Working-class men in the US have fallen behind women on a number of indicators of well-being. This is not due to a battle of the sexes, but because decades of growing inequality and precarity have had differential impacts on men and women.

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.

The Illusory Battle of the Sexes

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Take the following facts about performance in school, for instance: In high school, boys make up a majority of students in the bottom half of the GPA distribution; in the bottom tenth of the distribution, they outnumber girls two to one. Conversely, in the top half of the distribution, girls are a majority, and in the top tenth, girls have a mirror image two-to-one advantage. After high school, men are less likely than women to enroll in college, and among those who do give college a try, men are less likely to complete a degree.

There’s an obvious, misogynist battle-of-the-sexes reaction to this data, which says that if girls are doing better in school, it must be that women have somehow skewed schools to their own advantage such that they systematically discriminate against boys. My male undergraduate students told me that in their feeds, the social media algorithms regularly coughed up content from Andrew Tate and others of his ilk, conveying a targeted message to young men warning them off of college ambitions. More caring and careful observers point out that the pop-culture messaging boys get about masculinity (aggression, activity, individualism) and the behavioral demands made in school (cooperation, calm) are so at odds that schools end up failing to serve boys well.

There may be something to that, but focusing so narrowly on gender cannot explain why the female-favoring gender gap in high school graduation rates tends to be much larger in low-income school districts; some school districts, more often high-income ones, graduate boys at higher rates than girls. The fact that girls make up two-thirds of the students in the top tenth of high school GPAs can explain why Ivy League colleges have an applicant pool that is two-thirds female. But if we have already leaped to the conclusion that the education system is actively discriminating against boys (or even just inadvertently failing them), we cannot then explain why the boys in the Ivy League applicant pool are about twice as likely to be admitted so that, in the end, these most selective colleges admit and enroll a class that is roughly 50 percent male. (If anything, that looks like a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of boys.)

Insisting on a battle-of-the-sexes lens despite its explanatory failures lends support to a political project of mustering the male troops and launching an offensive campaign to take back the power that women have purportedly seized. Such a campaign might bring women down, but it can’t lift men up. What is there to “take back,” after all? Women, on average, still have lower wages than men, still experience higher poverty rates than men, and still do more unpaid domestic labor on men’s behalf than men do for women (or for themselves).

The cry-me-a-river reaction says: plenty of boys do just fine in school, so why should we trouble ourselves so much about the ones who dick around and waste the opportunities given to them? Moreover, men without college education earn more than women without college education. And when they do get their acts together to go to college, men maintain their wage gap advantage over their college-educated female counterparts. Sorting the gender wage gap data into groups based on the competitiveness and prestige of the post-high-school training and education pursued reveals more or less the same gap in every bin: when we compare like to like, women earn roughly 25 percent less than men, whether we are looking at those who have earned vocational certificates, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees at not-so-selective colleges, or bachelor’s degrees at highly selective colleges.

Women are not outperforming men academically because they are “winning.” Women have on average committed themselves to academics because they are losing in the labor market. Women must aim higher than men in school if they want merely to match men’s earnings. This is even truer for women who may want to have children. The pay gap between mothers and fathers is markedly wider than the overall average pay gap between women and men.

So, our eye-roller says, if men want to maintain their economic advantage over women, all they have to do is quit bellyaching and do their homework. But that interpretation is a trap too. No one wins a comparative victimhood contest, and “suck it up, bucko” isn’t a political agenda that can win widespread support or improve life for anyone.

The All-Too-Real Class War

Something has been taken from many men, but it clearly wasn’t women who took it. (Unless the “something” in question is broad social permission for men to kick women around, in which case, yes, every wave of the women’s movement has aimed at taking that permission away.) Who is responsible for the dire situation of many men today, then? The answer to that is also clear: the rich.

The evidence is plentiful. Exhibit A: the labor share of national income has fallen. From the end of World War II to near the end of the twentieth century, labor captured somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 percent of the value added in production each year. There was a slight downward drift in the years approaching and immediately after 2000, and then the Great Recession hit. The labor share plummeted to somewhere around 57 percent and hasn’t bounced back. This amounts to thousands of dollars per person per year lost by the vast majority of the population who don’t live on asset income alone.

Relatedly, exhibit B: what isn’t getting paid to workers is piling up around the superrich. In just fifteen years, from March 2008 to March 2023, the highest 0.01 percent of disposable personal incomes swelled 43.4 percent. We’re talking about 25,100 people — they wouldn’t even fill Fenway Park — who now bring in an average of $25.7 million per year after taxes. The rest of the top 1 percent, those whose incomes are only in seven digits, not eight, have trailed 5 or 10 percentage points behind in their rates of disposable income growth. That 43.4 percent income surge at the tip-top is more than twice the total income growth rate and more than three times the growth rate in income for people in the middle of the distribution.

From a technical policymaking standpoint, we know how to change this. And for about a year, from spring 2020 to spring 2021, we did. Pandemic-era policies such as more generous child tax credits, unemployment insurance benefits, and other forms of social welfare spending provided direct support to many, improved the bargaining position of workers, and held the top 0.01 percent in check. That one year, disposable incomes grew faster in the bottom 50 percent than in the rest of the distribution. Then we let the concentration of income resume with a vengeance.

As income gaps have expanded to Gilded Age proportions, gaps in outcomes when we compare people across differences of income have also expanded. These now dwarf any gaps we can find across differences of gender.

Consider life expectancy. For the cohort born in 1920 or 1930, rich men outlived poor men by about five years, rich women outlived poor women by about four, and when we look at men and women within groups with similar incomes, women outlived men by somewhere between three and six years. For those born just a little later in the century, the gender gap stayed about the same, but the class gap in life expectancy roughly doubled. A rich man born in 1940 is likely still alive today and can expect to hang on for three more years yet — a rich woman for five. On average, the women born in 1940 who lived at the opposite end of the income scale have been dead for five years, and the poor men have been gone for almost a decade. May their memory be a blessing.

Class disparities in years on Earth only widened for the baby boomers. For the cohort born in 1960, men and women at the top are thriving now that they are sixty-five and are projected to live longer than any cohort before them. Meanwhile, men at the bottom are not expected to have gained anything, and women at the bottom are expected to die younger than women born poor a little earlier.

If you line up Americans by income, then, you are also lining us up by probable age at death. The difference between top and bottom life expectancies is reached by a steady gradient across the whole domain of incomes — but the gradient is steeper for men than for women.

Being a man is not on its own a source of hardship. In the absence of money, however, it does seem that maleness functions as an accelerant for some of the injuries of class. Women have not been spared from the effects of class war from above, and poor women are of course harmed by poverty too. However, for now at least, they survive it a little longer than their brothers.

Maybe what allows women to cope better in some respects is that there is no historical precedent that led women to expect better for themselves in the labor market, whereas within living memory, men could more easily get jobs that were considered appropriately masculine and get a bigger slice of the national economic pie than they get now. Instead of considering their class injuries to be an insult to their manhood, men would do well to consider class injuries an insult to all who bear them. Whatever the reasons, on average, women endure the injuries of class a little longer than men. To do more than endure and directly combat class oppression, men and women will have to work together.

Who’s the Boss’s Bitch?

The oppressive, exploitative treatment of women in the workplace has repeatedly served as a pilot project for how capital will later treat men. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution in the United States, the first wage-labor force in the textile factories was almost entirely female. Later, intrusive factory discipline was imposed on men. Later still, when capital wanted to wriggle out of the commitments to labor that the twentieth-century union movement had pressed them into, they experimented with putting women into “flexible” labor arrangements through temp agencies such as Kelly Girl. (That is, flexible for the employer, not so flexible for the worker.)

Having figured out how to avoid long-term commitments to women workers while keeping them always available, capital then weaseled out of commitments men thought they had won. And here we are.

When working-class men express a feeling of being “feminized,” or when manosphere influencers tell men they are being emasculated, there is a kernel of economic truth. The dominant model of mid-twentieth-century male adulthood was the breadwinning head of a household, and a decent fraction of the jobs available to men made that role achievable. Some men were excluded, especially most black men whose gains from the civil rights movement arrived right around the same time that income distribution trends turned back toward increased income inequality. But for many men whose prime working years fell in the few decades after World War II, it was not necessary to start with a lot of assets or education to get a respectable slice of the economic pie.

With the shift of economic rewards steeply upward, the precarious, dead-end structure of work that was for a while mostly reserved for women and non-whites is now imposed on a bigger share of the male workforce too — including white men, especially if they do not have college degrees.

Women have always had to go above and beyond baseline requirements to prove that they are qualified for employment; the phenomenon of credential creep means that employers now often demand effortful and personally costly demonstrations of worthiness and commitment from men too. Get a degree, a certificate, a license to get your first job. Then if you want to advance, don’t expect an on-the-job career ladder. Go get more formal training at your own expense. Breadwinning is harder, so anyone who holds onto that as the measure of manhood is set up to feel like a failure.

No one wants to be overworked, underpaid, disrespected, and treated as expendable. In that sense, men are increasingly being treated similarly to how women have traditionally been treated. And being treated like a woman, in that sense, is bad for anyone. In short, no one wants to be the boss’s bitch. The problem isn’t that men are misgendered by degrading and insecure employment; the problem is that, with few exceptions and even fewer lifetime immunities, workers are degraded and insecure.

Meanwhile, even as the economy-wide share of “bad jobs” grows and an expanding share of the workforce is consigned to work them, women and non-white racial groups are no longer categorically barred from the dwindling share of “good jobs,” the high-pay, high-status work that used to be explicitly reserved for white men. But as a classic 1981 article about women in the professions by Michael Carter and Susan Boslego Carter put it, “Women get a ticket to ride after the gravy train has left the station.” As good jobs get scarcer, the demands they put on workers get more onerous — more entry requirements, more always-on availability — meaning that just when women and non-white workers get their first toehold in the “good jobs” section of the labor market, the good jobs that remain are worse than they used to be. The accelerating concentration of wealth and incomes at the very top of the distribution leaves most men and most women milling around on the platform together, the rumble of the gravy train receding in the distance.

What’s the Agenda?

Even for those stuck in a mistaken lost-battle-of-the-sexes diagnosis of men’s ills, the follow-up demand isn’t usually to combat exclusion so that men can have access to the kinds of lives that women are leading. There isn’t really any structural exclusion to combat; just, perhaps, some cultural squeamishness about shifting gender norms. (For example, employment is growing in the caring professions like education and health care. Many men may be refusing to enter, but the relevant schools and employers aren’t barring the doors against them.)

Demands to knock women down don’t deserve consideration. So what is an agenda that could win some dignity and economic security and pare back the class gaps in school achievement and life expectancy? Just about anything that reduces income inequality will help. Improve housing affordability in areas with strong labor markets and strong union movements so that workers can move to take advantage of economic opportunity. Raise labor’s share of pretax income by strengthening workers’ bargaining position with a strong social safety net, a robust public jobs program, and protections for unions’ collective action. Reduce the yawning gulfs in posttax income with more steeply progressive taxes. (There was a time when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent!)

These eminently doable options for making men’s lives better — affordable housing, wage growth at the bottom, progressive taxation, and so on — would of course make women’s lives better too. Sharing gains across lines of gender makes the gains bigger, even for men; past experience shows us that leaving women out only keeps alive a degraded status that threatens to swallow men again too.

Victims accuse military of ‘cover-up’ after it closed investigation without checking archives or interviewing suspect

How much longer will we watch Israel starve children to death and massacre civilians seeking food before American political leaders put a stop to this madness?

More than twenty months into the genocide, Israel has rendered Gaza a hellscape on earth. This hellscape is not an act of God, or a natural disaster, or some force majeure — it’s human-made, orchestrated by Israel, funded and armed by the United States, and cheered on by Western political elites.

For five hellish months, Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, blocking all food deliveries to the starving population of two million Palestinians, almost half of them children, and condemning hundreds to a slow and agonizing death. Unsatisfied with forced mass starvation, Israeli forces carried out the equivalent of their previous flour massacre in Gaza almost daily, slaughtering over one thousand Palestinians seeking food. On Wednesday, more than one hundred international aid and rights groups appealed to governments to take immediate action in Gaza, where over one hundred thousand children are facing imminent mass death if this barbarity continues.

The humanitarian calamity is so horrific that top UN officials have abandoned their customarily restrained tone for outraged and emotionally charged condemnations. UN secretary-general António Guterres has berated the international community for ignoring the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, which he said presents a “moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.”

“I cannot explain the level of indifference and inaction we see by too many in the international community — the lack of compassion, the lack of truth, the lack of humanity,” Guterres told participants at the global assembly of the rights group Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, genocidal rhetoric continues to pour out of the upper echelons of Israeli leadership, with one minister pledging that Israel is “racing to wipe out Gaza.” The genocidal mania also includes an Israeli version of Donald Trump’s Gaza video, featuring a dystopian AI-generated scenario of an ethnically cleansed Gaza, with Trump Tower glimmering over the depopulated landscape.

US president Trump has once again cheered for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In a recent interview, Trump openly called on Israel to cleanse Gaza, while virtually blaming Palestinians for their own death. He told Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza.

US complicity in the Gaza genocide goes beyond funding and arming Israel to the hilt with bipartisan blessing. Recent media reports have revealed that Israel and the Trump administration are coordinating a scheme to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, which could include countries like Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya — a revived Zionist dream as old as Israel itself, hatched originally by Zionist leaders like Moshe Dayan and Levi Eshkol, to transfer Palestinian refugees in Gaza to countries in North Africa (the Libyan Operation), or even to Latin America by air (the Moshe Dayan plan). “All of Gaza will be Jewish,” as one Israeli minister recently vowed.

Europe is faring hardly better. For over twenty months, the Western political class has refused to rein in Israel’s genocidal spree in Gaza. France’s recent recognition of a Palestinian state, while refusing to take immediate and concrete actions to stop the genocide and the forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, is a largely empty gesture, especially in the face of what the UN’s former aid chief describes as “the worst crime of the century.”

UK leaders seem to believe that Israel can always act with impunity and without consequences against Palestinians, while Germany has no qualms about making Palestinians pay for its past crimes against the Jews, with a horrifying repeat of past atrocities. Or as Hans Frank, a Nazi governor in occupied Poland, put it in his diary: “That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.”

For decades, Western leaders have winked at Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, refusing to take a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the siege of Gaza, and the apartheid in the West Bank, marked by the constant dispossession and erasure of Palestinian existence, daily dehumanization and forced displacement, unhinged settler violence, systematic torture, and other unspeakable injustices, which together have culminated in the Gaza genocide.

According to international law, siege starvation is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and an act of genocide. The global consensus has been that sieges are “barbaric and medieval” and belong to a darker period in human history. And yet, for nearly two decades, Israel has imposed its devastating and suffocating blockade of Gaza without consequences.

This brutal and inhumane blockade, the longest in modern history, has been sustained and naturalized with Western support and blessing, whose leaders have become accustomed to seeing Palestinians ghettoed in concentration camps swollen by refugees, caged in a tiny enclave like sheep penned for slaughter, under constant bombardment and invasions, displaced time and again. If Gaza was already unlivable before the genocide, it’s now “worse than hell on earth,” to cite the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Gaza genocide is the most documented genocide in human history. Future historians contemplating it will scratch their heads over how this unimaginable horror was allowed to happen in this enlightened century — how the civilized world watched it unfold in real time, broadcast by the victims themselves, and did nothing to stop it. As UNICEF spokesperson James Elder put it: “Gaza has shattered humanity’s records for its darkest chapters. Humanity must now urgently write a different chapter.”

For the horror of the Gaza genocide is not merely the fact that it was allowed to happen, but that it was allowed to happen for this long and for far longer than most genocides in recent memory — with the persistent backing of Western powers. The Srebrenica genocide, which marks thirty years this month, unfolded in a few horrific days in July 1995, prompting swift Western intervention. While Israel’s genocide in Gaza has reaped so far at least ten times as many victims as the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia, no other genocide has garnered the same level of complicity and apathy from Western elites. Not to mention Arab complicity, whose leaders largely see Palestinian resistance and struggle for freedom as an existential threat.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, American writer Kurt Vonnegut describes the bombing of Dresden, which unfolded eighty years ago and lasted for two nights, as the “greatest massacre in European history.” One wonders what he would say about Israel’s unending slaughter of Gaza, which has been unfolding before our eyes for nearly two years, with no end in sight. Gone are the days when a Palestinian prisoner’s hunger strike would cause a global outrage. The new threshold, established in Gaza by Israel and its Western allies, is that a pariah state can starve to death an entire people and still be a member of the United Nations.

For twenty-one months, Western powers, led by the United States, have allowed Israel to plumb new depths of barbarity in Gaza almost daily without offering Palestinians even the dignity of humanitarian sympathy. They continue to do so even when the Western-backed destruction of Palestinians has brought the whole global order and postwar moral legacy to the brink of collapse. And they remain unfazed by Israel’s absolute contempt for the basic tenets of international justice, thus rendering Gaza, in the words of a prominent Palestinian human rights lawyer, “the graveyard of international law.”

This holocaust must stop now. Humanity itself is at stake. As Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), has put it: “Make ‘never again’ a reality. If we fail the Palestinians in Gaza, others are likely to be failed too in the future.”

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.

In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.

Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.

As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.

Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world. 

The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.

In contrast to the political divides of the 20^th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?

This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”

At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.

Victims accuse military of ‘cover-up’ after it closed investigation without checking archives or interviewing suspect

Victims accuse military of ‘cover-up’ after it closed investigation without checking archives or interviewing suspect

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.

In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.

Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.

As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.

Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world. 

The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.

In contrast to the political divides of the 20^th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?

This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”

At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.

Working-class men in the US have fallen behind women on a number of indicators of well-being. This is not due to a battle of the sexes, but because decades of growing inequality and precarity have had differential impacts on men and women.

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.

The Illusory Battle of the Sexes

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Take the following facts about performance in school, for instance: In high school, boys make up a majority of students in the bottom half of the GPA distribution; in the bottom tenth of the distribution, they outnumber girls two to one. Conversely, in the top half of the distribution, girls are a majority, and in the top tenth, girls have a mirror image two-to-one advantage. After high school, men are less likely than women to enroll in college, and among those who do give college a try, men are less likely to complete a degree.

There’s an obvious, misogynist battle-of-the-sexes reaction to this data, which says that if girls are doing better in school, it must be that women have somehow skewed schools to their own advantage such that they systematically discriminate against boys. My male undergraduate students told me that in their feeds, the social media algorithms regularly coughed up content from Andrew Tate and others of his ilk, conveying a targeted message to young men warning them off of college ambitions. More caring and careful observers point out that the pop-culture messaging boys get about masculinity (aggression, activity, individualism) and the behavioral demands made in school (cooperation, calm) are so at odds that schools end up failing to serve boys well.

There may be something to that, but focusing so narrowly on gender cannot explain why the female-favoring gender gap in high school graduation rates tends to be much larger in low-income school districts; some school districts, more often high-income ones, graduate boys at higher rates than girls. The fact that girls make up two-thirds of the students in the top tenth of high school GPAs can explain why Ivy League colleges have an applicant pool that is two-thirds female. But if we have already leaped to the conclusion that the education system is actively discriminating against boys (or even just inadvertently failing them), we cannot then explain why the boys in the Ivy League applicant pool are about twice as likely to be admitted so that, in the end, these most selective colleges admit and enroll a class that is roughly 50 percent male. (If anything, that looks like a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of boys.)

Insisting on a battle-of-the-sexes lens despite its explanatory failures lends support to a political project of mustering the male troops and launching an offensive campaign to take back the power that women have purportedly seized. Such a campaign might bring women down, but it can’t lift men up. What is there to “take back,” after all? Women, on average, still have lower wages than men, still experience higher poverty rates than men, and still do more unpaid domestic labor on men’s behalf than men do for women (or for themselves).

The cry-me-a-river reaction says: plenty of boys do just fine in school, so why should we trouble ourselves so much about the ones who dick around and waste the opportunities given to them? Moreover, men without college education earn more than women without college education. And when they do get their acts together to go to college, men maintain their wage gap advantage over their college-educated female counterparts. Sorting the gender wage gap data into groups based on the competitiveness and prestige of the post-high-school training and education pursued reveals more or less the same gap in every bin: when we compare like to like, women earn roughly 25 percent less than men, whether we are looking at those who have earned vocational certificates, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees at not-so-selective colleges, or bachelor’s degrees at highly selective colleges.

Women are not outperforming men academically because they are “winning.” Women have on average committed themselves to academics because they are losing in the labor market. Women must aim higher than men in school if they want merely to match men’s earnings. This is even truer for women who may want to have children. The pay gap between mothers and fathers is markedly wider than the overall average pay gap between women and men.

So, our eye-roller says, if men want to maintain their economic advantage over women, all they have to do is quit bellyaching and do their homework. But that interpretation is a trap too. No one wins a comparative victimhood contest, and “suck it up, bucko” isn’t a political agenda that can win widespread support or improve life for anyone.

The All-Too-Real Class War

Something has been taken from many men, but it clearly wasn’t women who took it. (Unless the “something” in question is broad social permission for men to kick women around, in which case, yes, every wave of the women’s movement has aimed at taking that permission away.) Who is responsible for the dire situation of many men today, then? The answer to that is also clear: the rich.

The evidence is plentiful. Exhibit A: the labor share of national income has fallen. From the end of World War II to near the end of the twentieth century, labor captured somewhere in the neighborhood of 63 percent of the value added in production each year. There was a slight downward drift in the years approaching and immediately after 2000, and then the Great Recession hit. The labor share plummeted to somewhere around 57 percent and hasn’t bounced back. This amounts to thousands of dollars per person per year lost by the vast majority of the population who don’t live on asset income alone.

Relatedly, exhibit B: what isn’t getting paid to workers is piling up around the superrich. In just fifteen years, from March 2008 to March 2023, the highest 0.01 percent of disposable personal incomes swelled 43.4 percent. We’re talking about 25,100 people — they wouldn’t even fill Fenway Park — who now bring in an average of $25.7 million per year after taxes. The rest of the top 1 percent, those whose incomes are only in seven digits, not eight, have trailed 5 or 10 percentage points behind in their rates of disposable income growth. That 43.4 percent income surge at the tip-top is more than twice the total income growth rate and more than three times the growth rate in income for people in the middle of the distribution.

From a technical policymaking standpoint, we know how to change this. And for about a year, from spring 2020 to spring 2021, we did. Pandemic-era policies such as more generous child tax credits, unemployment insurance benefits, and other forms of social welfare spending provided direct support to many, improved the bargaining position of workers, and held the top 0.01 percent in check. That one year, disposable incomes grew faster in the bottom 50 percent than in the rest of the distribution. Then we let the concentration of income resume with a vengeance.

As income gaps have expanded to Gilded Age proportions, gaps in outcomes when we compare people across differences of income have also expanded. These now dwarf any gaps we can find across differences of gender.

Consider life expectancy. For the cohort born in 1920 or 1930, rich men outlived poor men by about five years, rich women outlived poor women by about four, and when we look at men and women within groups with similar incomes, women outlived men by somewhere between three and six years. For those born just a little later in the century, the gender gap stayed about the same, but the class gap in life expectancy roughly doubled. A rich man born in 1940 is likely still alive today and can expect to hang on for three more years yet — a rich woman for five. On average, the women born in 1940 who lived at the opposite end of the income scale have been dead for five years, and the poor men have been gone for almost a decade. May their memory be a blessing.

Class disparities in years on Earth only widened for the baby boomers. For the cohort born in 1960, men and women at the top are thriving now that they are sixty-five and are projected to live longer than any cohort before them. Meanwhile, men at the bottom are not expected to have gained anything, and women at the bottom are expected to die younger than women born poor a little earlier.

If you line up Americans by income, then, you are also lining us up by probable age at death. The difference between top and bottom life expectancies is reached by a steady gradient across the whole domain of incomes — but the gradient is steeper for men than for women.

Being a man is not on its own a source of hardship. In the absence of money, however, it does seem that maleness functions as an accelerant for some of the injuries of class. Women have not been spared from the effects of class war from above, and poor women are of course harmed by poverty too. However, for now at least, they survive it a little longer than their brothers.

Maybe what allows women to cope better in some respects is that there is no historical precedent that led women to expect better for themselves in the labor market, whereas within living memory, men could more easily get jobs that were considered appropriately masculine and get a bigger slice of the national economic pie than they get now. Instead of considering their class injuries to be an insult to their manhood, men would do well to consider class injuries an insult to all who bear them. Whatever the reasons, on average, women endure the injuries of class a little longer than men. To do more than endure and directly combat class oppression, men and women will have to work together.

Who’s the Boss’s Bitch?

The oppressive, exploitative treatment of women in the workplace has repeatedly served as a pilot project for how capital will later treat men. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution in the United States, the first wage-labor force in the textile factories was almost entirely female. Later, intrusive factory discipline was imposed on men. Later still, when capital wanted to wriggle out of the commitments to labor that the twentieth-century union movement had pressed them into, they experimented with putting women into “flexible” labor arrangements through temp agencies such as Kelly Girl. (That is, flexible for the employer, not so flexible for the worker.)

Having figured out how to avoid long-term commitments to women workers while keeping them always available, capital then weaseled out of commitments men thought they had won. And here we are.

When working-class men express a feeling of being “feminized,” or when manosphere influencers tell men they are being emasculated, there is a kernel of economic truth. The dominant model of mid-twentieth-century male adulthood was the breadwinning head of a household, and a decent fraction of the jobs available to men made that role achievable. Some men were excluded, especially most black men whose gains from the civil rights movement arrived right around the same time that income distribution trends turned back toward increased income inequality. But for many men whose prime working years fell in the few decades after World War II, it was not necessary to start with a lot of assets or education to get a respectable slice of the economic pie.

With the shift of economic rewards steeply upward, the precarious, dead-end structure of work that was for a while mostly reserved for women and non-whites is now imposed on a bigger share of the male workforce too — including white men, especially if they do not have college degrees.

Women have always had to go above and beyond baseline requirements to prove that they are qualified for employment; the phenomenon of credential creep means that employers now often demand effortful and personally costly demonstrations of worthiness and commitment from men too. Get a degree, a certificate, a license to get your first job. Then if you want to advance, don’t expect an on-the-job career ladder. Go get more formal training at your own expense. Breadwinning is harder, so anyone who holds onto that as the measure of manhood is set up to feel like a failure.

No one wants to be overworked, underpaid, disrespected, and treated as expendable. In that sense, men are increasingly being treated similarly to how women have traditionally been treated. And being treated like a woman, in that sense, is bad for anyone. In short, no one wants to be the boss’s bitch. The problem isn’t that men are misgendered by degrading and insecure employment; the problem is that, with few exceptions and even fewer lifetime immunities, workers are degraded and insecure.

Meanwhile, even as the economy-wide share of “bad jobs” grows and an expanding share of the workforce is consigned to work them, women and non-white racial groups are no longer categorically barred from the dwindling share of “good jobs,” the high-pay, high-status work that used to be explicitly reserved for white men. But as a classic 1981 article about women in the professions by Michael Carter and Susan Boslego Carter put it, “Women get a ticket to ride after the gravy train has left the station.” As good jobs get scarcer, the demands they put on workers get more onerous — more entry requirements, more always-on availability — meaning that just when women and non-white workers get their first toehold in the “good jobs” section of the labor market, the good jobs that remain are worse than they used to be. The accelerating concentration of wealth and incomes at the very top of the distribution leaves most men and most women milling around on the platform together, the rumble of the gravy train receding in the distance.

What’s the Agenda?

Even for those stuck in a mistaken lost-battle-of-the-sexes diagnosis of men’s ills, the follow-up demand isn’t usually to combat exclusion so that men can have access to the kinds of lives that women are leading. There isn’t really any structural exclusion to combat; just, perhaps, some cultural squeamishness about shifting gender norms. (For example, employment is growing in the caring professions like education and health care. Many men may be refusing to enter, but the relevant schools and employers aren’t barring the doors against them.)

Demands to knock women down don’t deserve consideration. So what is an agenda that could win some dignity and economic security and pare back the class gaps in school achievement and life expectancy? Just about anything that reduces income inequality will help. Improve housing affordability in areas with strong labor markets and strong union movements so that workers can move to take advantage of economic opportunity. Raise labor’s share of pretax income by strengthening workers’ bargaining position with a strong social safety net, a robust public jobs program, and protections for unions’ collective action. Reduce the yawning gulfs in posttax income with more steeply progressive taxes. (There was a time when the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent!)

These eminently doable options for making men’s lives better — affordable housing, wage growth at the bottom, progressive taxation, and so on — would of course make women’s lives better too. Sharing gains across lines of gender makes the gains bigger, even for men; past experience shows us that leaving women out only keeps alive a degraded status that threatens to swallow men again too.

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.

In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.

Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.

As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.

Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world. 

The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.

In contrast to the political divides of the 20^th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?

This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”

At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.

If asked to give a sketch of the ideal Victorian politician, most of us would describe someone like Rory Stewart. A former high-ranking Middle East diplomat turned public intellectual and non-profit executive, fond of soaring grandiloquent rhetoric, classical allusions, and the scion of a family with a long tradition of public service. This uniquely antiquated personage very nearly made Stewart Prime Minister, but ultimately British conservatives chose to elevate Boris Johnson, who later brutally ended Stewart’s time in the Conservative Party.

In his recently published memoirs, Politics on the Edge, Rory Stewart tells the saga of this political rise and fall. Amid the swirl of history and amusing political anecdotes, there is a curious reflection on the various ailments plaguing British politics. In the course of recounting his many fascinating experiences, Stewart gives readers an idea of how moral purpose can be restored to a political world defined by selfish technocracy and dangerous populism.

Though not a household name in the United States, Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a leading figure in Britain. The son of a high-ranking intelligence official, he served for many years as a diplomat and nonprofit leader in the Middle East before entering politics as a member of the Conservative Party.

Very soon after entering the arena, Stewart began to fear that his conception of conservatism fundamentally clashed with the predominant view of those in power. In meetings with local officials, he often encountered a narrow parochialism. In conversations with politicians, he discovered that few concerned themselves with the glories of the British political tradition but instead with polling data and performance metrics. Both of these attributes—that of reactionary parochialism and professionalized, technocratic politics—flew in the face of Stewart’s most deeply held beliefs: “limited government and individual rights; prudence at home and strength abroad; respect for tradition” and love of country.

As Stewart goes on to battle a broken prison system, inefficient bureaucracies, and international terrorism, it becomes clear that the professional political class stood in the way of any hope of institutional reform. The complete incompetence Stewart encounters in the upper reaches of the British government is truly astounding: A Prime Minister who believes the push for Brexit is a manageable burst of economic discontent; a foreign minister more concerned with giving bold Periclean speeches than understanding the nuances of foreign policy; an environment minister who seems only to understand sound bites. The unifying theme across these many failures is that almost every public official Stewart mentions is entirely sure of their own rightness. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson believe they have correct answers to most questions. Even when found to be bewilderingly, earth-shatteringly wrong, most politicians refuse to admit failure of any kind. This is actually an attribute voters are initially inclined to respect but inevitably find frustrating as the failures of such leaders began to pile up.

Stewart spends a great deal of time on the human tragedy that such hubristic characters reveal. However, latent within his descriptions of such individuals and their political struggles is a larger battle between the forces of tribalistic populism and corporatized neoliberalism. The neoliberals—best captured by Prime Minister David Cameron and his key supporters—are sleek, professional, and meticulous. They are also entirely removed from the lives of everyday voters. Cameron neither seemed to know nor care about what goes on in the lives of the average British citizens, unless those views could be expressed through a polling spreadsheet. By the end of the book, this detachment from the public catches up to the neoliberals. Brexit completely destroyed their grip on the Conservative Party and (until the recent election of Sir Kier Starmer) banished their carefully sanitized liberalism to the rump of British politics. Though Stewart’s story focuses on the case of the United Kingdom, this exact series of events has played out in Western democracies across the world. 

The populists are, as the name implies, not as distant from the minds of the people as their neoliberal opponents. Despite this, they prove themselves throughout the course of the book to be every bit as vapid and self-interested. Though Stewart certainly meets principled advocates of Brexit and supporters of Boris Johnson, many more seem to be grifters—mining the anger and resentments of their fellow citizens for personal benefit. Stewart rightly wagered both as a candidate for the leadership of his party and later as a citizen on the sidelines that this vapidness would catch up to the Johnson government.

In contrast to the political divides of the 20^th century, what was once a battle between conservatism and liberalism is now essentially a battle between neoliberals and populists. In theory, this need not be a tragedy; political divisions reset with each new age and the parties eventually catch up to such changes. However, neither neoliberalism nor populism represents viable political solutions. After all, who in a moment of crisis wishes to turn to a hollowed-out liberal ethos or a politics of resentment?

This, then, is the crisis of our age. In a time of social and technological upheaval, there is no viable political alternative to solve the manifold crises we confront. Yet at the heart of Stewart’s depressing narrative lay the broad contours of a political disposition that could save us from ourselves. Nowhere is Stewart’s approach better exemplified than in a speech he delivered to officially launch his campaign for leader of the Conservative Party. In his exordium, Stewart declared that: “We have to make a choice between two different paths for our country. A choice between fairy stories and the politics of reality.”

At first blush, this may sound like the sort of trite nonsense neoliberals say to discredit their opponents. Yet, as the speech continued, it becomes clear that Stewart is offering a bold alternative to all of modern politics. He talked about “love, and loving the reality of place,” and how we need institutions that permit greater input from the people themselves. His speech ends on a poetic note, quoting a line from T.S. Eliot: “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

Realism, love, localism, democracy, and humility—these may not seem like the typical foundations for a political movement. Yet that is precisely their strength. Over the course of his memoirs, Rory Stewart lays bare the fatal weaknesses of the political establishment, but he closes by granting hope to the reader. For in his dynamic and unusual approach to politics, one can start to detect the sort of moderate politics that could one day replace neoliberalism and stand on its own against nationalism—a politics grounded in place, conviction, and the honest humility that government can never provide all the answers to all of humanity’s problems.