THE MYTH OF EURABIA

THE MYTH OF EURABIA

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? 

By Andrew Brown London Guardian

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame. 

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.” 

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third. 

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.” 

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked. 

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.” 

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog. 

Fjordman, whose real name is Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – but managed to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable. 

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostly Gates of Vienna, but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal. 

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion. 

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade. 

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world. 

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals. 

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies. 

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil. 

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front). 

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop? 

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe. 

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” 

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.” 

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.” 

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik. 

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.” 

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis. He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam. 

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires. 

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog called Little Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration. 

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the “great replacement”. 

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly. 

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one. 

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkage facing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million. 

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat. 

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed. 

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.” 

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill. 

Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities. 

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement. 

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo. 

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.” 

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse. 

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.” 

‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA 

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.” 

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended. 

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”. 

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone. 

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular. Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism. 

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail. 

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it. 

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread. They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!” 

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

Understanding Populist Challenges to the Liberal Order

CLASS & INEQUALITY

Understanding Populist Challenges to the Liberal Order

PRANAB BARDHAN Boston Review

Late on election night, November 8, 2016, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times: “. . . people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate . . . so scary yet ludicrous.” About two and half years before that night, many liberals in India felt something similar at Narendra Modi’s massive victory—though one should say, Modi is scary but not ludicrous. 

The right-wing populist challenge to the liberal order is by no means limited to Donald Trump’s America or Modi’s India. The popular appeal of Britain’s Brexit, France’s Marine Le Pen, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, and the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte has baffled social thinkers over the last few years. Meanwhile after a decades-long triumphal march of authoritarian and rapid economic growth, China’s increasingly repressive regime seems to be winning all the marbles in the global power game. 

In deciphering a pattern in the looming illiberal challenge, an explanation has often been sought in the inexorable and unconscionable rise of economic inequality. The standard measures of income and wealth inequality show a significant rise in recent years, not just in rich but also in middle- and low-income countries (with the possible exception of some Latin American countries, although the levels of inequality there remain quite high). Liberalism, by encouraging the free play of market forces and relentless global competition and integration—particularly with the lifting of restrictions on international trade and capital flows—has accentuated inequalities and eroded the foundations of job security and social protection. The resultant dislocation, anxiety, and despair have supposedly driven workers into the arms of populist demagogues. 

The idea that the rise of populism was caused by market-driven inequalities fails to address why populism is so cozy with crony capitalists. 

But this explanation, while plausible, has some major gaps. 

On the contentious issue of globalization, the line to the rise of right-wing populist anger is not clear. A 2016 survey in the Economist across nineteen countries suggests that countries as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Hong Kong view globalization quite favorably. If China had been included in the survey, it would likely have made the list as well. Yet right-wing populism is no less rampant in India and the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in Indonesia, Germany, and Denmark. Of course skepticism about globalization is often greater in wealthy countries whose historically dominant positions in the international economy are slowly eroding. But even in France, where only 37 percent of all respondents agree that globalization is positive, 77 percent of those under the age of 24 concur. An earlier, 2014 Pew Research Center Survey of 44 countries yielded similar findings: 81 percent of respondents saw international trade and global business ties as good for their countries. 

On the issue of jobs, as Thomas Piketty has shown in Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2013), market-driven losses for unskilled workers play only a small part in the large rise in inequality. The takeoff in the income and wealth of the top 1 percent may have more to do with the excessive financialization and the entrenchment of a financial oligarchy, as well as the astronomical salaries of super-managers. All these factors are more prominent in the United States than they are elsewhere. 

Certainly in the manufacturing sector, the loss of jobs—or sluggish growth in the availability of good jobs—is starkly evident, not just in rich countries but also in many developing countries. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States due to competition from Chinese imports has now been widely documented. But this phenomenon is less documented in poor countries such as India, where job growth has been relatively stagnant while a surge in the youth population and an exodus from the agricultural sector continue unabated. In many cases, the impact of labor-replacing technological change is perhaps no less severe than that of cheap Chinese imports, though the latter often garners more attention. Even in traditional labor-intensive industries (such as footwear, electronic assembly, and textiles), manufacturing job expansion is stalled because of automation, chronic deficiencies in infrastructural facilities, and business and labor regulations, while China moves up the global value chain. In many cases the anger and despair are felt not just by the unemployed or the worst-off, but also by workers who are worried about the sustainability of their jobs and about their children’s futures. More than chronic job loss, the job churning brought about by domestic and foreign competition creates a climate of insecurity. 

Finally, the idea that the phenomenal rise of China represents the greatest success in the global illiberal challenge over the last three decades is not entirely accurate. Many, both inside and outside China, now believe in the so-called Beijing Consensus on economic development. In practice this consensus foregrounds an authoritarian, meritocratic state leadership in guiding a market economy toward long-term goals of massive infrastructural investment, as well as agressive adoption of cutting-edge technology, all in a single-minded pursuit of nationalist glory. And all the while trampling upon minor encumbrances such as human rights and democratic processes. There is even a new though ill-defined term frequently used in Chinese strategic papers: the “China Solution” or zhongguo fang’an, touted as the cure for many of the world’s major problems. 

This, however, is not a solution if one values individual autonomy, participation, and deliberation as an intrinsic part of development, as Amartya Sen does in his book Development as Freedom (1999). Even if one does not, such a “solution” chokes the flow of independent information from below, thus delaying the correction of policy mistakes; suppresses institutions of open public scrutiny that can check official corruption or collusion with business in matters of land grabbing, work safety, or toxic pollution; and encourages debt-fueled overinvestment and excess capacity in state-controlled or politically connected firms. It is also worth keeping in mind that some of the beneficial aspects of Chinese governance follow less from illiberal practices and more from historically unique features of Chinese governmental organization, such as the meritocratic selection of bureaucrats, the systematic use of performance incentives in career promotion, and the remarkable combination of political centralization with a large degree of economic and administrative decentralization, quite unusual for an authoritarian system. 

Is the culprit Homo economicus, with his hyper-rational pursuit of greed and self-interest? 

Perhaps above all, what the common explanation fails to explain is why, if global workers are angry with market-driven inequalities, they are gravitating toward leaders who are either plutocrats—such as Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Orbán, Erdo?an, and Putin—or are cozy with crony capitalists, such as Modi. Why, for example, are poor Louisianans more resentful, as Arlie Hochschild reports in Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), of ethnic minorities and immigrants than of the petrochemical companies that have ravaged their communities for decades? 

Several new books try to answer these questions. Beyond these economic and governance-related challenges to liberalism, there is a general critique of liberal modernity, popular with postmodernists and cultural theorists, that resonates ideologically with the turn toward populism. This critique usually associates modernity with cutthroat capitalism, and the ravages of imperialism with a presiding technocratic nation-state. It traces the poison all the way to the Enlightenment, even though Karl Marx and Mao Zedong are as much the children of this modernity as are Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. This critique of modernity is now quite familiar from the reading lists of any self-respecting cultural studies department. Here I shall confine myself to its exposition in a new book by Pankaj Mishra, The Age of Anger (2017), in which it is directly related to the populist anger that concerns us here. Going back to the eighteenth century, Mishra recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romanticist reaction to the Enlightenment’s rationalist narrative of unyielding progress, finding a reflection of that reaction in today’s illiberal challenge, from the angry worker in the U.S. Rust Belt to the Islamist suicide bomber. Ressentiment, born out of “an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness,” is undermining civic society. Homo economicus in its hyper-rational pursuit of greed and self-interest is the culprit, we are made to believe. 

For all the faults of capitalism (and economics, for that matter), this is too sweeping a judgment. In trying to explain too much, it actually explains very little. Contrary to the image of an angry East reacting to the destabilizing effects of Western capitalism, this rage appears to be less intense in those parts of the East (such as East, Southeast and South Asia) where capitalist growth has been relatively successful, than in West Asia and North Africa, where capitalist growth has been stunted and economic misery has been accentuated by corrupt political tyranny. The highly popular Arab Spring, now snuffed out, was a rebellion not against Western liberalism but against domestic tyranny and youth unemployment. The traditional Islamists seem disturbed less by the rational pursuit of money (Islam has nothing against profit-seeking) than by the collusion between domestic and foreign oligarchies. In fighting the “crusaders,” the Islamists try to build an apparatus with all its modernist techno-military paraphernalia. 

The working class seems angrier about cultural elites than about the financial elites who are the target of the left. 

Contrary to Mishra’s view, there is an intellectual tradition that suggests that economic interests can in fact tame human passions. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes writes, “Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement.” Albert O. Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977) has a more nuanced discussion of the relationship between interests and passions. However, both Keynes and Hirschman were talking about earlier times in Europe. Today, when the opportunities for money-making have opened up in countries such as China and India, passions are channeled by the ruling party in both countries into the service of a national aggrandizement that capitalist growth has at last made possible. 

But Rousseau’s romantic search for community may be relevant to the present crisis. A common element of reactions across rich and poor countries is that the working class seems angrier about the cultural elite than about the financial elites who are the target of the left (incidentally, coming from Geneva, Rousseau himself felt like an outsider in the Parisian salons of high culture). For many populist supporters, the liberal elite’s lofty preaching of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism offends their sense of cultural rootedness in family, community, and nation, making them easy prey for the militant ethnic nationalism that is often the first refuge of demagogues. Likewise, liberal criticism of demagogues is often easily dismissed as elitist and anti-national. Meanwhile minorities and immigrants are demonized by populist leaders as obstacles to national unity; historical facts about the role those minorities and immigrants played in nation-building are not allowed to interfere with nationalist myths. As nineteenth-century French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan famously quipped, “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” 

This is how immigration as part of a globally fluid economy becomes a sensitive issue. It is also why economists’ usual arguments about the value of immigrants to the economy do not cut much ice. In the Economist survey cited above, only a minority of respondents in seventeen of the nineteen countries considered the effect of immigrants on their countries to be positive. 

This anti-immigrant sentiment is part of a larger majoritarian perception of siege and victimhood, exacerbated by the majority community’s perception that it is now less secure or privileged than it was in the past. In widely-noted research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton about the “deaths of despair” from suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol abuse among middle-aged whites in the United States, the authors document how the rising mortality rates of people with a high school degree or less for whites are now converging with those of similar less-educated blacks. 

In India Muslims are on average socially and economically much worse off than Hindus, and yet Hindu resentments provide fuel for the right-wing resurgence. Hindus constitute about 80 percent of the population, while Muslims constitute a mere 13 percent, and yet the supposed higher fertility rates of Muslims is cited to stoke fears among Hindus about becoming outnumbered. Fearmongering about the threat of terrorism only adds to this. The traumatic history of Partition and the proximity of Muslim-majority Pakistan make Muslims an easy suspect. In the United States, Europe, and India, crime and violence are routinely attributed to minorities (Muslims, gypsies, Hispanics, blacks), and the blatant discrimination and ghettoization of these minority groups can often make such perceptions self-fulfilling. 

In the United States, Europe, India, Turkey, and elsewhere, the perceived appeasement of minorities—which is assumed to be implicit in the liberal support for minority rights—fosters resentment amongst the majority, which find the liberal rhetoric of diversity and political correctness condescending if not outright threatening. Conversely a Trump or a Modi’s thinly-veiled rantings, taken as anti-establishment raw spontaneity, energize this base. In Hochschild’s book, her white working-class respondents in Louisiana sense that all demographic groups other than theirs receive sympathy from liberals. Hochschild quotes a gospel singer and avid Rush Limbaugh fan saying, “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.” A Tea Party enthusiast claims, “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees. . . . But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.” 

There is an intellectual tradition that suggests that economic interests can in fact tame human passions. 

In recent years the gulf between the working class and the liberal elite has widened. Elites have become isolated by effectively segregating themselves in large gentrified cities, marrying within their class, and adopting mostly professional occupations. The consequences of this disjuncture are particularly important in the context of the shrinking influence of worker organizations. With wage stagnation and job losses, blue-collar trade unions cannot deliver on their economic promises, and membership continues to decline. With this decline of trade unions all over the world, the traditional institutions that used to tame and transcend nativist passions and intolerance of working-class families are now sorely missing. 

In different parts of the world, political leaders who are adept in machine politics are cognizant of the electoral payoff of stoking feelings of siege and victimhood in majority communities. The current ruling parties in the two largest democracies, India and the United States, have mastered this. As a result, there is now considerable tension between the politics of electoral mobilization and the procedural aspects of democracy. Mobilized followers do not care much about the procedural niceties of a liberal order. They often show impatience with the encumbrances of due process and affirmative action. They hanker for strong leaders who can embody the “will of the people,” surpass those encumbrances, and provide seductively simple solutions to problems. The organizational norms of traditional political parties that once disciplined mass fanaticism are being cast aside—voters are choosing political outsiders, or, within established political parties, leaders who defy traditionalists. 

The hard-to-define word populism is used in political discourse in many senses. Economists use it to mean pandering to short-term interests at the expense of the long-term. They often point to left-wing populism (familiar in Latin American history) that is prone to encouraging fiscal extravagance. Here I use it to mean when a leader claims to organically embody the popular will, thereby rendering standard institutions of representative democracy (along with minority rights and procedures) less relevant. From the procedural point of view they enjoy a culture of impunity in violating liberal norms and dismissing critical media as purveyors of “fake news.” In Hungary Orban openly advocates an “illiberal democracy.” Of course, institutions of checks and balances are still much stronger in the United States than they are in India, Turkey, or Hungary. 

Such populism is right wing in the sense of being both business-friendly and congenial to ethnic hubris and muscular nationalism. But it is not right wing in the sense of insisting on a minimalist state. It calls for an active role of the state in both boardrooms and bedrooms. Paradoxically, China may also fall under this category of right-wing populism. The ruling party (represented by its “core” leader) is supposed to embody the popular will by being business-friendly, ultra-nationalist, and a vigorous propopent of state policy. But China is not populist in the economist’s sense of short-termist. 

Political leaders adept at machine politics are cognizant of the payoff of stoking feelings of siege and victimhood in majority communities. 

Going back to Rousseau’s idea of the community, many people today believe that their basic values, as well as their nostalgia for a (false) golden past, are disrespected by a cosmopolitan elite whose liberalism prioritizes individual freedom over community bonding and traditional loyalties. In this sense, liberty and fraternity are clearly not always in harmony. 

A deeper conflict in the conception of the individual may also be at stake here. In his recent book, On Human Nature (2017), the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton distinguishes between the liberal individual, self-possessed in her autonomous decisions, consent, contract, and trade, and the conservative individual who endows meaning to her life mainly through her identity in relation to a community with established traditions. If there is anything to this, then the traditional role of trade unions and other worker associations in linking up with neighborhoods and communities in local cultural and social activities becomes all the more important, beyond mere wage bargaining. Their role in sustaining politically the network of social insurance and protection is also crucial in keeping despondent workers away from demagogues. 

The trend of rising white mortality rates in the United States, highlighted by the Case-Deaton study, does not apply to whites in Western Europe or Canada. One possible reason for this is that structures of social insurance (along with worker retraining programs) are much stronger there. Perhaps there is a shred of hope in the fact that Trump is finding it difficult to decimate U.S. health care provisions for the poor, or that Modi has decided to keep India’s minimal welfare measures intact, which he had earlier dismissively described as “dole.” Focusing on measures to alleviate the financial insecurity of workers—including those from the majority community and religious conservatives—with active involvement of worker associations in those communities may help relieve some of their perceived cultural insecurities. Worker and religious organizations may in fact find some common cause on matters of social and environmental protection. 

If sluggish wage and job growth continue, fueling mass disaffection with liberal politics, and the pace of automation becomes inexorable, worker organizations should give serious consideration to demanding more public investment in job-creating renewable energy and public health care services; more participation in the internal governance of firms, particularly in decisions to outsource and relocate; and the institution of a basic income. 

The labor movement is weak today. In rich countries, many blue-collar workers have dropped out of unions, and other workers, such as professionals and those in the so-called gig economy, never belonged to one. In poor countries, most workers are in the informal sector outside unions. The demand for a basic income as part of a citizen’s rights may provide a common bridge for the currently divided labor force. In general, the labor movement has been dissipated by the constant threat of capital moving abroad, facilitated by the part of globalization not emphasized enough in the standard attitude surveys (like those cited above), that of opening up the capital account. In demanding some restrictions on capital movement and other universal pro-labor measures such as basic income, the strengthening of the structure of unions toward a more coordinated and confederate mode may become necessary. For now, outside Nordic countries and Central Europe, labor unions are much too fragmented to achieve such countrywide goals.

David A Fairbanks response:

This article ignores a fact that is behind US populism. The Confederates took over the Republican Party after WW2 and along with federalists and modern bigots created an alliance with television preachers and over three decades perfected their message of hatred for liberals, women, gays and blacks. Now with Trump in the White House and personally oblivious to this plan they control 27 states and see victory coming. There is no group of men in a room but there are like minded politicians and businessmen who want to control the workers and contain women and blacks. Fox news and Hate radio assist in the poisoning of the masses. Their defeat will come from their failure to protect their followers with decent wages, healthcare and stable rent. The US populist think they can stiff the next generation with low wages massive debt, they can't and they won't. The liberals now progressives will win in the end because they will raise wages.

Why Trump can’t change, no matter what the consequences are

Why Trump can’t change, no matter what the consequences are

Personal growth is about seeing more. The president is too self-absorbed for that.

Tony Schwartz  Washington Post

In April 2016, on the verge of securing the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump announced that his “campaign is evolving and transitioning, and so am I.” At a rally around the same time, he told supporters that “at some point, I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” but “I just don’t know that I wanted to do it quite yet.” 

When Trump was elected, some critics held out hope that he would grow in office, as other presidents have. No one believes that’s possible anymore. After Mick Mulvaney took over as Trump’s third chief of staff last December, he let it be known that his approach would be to “let Trump be Trump.” Mulvaney was simply succumbing to reality. As Trump himself has said, he is essentially the same person today that he was at age 7. He has his story, and he’s sticking to it.

Growth and development are about seeing more. The wider, deeper and longer our perspective, the more variables we can consider — and the more capable we become. Likewise, the more responsibility we take for our behaviors, and the less we blame others for our shortcomings, the more power we have to influence our destiny. 

None of this is possible for Trump.

I got to know Trump three decades ago when he hired me to write “The Art of the Deal.” Although the book became a bestseller, working with him was deeply dispiriting, given his almost complete self-absorption, the shortness of his attention span and the fact that he lied as a matter of course, without apparent guilt. 

After that, I tried to steer my life in a direction as far from Trump as possible, and the next book I wrote was titled “What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America,” an exploration of people who had found success and satisfaction in ways vastly different than Trump’s focus on wealth, power and fame. In 2003, I founded the Energy Project to help leaders and their employees pursue healthier, happier, more productive and more meaningful lives. We’ve helped organizations ranging from Google and Pfizer to Save the Children and the Los Angeles Police Department.  

As part of our work, we encourage clients to ask themselves two key questions in every challenging situation: “What am I not seeing here?” and “What’s my responsibility in this?” These questions emerged from studying developmental psychology. Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development describes four increasingly complex stages of thinking that we move through in childhood. As we grow up and become less self-centered, our perspective gets progressively bigger and more complex. Thinkers such as Robert Kegan, William Torbert and Susanne Cook-Greuter have described the potential for further growth as adults. Cook-Greuter’s framework, for example, refers to “nine stages of increasing embrace,” characterized both by deeper and deeper self-awareness and the capacity to take into account a wider world.

Those theories teach us that humility enables learning and growth — but Trump confuses humility with humiliation and defaults instead to hubris and grandiosity. “I alone can fix it,” he told us when he was nominated for president. On multiple  occasions since, describing virtually any subject, he has begun with “Nobody knows more about ____ than I do.”

In reality, Trump’s worldview remains remarkably narrow, shallow and short-term. It’s narrow because he is so singularly self-absorbed, which has been true throughout his life. In the 18 months I worked with him, I can’t remember a single time Trump asked me a question about myself. I never saw him engage for more than a cursory couple of minutes with any of his three young children. 

Trump’s knowledge and understanding remain shallow because he resists reflection and introspection and struggles mightily to focus. When I set out to interview him for “The Art of the Deal” in 1986, he was unable to keep his attention on any subject for more than a few minutes. “I don’t like talking about the past,” he would tell me. “It’s over.” After a dozen interview attempts, I finally gave up and settled instead for piecing the book together by sitting in Trump’s office listening in on his constant stream of brief phone calls.

His need for instant gratification prevents him from considering the longer-term consequences of his actions. Instead, he simply reacts in the moment. This helps to explain why he moves into overdrive whenever he feels attacked. On Wednesday alone, as the furor around him grew, Trump tweeted furiously, more than 20 times in all. “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast!” he declared in one post, after the House speaker walked out of a meeting with Trump that Democrats described as a presidential meltdown. “Pray for her, she is a very sick person!”

The negative qualities we ascribe to others are often those we find it most intolerable to see in ourselves. Throughout his adult life, Trump has viewed the world as a dark, dangerous place teeming with enemies out to get him. In the face of potential impeachment, this fear has escalated exponentially. The threat he imagines is no longer just to his fragile sense of self but, realistically, to his future as president. Any capacity Trump ever had to think clearly or calmly has evaporated. Instead, he’s devolved into anger, blame, aggression and sadistic attacks.

When people enter this “fight or flight” state, the amygdala — the lower part of our brain known colloquially as “fear central” — takes over from our prefrontal cortex. This wasn’t much of an issue when I worked with Trump because he was riding high. Now, like a drowning man, all that matters to him is survival, no matter how much collateral damage his behaviors cause. 

The only wall Trump has built is around himself, to keep his own insecurity and vulnerability at bay. Ironically, his defense consistently produces precisely what it’s meant to protect against. That is just what happened when the Wall Street Journal broke the story of his attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden. In an impulsive attempt to defend himself, Trump released the transcript of their conversation, which substantiated the very point he was seeking to undercut and led to the current impeachment inquiry in Congress. 

The same thing happened when Trump suddenly decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. After even his most loyal Republican supporters condemned the action, he reacted with anger, singling out Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of his most vociferous defenders. Once it became clear that the withdrawal was a terrible mistake, Trump reacted by writing a crude, bullying letter to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatening to destroy Turkey’s economy.  

Trump’s behavior is an extreme version of what we observe every day in our work at the Energy Project. Facing threats to their businesses and uncertainty about the future, leaders instinctively double down on what’s worked best for them in the past. The problem is that any strength overused eventually becomes a liability: Confidence turns into arrogance. Courage becomes recklessness. Certainty congeals into rigidity. Authority moves toward authoritarianism. Feeling attacked and aggrieved, Trump becomes more Trumpian. 

The prerequisite to growth is the capacity to self-regulate, which frays under stress. As an antidote, we encourage our clients to practice something we call the “Golden Rule of Triggers”: Whatever you’re compelled to do, don’t. Compulsion means we’re no longer in control of how we respond, which is so often the case for Trump. But it is possible to better manage our triggers. Even a brief period of deep breathing, for example, can clear the bloodstream of the stress hormone cortisol and return control to the prefrontal cortex. 

To grow, we need an inner observer — the ability to stand back from our emotions rather than simply acting them out. Trump is a prisoner of his poor self-control, his inability to observe himself and his limited perspective. Refusing to accept blame or admit uncertainty is a habit he developed early in life to protect himself from a brutal father, whose withering criticism he had watched drive his older brother, Fred Jr., to alcoholism and an early death.  In Trump’s mind, if he is not seen as all good, then he is all bad. If he’s not viewed as 100 percent right, then he is 100 percent wrong.

Growth is possible only when we can see ourselves not as right or wrong, good or bad, strong or weak, but as all of who we are. We won’t change Trump, and he won’t change himself, but we can grow ourselves. The more we see and acknowledge — our best, our worst and all the shades in between — the less we feel compelled to defend our own value, and the more value we can add in the world.

secret battles between your body’s cells

These secret battles between your body’s cells might just save your life

To fight cancer and ageing, biologists are looking at how cells evict, kill or cannibalize less-fit rivals. 

Kendall Powell Nature 

Yasuyaki Fujita has seen first-hand what happens when cells stop being polite and start getting real. He caught a glimpse of this harsh microscopic world when he switched on a cancer-causing gene called Ras in a few kidney cells in a dish. He expected to see the cancerous cells expanding and forming the beginnings of tumours among their neighbours. Instead, the neat, orderly neighbours armed themselves with filament proteins and started “poking, poking, poking”, says Fujita, a cancer biologist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. “The transformed cells were eliminated from the society of normal cells,” he says, literally pushed out by the cells next door.

In the past two decades, an explosion of similar discoveries has revealed squabbles, fights and all-out wars playing out on the cellular level. Known as cell competition, it works a bit like natural selection between species, in that fitter cells win out over their less-fit neighbours. The phenomenon can act as quality control during an organism’s development, as a defence against precancerous cells and as a key part of maintaining organs such as the skin, intestine and heart. Cells use a variety of ways to eliminate their rivals, from kicking them out of a tissue to inducing cell suicide or even engulfing them and cannibalizing their components. The observations reveal that the development and maintenance of tissues are much more chaotic processes than previously thought. “This is a radical departure from development as a preprogrammed set of rules that run like clockwork,” says Thomas Zwaka, a stem-cell biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

But questions abound as to how individual cells recognize and act on weaknesses in their neighbours. Labs have been diligently hunting for — and squabbling over — the potential markers for fitness and how they trigger competitive behaviours. These mechanisms could allow scientists to rein in the process or to help it along, which might lead to better methods for fighting cancer and combating disease and ageing using regenerative medicine.

“Cell competition is on the global scientific map,” says Eugenia Piddini, a cell biologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who likens the buzz around this idea to the excitement that helped propel modern cancer immunotherapies. The better scientists understand competition, she says, the more likely it is that they will be able to use it therapeutically.

History repeats

During a blizzard that dumped more than 30 centimetres of snow this past February, biologists from about a dozen disciplines convened at a hotel at Lake Tahoe, California, for the first major meeting devoted to cell competition.

“It was a zoo of researchers,” says co-organizer Zwaka, and included biologists who study flatworms that can regenerate their whole body from a single cell, geneticists attempting to make interspecies chimaeras of mouse, monkey and rabbit embryos, and a keynote speaker who spoke about the terrible battles and cooperative campaigns waged in bacterial communities.

The snowbound attendees, about 150 in all, debated how and why cells size up their competition. And they celebrated the discovery that gave birth to the field.

How secret conversations inside cells are transforming biology

In 1973, two PhD students, Ginés Morata and Pedro Ripoll were perfecting a way to track the various cell populations in a fruit-fly larva that would eventually develop into a wing. Working at the Spanish National Research Council’s Biological Research Center in Madrid, they introduced a mutation called Minute into a few select cells in the larva and left the rest of the cells unaltered.

Knowing that Minute cells grow slower than their unaltered neighbours, the scientists expected to find some smaller cells amid the wild-type counterparts. “Instead, we found that the cells disappeared,” says Morata, now a developmental biologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain.

On their own, Minute cells can develop into a fly that is normal — except for the short, thin bristles on their bodies that give the mutation its name. But when mixed with wild-type cells in the larva, the cells simply vanished. “Minute cells were not able to compete with the more vigorous, metabolically active wild-type cells,” says Morata. They described the activity as cell competition1. “It was a very surprising and interesting observation,” Morata says. But lacking the molecular tools to follow cell fates more closely, he and his colleagues let the finding simmer.

Twenty-six years later, postdocs Laura Johnston and Peter Gallant observed nearly the same phenomenon. Working with Bruce Edgar and Robert Eisenman, respectively, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington, they were studying a mutation in another fly gene, Drosophila Myc (dMyc), that also slows cell growth2.

“There was a eureka moment when Peter and I realized that these dMyc mutant cells would disappear,” says Johnston, now a developmental biologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. They eventually showed that the mutant cells were forced to initiate a form of programmed cell death called apoptosis. “It was very clear that this was a competitive situation,” Johnston says.

Their 1999 paper ignited interest among scientists, including Morata. He jumped back into the fray with Eduardo Moreno, and they took advantage of modern molecular tools to repeat the Minute experiments. “The field blossomed from there,” says Johnston.

Myc acts as a master controller of cell growth, and Minute encodes a key component needed for synthesizing proteins — so it’s not surprising that reduced expression of those proteins makes cells less fit. But Johnston’s next finding took people by surprise. She showed that cells with an extra copy of normal dMyc outcompeted wild-type cells3. These fitter-than-wild-type cells came to be called “supercompetitors”.

Johnston’s discovery of supercompetition emphasized that cell competition is about the relative fitness of a group of cells, says Zwaka. If one cell is falling behind, the entire group of neighbours could decide it has to go. But on the flipside, they can also sense that certain cells are better and should survive.

Cell competition wasn’t simply about getting rid of defects; it was about survival of the fittest, with the less-fit ‘loser’ cells dying and the ‘winners’ proliferating. Importantly, competition was seen only when there was a mixture of genetically different cells, a phenomenon known as mosaicism. In this way, cell competition acts like a quality-control system, booting out undesirable cells during development.

Vying for viability

Fujita’s observation of the kicked-out kidney cells was one of the first hints that mammalian cells compete, too4. Soon after that work was published, researchers started to observe competition forcing out mutated cells from various other tissue types such as skin, muscle and gut.

The next most obvious place to look for competing cells was the mammalian embryo. In 2013, Zwaka’s team, and two other laboratories, probed mouse embryos at the earliest stage of development — those that have progressed just beyond a ball of cells. Zwaka’s group made mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) with a supercompetitor mutation that lowered expression of p53, an important quality-control protein that normally puts the brakes on cell division. When these cells were put into a mouse embryo, they quickly took over and developed into a normal mouse5. Similarly, Miguel Torres’s lab at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research in Madrid showed that supercompetition could be induced in an early mouse embryo using slight overexpression of the mouse Myc gene.

By artificially creating losers or winners, researchers could force cell competition into play. But Torres’s team, led by then-postdoc Cristina Clavería, also made the striking observation that Myc expression varied naturally in mouse ESCs. Cells in the embryo with approximately half the amount of the protein compared with their neighbours were dying by apoptosis. This was one of the first studies that strongly pointed to naturally arising cell competition6.

Sculpting tissues

The phenomenon also comes into play later on in embryonic development. In a study published this year, postdoc Stephanie Ellis at Elaine Fuch’s lab in Rockefeller University in New York City, looked at mouse skin. During development, its surface area expands by a factor of 30 over the course of about a week. The cells within proliferate wildly — first as a single layer and later as multiple layers.

Ellis injected mouse embryos with a concoction that turns cells into genetic losers. She targeted a few cells present when the embryonic skin is a single layer thick, and added a marker gene that made them glow red. Then she used time-lapse imaging to watch their grim fates: the skin cells popped out from the surface layer, broke up and disappeared. Later, she noticed the winner cells engulfing and clearing the losers’ corpses7.

Repeating the experiment at the multilayer stage, Ellis no longer saw the less-fit skin cells perishing or being engulfed. Instead, the loser cells tended to differentiate and migrate into the outer layers of skin — where they acted as a barrier for a short time before being shed. The winner cells were more likely to remain behind in the bottom layer as stem cells.

This made sense. “Killing a cell is energetically expensive,” says Ellis. A developing tissue, she says, might decide: “Why not just remove losers through differentiation?” Emi Nishimura’s lab at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, found that competing stem cells in the ageing tail skin of adult mice used the same pattern of asymmetrical divisions to eliminate stem cells with lower levels of a key structural collagen protein8.

These experiments could provide guidance for scientists looking to harness stem cells to rejuvenate ageing tissues and organs. Cell competition could either help or hurt such therapies: stem cells might outcompete older, less-fit cells, or they might encounter a hostile neighbourhood when transplanted into tissue. Understanding whether and how cell competition happens in adult tissue could help settle this matter.

Piddini admits that she was a little obsessed with the idea, and her group was part of a wave of researchers that proved cell competition does take place in adult organisms. To test the idea, she says, the team “genetically sprinkled” a mutated copy of RPS3, a gene functionally related to Minute, into some cells in the intestine of adult flies. Cells with the mutant copy were outcompeted by their wild-type counterparts. It didn’t matter whether the losers were the stem cells that maintain the gut or differentiated cells: all eventually perished9.

Cristina Villa del Campo, a senior postdoc in the Torres lab, tested for adult competition in the mouse heart by introducing winner cardiac cells at eight to ten weeks of age. Over the course of one year, she tracked the numbers of winner cells and wild-type losers and saw the loser population decline by about 40%10.

“It was a slow replacement in the adult,” says Villa del Campo. “But even highly differentiated functional adult cells can sense the less-fit heart cells and eliminate them.”

Unanswered questions

Even with so many examples of cell competition playing out in different conditions, the field still faces a torrent of unanswered questions. One big puzzle is how cells in a group sense fitness. “Maybe cells are recognizing chemical differences, or physical differences, or differences in cell-membrane composition,” says Fujita, who adds that labs have found evidence for all three.

His filament-poking kidney-cell experiments suggest that cell–cell contact is needed. Others have seen chemical-fitness signals that seem to be short-range, travelling up to eight cell diameters. Exactly which molecules are responsible for this signalling — either secreted chemicals or physical tags — is the subject of intense debate and investigation.

Both Johnston and Zwaka have turned up signals associated with immune surveillance. Johnston’s group identified molecules that typically call immune cells to swarm in and engulf foreign invaders and that were driving death in losers11. Normal cells express low levels of these death signals at all times. But in a competitive mix, winners flooded their loser neighbours with the signal, which pushed them to kill themselves.

Zwaka proposes that cells might assess each other’s health by sniffing out the general signals or debris that cells shed. It’s akin to smelling the steaks that your neighbour is grilling for dinner and concluding that they must be doing well.

Or it could be as simple as seeing which flag your neighbour is flying. Moreno heads his own group now at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, which discovered a membrane-spanning protein called Flower12. In humans, the protein can take four forms, each displaying its own characteristic structure on the outer cell surface. Two signal ‘I’m a winner’ and the other two signal ‘I’m a loser’ to nearby cells, says Moreno.

Some human cancer cells fly the Flower-winner signals, which might enhance their survival. Experiments in Moreno’s lab showed that silencing the winning flags on tumours slowed the cells’ growth and made them susceptible to chemotherapy13.

Some researchers, however, dispute the importance of the Flower tags. Moreno acknowledges that they are not present in all cell-competition situations.

Healthy competition. Cracking the mechanics of competition will be key if researchers want to use it to improve cell-based cancer or regenerative therapies.

There are tantalizing hints that cell competition might already protect against cancer. Findings made in the past few years reveal that human skin, oesophageal and lung cells show high levels of mosaicism. Approximately one-quarter of skin cells, for example, harbour many precancerous mutations that only rarely turn into tumours14,15.

It is unclear what gives cancerous cells the advantage when tumours do form. If researchers can learn how to subdue supercompetitors or blunt cancer cells’ ability to compete, they might be able to turn that against cancer.

Conversely, stem cells might need to gain a competitive edge if they are to replace aged or diseased tissue for an organ makeover. Villa del Campo says that clinicians are already considering how to enhance patient-derived cardiac stem cells to efficiently replace cells that have been damaged by heart attacks or disease.

What started as modest observations in minuscule fruit-fly larvae has exposed the primal cellular battles that could usher in a new era of cell-based medicine. The process has scientists buzzing, but it remains mysterious.

“Cell competition might be a general process to remove any undesirable cell that should not be there,” says Morata, after returning from a one-day meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland devoted to competition in September.

Now 74, he’s thrilled that work he essentially shelved more than 40 years ago is gaining new life and that the competition is heating up. “It’s really exciting.”