Slop merchants, complex centrists and the return of English-Americans

Wrong Side of History newsletter #70

Good morning - and welcome to Wrong Side of History. Thanks to all of you for subscribing, and to those of you who’ve shared articles and spread the word. The substack now has 46,000 subscribers, located in 174 countries, although I still haven’t broken into North Korea, Bhutan or DR Congo. After the big four Anglophone countries, India is now the fifth biggest market, but on a per capita basis I think Iceland has the most subscribers (after Britain). But then Icelandics are the most avid readers in the world, consuming the most books and newspapers, so that makes sense.

While I love all my subscribers deeply, I have a particularly fond, extra special love for paid subscribers, so please consider joining this elite group by upgrading. I’ve never asked before, because like my hero Edmund Blackadder I like to pretend that I’m wealthier than I actually am, and it seems especially awkward to request this when I’ve spent much of the last few months travelling around like I’m on some sort of gap yah.

The milk of human kindness

People might assume that, because I have gloomy conservative views about the world, that I must think humans are naturally selfish or somehow bad. Actually I think the human capacity for altruism, sacrifice and co-operation is rather remarkable, and what makes us so unique. This is the subject of Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth, which I highly recommend and which I’ve thought about quite a bit since reading it (I also wrote a bonus piece about some other amazing animals, such as dolphins and elephants).

Since the last newsletter, I’ve also written about America’s forgotten terrorism epidemic, and how all the crazed extremists from the late 1960s were entirely forgiven and ended up with good jobs in academia.

I wrote about all the terrible art notes found in galleries and museums.

I wrote about the crisis of liberal democracy, and why authoritarian rulers seem to be more in tune with public opinion than democratically-elected politicians. On a similar topic, I wrote about why I’m scared of young people. (On the issue of political violence, elite subscriber Noah Carl points out that support among the young is not as strong as has been suggested.)

I also discussed the subject of British emigration with Louise Perry, and wrote about Why Starmerism failed, and the decline of juries (the latter is especially depressing - sorry).

Canon Club returns

Sebastian Milbank will be discussing Goethe, Germany and the Birth of Modernity on 13 January. Get your tickets here. If you’re unaware of what I’m talking about, this was the original post explaining the Canon Club.

The Great Satan

I recently spent some time in the United States, and wrote some general thoughts here. I also wrote about Charleston, often called America’s most beautiful city: lots of people in the comments have mentioned that Savannah is just as nice, so maybe one day I’ll go there.

I wrote about the huge homeless problem there, and it inspired my piece on the case for narcotics licences. In Texas I saw a ‘No Kings’ protest, which made me wonder why the elderly love to protest. Next week I’ll publish the articles about Austin, San Francisco and New York; they’re basically written, but have been delayed by other things.

Third Worldism

While in New York at no point did I think ‘what this city really needs is a mayor who’s soft on crime and squalor’, but, well, they voted for one.

This was a really fine piece, by Zineb Riboua, on Zohran Mamdani as exemplar of Third Worldism

Many today label every political expression of Islam as “Islamist,” but that is a mistake. Islam’s fusion of theology and politics gives it an activist edge, but its meaning is always contingent on who invokes it and to what end.

Under a decolonial lens, Islam assumes a different, explicitly ideological function. It is no longer treated as a faith rooted in ritual and law (sharia), but rather as a symbol of protest. In the decolonial framework, Islam is the religion of the oppressed, a universal language through which the marginalized can articulate resistance to empire and hierarchy.

Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, wrote that “religious misery is, on the one hand, the expression of real misery and, on the other hand, the protest against real misery.” Religion, in his view, both reveals the suffering of man and gives that suffering a voice. Mamdani’s version of Islam follows this logic almost perfectly. Faith is a social instrument, a language of protest against injustice rather than a structure of divine truth. Islam, for him, does not reveal God, it reveals oppression.

The irony is that this worldview subverts Islam itself. It is almost amusing to see Gulf Arabs, whose societies still link religion to prosperity, honor, hierarchy, and self-assertion, mocking Mamdani on social media. Their reaction is revealing. They instinctively recognize that what he promotes is a sort of victimhood mentality that is incompatible with a religion that promoted merchants and warriors. Perhaps the Muslims in New York with this sensibility did not vote for Mamdani precisely because of this, and why they voted for Trump 2025.

Mamdani also epitomises a Global South Aristocracy who use western progressive politics and white guilt to further their own interests - all politics, and political alliances, are downstream of that.

Mamdani’s campaign to have statues removed, just two years after becoming a citizen, is typical of this aristocratic arrogance; it’s very corrosive that immigrants no longer feel pressure to express gratitude towards their new country, as I wrote about last month.

On the other hand, the next mayor’s visit to see Trump was very amusing, and both men came across well. Maybe they get on because ‘Trump is spiritually Arab. Loyalty politics. No particular ideology. Gold everything. Big money. Many wives.’ Whenever you see him on visits to the Gulf, he looks so happy.

Complex centrism, simple populism

Ian Leslie wrote about whether populism is simple and centrism is ‘complex’. I tend to agree that this explanation is, well, simple. Centrism is unpopular because it delivers poor results, which is downstream of failings found across British elite institutions. Among them:

Too many don’t really understand incentives or second-order effects, or just ignore them; if you allow billions of people access to residency in Britain, then a large number of people will try to get here and will lie to do so, while organised crime will end up running networks. I saw a Labour MP last week arguing that it would be cheaper to just wave through all the migrants currently here: in the short term, yes, but you’ll incentivise more to come.

There is a misaligned idea of the balance between duties to citizens and global responsibilities, because the latter carries more prestige. The Gus O’Donnell problem.

Many overestimate the importance of ‘narrative’, and so actual results are underplayed. The idea that the tabloids inform public opinion might have been vaguely plausible in the 1990s, but is clearly no longer; most of the anti-migrant protests over the summer organically arose on Facebook groups, through an instinctive anger about the sexual assault of girls by migrants.

On that issue, too many describe problems as ‘complex’ when what they mean is ‘solvable, but it makes us uncomfortable’.

There is way too much emphasis on ‘fairness’, which often means that we can’t have nice things because it would increase inequality.

The British elite is totally beholden to the blank slate, and this is also true of conservatives to some extent. Trying to formulate laws while ignoring the huge influence of genetics on social outcomes is to voluntarily wear a blindfold.

Finally, they’re overly respectful of modern institutions, many of which only date to the Blair regime and have not passed the Chesterton’s fence test. Reverence for the Human Rights Act (1998) is the most extreme example, with many people actually believing we owe our basic rights to it.

Aris Roussinos described Keir Starmer, who has become the tragic personification of this fading consensus, as ‘An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime.’

Not another one!

The endless litany of female prison wardens getting up to mischief with inmates continues.

In August an officer at Stony Stratford was jailed. In September a prison cashier was sent to jail for the same thing. This month, a 31-year-old at HMP Dovegate has pleaded guilty to having an affair, while another officer was convicted of having affairs with two inmates, including use of the multifaith prayer room, probably the most meaningful encounter anyone has ever had in one of those places.

If only there was some easy way to stop this continually happening. I guess if our brightest policymakers can’t find an explanation, we’re all stumped.

What happened to Minnesota?

The largest funder of Al-Shabaab, the terror group in Somalia, is the Minnesota taxpayer. It’s an almost perfect example of a welfare system creating perverse incentives and outcomes. It also illustrates how systems set up for one group of people, in this case Scandinavians, don’t work for another.

On the other hand, it’s a tribute to the US that it’s so rich that ‘minor states are accidentally funding both sides of African civil wars almost incidentally, as a small side effect of well meaning social policy.’

It’s not the only example of the state accidentally funding terror. As Kevin Myers recounted in his absurdly under-appreciated Watching the Door, during the Troubles the British government would automatically pay for the refurbishment of any building damaged by bombs; most of the glaziers, unfortunately, were forced to pay protection money to Republican or Loyalists paramilitaries, who used it to fund more bombing campaigns.

English-Americans

American humourist Robert Benchley once quipped: ‘We call England the Mother country, because most of us come from Poland or Italy.’

It’s a funny line, except that almost all of Benchley’s family in fact came from Britain, even if they were mostly from Wales or from the Border folk.

I noticed an interesting development whereby more Americans are identifying as English, and that this could be downstream of DNA tests like 23andMe and Ancestry. (It may just be the way that statistics are counted; this is not a fully-formed theory).

The scale of English immigration to the United States was gigantic, right up until the 20^th century, but their identity was subsumed by their own creation, the Americans. The 1940 US census recorded roughly as many people born in England as in Ireland, but those migrants are entirely forgotten and un-hyphenated.

I wonder if 1776 will see a revival of English-American identity, and people will recall the words of William Bradford: ‘Our Fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in the wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard this voice and looked on their adversities.’

Foreign slop

I cancelled my blue tick on Twitter because Elon Musk blocked links to substack, meaning that it offered little financial reward and I have no interest in making money from posting there. In fact I don’t like the perverse incentives created by monetisation, which has led to a tide of slop. I also really dislike the fact that Musk himself posts some very inflammatory and irresponsible comments; yes, he’s on ‘our’ side, but he’s totally justifying the leftist argument that there isn’t really free speech or democracy when incredibly powerful individuals are allowed to have such an outsized voice.

The incentive system is especially odd when you consider that someone in a poor country can make a decent living posting totally misleading content designed to increase partisan hatred in the US and other western countries.

In his defence, Elon has made some positive changes: first, community notes, which hugely reduced the opportunities for bad actors to spread false stories, and now a function which allows people to see where each account is located.

Many accounts, especially low-effort MAGA accounts and masculine promoters, have turned out to be south Asian, just as everyone predicted. I don’t blame people for becoming slop merchants, because people will just respond to financial incentives if you let them. Hopefully we’ll see less manosphere content and crappy accounts called ‘Europe has fallen’.

The most right-wing Britain has ever been

David Goodhart on whether Britain really has moved to the right, listing the ways that it hasn’t.

The size of the state; levels of tax and redistribution; public spending on health, welfare and disabilities; income and wealth inequality, poverty levels; the level of the minimum wage; regulation of business; representation of women and minorities in the professions and political class; social mobility/openness of the elite; proportion of school-leavers going to university; protection of human rights (including the rights of those who are not British citizens); scale and speed of immigration; levels of value and ethnic diversity; investment in de-carbonisation.

This week’s budget, for instance, was pretty left-wing.

I think there are two things that might create this idea: firstly, the tendency for everyone to think that they’re losing, downstream of the general air of catastrophe. Secondly, Britain has continued to move to the Left, and woke is certainly not dead here – see this recent communique by the Metropolitan Police or a new analysis of terms like ‘equality’ . On the other hand, the anti-racism taboo is starting to weaken, and not just online. I’m half-way through a piece trying to explain why this is.

Probably the best asylum system in the world

I wrote about the government’s supposed new tough Danish asylum laws.

Chris Bayliss thinks that it’s actually a liberalisation, and that journalists are too lazy and gullible to look at the small print and question the presentation.

‘As any fool can see, this regularises and formalises the existing settlement, under which arriving illegally in the UK and seeking asylum is the most straightforward way into Britain for those who lack the skills or credentials to find sponsorship or obtain a visa. Furthermore, such arrivals will still be able to obtain British nationality for themselves and their descendents for all and ever after, and will become just as British and you or me.

Not only is this all evidence of the shallowness of public debate and democratic scrutiny in Britain, but it’s also downstream of the maddening tendency of British politicos to outsource their thinking to one another. Everybody in Westminster is so desperate to reassure everyone else that they know what is going on that they grab the easiest and most digestible story on offer, rather than trying to process the facts themselves.

Also recommended

Louise Perry on the exile of the Cockneys

The Custodian Substack on the Mehdi Hasan v Nigel Biggar debate

The central reason why Hasan’s question is a false dichotomy is the following: pride and guilt are not symmetrical. Pride is aspirational, binding a community together around achievements that inspire. Guilt is moral, requiring personal responsibility. To conflate the two is sophistry.

‘One-third of all newspapers in America closed between 2004 and 2025. When newspapers close, local businesses commit more legal violations, local government borrowing costs grow because of decreased public scrutiny of spending decisions, people vote less…’

Americans are very amused by this ancient beef between Scottish history alpha males Niall Ferguson and William Dalrymple, which centres on what their families did in the empire.

More banned books LARPing. It’s one of the strangest aspects of a ruling class who refuse to accept they’re in charge. Invariably these books are classified as banned because some school board in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the Mid West removed them.

Labour continues to lose the green wall. I wrote about this back in April, and there is speculation that the abolition of the two child cap is going to massively benefit the demographic who deserted Labour for Gaza Independents last year.

The British Right are more anti-immigration than their American equivalents, and (more obviously) less socially conservative. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the case across Europe.

Eric Zemmour and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann begin their debate on French identity. It’s notable how similar the debate is in Britain and France; the similarities of the two political cultures is often underplayed, just as that between Britain and the US is overplayed.

Koreans became the master of cooking chicken by refusing to support old people, who therefore became chefs. Something for us to ponder.

Did the Industrial Revolution begin in our DNA? ‘Traits linked to learning and foresight rise sharply after 1350, clearest in England’. While a lot can happen in ten thousand years, a lot can happen in even a few centuries.

‘Despite comprising only 4% of the population of early Renaissance Venice, nobles were responsible for nearly a quarter of the recorded assaults.’ Noblemen were also far more likely to commit murder in late medieval England, one reason being that they were heavily armed.

Gender polarisation in Weimar Germany, via Rod Dreher, from Harald Jähner’s history of the Weimar Republic,

[Stefan] Zweig was quite certain that ‘a future cultural history of this complete revaluation and transformation of European women’ would ultimately be more disruptive than the war. He was convinced that women had radically changed, and the rest of the country with them, and that this shift ran deeper than all the changes in architecture, traffic, technology or even politics. Not only had women’s appearance undergone a radical change between 1905 and 1925, their behaviour, their speech and their thought had changed as well.

‘And what about men? They seemed to have stayed more or less the same; at least that was how it seemed to men themselves, since most of them, pragmatic by nature and habit, thought comparatively little about themselves. However, many men shared the feeling of standing on the edge of a great upheaval, with women at its centre. According to their characters and political viewpoints, they viewed the emancipation of women with concern, anxiety, pity, acquiescence, joy or loathing.

Well, that turned out okay, so nothing to worry about.

On a similar subject, congratulations on his election victory to Adolf Hitler. Remember that name – he’ll go far!

A nice improved design for Thanet Parkway, the recently built railway station that has come to epitomise the complete absence of any aesthetic sense among British planners; it’s too bland to even be a monstrosity.

Finally, very sad news with the death of Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum; I worked with Peter many years ago on a project, and would always chat to him at parties whenever I saw him. He was kind, thoughtful and fun, but serious about what mattered, passionate about culture and his country, a true patriot. Rest in peace, Peter.