One of the distinctive patterns of backlash is its strategy of making false concessions. Its rhetoric will generally admit that there was at one point a problem; that at some point in the bad old days, women really did have to worry about inequality. Then the backlash posits that the problem has been solved well before it actually has been. “The anti-feminist backlash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it,” says Faludi. “It is a preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line.”

This endless fanfare of grievance, innuendo, and motivated misprioritization colors most of the content you’ll find on the most popular conservative news and opinion outlets: vast edifices of bullshit constructed atop small kernels of verifiable information. But this ongoing victim narrative is undermined by the plain fact that, far from being marginalized and undervalued, by most available metrics, right-wing news and opinion is very popular and profitable. Fox News consistently tops the cable news ratings. Conservative radio shows and podcasts top the leaderboards in their respective disciplines. Right-wing Facebook pages are consistently among the most popular issues-based Facebook pages. Substacks dedicated to the proposition that divergent political opinion has no home in the American media earn their proprietors better livings than they ever would have made at the publications they once called home. We are literally living in the Golden Age of Getting Rich and Wielding Influence by Pretending That Your Voice Has Been Silenced—which brings us back to the Twitter Files, and the people to whom they were handed by the wealthiest man in the world.

The aim was to maximise profit, enrich management and shareholders, and circumscribe worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation.

This has sparked a new wave of attention on China’s labor politics since the pandemic and provoked some response among overseas Chinese communities, though less prominent for now than the global diaspora mobilization in solidarity with the protester in Beijing’s Sitong Bridge last month. It provides a telling background to the broader social uprising in China sparked by the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Even so, the new government is still not a “Chinese-dominated” government because there are 105 non-Chinese MPs, more than double the number of Chinese MPs.

However, upon closer inspection, we argue that the law reforms achieved were ones the state views as congruous with its wider identity-making project for citizens. Consequently, issues at odds with entrenched values imposed on citizens by dominant state narratives become difficult to reconcile, resulting in roadblocks and stalled progress.