Sunday West 50

Right-wing progressivism, the gender wars and why the Reform Party doesn't exist

Good morning and welcome to all new subscribers from around the world. I’m writing this from a very wet London, where it indeed never seems to stop raining; it’s like that Young Ones episode ‘Flood’, or to use a more obscure cultural reference, the Bible.

Since the last newsletter, I have written about:

Soft Cancelling

There is a great deal of discussion made on the subject of cancelling, but even critics who claim to be against cancelling people – sacking, no-platforming or closing down their meetings – often engage in what might be called ‘soft cancelling’, describing the political views of opponents as so beyond the pale that the message that ‘we should still let them speak’ is completely undermined and contradicted. 

Why everyone is starting culture wars

Yet people do care about non-material issues; penniless rural Christians really are invested in the unborn, just as modern progressives care about protecting vulnerable transgender children, even if they might have a hundred and one more pressing problems in their lives (and don’t we all). Man is a believing animal, and prestige and status matter hugely to our wellbeing.

The real Singapore-on-Thames

Over ten years ago, in The Diversity Illusion, I argued that one result of multiculturalism was a society that was inevitably more conformist and strict than the easy-going, eccentric social norm Englishmen and women had grown used to. We would have to accept some sort of Singapore-style future because that is the only successful model of multicultural democracy. ‘The Singaporeans value multiculturalism, but they believe that it cannot co-exist with free speech,’ I wrote cheerfully: ‘Europeans are learning the same lesson.’

Our new colonial police force

The imperial ruling class gloried in the diversity of their domain both because it had an uplifting message about people working together, and because it flattered them, and their ability to rule them in harmony. The same is true of today’s neo-imperial class.

And why I won’t be getting an Irish passport (Free)

One obvious reason for my refusal so far is that I supported Leave, although regretted it almost instantly, and while my opinion on that referendum tends to change every few weeks, I’m still of the view that it was a bad move. In which case, it seems galling for a member of the White Star Line Iceberg Look-out Committee to join the throngs for a lifeboat while everyone else has to take their chances.

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There are still a handful of tickets for the next Canon Club event, with Professor Douglas Hedley speaking about Samuel Taylor Coleridge on May. 14 Should be fun, so buy your tickets here.

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Elsewhere, the Cass review of gender identity services was big news in Britain, and The Studies Show had a very good episode looking at all the studies that have influenced medical treatment of gender dysphoria. These procedures seemed to have gone ahead based on the thinnest of evidence.

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Great minds think alike, and Mary Harrington also wrote about how the Metropolitan Police finds itself unable to deal with its new colonial situation.

Harrington also wrote a very good piece about right-wing progressives.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety, let alone any current mainstream Tory. It has as yet no party-political or institutional representation in Britain, and is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And it’s not hard to see the appeal of Bukele as a poster-boy for such movements: while China is arguably a far larger and more successful instance of high-tech authoritarianism, it’s both (by Western standards) off-puttingly collectivist, and also a little too powerful for comfort. By contrast, El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity: a project that both has underdog appeal, and also poses no direct material threat to American geopolitical interests.

I admire what Bukele has done so far, I’m just wary of being one of those conservatives who becomes a cheerleader for a Latin American strongmen, only for them to start throwing people out of helicopters. I’m pretty confident he won’t, and I take the view of Richard Hanania that high crime makes economic and social development impossible.

I also think right-wing progressivism is a useful concept; my feeling is that conservatives will lose the argument over immigration, for reasons of path dependency and class interests, but win on crime/disorder, and most societies will move towards a more Singapore model of law enforcement. That’s a deal most people will accept.

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Duncan Robinson at the Economist on why the Reform Party doesn’t really exist. I have always believed this, so it’s nice to have it confirmed by the high-brow magazine and voice of the City of London’s global corporatist interests.

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Earlier this week, one X user got a huge number of responses with the astute observation: ‘A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.’

Apart from the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Maoists and the Taliban, that’s spot on!

At the Atlantic, Michael Powell wrote about Columbia University’s ‘Liberated Zone’.

As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians Against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass.’

It’s notable that the first thing they did was set up a border.

I know a lot of this is quite bad, and intimidating to some, but it also quite funny. Anyway, no need to worry, as these people will all grow up, and soon become leaders of America’s major institutions.

I think of all the signs and slogans protesting this tragic war, the repeated use of ‘go back to Poland’ is the most incomprehensible in its horribleness. People seem to heavily overestimate how many Israelis came from Poland, which was around the same as the number who came from Iraq; most Polish Jews were in fact murdered by the Nazis, so it just seems like an unnecessarily hurtful thing to write or say. Polish Jews have, however, played an outsized part in the Israeli military, and many Poles were proud of their victories in the 1967 war.

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Ganesh on top form again, on why there generally aren’t second chances.

There should be more candour about this from the people who are looked to (and paid) for guidance. The rise of the advice-industrial complex — the self-help podcasts, the chief executive coaches, the men’s conferences — has been mostly benign. But much of the content is American, and reflects the optimism of that country. The notion of an unsalvageable mistake is almost transgressive in the land of second chances. 

Martin Amis, that peer of McEwan’s, once attempted an explanation of the vast international appeal of football. “It’s the only sport which is usually decided by one goal,” he theorised, “so the pressure on the moment is more intense in football than any other sport.” His point is borne out across Europe most weekends. A team hogs the ball, creates superior chances, wins more duels — and loses the game to one error. It is, as the statisticians say, a “stupid” sport.  

But it is also the one that most approximates life outside the stadium. I am now roughly midway through that other low-scoring game. Looking around at the distress and regret of some peers, I feel sympathy, but also amazement at the casualness with which people entered into big life choices. Perhaps this is what happens when ideas of redemption and resurrection — the ultimate second chance — are encoded into the historic faith of a culture. It takes a more profane cast of mind to see through it.

Overall, he’s right of course, although there are exceptions, and I rather admire the American capacity for self-reinvention and redemption.

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Another very good Louise Perry piece, on why Cancel Culture is Girl Culture.

When I spoke about this sociosexuality difference between the sexes at a literary festival a couple of years ago, a woman in the audience reprimanded me during the Q&A. What she objected to, specifically, was my use of the word “abnormal” to describe people at the tails. It was “unkind”, she said, to use that kind of language. I pointed out that, since I was talking about a normally distributed trait, the word “abnormal” was the correct technical choice. Was there some synonym that she would prefer? Outlier, unusual, anomalous? None of these were acceptable, she said, since they all served to make some people feel “excluded.” So I sat there onstage, condemned as unkind for expressing a statistical truth. 

This sex difference is also evident among students, and in other disciplines. Cory argues – and I think she’s right – that the cultural changes we’ve seen in academia over the last few decades are primarily a consequence of the influx of women into the profession, bringing with them their female-typical preferences and perspectives. Some of those effects are good, like the fact that male academics are now less likely to get away with exploitative behaviour like offering students good marks in return for sexual favours. Other effects are bad, like the persecution of heterodox thinking within academia. Notice that the disciplines that have witnessed the most aggressive attacks on free speech – feminist philosophy, for instance – are those most dominated by women, whereas male-dominated disciplines like maths and engineering have so far proved to be mostly immune (for more on the conflict within feminist philosophy, see this episode I recorded a few months ago). 

A greengrocer putting a sign that reads “workers of the world, unite!” in the window of his shop is demonstrating his loyalty to the Soviet regime. An office worker putting her pronouns in her email signature is demonstrating her loyalty to a new regime. The difference is that, while the former risks violent punishment if he falls afoul of the Soviets, the latter is risking a much more feminine style of punishment if she offends a much more feminine kind of regime. 

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Ian Leslie on whether being left-wing makes you unhappy.

There is indeed some evidence that this is part of the problem. A 2021 paper from epidemiologists at Columbia University, entitled “The Politics of Depression”, proposes that one cause of the rise in youth depression is “increasing exposure to politicized events”. Importantly, the authors observe a significant difference in rates of depression between students who identify as liberal and conservative:

This is consistent with a longstanding finding in the scientific literature on happiness: people who lean right, politically speaking, tend to be happier than those who lean left. For instance, this analysis of two long-running global happiness studies finds that conservatives are generally happier than liberals, with the relationship reversed in only five out of ninety-two countries. Another study, of sixteen European countries, finds that voters who espouse conservative beliefs report greater happiness than liberals, even as more liberal countries tend to be happier overall.

The bad thing is that this neurosis seems to work as a political strategy.

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Am interesting post on the similarities between the Japanese and British royal families.

Some Japanese gave into nihilism and despair in the immediate post-war, in the face of the collapse of their Emperor-centred world and the futility of their sacrifices. But on the whole MacArthur’s “mercy” and imperial continuity were popular, and the country quickly turned to the task of rebuilding. Remarkably, Hirohito transitioned from God and Supreme Warlord to a small-talking Sovereign, much like Her Late Majesty; the second time in less than a century that Japan’s oldest institution remodelled itself and became more Western, more British. 

As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Japan and have been meaning to post on the Meiji restoration, but will get around to it soon.

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Rwanda is in the news, as always, and my cousin Ben West, a travel writer, had an interesting post on what the country is actually like.

This made me marvel at a country that, having been through one of the darkest moments in 20th century history, seemed to now have a most peculiar priority: the prevention of litter. Where America and many other countries are still awash with disposable plastic bottles, cups, packaging and bags, Rwanda became one of the first countries in the world to ban single-use plastic bags and bottles in 2008.

And Rwanda has gone considerably further than this: it is the only country in the world that sets aside time each month for the whole nation to work together to participate in community work.

The practice is called Umuganda, a Kinyarwanda word that translates as ‘coming together in common purpose to achieve an outcome’. Today, it takes place on the last Saturday of each month from 8am and lasts for at least three hours.

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‘The Country That Ran on Cocaine and Yoga’ – Ned Donovan on Gabriele D'Annunzio’s mad experiment in Trieste.

These corporations selected members for a state council, which was joined by “The Council of the Best” and made up of local councillors elected under universal suffrage. Together these institutions were instructed to carry out a radical agenda that sought an ideal society of industry and creativity. From all over the world, famous intellectuals and oddities migrated to Fiume. One of D’Annunzio’s closest advisers was the Italian pilot Guido Keller, who was named the new country’s first “Secretary of Action” – the first action he took was to institute nationwide yoga classes which he sometimes led in the nude and encouraged all to join. When not teaching yoga, Keller would often sleep in a tree in Fiume with his semi-tame pet eagle and at least one romantic partner. 

If citizens weren’t interested in yoga, they could take up karate taught by the Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi, who had translated Dante’s works into Japanese. Shimoi, who quickly became known to the government of Fiume as “Comrade Samurai” was a keen believer in Fiume’s vision and saw it as the closest the modern world had come to putting into practice the old Japanese art of Bushido. 

I hugely enjoyed Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike and mean to write a post on it at some point, but my notes are around 8,000 words long, from what I remember, so it maybe some time.

Thanks for subscribing, and have a good Sunday, whatever the weather.