Language Matters by Elias Winter

Elias Winter
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  • Society & Culture

Language Matters is a literary and philosophical exploration of power, language, technology, religion, and the human struggle to remain fully human inside systems that reduce people to abstractions. eliaswinter.substack.com

  1. 3h ago

    The Children of the Covenant and Trump’s War on Iran

    On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military assault on Iran, a civilization that had survived Alexander the Great, the Arab conquest, the Mongols, the British Empire, and several thousand years of foreigners explaining what was best for Persia. This time the foreigner was Donald Trump, a former casino proprietor from Queens who had promised Americans an escape from endless wars and had apparently concluded that the most efficient way to accomplish this was to begin another one. The operation was called Epic Fury, a title suggesting that the Pentagon’s naming committee had recently discovered professional wrestling. Missiles struck Tehran. Iran’s supreme leader was killed. Regional capitals braced for retaliation. American officials explained that the purpose was national security, nuclear deterrence, regional stability, the liberation of the Iranian people, or some combination of these objectives, depending on who was speaking and which catastrophe required explaining. The president had arrived at the decision after months of consultations with Israeli leaders, American officials, and advisers whose views of Iran ranged from strategic concern to enthusiastic anticipation of its military destruction. Saudi Arabia, determined not to let Israel monopolize the improvement of regional stability, had reportedly encouraged confrontation as well. But outside the formal machinery of government stood another collection of interested parties: donors, publishers, financiers, political advocates, and people who had spent decades cultivating the remarkable American privilege of having their telephone calls returned by presidents. The names were familiar. Rupert Murdoch. Miriam Adelson. Jared Kushner. Benjamin Netanyahu. And behind several of the earlier relationships, like a ghost still collecting professional fees, stood Roy Cohn. There was no shortage of explanations for the war. The interesting question was how so many of the same people had acquired a place in the story long before the first missile was launched. To understand that, we must return to New York in 1843, when twelve German Jewish immigrants gathered in a café to establish an organization devoted to the unreasonable proposition that people should help one another. They called it B’nai B’rith, the Children of the Covenant. Their ambitions were modest. They wished to help widows, support orphans, provide assistance to impoverished families, and preserve communal solidarity in a society where Jewish immigrants could not always depend on the generosity of their neighbors. If a member died, the organization would help pay for his burial. If his children needed assistance, the others would provide it. It was an admirable idea, and therefore one that American history would eventually complicate beyond recognition. Over the following century, B’nai B’rith expanded into an international organization. It supported Jewish education, communal institutions, and eventually the Anti-Defamation League. Its lodges extended to Europe and Ottoman Palestine, where Jewish national culture and political Zionism were developing along sometimes overlapping paths. It was not originally a Zionist political organization. Indeed, Jewish communities disagreed about whether their future depended on integration into existing states or sovereignty in a homeland of their own. Then came the Holocaust, the destruction of European Jewish life, and the founding of Israel in 1948. Jewish national sovereignty became central to many organizations that had originally focused on communal security. Supporting Israel came to involve political advocacy, diplomatic relationships, economic development, and fundraising. By the early 1980s, B’nai B’rith’s Banking and Finance Lodge was organizing fundraising dinners alongside State of Israel Bonds. The original founders had wanted to help bury the dead. Their institutional successors had discovered that the living occasionally possessed millions of dollars, influential acquaintances, and unusually strong opinions about Middle Eastern borders. One of the men they chose to honor was Roy Cohn. Cohn was born in 1927 into a prominent New York Jewish family. His father, Albert Cohn, was a judge and a B’nai B’rith district president. Young Roy became a lawyer, participated in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and achieved national notoriety as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was an astonishing American contradiction: a Jewish lawyer who helped prosecute Jewish communists, a gay man who operated within a political movement notorious for persecuting homosexuals, and an attorney whose methods of obtaining favorable outcomes would eventually cost him the right to practice law. He understood that American power resided not merely in institutions, but in the private vulnerabilities of the people administering them. After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn returned to New York and assembled a clientele that included celebrities, developers, politicians, publishers, and organized-crime figures. His parties became legendary. His telephone rang constantly. His office functioned as a meeting point between worlds that respectable society preferred to describe as separate. Consider Anthony Salerno, the Genovese crime-family leader who became one of Cohn’s clients. During the early 1980s, organized-crime families exercised considerable influence over Manhattan’s construction industry, particularly concrete supply. Companies associated with Mafia interests obtained lucrative contracts, including work on Trump-related projects. In 1985, federal investigators monitored Cohn’s office while attempting to intercept Salerno’s conversations. FBI records later examined by The Washington Post described Salerno apparently using the office for business connected to the investigation. Trump was not implicated in the Mafia prosecution. But the commercial intersection was real: a Mafia-connected concrete industry, a prominent attorney representing organized-crime figures, and a rising developer whose projects relied on that industry. It was an unusual kind of professional ecosystem. Some clients needed permits. Some needed favorable legal representation. Some needed political protection. Some needed newspapers to print something, or perhaps to refrain from printing something. Cohn knew people who could help. And in 1973, Donald Trump became one of them. Trump and his father were facing federal accusations of discriminating against Black apartment applicants. Cohn advised the younger Trump to respond aggressively. A spectacular counterclaim against the government followed. The counterclaim failed, and the housing case ended in a consent decree. But the relationship supplied Trump with something more valuable than a favorable ruling. It supplied a method. The method began with the principle that an accusation should never be allowed to remain merely an accusation. It should become a fight. The person bringing the charge should find himself under attack. The newspaper covering the controversy should become another battlefield. Cohn was not simply advising Trump on the law. He was teaching him how to turn conflict into political capital. And Cohn understood that sometimes the most valuable legal work occurred nowhere near a courtroom. In 1983, Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry was seeking a federal judgeship. Cohn lobbied Reagan adviser Edwin Meese on her behalf. Barry was an experienced prosecutor, but the family’s political intervention was significant. She received the appointment. Years later, surviving notes from Cohn’s office would describe a telephone call announcing the news, followed by a grateful call from Donald Trump. The judiciary was supposed to be independent. The route to a judicial appointment, however, could apparently include a Manhattan attorney whose clients knew where to find the White House. Then there was Roger Stone. Stone, a Republican operative who had worked on Reagan’s presidential campaign, ent… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  2. 1d ago

    To Love a Nation,...

    Friends, Tonight, I find myself returning to one of the first essays I published on Language Matters: To Love a Nation Is to Know Its Ghosts. I wrote it in March 2025, tracing a history that began with the Founders themselves—particularly the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when a republic barely a decade old began criminalizing dissent and treating immigrants as threats to its survival. The lesson I drew then was simple: America has never been free of the temptation to confuse power with principle. But neither has it been free of those willing to resist. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams. The Sedition Act did not fall because the courts suddenly discovered the meaning of the First Amendment. It expired, and the political movement that had sustained it was defeated at the ballot box. Jefferson was no saint. His conception of liberty was narrow, his contradictions enormous. But his victory demonstrated something fundamental about democratic life: when institutions fail to restrain power, the electorate can still change who exercises it. Tonight, as Democrats celebrate their victories in the 2026 midterms, I find reason to celebrate with them. Not because the Democratic Party is beyond reproach, or because an election can undo the damage of the past two years. But because Americans have once again demonstrated that power is not an inheritance, that authority is not permanent, and that a government cannot indefinitely mistake its possession of office for the consent of the governed. I ended that essay with a conviction I still hold: to love a nation is not to excuse it, nor to despair of it, but to know its wounds and name them aloud. Tonight is a reminder that the American story is not merely one of repression repeated. It is also one of resistance renewed. The ghosts remain. But so do the living. And tonight, the living have spoken. — Elias This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  3. 2d ago

    The Internationalization of Everything

    There is a Frenchman standing in the street protesting a pension reform. He is sixty-two years old. His back hurts. He has worked for forty years, paid his taxes, and would like to spend whatever remains of his life doing something other than working. Unfortunately, he has made the catastrophic mistake of allowing himself to be photographed. Within minutes, an Israeli commentator discovers that his protest is somehow connected to Palestine. A British conservative identifies the familiar symptoms of Islamic extremism. An American progressive recognizes a manifestation of systemic racism. An American conservative concludes that Western civilization is collapsing under the weight of immigration. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, an algorithm carefully examines these interpretations and determines that the Frenchman is likely interested in purchasing a tactical flashlight. Nobody asks the Frenchman why he is protesting. This is the great achievement of globalization. We have connected eight billion people through satellites, fiber-optic cables, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and an extraordinary infrastructure of instantaneous communication, only to discover that everybody is still talking about himself. The world has become a giant international conference in which every delegation has arrived with exactly one PowerPoint presentation, prepared forty years ago, and absolutely no intention of listening to anybody else’s. Consider Britain. Britain has a fascinating relationship with immigration, largely because it spent several centuries traveling around the world uninvited and now finds the arrival of foreigners at Heathrow somewhat unsettling. The British Empire once governed roughly a quarter of humanity. It extracted resources, established trading systems, reorganized economies, and introduced people who had never heard of Yorkshire to the magnificent possibilities of working for a British industrialist. Then came the Second World War, the decline of empire, and the inconvenient discovery that a modern economy still required workers. So Britain recruited labor from the Commonwealth and former imperial territories. Pakistanis arrived to work in textile mills and factories across Yorkshire and the Midlands. People from India and the Caribbean entered manufacturing, transport, and public services. Families followed. Communities formed. Mosques appeared. Children were born who spoke English, supported English football clubs, and occasionally made the unforgivable decision to remain in the country of their birth. France performed a related experiment with Algerians. Having spent 132 years ruling Algeria, appropriating land, and violently suppressing resistance, the French discovered that Algerian workers were extremely useful in French industry. They came to build cars, maintain infrastructure, and perform labor that metropolitan society preferred not to perform itself. The French then expressed astonishment when Algerian neighborhoods appeared in France. One might call this the return on imperial investment. There were real consequences. Industrial employment declined. Immigrant communities remained concentrated in neighborhoods where housing was cheap and opportunities limited. Some communities preserved conservative religious and social practices. Others experienced unemployment, discrimination, educational disadvantage, and alienation from mainstream institutions. And there were serious failures that no romantic account of multiculturalism should conceal. The organized sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham and Rochdale exposed horrifying crimes and institutional cowardice. Baroness Louise Casey’s 2025 audit found disproportionate representation of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men among suspects in certain local investigations, while also finding that national ethnicity data was too inadequate to establish the overall pattern reliably. The crimes were real. The victims were real. So was the failure of authorities to investigate uncomfortable questions. But notice the extraordinary historical compression that follows. A problem involving particular towns, generations of industrial migration, cultural practices, failures of policing, poverty, and the peculiar inheritance of British imperialism becomes a general theory of Muslims. Then a general theory of Muslims becomes a general theory of immigration. And eventually the theory arrives in Texas. The British have a remarkable talent for this sort of thing. They lost the empire, but retained the language, the publishing industry, and an impressive ability to explain other people’s countries to them. Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe, writes and speaks extensively about immigration, Islam, and European civilization. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of TRIGGERnometry, moves comfortably between British political debates and enormous American podcast audiences, including Joe Rogan’s. The Telegraph, The Spectator, American conservative media, and the podcast circuit form a transatlantic marketplace in which the anxieties of British society can acquire an American accent without changing their historical content. There is nothing inherently wrong with a British commentator discussing America. The problem begins when a Pakistani family whose grandfather worked in a Bradford textile mill becomes intellectually interchangeable with a Guatemalan laborer crossing the Rio Grande. These people have different histories, religions, economic circumstances, migration routes, and relationships to the countries receiving them. In England and Wales, Muslims constituted 6.5 percent of the population in the 2021 census. Britain’s Muslim communities are heavily shaped by migration from Pakistan and Bangladesh and their descendants. In America, Muslims constitute roughly 1 percent of adults, with a strikingly different composition that includes African Americans, Middle Easterners, South Asians, Africans, converts, and highly educated immigrants. The United States also has its own immigration controversies, but its unauthorized immigrant population is disproportionately drawn from Mexico, Central America, and South America. Many are Christian. Many are fleeing different combinations of economic hardship, violence, authoritarianism, and institutional failure. Meanwhile, Britain’s contemporary Channel crossings involve a different migration system again. In 2025, more than 41,000 migrants arrived by small boat, including substantial numbers from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Apparently, however, all these people can be understood through a single theory developed somewhere between Bradford and a London podcast studio. The British have accomplished something the empire never quite managed: they have made Yorkshire a universal condition. There is another delicious historical irony. Colonial domination sometimes helped make religion a language of political resistance. In Algeria, Islamic identity could become part of the struggle against French rule, alongside secular nationalism. British India and the territories emerging from Partition developed their own complex relationships among religion, nationalism, and state power. Not every religious radicalism originated in colonialism, but colonial domination certainly did not occur in a political vacuum. Imagine reversing the arrangement. A Muslim empire conquers England, takes its coal, reorganizes its economy, and establishes a ruling elite. Christian resistance movements emerge, some peaceful and some violent. A century later, the empire’s intellectuals discover that Christianity is associated with resistance to Muslim rule. They publish a book called The Strange Death of Arabia. The book becomes a bestseller. Unfortunately for the British, America is not a passive recipient of imported neuroses. It possesses an enormous domestic supply. America has its own history, and what a spectacularly particular history it is. A republic declaring that all men are created equal while ma… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  4. 6d ago

    The Right Side of History

    I. The Emergency Committee for the Preservation of Everything The emergency meeting began at nine in the morning, which Professor Bartholomew Grievance considered an act of Marxist aggression. He had spent the previous evening recording a three-hour podcast explaining why civilization was collapsing because a university librarian in Vermont had suggested renaming the motherboard the parentboard. He had connected this development to Carl Jung, the Babylonian captivity, the castration of Uranus, and something he called the Postmodern Neo-Marxist Feminization of Electrical Components. The episode had received fourteen million views. The librarian, who was sixty-three, had made the suggestion as a joke. Nobody had asked her. The professor entered the conference room carrying a leather briefcase containing a Bible, three unread books by Nietzsche, and a collection of newspaper clippings about women who had refused to marry him. Seated around the enormous mahogany table were Benedict Shrapnel, founder of The Daily Detonation; Gideon Thistlebeard, the world’s leading authority on other people’s g******s; Portia Alarmbell, an investigative journalist who had never investigated anything she hadn’t already decided was true; and Savannah Bellweather, the platinum-blonde host of America at the Precipice. Savannah was applying lipstick. “Is this about the homosexual penguins again?” she asked. “No,” said Benedict. “Those were last Thursday.” “Thank God. We did penguins for six hours.” “We have a more serious problem,” announced Augustus P. Vault. Vault owned the studio, the building, the broadcasting network, three private prisons, two defense contractors, a pharmaceutical distributor, and forty-seven percent of a corporation manufacturing autonomous weapons systems. He was seventy-four years old and had spent most of his life warning the public about the dangers of government intervention while receiving approximately eight billion dollars in government contracts. He placed a document on the table. “Our employees want to unionize.” Nobody spoke. Then Gideon crossed himself. “Dear God.” “Precisely,” said Vault. Bartholomew adjusted his glasses. “Well, you see, Augustus, this is precisely what happens when you abandon the archetypal structure of the masculine household. The father, you understand, represents the ordering principle, whereas the union represents the primordial chaos of the devouring feminine—” “They want health insurance,” said Vault. “Exactly. The maternal archetype.” Benedict leaned forward. “Actually, if you look at the statistics, unionized workers have a statistically significant tendency toward collectivist arrangements, which historically correlate with communist atrocities, and if you disagree with that, you’re disagreeing with mathematics.” “What statistics?” asked Savannah. “All of them.” Vault rubbed his temples. “The employees at CrownMind are discussing collective bargaining. They’re asking whether replacing half the workforce with artificial intelligence should entitle them to some share of the productivity gains.” The committee considered this extraordinary proposition. “That’s theft,” said Benedict. “They haven’t stolen anything,” said Vault. “They’re proposing to.” “How?” “By asking.” Portia opened her laptop. “I’ve found something.” She turned the screen toward the others. A twenty-one-year-old anthropology student at a small college in Oregon had posted a video suggesting that competitive chess reinforced patriarchal assumptions about kings and queens. The video had seventeen views. “This,” Portia announced, “is the face of the modern left.” Gideon stared at the screen. “Is that a man?” “Doesn’t matter,” said Portia. “I’ll say it is.” Savannah immediately began rehearsing her opening monologue. “Tonight, Americans are asking a simple question: Has the radical left declared war on chess?” “Excellent,” said Vault. “Perhaps we can connect chess to the union situation,” offered Bartholomew. “You see, the board itself is a metaphor for the distribution of labor within a hierarchical society. The king occupies—” “Bartholomew,” interrupted Vault. “We don’t want to connect them.” “Ah.” “We want people to forget the unions exist.” The professor looked relieved. “Oh. Well, that’s considerably easier.” Portia had already found a second video, this one featuring an obscure activist who claimed that sandwiches were colonial constructs. “She has eleven followers,” Portia said triumphantly. “How many Americans does she represent?” Savannah asked. Benedict opened a spreadsheet. “Approximately ninety-four million.” “How do you know?” “I multiplied.” “By what?” “A number.” The committee was making excellent progress. By eleven, it had identified twelve existential threats to Western civilization, including gender-neutral potatoes, a vegan children’s puppet theater in Massachusetts, and an unpublished doctoral dissertation on the semiotics of shoelaces. Nobody had mentioned wages. Then an assistant entered carrying coffee. “Excuse me,” she said. “The production crew wanted to know whether the company has responded to their request for paid sick leave.” Vault reached beneath the table and rang a little silver bell. Ding. “CULTURE,” he announced. Savannah snapped her fingers. “Can we say paid sick leave is a Chinese concept?” “Possibly,” said Benedict. “Let me check.” Bartholomew was already speaking. “The very notion of sickness, you understand, when placed within the broader context of post-Enlightenment materialism—” The assistant quietly left. She earned eighteen dollars an hour. The discussion continued until lunchtime, when Vault’s private chef served a selection of ethically sourced vegetables accompanied by beef flown in from Argentina. Gideon refused the vegetables on principle. “I believe in natural hierarchies,” he explained. “Of course,” said Savannah. “The lion does not negotiate with the gazelle.” “Beautiful.” “The wolf does not ask permission of the sheep.” “Powerful.” “The masculine lobster establishes dominance through ritual combat.” Bartholomew looked up. “Actually, that’s my department.” At three, Vault rose to conclude the meeting. “Gentlemen. Ladies. We have a civilization to defend.” Savannah smiled. “Western civilization.” “Precisely.” “Against the Marxists.” “Certainly.” “And the chess people.” “Especially the chess people.” Vault walked toward the windows overlooking Manhattan. Far below, delivery workers hurried between cars, nurses entered crowded subway stations, construction workers crossed dangerous scaffolding, and a man with two jobs slept sitting upright on a public bench. None of them had heard of the anthropology student in Oregon. None of them had read the doctoral dissertation about shoelaces. Most were concerned about rent. Vault regarded the city affectionately. “Look at them,” he said. “Our people.” “Indeed,” said Bartholomew. “Everything we do, we do for them.” Savannah checked her reflection in the window. “Augustus, darling, what exactly are we defending?” Vault appeared momentarily confused. Then he laughed. “Western civilization, of course.” “But what is Western civilization?” He thought about this. “Well,” he said, “at the moment, it’s mostly mine.” II. The Day God Invented the Right Versailles, September 11, 1789. Étienne Bric-à-Brac had been employed by the French National Assembly to manage ink, chairs, documents, and the occasional aristocrat who had fainted upon discovering that peasants possessed opinions. He was twenty-seven, badly paid, and afflicted with the unfortunate habit of noticing things. On the morning of September 11, his principal concern was a shortage of writing paper. France, meanwhile, was undergoing a revolution. The Bastille had fallen. Feudal privileges had been formally abolished in the decrees of August. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen had been adopted. The ancient political order was being dismantled with terrifying speed. The deputies were gathered in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, where they had occupied themselves for months with the delicate business of determining h… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  5. Oct 25

    The Awkward Business of Not Being an Empire Anymore

    There is an awkward conversation the West has been avoiding for some time. It concerns a rather unfortunate development: the empire is ending, the colonies are no longer interested in being colonies, and the inhabitants of the imperial center are beginning to discover that maintaining an extraordinarily comfortable civilization becomes considerably more complicated when the rest of the world stops contributing to the arrangement against its will. Naturally, instead of discussing this predicament, we have decided to argue about gender-neutral bathrooms, campus drama and which books deserve a shelf in our school libraries. It is a remarkably efficient system. We can discuss absolutely everything except the thing that explains much of what we are discussing. Perhaps we should begin with an impolite word: empire. I know. It is terribly old-fashioned. It conjures images of British gentlemen with impressive mustaches, standing over maps of Africa while deciding which rivers belonged to His Majesty. We prefer more sophisticated language now. We have international leadership, strategic partnerships, security commitments, and the rules-based international order. The old colonizer stole things. The Americans established partnerships. The vocabulary has improved considerably, even if the people on the receiving end have occasionally struggled to appreciate the distinction. Europe’s rise to global dominance was a peculiar historical achievement, born partly from its inability to stop fighting itself. Geography fragmented the continent into competing kingdoms, churches, principalities, and ambitious aristocrats who spent centuries finding theological justifications for murdering one another. This produced an extraordinary concentration of military competition. But something remarkable emerged from the violence. Rival states competed for commerce, knowledge, military technology, and talented people. A scientist persecuted by one monarch could sometimes find refuge under another. Ideas crossed borders, even when armies could not. Scientific inquiry, commerce, and eventually the Enlightenment helped transform a continent of warring monarchies into societies capable of producing remarkable intellectual and political institutions. Europe made genuine contributions to civilization. Its scientific achievements, constitutional traditions, and eventual development of democracy were extraordinary. It would be absurd to deny them. Unfortunately, Europe also developed the ships and weapons necessary to make other people’s contributions available for European consumption. Colonialism was theft conducted with an impressive amount of administrative paperwork. Land was conquered, resources appropriated, labor coerced, and entire economies reorganized to serve distant capitals. Military superiority enabled extraction on a scale that substantially enriched imperial powers. The wealth generated through industrialization, science, technology, and productive labor developed within a world in which European states also enjoyed enormous advantages from their colonial possessions. To hear some accounts of British economic history, one might imagine that Britain became wealthy through punctuality, tea, and an exceptional national commitment to working hard, while India happened to become poor through a regrettable shortage of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. As wealth accumulated and European societies developed, ordinary people began demanding a share of the prosperity. Workers organized, education expanded, democratic institutions grew, and citizens acquired rights their ancestors could scarcely have imagined. These were genuine achievements, frequently won against the resistance of ruling elites. They deserve recognition. Yet the extraordinary contradiction remains: while Europeans increasingly demanded liberty for themselves, their governments continued denying it to populations abroad. Democracy expanded at home while imperial domination continued overseas. The European citizen was becoming a political subject entitled to rights. The colonial subject was still awaiting a suitable administrative classification. Then something deeply inconvenient happened. The rest of the world began catching up. Colonized populations rebelled. Independence movements succeeded. Industrial knowledge spread. Countries once regarded as suppliers of raw materials developed scientific institutions, military capabilities, and political ambitions of their own. The United States inherited much of the imperial position previously occupied by Britain and other European powers, although its dominance operated through a different combination of military bases, finance, corporations, alliances, and international institutions. For decades, it occupied the extraordinary position of exercising power across the globe while generally refusing to call itself an empire. Now the arrangement is becoming more difficult to maintain. China has become an industrial and technological power. Other states have acquired the military capacity to impose serious costs on foreign intervention. Countries once accustomed to taking instructions from Western capitals have begun discovering the pleasures of having opinions. This is what I mean by imperial decline. The empire can no longer extract, dictate, intervene, and command at the same cost. Its privileges are being contested. And because those privileges contributed to Western prosperity, their erosion creates the prospect of relative economic decline and painful adjustments in Western living standards. An empire losing its privileges is a historical development. Unfortunately, some among us have developed a remarkable talent for interpreting every inconvenience through the Book of Revelation. A country that once expected the world to accommodate its preferences encounters resistance, and suddenly the Four Horsemen have appeared outside Costco. Groceries become more expensive, and civilization is finished. China develops an advanced technology, and the Antichrist has entered Beijing. There is something almost touching about a civilization so accustomed to global superiority that it mistakes the possibility of becoming ordinary for the end of creation. Many of us know societies considerably poorer than the United States. We have seen people with fewer possessions, lower incomes, and far less material security who nevertheless possessed friendship, laughter, dignity, and the capacity for happiness. Poverty is not romantic. But human happiness does not begin at the American level of consumption, nor does civilization end when everyone can no longer afford three automobiles and a refrigerator large enough to accommodate a minor agricultural harvest. Imperial decline can be managed. A society can remain decent, educated, productive, and humane while losing its position of global dominance. The difficulty is that the political arrangements appropriate for an empire are not necessarily appropriate for a country that must increasingly live from its own productive capabilities. And this is where socialism enters the picture. The political economy of a declining empire forces a question that imperial prosperity helped postpone: how will the wealth of society be distributed when external advantages diminish and domestic economic pressures intensify? My expectation is that America will move toward socialism, or at least a much more socialized distribution of economic resources. I see this as a response to changing material conditions. When prosperity becomes harder to sustain and ordinary people face declining living standards, the concentration of extraordinary wealth in the hands of a small minority becomes increasingly politically combustible. European countries developed extensive welfare states through labor struggles, democratic movements, and economic transformations. America will have to confront the same fundamental question: whether the state exists to protect the accumulated advantages of its wealthiest… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  6. Oct 24

    The Second Goodbye

    I. The Morning He Was Gone Kallstadt, October 1885 — Katharina The bread had not yet risen when I found his letter. It was lying on the kitchen table, beneath the little glass we kept for drinking water. At first I thought he had left me some instructions, perhaps something about his clothes or the money I had given him. He was always writing things down, that boy. Numbers, mostly. What things cost. What they might fetch somewhere else. I recognized his handwriting before I understood the words. He had gone to America. I read the note standing up. Then I sat down and read it again. I remember noticing that the table needed scrubbing. There was flour caught in a crack near the edge, and I pressed my thumbnail into it while I read. It is strange what the mind chooses to occupy itself with when the heart has been struck. He had taken his coat, his good trousers, and the little case in which he kept his barber’s instruments. The blanket at the foot of his bed was folded. His pillow lay crooked against the wall. I touched it. It was cold. I had known he wanted to go. We had spoken of America so often that the word had begun to live in the house like another member of the family. His sister was already there. There was work, she wrote, and money to be made by anyone willing to labor. Friedrich had listened to these things with an attention that frightened me. Still, I had imagined there would be a morning when we would know it was our last together. I had imagined making him breakfast. I had imagined walking him to the road. A foolish thing, perhaps, for a woman of forty-nine to imagine that the world would allow her the small ceremony of a goodbye. His father had been dead eight years. Johannes was not an easy man to replace, though God knows I had tried to replace what he provided. I had worked the vineyard, baked bread for other families, calculated debts by candlelight, and learned which creditors could be persuaded to wait until the harvest. The children helped when they could. But Friedrich was never strong enough for the vineyard. His body was thin, his hands better suited to small instruments than the hard work of tending vines. When he was little, he would watch his brothers working and grow quiet. Once, after his father’s death, he asked me whether he would ever be a useful man. I told him a man could be useful in a hundred ways. He did not believe me. So I sent him away to learn barbering. I told myself that a trade was something nobody could take from him. I watched him depart then, too, but I knew the town to which he was going. I knew the roads. I could imagine his days. And he came home. Now he had gone somewhere I had never seen. There had been eight children. Two had died so young that I sometimes wondered whether the world had ever properly noticed their arrival. People tell mothers that God takes children for reasons beyond our understanding. I had stopped asking for those reasons. But Friedrich was alive. That was the unbearable thing. He was alive and moving farther away while I sat in the kitchen. I tried to picture him on the road to Bremen. Had he eaten? Had he brought enough money? Was he cold? What if somebody robbed him? What if he became ill aboard the ship? What if he never came back? One of the children entered and asked where Friedrich was. I said he had gone to America. The words sounded absurd in my own mouth. Outside, the vineyards were beginning to lose their leaves. The hills beyond Kallstadt stood in the pale morning light, and the village bell rang as it always had. I thought then of all the ordinary things that would continue without him. The baking. The washing. The price of flour. The approach of winter. I wanted to be angry. For leaving a note. For sparing himself the sight of his mother crying. For making a decision that would alter both our lives and then slipping away while I slept. But I knew the life he would have had if he stayed. I had seen him return from his apprenticeship with his instruments and his newly acquired skill, only to discover that Kallstadt had no need for another barber. I had seen the disappointment settle upon him. I could not ask him to remain poor because I was afraid to be lonely. That was the cruel arithmetic of motherhood. You raised a child so that he might live, and then, if you succeeded, his life could carry him beyond your reach. I put the note beside the stove. I kneaded the bread, though my hands would not move properly. I fed the fire. I swept the floor. Then I took down his cup from the shelf. For a long time I stood holding it. At last I washed it and put it away. Before noon, I took it down again. II. The Boy Who Crossed the Sea Bremen and the Atlantic, October 1885 — Friedrich I had expected to feel free. Instead, when the wagon carried me beyond the last familiar fields, I felt terribly small. The road was long. I had never traveled so far alone. I kept counting my money, though each time I counted it the amount remained the same. Sixteen years old, and I had already learned that money was not merely something one possessed. It was the difference between having a choice and waiting for someone else to make one for you. My mother understood money better than anyone I knew. She could make a loaf last longer than it ought to. She knew which shoes could survive another winter and which repairs would cost more than replacing them. I had watched her turn a few coins over in her palm as though, by examining them carefully enough, she might discover another coin hidden among them. I hated that sight. It was not her poverty that shamed me. It was my inability to do anything about it. After my father’s death, I had tried to help in the vineyard. My arms tired quickly. The work was heavy, and there were always stronger hands available. My mother said I was not made for such labor. At Frankenthal, where I learned barbering, the master had no sympathy for tired boys. I swept hair from the floor, prepared the shop, carried water, cleaned blades, and watched carefully until he trusted me to work. I liked the precision of it. A good razor did not care whether a man was strong. It cared whether his hand was steady. When I returned to Kallstadt, I imagined I had become someone. But there were already barbers in the village. A man cannot earn his bread by cutting hair that does not need cutting. I knew what lay ahead if I stayed. More waiting. More obligation. Military service. More years in which my mother would grow older and I would remain dependent upon her. My sister had written from New York. There was room for me, at least at first. So I decided to go. My mother knew. We had discussed it. But knowing that a thing will happen and watching it happen are not the same. In the days before I left, she talked about the weather. She asked whether I had packed a heavier shirt. She told me to write as soon as I arrived. I had never told her which morning I intended to go. I could not bear the way she avoided looking directly at me. After everyone had gone to bed, I sat at the table with a piece of paper. I meant to write a proper farewell. I began several times. Each sentence sounded like an excuse. Finally, I wrote that I had gone, that I would work hard, that I would send word. I put the paper beneath her glass. I left before dawn because I knew that if I woke her, she would embrace me. And I was afraid that if she embraced me, I would stay. In Bremen, I saw more people in an hour than I had sometimes seen in a week at home. Carts rattled across the streets. Porters shouted. Men argued in languages I did not recognize. Ships stood at the harbor like immense buildings that had somehow learned to float. The Eider was larger than anything I had imagined. Below deck, the air smelled of damp clothing, unwashed bodies, and sickness. I found my place among strangers who were carrying the remnants of entire lives in sacks and boxes. There were families, children, old men, young women holding bundles close to their chests. I had brought very little. One evening, a man asked … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  7. Oct 19

    The Republic of Others

    Chapter One: The Price of Glass The first window broke at nine seventeen. It belonged to a shop on Avenue Montaigne where a handbag cost more than Nassim Belkacem’s mother earned in six months. Nassim knew this because his friend Kévin, who had never owned anything more expensive than a stolen iPhone, announced the price before throwing the brick. “Four thousand euros!” he shouted. The glass shattered. “Congratulations,” Nassim said. “You’ve liberated the handbag.” There were six of them, all between nineteen and twenty-two, all born in France, and none particularly interested in the French Revolution despite having spent the afternoon invoking it. Nassim had come because his younger sister’s lycée in Sevran had gone three weeks without a mathematics teacher. Kévin had come because there would be police. Ibrahim had come because Kévin had come. The others had less developed political theories. A few hours earlier, the demonstration had been peaceful. Teachers, students, and trade unionists had marched beneath banners demanding more funding for public education. Nassim had carried a placard reading Liberté, Égalité, Prof de Maths. His sister Inès had made it. Then the evening arrived, and the people who had organized the demonstration went home. Others remained. Smoke drifted between the elegant buildings. Someone overturned a rubbish bin. A young man climbed a bus shelter and announced the death of capitalism before falling through its roof. Now Kévin was reaching for another brick. “Don’t,” Nassim said. “What’s wrong with you?” “Nothing. I just think the revolution has enough handbags.” Across the avenue, a line of riot police appeared. Someone shouted. A bottle flew. Then came the familiar sound of shields advancing over pavement. The group scattered. Nassim ran. He heard Kévin laughing behind him, then swearing, then nothing. He ran past shuttered boutiques and a restaurant where three customers continued eating oysters behind reinforced glass. A waiter watched him pass without expression. Nassim was not especially afraid of the police. He was afraid of explaining himself to them. He possessed the exact combination of characteristics that made explanations difficult: he was 19, wore a black hoodie, had Algerian parents, and had been running away from a riot. He stopped beneath a doorway, breathing hard. His phone showed fourteen messages from his mother. The most recent said: Inès says you’re in Paris. Don’t be stupid. He considered replying that the stupid people had been elsewhere, but it seemed insufficiently reassuring. Another explosion sounded down the avenue. He opened Grindr. It was not, under ordinary circumstances, an emergency service. But Nassim had discovered that in Paris there were men willing to open their doors to strangers with considerably less information than the police required. A profile appeared nearby. ADRIEN, 34. No shirtless photograph. Just a handsome man with dark blond hair, an expensive-looking apartment behind him, and the expression of someone who had never been required to wait for a bus. Discreet. Alone. No drama. Nassim typed: Can I come over? The answer arrived immediately. Now? Yes. There’s a riot outside. I’ve noticed. A pause. How old are you? Are you involved? I’m 19, running away from it. Another pause. That’s rather exciting. Nassim stared at the screen. It’s not exciting. It’s tear gas. The man sent an address near the Trocadéro. Twenty minutes later, Nassim stood before an enormous Haussmannian building whose front door was taller than his family’s living room. A brass plaque listed the residents’ names. Several contained particles—de, du, d’. Nassim wondered whether wealthy French people were allowed to have ordinary surnames. The concierge opened the door cautiously. “Monsieur de Vauclerc?” Nassim nodded. The concierge examined his trainers, his hoodie, and his face. “Sixième étage.” There was an elevator lined with polished wood. Nassim had never seen an elevator in which he felt underdressed. On the sixth floor, the door opened before he knocked. The man from the photograph stood wearing dark trousers and a white linen shirt. “You’re late,” he said. “There are police everywhere.” “Yes,” the man replied. “Paris has become terribly inconvenient.” He stepped aside. Nassim entered. The apartment extended through a sequence of enormous rooms filled with paintings, books, pale furniture, and objects apparently selected for their inability to perform any practical function. A bronze sculpture stood in the entrance. Nassim looked at it. “What is that?” “An early work by a Belgian conceptual artist.” “What’s it supposed to be?” “An interrogation of absence.” “It looks like a broken radiator.” Adrien smiled. For the first time that evening, Nassim felt that he had done something right. They drank water. Adrien offered wine; Nassim refused. Somewhere in the apartment a television was discussing the riots. “Were you protesting?” Adrien asked. “Yes.” “What about?” “School.” “University fees?” “No. Actual school. The kind where children go.” Adrien leaned against the kitchen counter. “I’m a great believer in public education.” “Which school did you go to?” “Stanislas.” “Is that public?” “No,” Adrien said. “But my convictions are.” Nassim laughed despite himself. Later, the conversation became quieter. Adrien put away his phone. Nassim stopped checking the street. There was an intimacy neither had planned and neither needed to explain. In the morning, Nassim woke beneath sheets so soft they seemed politically objectionable. Adrien was making coffee. “Would you like breakfast?” “No.” “Are you sure?” “I’m not an orphan.” “I didn’t suggest you were.” “You were looking at me like you were about to sponsor me.” Adrien laughed. Nassim dressed and left. On the way out, he passed the bronze sculpture again. He still thought it was a radiator. Chapter Two: The Swimming Pool of the Republic Adrien de Vauclerc belonged to a generation of wealthy Frenchmen who had inherited sufficient money to despise capitalism without suffering any consequences from their opinions. His grandfather had owned factories. His father managed investments. Adrien managed a cultural foundation, which meant that three days a week he sent emails about contemporary art and the remaining four he attended events where people congratulated one another for supporting it. His most serious professional achievement was an exhibition entitled The Materiality of Absence. It had cost €280,000. The following Saturday, he attended a pool party at a villa in Saint-Cloud. There were twenty-seven men, two women, a Ukrainian DJ, four waiters, and a Labrador named Voltaire. Nobody knew who owned the Labrador. The guests were almost entirely gay, which gave the gathering an atmosphere of extraordinary physical discipline combined with intellectual chaos. Men who had spent their mornings measuring their protein intake were now explaining the decline of Western civilization over champagne. A television beside the pool was tuned to CNews. A bearded commentator named Philippe Pradeau was speaking. Pradeau had developed a successful career by asking questions so loudly that answers became impossible. “WHERE IS THE REPUBLIC?” he demanded. His guest attempted to respond. “NO, NO, I’M ASKING A SIMPLE QUESTION!” A man in swimming trunks applauded. “Finally, someone says it.” His name was Charles-Édouard. His father owned several logistics companies. He had recently announced that France was becoming unrecognizable, despite spending eleven months each year between Paris, London, and Mykonos. “Immigration is the problem,” he declared. His Portuguese personal trainer brought him another drink. “Merci, Miguel.” “It’s Manuel.” “Of course.” Adrien watched in silence. His friend Laurent, who worked in television production, approached wearing sunglasses that cost more than a month’s rent in Sevran. “You seem distracted.” “I met someone.” “Good-looking?” “Yes.” “Rich?” “No.” “Artist?” “No.” Laurent removed his glasses. “How poor?” “Why does that matter?” “I’m trying to understand the degree of adventure.” Adrien said … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

  8. Oct 17

    The Last Worshippers of Empire

    On October 7, 2026, Marco Rubio stood beneath the Acropolis in Athens to celebrate the greatness of Western civilization. Of all dates, October 7. Three years earlier, Palestinian armed groups had massacred Israeli civilians and abducted hostages. Israeli forces had also killed Israeli civilians that day in incidents linked to the Hannibal Directive, a practice intended to prevent captives from being taken, even at the risk of their deaths. Reports have since raised serious questions about whether Netanyahu ignored advance warnings of the attack. All of this occurred within a long history of occupation, dispossession, imperial intervention and retaliatory violence. What followed was the mass killing of Palestinians, including children, and the systematic destruction of the conditions that make human life possible. Homes, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, and entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble. For what is the destruction of a people if not also the destruction of the world in which they live? A home is not merely a building. It is where a child sleeps, where a family gathers, where generations preserve their memories, where a human being belongs. Destroy the homes, the hospitals, the schools, the streets, and the possibility of return, and you have not merely destroyed infrastructure. You have attacked the continuity of human life itself. And behind this entire tragedy stands an unresolved history of Western imperial intervention: the collapse of Ottoman rule, the British Mandate, the Balfour Declaration, and the competing national claims that imperial powers helped shape without securing a just settlement. This was not simply an ancient religious quarrel. It was also a modern political catastrophe profoundly entangled with European colonialism. What, precisely, was Rubio celebrating on this anniversary? The massacre of civilians? The destruction of Gaza? The imperial arrangements that helped produce the conflict? There was nothing glorious about October 7, nothing glorious about the decades of dispossession preceding it, and nothing glorious about the devastation that followed. Hamas’s murder of civilians was barbarism. The killing and destruction inflicted by Israeli forces in Gaza was barbarism. Neither becomes civilization merely because its perpetrators invoke history, victimhood, national survival, or the authority of God. And yet there stood an American statesman, beneath the monuments of antiquity, speaking of the greatness of the West while one of the most devastating conflicts of our age exposed the enduring consequences of its imperial past. Whether the date was chosen deliberately or coincidentally, the irony was extraordinary. Rubio had come to celebrate civilization. History had supplied an indictment. Rubio spoke of Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Columbus, and Cortés. He spoke of glory, conquest, ambition, and the exceptional character of the Western mind. He presented Western history as a magnificent procession of men whose courage and appetite for achievement had transformed the world. One might have mistaken the speech for an address delivered to the surviving aristocracy of a vanished empire. But there was something missing from this parade of heroes. The peasant. The laborer. The conscript. The enslaved. The colonized. The people who built the ships, cultivated the land, paid the taxes, buried their children, and financed through their suffering the adventures of men whose names would later be carved into marble. Rubio came to Athens to speak for the West. But who gave him ownership of its history? And more importantly, what if the entire story of Western greatness has been told backward? I. The Geography of Violence Europe did not become powerful because its inhabitants possessed an extraordinary hereditary appetite for glory. It became powerful, in significant part, because its geography made political unity difficult. Consider the continent itself: fractured by mountain ranges, divided into peninsulas, threaded with rivers, surrounded by navigable seas. The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the British Isles, the Italian peninsula, the Scandinavian coastline. These were not merely features of the landscape. They were obstacles to conquest and consolidation. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, no successor established lasting political control over the whole continent. Europe remained divided among competing kingdoms, principalities, republics, and empires. And they fought. They fought over land, dynastic inheritance, religion, resources, and commerce. They fought until their treasuries were exhausted, their villages burned, and their populations depleted. Yet this fragmentation generated an extraordinary consequence. Competition. A kingdom that failed to improve its artillery risked defeat. A ruler who could not finance an army risked displacement. A state that neglected naval development risked surrendering its trade routes to a rival. War became a mechanism of institutional selection. Those who failed to adapt could disappear. Those who survived borrowed, copied, financed, and refined the techniques of their enemies. Over centuries, European states developed increasingly sophisticated systems of taxation, military administration, fortification, artillery, shipbuilding, and public borrowing. This is close to the argument advanced by economic historian Philip Hoffman in Why Did Europe Conquer the World? Europe’s eventual military advantage was not simply a manifestation of superior culture. It was partly the outcome of repeated competition under particular political and economic conditions. Compare this with China. China repeatedly experienced periods of fragmentation and warfare. But its geographic and institutional circumstances also permitted the recurring consolidation of enormous imperial states. Europe’s competing kingdoms, by contrast, survived as a persistent political system. This distinction was not absolute. India, Japan, the Middle East, and African kingdoms also experienced military competition and technological development. Fragmentation alone cannot explain Europe’s rise. But it helps explain how Western European states developed particular military capabilities. And eventually those capabilities traveled overseas. The irony is profound. Europe’s eventual strength emerged partly from its failure to achieve the political unity that empires ordinarily considered the supreme measure of success. What Rubio celebrates as a distinctive civilizational character may have been, in considerable part, a historical consequence of political geography. Not destiny. Not blood. Not a superior species of human being. Geography. Competition. Institutions. Accumulated power. II. The Aristocracy That Became a Civilization Rubio’s account transforms this history into mythology. In his telling, Western greatness emerged from a distinctive character inherited across generations, from ancient Greece through Rome and Christendom to the United States. But military history is not moral philosophy. A society can become extraordinarily effective at organized violence without becoming morally superior. The armies of Europe were not instruments of some universal democratic will. They were frequently instruments of monarchies, dynasties, aristocracies, and competing commercial interests. The ordinary European did not necessarily benefit from their ambitions. He might have been conscripted to fight for a king whose palace he would never enter, taxed to finance a war whose objectives he did not understand, or displaced by armies claiming to defend his civilization. Yet centuries later, the descendants of those subjects are invited to imagine the glory of conquest as their collective inheritance. The king becomes the people. The aristocracy becomes the nation. The conqueror becomes civilization. And the suffering of ordinary Europeans disappears beneath the triumphal language of national greatness. This is the central deception of the civilizational myth. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com

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Language Matters is a literary and philosophical exploration of power, language, technology, religion, and the human struggle to remain fully human inside systems that reduce people to abstractions. eliaswinter.substack.com

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