The smartphone is the new shtetl: technology is making integration harder
Consider two Egyptians arriving in Britain: one in 1970, another in 2010. The former stepped off the plane into cultural exile. No Arabic TV, halal groceries were limited to a few parts of London, and there were no WhatsApp lifelines. Survival demanded immersion; you bartered broken English for bus directions, swapped Eid for fish-and-chip Fridays, diluted your identity to fit in. 'You either became British or you became invisible,' a 1970s-era Egyptian shopkeeper told me at his London Middle Eastern grocery.
Fast-forward to my generation. When I landed in London in 2016, I brought Cairo with me. My phone buzzed with Al-Jazeera alerts, my laptop streamed Ramadan dramas, and Amazon Prime delivered molokhia (an iconic Egyptian stew) for Friday dinners. To many, work-from-home flexibility also meant biannual returns to Egypt – not pilgrimages, but extended coffee breaks. The pressure to assimilate? No such thing – that's 'racism.' The result? A generation of migrants who inhabit the West physically but not culturally. They may live here, but their hearts, minds and values remain tethered to foreign shores.
Technology didn't just ease migration – it neutered its transformative power. Algorithms feed immigrants the familiar, not the foreign. YouTube recommends extremist preachers from home, not BBC explainers on parliamentary democracy. TikTok's #ResistWest hashtags outcompete voting guides. 'The smartphone is the new shtetl,' as I argued at a hybrid threats symposium, 'building walls of comfort that breed contempt for the host culture.'
My counter-extremism research reveals a grim trend: second-generation immigrants, unmoored from their parents' struggles, cling to hyper-curated ancestral identities – distorted by online echo chambers.
Take Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bomber. His radicalisation fused familial ties to Libya's Islamic Fighting Group with encrypted ISIS propaganda. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 ringleader, was a Leeds native who was radicalised through UK-based cells preaching a warped 'clash of civilisations.'
These cases expose a brutal truth: when ancestral identity is algorithmically weaponised – elevated above British values by Silicon Valley code and state timidity – the social contract unravels. We are engineering our demise, trading shared liberty for tribal solitudes.
Integration isn't dead – it's been privatised. A choice few make, while most refuse to 'marry out' of their faith. My union with a British woman forced a reckoning: Sunday roasts replaced koshary Fridays, Adel Imam films swapped for Only Fools and Horses. Our children speak English, celebrate Bonfire Night, and inherit Judeo-Christian traditions. I let go of who I was as a teenager for who I want to be as a father, husband, and a British citizen.
As such, cross-cultural marriage is now the only effective assimilation tool. Yet most second-generation immigrants marry within their diaspora, creating self-contained communities that engage Britain transactionally – through schools, hospitals, Uber jobs – but rarely culturally.
This isn't just social theory – it's a national security tinderbox. For decades the UK has allowed immigration from the same countries to the same locations within the UK (specific neighbourhoods, boroughs and cities), creating clustered enclaves.
This, as extremism scholars argue, provides an environment, in the virtual and real worlds, that shares and supports one's extremism, which is crucial to maintaining and nurturing extremism. We now face an identity-driven cold war, heating by the day. When migrants no longer show an interest in belonging to their host nations, loyalty becomes negotiable. Why pledge allegiance to a country you've never truly joined?
The fix isn't just enhanced vetting and slashing immigration from high-risk states like Pakistan or Afghanistan – it's about reimagining integration. Denmark's 'ghetto laws,' which disperse ethnic enclaves, are harsh but work. Britain, however, remains shackled by Roy Jenkins's 1966 multicultural dogma. The late Home Secretary defined integration as 'equal opportunity with cultural diversity,' rejecting assimilation as 'a flattening process.'
His vision was dangerously naive. Consider Egypt: anti-Semitism is widespread, homosexuality is criminalised, and women's rights lag behind the West. This isn't 'diversity' to be celebrated – it's bigotry incompatible with British liberty.
True integration demands friction – the messy clash of traditions that forges new identities. We should mandate English fluency, incentivise mixed neighbourhoods, and dismantle clustered enclaves. We ought to celebrate cross-cultural unions that prioritise British values. We should expect migrants like me to abandon practices antithetical to liberal democracy or go home.
Khaled Hassan is an Egyptian-British national security and foreign policy expert with over 14 years of experience combatting extremism, antisemitism, and disinformation in the Middle East
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In the book, Deneen argues that liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism and free markets, has sown the seeds of its own demise by undermining traditional social structures and neglecting deeper sources of human flourishing. 'I dog-eared and highlighted the crap out of that book,' Murphy said. 'While I don't go to all the places Deneen goes, it opened my eyes as to how the market fundamentalism that had creeped into the Democratic Party had really corrupted the country's soul.' 'But then I went a step further,' Murphy continued, 'and started spending time listening to the Red Scare, and reading Curtis Yarvin, and going through the stuff that the Claremont Institute was producing.' He came to feel that the new right—skeptical of free-market libertarianism and eager to use state power to impose its values on American institutions, including Big Business—was asking the right questions, even if its answers were alarming. 'What I was hearing and what I was reading was a conservative movement that was actually spending real time trying to understand the spiritual crisis that the country was in,' Murphy said. 'Listen: Blake Masters is a creepy weirdo, but a lot of the stuff he was getting into in 2022—about the emptiness of American life when all that matters is how much you buy and how good a consumer you are—really, it spoke to me.' Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism Where Deneen critiqued liberalism as such, Murphy, like others on the left, saw the culprit as neo liberalism, the philosophy that favors private-sector solutions and defines good policy largely in terms of total economic growth. Neoliberal Democrats, according to their critics, had placed too much faith in free markets, relied too heavily on welfare programs to compensate the economy's have-nots, and overlooked the political perils of concentrated wealth. The Biden administration thus sought to break from neoliberal ideas in key ways: reviving tough antitrust enforcement and consumer protection, strongly supporting labor unions, and directing huge sums of public money into domestic manufacturing. In his Atlantic essay, Murphy argued that this agenda provided Democrats a way to defeat Trump by selling 'a new, winning message of actionable economic nationalism.' This is not quite what happened. Opinions differ on why the 2024 presidential election went so wrong for Democrats. One school of thought holds that Biden had been a fool to reject neoliberalism in the first place. 'Policymakers should never again ignore the basics in pursuit of fanciful heterodox solutions,' Jason Furman, an influential centrist Democratic economist, wrote in a postelection essay titled 'The Post-Neoliberal Delusion.' The other possibility is that the theory was sound, but the implementation wasn't. Perhaps voters would have rewarded the Biden administration if they hadn't been so upset about inflation—a post-pandemic phenomenon that triggered anti-incumbent backlash in democracies around the world and that the administration was slow to recognize as an emergency. Or perhaps what sank Democrats was the fact that, thanks to the slowly turning gears of government, most of Biden's concrete achievements—new infrastructure, reduced drug prices, and so on—had not materialized by the end of his term. (We can set aside the obvious problem of having a president so ravaged by age that he had to abandon his reelection campaign. Opinions don't really differ about that.) Murphy believes that the decisive factor was communication: The administration failed to sell its own record. 'Nobody knew what Lina Khan was doing,' he told me, referring to the Biden-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission whose aggressive agenda drew the enmity of much of corporate America (and for whom I briefly worked before joining The Atlantic). 'Nobody understood that the president actually was in the process of breaking up concentrated corporate power.' David A. Graham: Independent agencies never stood a chance under Trump As the nominee, Kamala Harris seemed unwilling to lean into a populist economic message. Two moments crystallized the lost opportunity for Murphy: One was when rumors swirled that Harris intended, as president, to reward her Silicon Valley supporters by firing Khan—rumors that Harris did not dispel. Another was when Harris proposed a ban on supermarket price gouging as a way to address voter anger over food costs. That plan was mocked by many economists and pundits, including liberal ones, who insisted that capping the prices businesses can charge for essential goods would lead to Soviet-style shortages. The campaign subsequently downplayed the proposal. Ali Mortell, the director of research at Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic-strategy firm, told me that a campaign ad in which Harris promised to 'crack down on landlords who are charging too much' and 'lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers' was in the top 1 percent of effectiveness among the many thousands of ads her firm has tested. But for whatever reason, the ad 'was not necessarily what received the most airtime,' Mortell said. An analysis published by Jacobin found that Harris mentioned economically populist themes and policies less and less as the campaign went along. When asked during her first and only 2024 presidential debate whether Americans were better off financially than they had been four years earlier, Harris offered a stultifyingly dry sales pitch for what she called her 'opportunity economy,' which seemed to consist exclusively of tax cuts. In Murphy's diagnosis, Democratic politicians must adopt a more confrontational style in which 'you tell people who's screwing them'—which is to say, giant corporations that wield their power to raise prices, nickel-and-dime consumers, and corrupt the government (and, in the case of tech companies, to addict our children to harmful social-media feeds). For Harris, that would have meant addressing grocery inflation by talking about collusion among monopolistic food companies. Instead, the administration 'chose to just take it on the chin, over and over again, on inflation,' Murphy said. I asked why he thought that was. He was silent for a moment before saying, in an almost pained whisper, 'I don't know.' If pugilistic economic populism is such effective politics, shouldn't Bernie Sanders be president right now? Maybe his problem was the S-word. Maybe a type of populism that aimed at fixing capitalism, rather than replacing it with socialism, would perform better—except that's what Elizabeth Warren tried in 2020. For her troubles, she got to split a New York Times endorsement with Amy Klobuchar and finished behind Sanders in the primary. But a lot of other things were going on back then. Social-justice issues dominated Democratic politics. Warren and Sanders were among the 2020 primary candidates who declared their support for unpopular left-wing positions such as decriminalizing border crossings, banning fracking, and abolishing private health insurance. To this day, the public overwhelmingly perceives the Democratic Party as caring more about progressive social causes than economic ones. Murphy puts forward a version of an argument that has been advanced by the likes of Steve Bannon and J. D. Vance: that millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities are to the left of the GOP on economics and to the right of Democrats on social issues, and whichever party can occupy that sweet spot will reap major benefits. 'The race is really a matter of whether Republicans become more genuinely economically populist before Democrats open up their tent and accept in folks who aren't with us on every single issue, from abortion to climate to guns,' he said. This approach cuts against both the economic self-interest and the cultural preferences of much of the Democratic donor base. But it seems to have worked for some swing-district Democrats, including Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Representative Pat Ryan of New York, social moderates who emphasized anti-corporate themes and ran far ahead of Harris in their congressional districts last year. The political writer Matthew Yglesias has accused Murphy of ' dog whistle moderation ' for implying that Democrats are too 'woke' without actually saying anything anti-woke. It's true that Murphy does not offer any particular culture-war takes that defy progressive orthodoxy, perhaps because his record as a blue-state liberal makes this improbable. His critique is more about tone and emphasis. 'It's not just about that specific message of attacking corporate power,' he said. 'It is also about having the discipline to spend 80 percent of your time on that message.' This is hard for Democratic politicians, who are much more comfortable talking about social issues. 'Climate, guns, choice, gay rights, voting rights: Every single one of those issues is existential for an important community. But I think right now, if you aren't driving the vast majority of your narrative around the way in which the economy is going to become corrupted to enrich the elites, then you aren't going to be able to capture this potential realignment of the American electorate that's up for grabs.' 'And listen—I own part of that responsibility,' he added. 'I spent a lot of time trying to convince my party to spend more and more time talking about guns.' In my conversations with him, I got the sense that Murphy was better at making the case for populism than at actually doing populism. Perhaps because he came to it relatively recently, he seems at times to still be trying on the ideas. Unlike Sanders or Warren, he doesn't slip naturally into detailed, outraged explanations of how the economy has gone wrong. Even in his essays, he tends to hover at the level of abstract ideas. And Murphy's economic argument, given its overlap with the intellectual movement surrounding Trump, exists in some tension with his effort to whip up opposition to the real-life Trump agenda. Murphy recognizes this dynamic. 'I struggle with the question of how much time to be explaining that tariffs aren't always bad,' he said. 'That seems like wasted energy right now, because the way he's doing them is definitely bad.' To the wing of the party that thinks Bidenomics was a catastrophic blunder, agonizing over whether Trump has a point on the downsides of free trade is political insanity. Yglesias, for example, argues that Murphy's embrace of 'pseudoeconomics' is the exact wrong way to broaden the Democratic tent. Better to celebrate cheap goods as the key to prosperity and return to the more corporate-friendly, growth-oriented approach of the Clinton and Obama eras. Murphy is trying to prevent his colleagues from giving in to that temptation. But he faces skepticism from a party that is still uncomfortable with class-conscious politics. 'There has always been a resistance to what very rich people call the demonization of wealth,' he said. 'Part of the pushback is the idea that it's a mistake to talk about the dangers of concentrated wealth, because it feels like that's an attack on wealth, and people want to be wealthy. I think that's a legitimate criticism, but I think we have to explain that the current structure of power in this country is a barrier to people becoming wealthy. I'd like to have fewer billionaires and a lot more millionaires.'
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