and demands that algorithms that sway public discourse by pushing some users’ posts over others must be subject to transparency rules. Lastly, the EU (with the help of America, under previous management) has cracked down on what it deems unfair tax arrangements, which siphon profits to low-tax jurisdictions.

The tech outfits’ hordes of lobbyists have long muttered that Brussels hyper-regulation is not only bad for them but for Europe, the very reason the continent’s economy is stuttering. As if to warn Europe, Apple and Meta are among those that have delayed the launch of products in the EU market. Now they seem to be goading Mr Trump to act on their behalf. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, has painted the fines imposed on big tech by the EU as akin to tariffs—the kind of thing Mr Trump should retaliate against, in other words. Earlier this month he described EU rules as “institutionalising censorship”, as if Eurocrats’ demands that rape videos must be taken down were like North Korean brainwashing. In October Mr Trump railed at American companies being “taken advantage of” by the EU. His running-mate, now vice-president, J.D. Vance, questioned whether America should keep defending Europe through NATO if Europe regulates X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, who is now an adviser to Mr Trump.

At home, the new president has already kiboshed some of the global tax rules that big tech railed against. Getting the EU to stand down will be harder. Much of the regulation it has crafted reflects its ancestral wariness of big business. Ensuring dominant companies do not profit unduly from their market power is not some fad: it is enshrined in the treaties that govern the EU. Limiting big tech’s sway over users is a matter of human rights, not easily circumvented. Something of a consensus exists that bits of EU regulation are indeed too cumbersome; there are moves to roll some of it back. But most Eurocrats believe that its rules are on the whole working as intended.

Regulators at the gates

Getting the EU to stand down would be a win for big tech. Not only is the European market second only to America when it comes to rich users, but regulations crafted by the EU are often copied by jurisdictions far beyond its borders. This “Brussels effect” is a point of pride for Europeans. Anu Bradford, a tech expert at Columbia Law School who coined the term, says she expects the EU will hold firm. “Nobody in Europe will look at big tech companies this week and think, ‘We wish they were more powerful’.” The fact that Mr Musk has used X to boost hard-right parties in Europe has made policymakers there all the warier.

Various EU officials insist it is business as usual and that its many investigations of big tech firms will be concluded and made public soon, fines and all. But the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, told the World Economic Forum in Davos the day after Mr Trump’s inauguration, that Europe would have to be “pragmatic” in dealing with the new administration. The final stage of punishing tech giants is in part a political decision. There are reports of the commission “reassessing” how this might be done, though no clear sense of how this will happen in practice. Europe will find it very hard to stand down against big tech—but it may not like the price of standing firm. ■

International | The Telegram

Trump unmasks American selfishness, say cynics

But sceptics are wrong to call America First business as usual

Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck

Jan 21st 2025

THESE ARE happy, “I told you so” times for foreign-policy cynics. In many world capitals the inauguration of an America First president inspires not shock, but vindication. Over a policy-filled lunch in Asia, a veteran official tells The Telegram that his government feels “serene” about the return of President Donald Trump. Westerners are forgetting their history, he suggests, if they mourn the crumbling of a principled, America-led world order that has supposedly prevailed for 80 years. Tell that to Asian peoples attacked by colonial European troops as they fought for independence, he says. Moral values never guided the post-war world. At least under Mr Trump, the mask is off, and interests are all.

Jump to Latin America, and coffee with a former government minister. Talk turns to free trade, and how Mr Trump’s love of tariffs alarms allies. The Trump era’s true novelty is honesty, the politician retorts: “I negotiated with two American administrations. They were both protectionist, one just admits it more openly.”

If many elites in emerging economies are impatient with Western dismay over Mr Trump, they are in step with their publics. A survey of some 29,000 people in 24 countries by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, finds deep gloom about Mr Trump’s re-election in western Europe and in South Korea, a close ally. In contrast, his transactional approach to statecraft is called good for America and for world peace by pluralities from Brazil to China, India, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Officials from the global south are right that America can fall short. But to claim that Mr Trump is just another president, guided like all the others by selfish interests, is crude and unfair. Just ask a different group: American diplomats with long careers under Democratic and Republican presidents. A wave of them are quitting or retiring from the State Department. Some resignations were ordered by Mr Trump’s team. Others reflect bleak career prospects for traditional envoys. A former ambassador describes “deep despair” over signs of meteoric promotions for a few Trump-supporting colleagues, regardless of age or experience.

Trump loyalists will cheer such exits, for they scorn the State Department as a treasonous, left-wing, anti-American “deep state”. In reality, career diplomats are often hard to pigeonhole politically. The same officials can be admirers of Henry Kissinger’s unsentimental, interests-led approach to foreign policy, and ardent defenders of reforms dating back to Jimmy Carter’s presidency, that urge American embassies and envoys to promote human rights and democracy whenever the national interest allows.

Diplomatic veterans are sure that Mr Trump marks a rupture, and is not merely America with the mask off. They do not expect pure isolationism from Mr Trump. The returning president seeks a legacy as a peacemaker in Ukraine and the Middle East. His new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is called deeply knowledgeable after years as a Republican senator focused on foreign policy, notably in Latin America. Instead, old-timers worry about Mr Trump’s focus on coercion rather than persuasion when trying to bend foreign powers to his will, and his seeming hostility to democratic norms. They also remember his first administration’s record of scorning the sort of expensive, thankless missions that America has led when no other country would or could.

Examples abound. Africa hands cite the fight against the Ebola virus. In 2014 Barack Obama sent scientists, mobile laboratories, isolation units and 3,000 troops to west Africa, to lead multinational efforts to quell an outbreak. Mr Trump, then a vocal New York property tycoon, called it “stupid” to send troops to infected regions, adding that Ebola-infected Americans should be banned from coming home. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” he tweeted. Amid fresh outbreaks in 2018, the first Trump administration tried to cut $252m in Ebola funding as “excessive spending” overseas. All eyes are now on PEPFAR, a multi-billion-dollar project launched by George W. Bush in 2003 to test for and treat HIV in Africa, estimated to have saved 26m lives. Up for renewal this year, it was targeted for cuts by the last Trump administration.

Cynics will miss the old America if it vanishes

Longtime diplomats insist that America has good works to be proud of in Latin America, as well as misdeeds to regret. They cite two decades of bipartisan support for Colombia that built up everything from its justice system to tax collection and education when drug gangs and leftist rebels left the country “almost a failed state” by the mid-1990s. An official who recently left office recalls the crisis in 2022 when Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist, right-wing former president, sought to overturn an election defeat. American generals and defence chiefs quietly urged Brazilian counterparts to respect democratic values and their oaths to the constitution, he says. Such calls helped “turn the tide” and prevent a coup. The Trump worldview is different. Though he faces conspiracy charges in Brazil, which he denies, Mr Bolsonaro was invited to Mr Trump’s inauguration (a confiscated passport kept him in Brazil).

Scepticism of America has many causes. Some good deeds must go unsung, for America’s aim is to strengthen partners, not shame them. American help is taken for granted, too. China is much praised in the developing world, though it is a stingier donor than America and a hard-nosed lender. But it is a newcomer, and eschews lectures about corruption or human rights. Still, a resentful America First response miscalculates the costs and benefits of magnanimity. Take American free- and preferential-trade pacts with very poor countries, from Africa to Haiti. They amount to a “rounding error” in global trade, notes a veteran diplomat. But they create vital jobs, curbing instability and migrant flows. Imperfect America is indispensable at times. ■

Business | Bartleby

Knowing what your colleagues earn

The pros and cons of greater pay transparency

Illustration: Paul Blow

Jan 23rd 2025

How much do your colleagues get paid? In a few countries, such as Norway, you can take a good guess by looking at public records on individuals’ overall tax payments and income. But in most places, finding out people’s salaries means asking them what they earn. And that is about as socially acceptable as saying “What an ugly baby.”

In a recent study Zoë Cullen of Harvard Business School and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of the University of California, Los Angeles, offered monetary rewards to employees of a South-East Asian bank if they were able to accurately estimate the wages of some of their peers. The researchers found that a majority of employees were very uncomfortable asking colleagues about their pay and were also unwilling to reveal their own salaries to their colleagues, particularly if they thought they might be earning more than them.

Norms of privacy and secrecy around income help explain why legislators who fret about unfair pay differentials increasingly require greater transparency. Few jurisdictions are as radical as the Scandinavians, but more and more of them are mandating that firms disclose gender (and other) wage gaps, publish pay ranges on job adverts or refrain from asking about applicants’ prior earnings. New transparency laws take effect in Illinois, Minnesota and Vermont this year; an EU directive is due to come into force in 2026.

A recent review by Ms Cullen into the effects of all this sunlight reveals a mixed picture. Greater transparency about what people in similar jobs are earning has helped close pay gaps between men and women. This is not because lower-paid employees were given big pay bumps, however, but because average wages were suppressed. Transparency appears to hand employers a powerful bargaining tool: firms can argue that a pay rise for one individual would need to be replicated for others.

A Danish law from 2006, requiring that firms above a certain size disclose gender pay gaps among comparable workers, provides an example. In a paper published in 2019 Morten Bennedsen of insead and his co-authors found that the gap between men and women narrowed, primarily because male employees saw slower wage growth. A lower wage bill is not necessarily good news for firms, however. Productivity at affected Danish firms also went down, perhaps because lower earners were fed up to discover they were undervalued or because higher earners resented the slower wage growth that followed.

Disclosure can lead to different outcomes. Requirements to include salary details on job postings appear to push up pay, for example, in part because firms as well as employees have better information about market rates. It is surely worth paying a bit more to avoid wasting time on job applicants whose salary expectations bear no resemblance to budgets.

Transparency can also stoke motivation. A recent paper by Cédric Gutierrez of Bocconi University and his co-authors found that pay transparency among American academics increased the effort of those who were revealed to be overpaid. If you’re earning a lot more than others, you’d better prove your worth.

As for wage disparities between bosses and those below them, you might imagine that gaps foster resentment. But they can also pique aspiration. Other research by Ms Cullen and Mr Perez-Truglia suggests that employees not only consistently underestimate how much managers earn but also work harder when they find out the rewards that promotion can bring.

Transparency makes it more important to get performance-based pay right. A recent paper by James Flynn of Miami University looked at what happened when the previously secret salaries of ice-hockey players in North America were published in the middle of the 1990 season. Underpaid players shifted their efforts towards scoring goals and providing assists, which were more highly rewarded than defensive contributions, to the detriment of their teams’ performances as a whole.

Pay transparency offers prizes and pitfalls for managers, in other words. If things go well, it ought to close unjust pay gaps and provide workers with more information on their options inside and outside their firms. If things go badly, morale and productivity may suffer as the pursuit of equity catalyses slower wage growth; performance-based pay may converge on things that are easier to measure, not what matters most. Sunlight is lovely. It can still cause damage. ■

Business | Schumpeter

Donald Trump’s America will not become a tech oligarchy

Reasons not to panic about the tech-industrial complex

Illustration: Brett Ryder

Jan 21st 2025

WHAT NATION can you fit into the Capitol Rotunda? Answer: somewhere between a Portugal and a Thailand. Each country’s total household net wealth was $1.3trn, give or take, according to the latest available figures from a few years ago. This is around the accumulated fortune of the billionaires who turned up for Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20th. Bernard Arnault, owner of LVMH, a luxury empire, and Europe’s richest man, represented the old continent’s fat cats. Mukesh Ambani, an Indian industrialist who is Mr Arnault’s Asian opposite number, stood in for the global south’s.

However, it was Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (collective net worth: $911bn, a bit shy of three Luxembourgs) who got the most attention—and better seats than the incoming cabinet. Only the Trump family stood between the tech moguls and the 47th president as he took the oath of office.

This proximity to power—literal and figurative—alarms many. In his farewell address from the White House five days earlier Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America” and of a rising “tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country”. It is not just Americans who are worried. On January 18th Reuters reported that Germany’s ambassador to the United States, a sober Teutonic type not normally given to hyperbole, had confidentially alerted the government in Berlin that, among other disruptive moves by the second Trump administration, “big tech will be given co-governing power.”

Inaugural seating arrangements notwithstanding, such assessments seem far too bleak. America is no oligarchy—and unlikely ever to become one, for three reasons. First, the supposed technoligarchs control far too small a portion of the country’s vast and vastly diverse economy to be able to influence its overall direction—one of the big fears behind warnings like Mr Biden’s.

Although Mr Bezos’s Amazon, Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta and Mr Musk’s Tesla together account for one-tenth of the value of all listed stocks in America, their economic contribution is much more modest. This contribution, or gross value added, is calculated by adding a firm’s profits before net taxes and financing costs to what its employees earn in salaries and benefits. Companies seldom report their total wage bills but sales and general administrative expenses combined with research-and-development costs give a rough idea. Add this to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, and Amazon, Meta and Tesla correspond to 1.8% of American GDP.

Even if you add Apple and Alphabet, whose CEOs also attended Mr Trump’s swearing-in but who are hired stewards rather than founder-owners and thus decidedly unoligarchic, the figure rises to just 3.1%. In Russia, home to the original oligarchs (in the non-ancient-Greek sense), the figure is much higher. A study from 2004 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that two dozen magnates employed nearly a fifth of all workers and earned 77% of sales in manufacturing and mining, which at the time accounted for two-thirds of Russian output. In Hungary, the closest the Western world has to a real oligarchy, chums of Viktor Orban, the strongman prime minister, may oversee 20-30% of the economy, according to one estimate.

Other measures tell a similar story. Amazon, Meta and Tesla make up 9% of business investment by America’s 1,500 largest firms. In India, Mr Ambani’s Reliance Industries accounts for 16%. The trio’s capital spending is equivalent to 0.4% of GDP, compared with nearly 1% for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1906.

The experience of Rockefeller points to another reason not to panic. Despite his immense wealth—at its peak almost twice Mr Musk’s relative to the size of America’s economy—he struggled to have his voice heard in the corridors of power, points out Tevi Troy, author of “The Power and the Money”, a history of American potentates’ rapports with commanders-in-chief. President James Garfield did not know how to spell his name.

Even though Mr Trump is clearly friendlier to business than his trustbusting predecessors a century ago, his feelings towards tech do not seem to run deep. The word “technology” did not feature in his inaugural address (in contrast to “liquid gold”). Moreover, in America public opinion still matters, and could easily turn against the tech billionaires. Sections of MAGA already loathe them.

Crucially, in contrast to Rockefeller, who wielded near-total control over a critical economic input in the form of refined petroleum products, they cannot hold the American economy to ransom. No Amazon? Walmart will happily sell you everything you need. Instagram says access denied? Great, then you have time to read Mr Troy’s riveting book. Want a new car? Tesla may anyway not be your top pick of vehicle these days. Even Mr Musk’s SpaceX rockets may not be the only game in town for ever, though Rocket Lab, the firm’s closest competitor, and Blue Origin, a company founded by Mr Bezos, are still some way behind.

Teeming with rivals

The rocket rivalry highlights the last reason for calm. Big tech is not a monolithic interest group, like the Russian oligarchs whose businesses mostly do not overlap. The technology tycoons’ interests are often in conflict. Messrs Bezos and Musk compete in space. Mr Musk and Mr Zuckerberg own rival social-media platforms. Amazon is taking a bite out of Meta’s online-advertising business. Everyone is piling into artificial intelligence.

Mr Trump is more transactional than presidents before him, which increases the risk of cronyism and self-dealing. But America’s economy, including its technology industry, is too unwieldy and dynamic to petrify into an actual oligarchy, whatever diplomats and departing presidents say. ■

Finance & economics | Free exchange

Do tariffs raise inflation?

Usually. But the bigger problem is that they harm economic growth and innovation

Illustration: Álvaro Bernis

Jan 23rd 2025

Mountain-naming turned out to be a curiously high priority for Donald Trump. Mere hours after his inauguration, the president signed an executive order to change the name of America’s highest peak from Denali, of indigenous Alaskan origin, back to Mount McKinley, as it was officially known until Barack Obama intervened in 2015. The rechristening reflects more than just the usual culture-war ping-pong. Like Mr Trump, William McKinley was a “tariff man”. As a congressman and later president, he swung America toward protectionism in the late 19th century. “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent,” said Mr Trump in his inaugural address.

Over a century later, Mr Trump hopes to pull off the same trick. His raft of day-one executive orders did not institute any new tariffs, focusing on mountains, a border emergency, drilling for oil and halting DEI programmes. But the president still found time to threaten a 10% tariff on China, as well as a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico, to be introduced as soon as February 1st. He also floated a “global supplemental tariff”, which would apply to any good imported from abroad, no matter its country of origin.

Higher tariffs, Mr Trump and his backers say, will boost American manufacturing and fund tax cuts at little cost to the everyman, with foreigners footing the bill instead. These justifications are feeble, just as they were in McKinley’s day. For a start, firms usually pass on tariffs by raising prices. During Mr Trump’s last sortie against Chinese manufacturing in 2018-19, prices of impacted items went up roughly one-for-one with higher tariffs.

Mr Trump’s more thoughtful advisers, such as Scott Bessent, nominated for treasury secretary, and Stephen Miran, for chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, accept this dynamic. But they emphasise that tariffs also strengthen the dollar by pushing Americans to purchase less from abroad. This lifts their purchasing power and so should help cancel out higher prices. Exchange rates depend on much more than goods trade, so the effect of tariffs during Mr Trump’s first term was small. In 2018-19, for instance, they explain at most a fifth of the move in the dollar over the period, according to Olivier Jeanne and Jeongwon Son of Johns Hopkins University. Bigger tariffs would have bigger effects.

Yet even if the dollar rises, the pain simply shifts to exporters, whose wares become more expensive for international buyers (which is why Mr Trump usually favours a weaker dollar). For his part, Mr Miran argued in a recent paper that the greenback’s popularity imposes “externalities” on America’s economy, since demand for assets yanks the dollar above its fair value, hobbling exporters in the process. This theory is questionable on its own merits. The big deficits that recent administrations have run could not have been financed so cheaply without a queue of foreigners buying Treasury bonds. Moreover, if Mr Miran had his way, any boost to the dollar from tariffs would be short-lived: a dollar deval‎uation would once again leave households facing higher prices.

Tariff-boosters also downplay the odds that other countries will respond in kind. And patience, even among allies, is already wearing thin. “One tariff would be followed by another,” warned Claudia Sheinbaum, president of Mexico, in November. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, has vowed “robust, rapid” retaliation. Such moves would pull the dollar in opposing directions: American demand for imports from abroad would fall, but so would foreign demand for American exports. All told, American households would be left with little insulation from tariffs.

So tariffs raise prices. Does that mean they cause painful inflation? Not necessarily. A one-off increase in prices might create only a short-term pop in inflation, not a sustained rise. Tariffs erode consumers’ overall spending power, and falling consumption of things produced at home creates offsetting disinflation over time. Yet there is at least a danger that a one-off shock would set off an upwards spiral of prices and wages. After several years of high inflation, such a risk is now more pronounced.

Mountainous problems

Worse still, tariffs also crimp economic growth by creating “deadweight loss”, as demand is skewed towards domestic companies even when they are less efficient. As a consequence, resources are wasted on production that is more expensive than it otherwise would have been. The result is a vast economic distortion and lower incomes throughout the economy.

This effect is exacerbated by the fact that tariffs induce companies to innovate less and misbehave more. Sheltered from better-run foreign rivals, firms have less incentive to produce superior and cheaper products. Alla Lileeva of York University and Daniel Trefler of the University of Toronto have found that reductions in American tariffs in the late 1980s and 1990s prompted previously less productive factories in Canada to innovate more, adopt advanced technology and, as a result, increase the productivity of their workers. Tariff regimes also tend to be chock-full of exemptions, which the savviest firms learn to exploit, at the same time as their lobbyists seek more carve-outs. Mr Trump’s love of doling out favours could cause a particular problem in this regard.

Over the course of his political career, McKinley’s own enthusiasm for protectionism softened. Although America’s 25th president never transformed into a free-trader of The Economist’s variety, he did come to appreciate the benefits of mutually advantageous trade deals with friendly countries. “We must not repose in fancied security that we can for ever sell everything and buy little or nothing,” he announced in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, before adding that “commercial wars are unprofitable”. America’s 45th and 47th president has perhaps not learned the correct lessons from his predecessor. ■

Finance & economics | Buttonwood

How American bankers dodged the MAGA carnage

The masters of the universe have escaped an anti-globalist revolt

Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi

Jan 23rd 2025

Wall Street was poorly represented in the expensive seats behind Donald Trump at his inauguration. That honour fell instead to the leaders of America’s technology industry, who turned up en masse. Was this a humbling exclusion? Not quite. Whereas Silicon Valley travelled east to avoid retribution, Wall Street stayed away because it expects none.

Bankers are likely to thrive in America’s MAGA era. The expectation of broad financial deregulation, provided by a president obsessed with the stockmarket, has made investors giddy. News that Michael Barr, who has sparred with banks over capital requirements, will relinquish responsibility for financial regulation at the Federal Reserve marks the start of a more amiable period of supervision. If in recent years it has felt like high noon in the Valley, it is now morning again on the Street.

J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, announced that the Republican Party was done “catering to Wall Street” during the election campaign. Indeed, Mr Vance is alive to the irresolvable tension between markets and conservatism. Some in his orbit even decry “financialisation”, shorthand for a misalignment of interests between America’s financial industry and its people. So it is strange to imagine Wall Street elites in Davos cheering the ascension of this self-styled common man. Yet bankers have never felt so bulletproof.

Their mood owes something to a strong economy and the passage of time. When Steven Mnuchin became treasury secretary at the start of Mr Trump’s first term, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, was recent history. His time at Goldman Sachs and property deals were noisily scrutinised by senators during his confirmation hearing. When Scott Bessent, Mr Trump’s pick this time around, was quizzed by senators, Wall Street and its implosion in 2008 hardly came up. How cool was this former lieutenant of George Soros as he prepared to take a post in the counter-revolutionary struggle against the globalist elite.

Absence of catastrophe is not the only reason Wall Street is enjoying political irrelevance. Culture has replaced inequality as the overwhelming focus of American politics. In his inaugural address, Mr Trump promised to restore meritocracy and free expression‎. This change puts big tech, rather than big banks, most squarely in the stocks. The same tech firms could also play a decisive role in America’s competition with China, whereas bankers probably will not. Proximity to power means greater whiplash when it shifts. Since November Wall Street’s executives have needed only to kiss the ring: institutions have exited a green banking alliance, for instance. Those at the helm of America’s biggest tech firms, meanwhile, are in danger of swallowing it.

It would also be more difficult to march pitchforks down Wall Street today. That is not because finance has lost its flare for creative destruction, or because of bodyguarding by its indefatigable lobbyists. It is because Wall Street would provide a slippery target for Mr Trump’s “revolution of common sense”, as its risk-taking has become more dispersed. Since the financial crisis, regulation has pushed the hard edge of finance from banks to more—and more complex—institutions in private markets and among hedge funds. Obscurity brings its own risks, but is a shield against angry politicians. Big-tech firms do not benefit from such protection.

In Europe things are different. On the continent, bankers remain the kings of finance, and a punch-bag for populists. There is nothing like big tech to take their place. In Italy, for example, threatening to introduce new taxes on banks seems to have become an annual event. Negotiating bank mergers within the bloc passes for foreign policy. Some governments are still selling stakes in financial institutions, a legacy of crisis-era bail-outs. America might be in danger of forgetting some lessons from the crisis; Europe is still living through it.

Although the beating heart of American finance is now more remote, its risk-taking ethic has infiltrated the American psyche. Increasingly complex products for retail investors, legalised sports betting and cryptocurrency’s boom reflect the appetites of Main Street. Mr Trump’s decision to launch his own meme coin, days before taking office, was an extraordinary act of personal greed. But wouldn’t most Americans do the same thing, if given the opportunity? It is easy to be a banker when such a mood has taken hold.■

Science & technology | Well informed

Can you breathe stress away?

It won’t hurt to try. But scientists are only beginning to understand the links between the breath and the mind

Illustration: Cristina Spanò

Jan 17th 2025

SEVERAL TIMES a day groups of young-professional types gather at 7Breaths, a meditation studio in central London, simply to breathe. The studio offers yoga and meditation sessions but their signature class is focused on “breathwork”. Those attending sit cross-legged atop small cushions in the warm, minimalist space, as an instructor gently guides them first to pay attention to their breath and then to gradually lengthen the inhales, the exhales and the pauses in between. The goal: to de-stress.

The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture from 1st or 2nd century BC, talks about “pranayama”—a yoga practice of controlling the breath—and yoga texts from a few centuries later describe its benefits for steadying the mind. For modern breathwork-enthusiasts who say that guided breathing helps them feel better, it undoubtedly does. But to test whether such exercises can reduce stress in the as-yet-unconverted, you need randomised-controlled trials (RCTs).

A meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports in 2023 compiled the results of 12 RCTs, including 785 participants, to examine the effect of slow-breathing on stress. The studies used a mixture of in-person coaching, online classes and self-guided breathing. Participants who took part in the breathwork sessions reported greater stress-reduction than those in the control group. The effect was small but significant, roughly in line with the benefit from online cognitive behaviour therapy.

These findings come with caveats, however. Several studies, for example, recruited participants who were seeking help for stress and compared a subset who took part in breathwork classes with others who remained on a waiting list for care. This is a problem, as waiting for mental-health treatment can create a “nocebo effect”, where well-being gets worse. Comparing the people who receive treatment with a deteriorating control group can make interventions look better than they really are.

In 2023 researchers at Stanford University published a study in Cell Reports Medicine. Participants performed either mindfulness, “cyclic sighing” (two short inhales, one long exhale), “box-breathing” (inhale, pause, exhale, pause), or “cyclic hyperventilation” (30 short inhales and exhales, followed by a 15 second pause), for five minutes a day, for a month. Everyone got an initial mood boost at the start, but only those who were doing breathwork reported that their mood continued to improve as the study progressed. The best results were in the cyclic-sighing group.

How might breathing control mood? One idea is that it forces attention away from negative or stressful thoughts. Researchers have also found that voluntarily slowing breathing can increase heart-rate variability—the fluctuations in the timing between heart beats. This is often low in people with psychiatric disorders like depression, bipolar and ADHD. Increasing it, the theory goes, should therefore be a good thing. There is also evidence that slow breathing and stress regulation might share brain circuits, at least in rodents. A study published in Nature Neuroscience in November 2024 found that stimulating a pathway which causes slow breathing in mice also suppressed anxious behaviours.

The evidence on breathwork might still be unclear, but the practice appears to have no real downsides. Everything from gut health to infection is now understood to influence mental health. Slow, controlled breathing may soon be added to the list.■

Culture | Back Story

Witty and wise, “A Real Pain” is a masterpiece in a minor key

Jesse Eisenberg’s deceptively slight film asks big moral questions

Photograph: Landmark

Jan 21st 2025

The bathetic scene will be familiar to many Jews who have traced their roots in eastern Europe. You go in search of der heim, your family’s cradle and the fulcrum of its lore, and discover there is nothing left to see. Amid the vacant lots and communist architecture, there is little even to feel. “It’s so unremarkable,” says Benji (Kieran Culkin) when, in “A Real Pain”, he and his cousin David find their grandmother’s house in Poland.

Out in British cinemas now and streaming on Hulu in America, “A Real Pain” is a stealth contender for the Oscars. With a running time of 90 minutes, it shows how a seemingly modest film can encompass grand philosophical themes. Amid the zigzagging mood, it deftly raises moral quandaries at once specific to its characters and universal.

Played by Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer and director), David is a tense New Yorker with a wife, a child and a job peddling advertising banners; or, as his cousin puts it, “selling shit online”. In his Golden Globe-winning turn as Benji, Mr Culkin reprises the manic charisma of his role in “Succession”, but with added pathos. Where David’s feelings are withheld, Benji’s emerge unfiltered. His is the sort of antic life that is fun to watch but punishing inside. “I love him, and I hate him,” David summarises, “and I want to kill him, and I want to be him.”

Their recently deceased grandma, who survived the Holocaust by “a thousand miracles”, left them some money for this pilgrimage to Poland, perhaps in the hope of rekindling the closeness of their youth. In Warsaw they join a Jewish-heritage tour group that includes Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism out of a sense of solidarity. As they visit monuments to ghettos and uprisings, Benji’s tomfoolery wins everyone over. David sulks.

Since 2002, when Jonathan Safran Foer published “Everything is Illuminated”, a madcap quest into a Jewish family’s past, the third generation’s perspective has been a dominant lens on the Holocaust. This cohort grew up in the shadow of persecution but didn’t experience it; it knows the heart-wrenching stories but doesn’t feature in them. As James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide in “A Real Pain”, notes, the likes of Benji and David find themselves, with unsettling irony, “staying in fancy hotels [and] eating posh food” while pondering their forebears’ agony.

Focusing on the descendants’ angst, rather than the ancestral horror, might seem self-indulgent. But an indirect approach can be more respectful than trying to confront a tragedy head-on. The power of tact was demonstrated recently by “The Zone of Interest”, a film about the domestic life of the commandant of Auschwitz, which declined to cross the barbed wire and enter the concentration camp itself.

In “A Real Pain”, the third-generation ironies are mixed with a reverential awe. When David, Benji and the rest of the group visit Majdanek, another Nazi camp, the wisecracks stop; the trilling Chopin soundtrack falls silent. As the visitors peer into a gas chamber, the camera does not follow their gaze but looks back at their expressions, as if acknowledging that today’s audiences can know this hell only at a remove.

Suffering is always personal. “A Real Pain” is a tale of idiosyncratic characters, set in the wake of a specifically Jewish catastrophe. At the same time it evokes questions with which every thinking person contends. For starters, how do you weigh private woes against large-scale calamities? As war rages in Ukraine and Sudan, for instance, how sad are you entitled to be if a project or relationship fails? In the scheme of things, how much does your own pain really matter?

David and Benji wrestle with this problem in Poland. Memories of their shared childhood, and of mooching around New York, jostle with recollections of their beloved grandmother. Even as they mourn her, and strive to honour her legacy, other worries beset them—not least the awareness that their once-entwined paths have diverged, and that a chasm of incomprehension has opened between them.

Then there is the bedrock challenge of living alongside evil and disaster. “People can’t walk around the world being happy all the time,” Benji rails. Eloge, the Rwandan, is baffled by how “The world seems to carry on like there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked.” This is a conundrum, even for philosophers. One way or another, though, life does carry on—and, after their miniature, tragicomic odyssey, in a film both slight and deep, so do David and Benji. ■

Culture | Ready to bag it?

Backpacks are, surprisingly, in vogue

They are following in sneakers’ path and becoming more fashionable

Illustration: Ben Hickey

Jan 23rd 2025

They were once the accessory of choice for hikers, paupers and pupils. No adult with even vague ambitions of style would be caught dead with one. But backpacks have hitchhiked into greater acceptance. Young people are now opting for them over briefcases and tote bags. Sales in America rose to a new high in 2022, as workers returned to the office after covid, according to Circana, a research firm.

“Twenty years ago, you couldn’t wear a backpack into work,” says Taylor Welden, creative director at Carryology, a platform for designers and writers who are enthusiastic about bags. That has changed. Andy Fallshaw, co-founder of Carryology and Bellroy, a bagmaker, compares backpacks to sneakers. Once a niche product worn by athletes, sneakers have snuck into popular culture and now strut down pavements and even catwalks. A growing community of “bagheads” take to online forums and social media to gush about strapping straps and zippy zips.

What changed? Workplaces have become more casual; at the same time backpacks are being designed to look more fashionable. Materials such as waxed canvas and leather offer backpacks a more elevated air than rucksacks of yore. Airlines’ baggage fees may have also given backpacks a bump: faced with higher prices for checking suitcases, people are anxious to carry more on board with them, and lugging weight on one’s back is easier than on a single shoulder. Longer commutes into the office—after some opted to move farther out of cities during covid—have also converted people into daily “backpackers”.

Humans have schlepped stuff on their backs for millennia. Ötzi, a mummified “iceman” who lived some 5,300 years ago, is thought to have hauled around a wooden backpack before meeting his chilly demise in the Alps. Long used during war, including the Battle of Waterloo, backpacks evolved in the early 20th century, when an American mountaineer added zips, replacing heavy straps and buckles. In the 1960s Murray McCory and Jan Lewis founded JanSport, designing compartments instead of top-loading bags.

A fresh generation of boutique bagmakers is thriving and experimenting with new, durable fabrics. Packolab, based in Ukraine, sells backpacks that cost around $400; they are so popular that the firm has implemented a lottery system to manage demand. Fashion brands, from Chanel to Saint Laurent, have taken notice, too. In 2023 Dior partnered with Mystery Ranch, a bag designer in Montana best known for making kit for firefighters, hunters and soldiers, to create a limited-edition backpack with a $4,000 price tag. Yeti, an outdoor-products firm, acquired Mystery Ranch last year. Even established bagmakers are following the pack. ■

Obituary | What lies behind curtains

David Lynch mesmerised filmgoers with mystery, beauty and horror

America’s strangest and most surreal film-maker died on January 16th, aged 78

Photograph: Camera Press/Sébastien Soriano/Figarophoto

Jan 22nd 2025

The first long, proper kiss David Lynch had with a girl took place in a ponderosa pine forest in America’s north-west. Pine needles, incredibly soft, covered the floor to a depth of about two feet. High treetops pierced the blue sky. The feel of the woods he knew as a boy stayed with him all his life: the smell of them, their dim lost interiors, the crispness of the air. “Twin Peaks”, the mysterious TV series that made him wildly famous in the early 1990s, opened with a shot of pines, mountains and mist. The mist too lingered, drifting in deep bass notes across the face of Laura Palmer, the high-school homecoming queen whose dead body, wrapped up in plastic, lay at the heart of the story. Beneath the surface ordinariness, violent disturbance was going on.

That seemed true of most small towns. He grew up in them, especially in Boise, Idaho, and sometimes felt romantic for those neat yards and white picket fences, the scrubbed children and Sunday excursions. Yet under those lawns (as under the pine needles), insects were tangling and devouring each other. Entropy ate away at every new thing. As a boy he liked to walk the streets at night, curious not about the brightly lit windows but the low-lit, curtained ones. Curtains hid secrets. Behind them, a man and a woman might be sitting in silence in an atmosphere of coiled-up menace. Should he stay silent himself? Should he speak? What would happen next? In his film “Blue Velvet” (1986), one small-town field produced a newly severed ear, evidence, eventually, of a psychopath’s sexual rampages. A woman also appeared out of the dark at the end of a street, naked, with a bloodied mouth. That was something he had witnessed himself—in Boise. It was in such a tender state, all this flesh, in an imperfect world.

His view of what was ugly or grotesque was not like other people’s. Textures obsessed him, the very look and feel of mud, dust, scales and slime. Sores and wounds could be beautiful. He tried to concoct by himself the gruesome growths on the face of Joseph Merrick in “The Elephant Man”. And he loved abandoned factories in their full grime and ruination. As a young man, hoping to live “the art life”, he went to study painting in then-run-down Philadelphia. His enchantment with its smoky walls, stark shadows, broken windows and wailing trains was poured into “Eraserhead” (1977), a black-and-white film he produced while on a fellowship at the American Film Institute. Its very weirdness made critics notice him. The hero, Henry Spencer, the new father of a mutant-fetus baby, was an innocent whose wedge-shaped hair seemed to explode with confusion. He moved wide-eyed through the horror, beauty and mystery of the world, trying to figure out how everything could be the way it was, as did the straight-arrow-cherry-pie detectives of “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks”. Their director saw himself in all of them.

It did not bother him that audiences were often left completely at sea. It was good to ask questions and compare interpretations. He himself knew exactly what he wanted; his task was to transfer his dreams and intuitions perfectly to the screen, turning fragile glass to steel. No detail—the placing of a cup, the dirt beneath a radiator, the precise orange hue of a lipstick—could escape his attention. But the plots, he felt, were simple. “Mulholland Drive”, the mesmerising tale of one aspiring actress unwisely befriending another, was a film that attacked the power structures of Hollywood. “Inland Empire”, which came later and did less well, was the story of an actress increasingly terrified by the death of the woman who had played the part before. At their simplest, almost all his films involved characters confronting the dark sides of themselves. And those were so dark that his lighting man struggled to produce a black that was black enough.

He himself, however, displayed no dark side. He seemed to come straight out of the 1950s, with his khakis, blazers and shirts buttoned right to the top because he didn’t like air on his collarbone. Male friends were “buster” and good things “peachy-keen”. For months and years he would eat the same breakfast every day, coffee and a chocolate milkshake at Bob’s Big Boy in LA, and the same lunch, a grilled-cheese sandwich. He smoked as though the practice had never been outlawed, getting emphysema in the end. With his actors he was no yeller, but gentle, indicating what he wanted with just a word or a touch on an arm. This went right to them. His aspect was so serene—the result of the meditations he had done twice daily since 1973—and he asked so nicely, that his actors would strive to do whatever he wanted, even when it involved ceremonial rape and sado-masochism (in “Blue Velvet”) or rolling in the dirt and masturbation (in “Mulholland Drive”).

The only thing that maddened him was loss of control of the work. In 1983 he agreed to direct “Dune”, a science-fiction epic based on a bestselling novel. Its scale and its setting, in the empty desert, did not suit him at all. He was a man of interiors, details and harrowing close-ups; this was a Hollywood production for the extra-wide screen. Besides, he was an artist, who could no more collaborate on directing than on doing his lumpy, child-like paintings. Consequently, neither Hollywood nor the TV companies really took to him. He won no Oscars. Another director got the final cut on “Dune”, producing a version he refused to recognise.

Worse was what happened to “Twin Peaks”, when halfway through the second series ABC thought it was going too slowly, and forced him to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was. All the narrative tension leaked out of it then, and ABC killed it off. That was Fate, perhaps. He made further visits to the town, a prequel film and in 2017 a hugely popular third series, because he seemed to love Laura too much to leave her. Her face was still appearing and disappearing in the mist. And it gave him an excuse to go to the forest again, braving the haunted depths, to celebrate what a strange, beautiful trip life was. ■