Sunday West: April 16

'You're the elite!', 'No, *you're* the elite!'

Happy Sunday, and I hope you had a relaxing Easter break - and Happy Easter to the Orthodox Christians among you. I had a very wall-themed holiday in Northumberland and the Lake District, and close to Hadrian’s great structure I read Charlotte Higgins’s Under Another Sky and another sort-of wall-themed book, Katja Hoyer’s new history of East Germany, Beyond the Wall. Both highly recommended, and Hoyer’s work is clearly going to be one of the stand-out books of the year.

Since my last round-up, I’ve written about whether there are meaningful comparisons with the Test Acts; on how Scotland and England are going their separate ways in the new British Empire; on a similar theme I wrote about my book The Diversity Illusion, ten years on – still on special offer on Kindle; I wrote about why the liberal elite don’t like to admit to being one, and on the BBC website being so shamelessly lowbrow.

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Matthew Goodwin’s book about the new elite does seem to have elicited a strong reaction; in The Times James Marriott considered why people are so reluctant to admit to being part of it: ‘Modern conservatives deplore the politics of victimhood but the ubiquity of anti-establishment rhetoric is an unanswerable victory for the progressive doctrines of the 1960s — the powerful are liars, the noblest truths are spoken by marginalised outsiders, intellectual glamour belongs to the counterculture not the mainstream.’

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Meanwhile, Ian Leslie profiled Keir Starmer, the tortoise.

If you speak to those who have worked with or around Starmer they confirm what is apparent from a distance: he doesn’t have strong political instincts. He rarely has a strong, intuitive feel for a policy issue, or for political positioning, or for the right decision in a fast-moving situation. But they also say that this weakness is mitigated by a strength which is in some ways its flipside: he listens. He wants to hear the arguments and he tries to address his own areas of ignorance. He does not assume he is the smartest person in the room and he is not stubborn. So he learns on the job, slowly.

Starmer is a slow learner who improves gradually and erratically. That is why those of us who follow politics will always be frustrated by him, at any given point, yet also surprised by how much progress he makes. When I say he’s a slow learner, I don’t mean he’s dim; of course he’s not. It’s more that he relies heavily on his analytical brain because he can’t make the short cuts offered by strong intuitions. He has to run through all the computations, the costs and the benefits, before arriving at an output.

I didn’t know this about him:

Starmer’s childhood and young adulthood were dominated by his mother’s illness. Jo Starmer was a nurse and a loving and warm mother. She also suffered from a rare and disabling type of inflammatory arthritis called Still’s disease. When she was twenty she was told she wouldn’t be able to walk or have kids, but she determined to try anyway. She took steroids, and they helped - they enabled her to walk, and to have four children. But later on they contributed to a deterioration of her condition. She couldn’t use her hands, she had to have her leg amputated, and she was often close to death. Starmer says he was with her in intensive care many, many times, not knowing if she would make it or not. Imagine the fortress you need to build just to stop that from breaking you.

Starmer says his mother never moaned or complained about her condition. If you asked her how she was, on her hospital bed, she’d say she was fine and enquire after your health. (Jo Starmer died in 2015). His father, Rodney, was passionately devoted to his wife’s welfare. He knew every detail of her condition. He was always by her side when she needed him, spending many nights on hospital floors. But that meant he didn’t have much left over for his children, to whom he was loving but distant.

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The always amusing and interesting Chris Snowdon on why some conspiracy theories are respectable.

Brand does indeed seem to have lost the plot, but Monbiot could not resist slipping in a conspiracy theory of his own when he claimed that “the Great Reset conspiracy theory was conceived by a staffer at the Heartland Institute, a US lobby group that has promoted climate denial and other billionaire-friendly positions.” The Great Reset conspiracy theory portrays COVID-19 as a fake disease and the pandemic as a manufactured crisis designed to allow global elites to abolish democracy, private property and—for some reason—farming. This is all supposedly the work of the World Economic Forum (WEF), whose annual meetings in Davos can be fairly described as gatherings of the global elite and whose founder, Klaus Schwab, resembles Dr Evil. In June 2020, Schwab published a dull pamphlet about “stakeholder capitalism” titled “The Great Reset.” Things snowballed from there.

In the same article in which he lambasts Brand, Monbiot asserts that “Almost all successful conspiracy theories originate with or land with the far right.” But this simply isn’t true. An interesting study published last year concluded that neither the Left nor the Right are systematically biased towards conspiracy theories. Based on 20 surveys conducted in the US between 2012 and 2021, the authors found that around a third of the conspiracy theories they reviewed were more attractive to Republicans than to Democrats, a third were more attractive to Democrats than to Republicans, and the rest were non-partisan. Right-wingers were particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories about COVID-19 while left-wingers were drawn to conspiracy theories about Donald Trump. Right-wingers tended to be more anti-vax when it came to COVID-19 but not when it came to MMR. Republicans were more likely to believe that global warming is a hoax and the Sandy Hook massacre was faked while Democrats were more likely to believe that the Moon landings were faked and that OJ Simpson was framed.

He also mentions the horrific and chilling way that Leon Brittan was treated, a decent man who had served his country and, on his death bed, was investigated over obviously false child abuse allegations. I feel that this grave injustice isn’t remembered enough.

Both of these theories have been all but forgotten, but they dominated UK political Twitter for a day or two. They come and go, these upper-normie conspiracy theories, but no one’s reputation is damaged by propagating them. Tom Watson was recently elevated to the House of Lords despite having been the figurehead of a deranged movement aimed at “exposing” a nonexistent VIP paedophile ring at the heart of government, supposedly involving the former MP Harvey Proctor and former Home Secretary Leon Brittan. Based on the fraudulent account of a liar and bona fide paedophile named Carl Beech, who used the pseudonym “Nick,” Watson used parliamentary privilege to call Brittan “as close to evil as any human being could get.” Brittan died of cancer before his name was cleared.

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Matthew Schmitz on how gay marriage changed America.

Gay marriage was the first great triumph of cancel culture. Sasha Issenberg, a historian of gay marriage, has observed that by deploying the novel weapons of “shaming and shunning,” activists “changed the economic terrain on which cultural conflict was waged.” One of the early breakthroughs occurred when eightmaps.com appeared online. The site used information gathered under financial disclosure laws to list the names and locations of people who had donated to California’s Proposition 8, a referendum that stated marriage could take place only between a man and a woman. Suddenly American citizens came under pressure for their political views—not just from their friends and families, but potentially from anyone with an internet connection. Some reported receiving envelopes with powder and death threats.

LGBT organizations played an important role in the construction of this new reality. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Committee for the Free World, a neoconservative think tank, closed its doors. Its director, Midge Decter, concluded that it had served its purpose and so should dissolve. Gay-rights organizations chose a different path after Obergefell. Rather than declare victory and go home, they moved on to the “next frontier”: transgender rights. Religious conservatives had already been largely eliminated from important American institutions, and so posed no internal obstacle to the pursuit of this goal. Feminists, who remained, mostly went along with the idea that men could become women. Those who chose to speak were labeled “TERFs” and targeted with the same arsenal of social, professional, and financial threats that had once been deployed against opponents of same-sex marriage.

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On a similar subject, Capel Lofft writes on the new confessional state.

The most strikingly different and practically pernicious thing about the new orthodoxy is that it its priests and prophets unable to take responsibility for or even admit what it actually is. Because part of its ideological and spiritual dynamic is rooted in the idea that is essentially oppositional – that it is inherently subversive –  it can never acknowledge its own victory or status as an orthodoxy. That was, like or hate it, never a problem with the pre-Reformation Catholic Church or the post-Reformation Church of England. True, at various times – chiefly in their early stages – they had a subversive dynamic – against the Pagans, against the medieval Catholic Church. However, they were quite comfortable, after a while, with putting themselves forward as a complete, objectively true (albeit faith-based) framework for thinking about the nature of morality and reality, based on certain clear doctrinal statements and theological propositions, that could order our common life and, essentially, become the establishment. The new orthodoxy has to pretend to itself that it is always against any orthodoxy or establishment, even as it obviously becomes one to any external observer.

This is my belief; the age of free speech we grew up was just an aberration where neither the old nor new faith was powerful enough.

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In City Journal, Fred Bauer on the bias incident reports in New England schools. And what happens in New England, will certainly come to happen in Old England, too.

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Matthew Walther at the New York Times on militia culture.

I suspect that part of the reason for the rise of AR-15 fandom is the decline of other American hobby cultures: auto repair, darkroom photography, ham radio operation and the like. Automobiles have become hulking mobile computers that often can be repaired only by manufacturer-approved dealerships; anyone with a smartphone can now take high-quality pictures; no one needs limited-frequency radio bands anymore to talk with people on the other side of the world. Gun ownership is among the last preserves of community for those who might once have enjoyed the opportunities for the innocent pursuit of mastery and refinement afforded by those innocuous pastimes.

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Dominic Lawson, one of my favourite columnists, wrote a moving tribute to his recently deceased father, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel. He sounded like a good egg, and one of the last of the generation of politicians I grew up with.

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A bit late to this but Helen Andrews writes about the most influential man in the conservative commentariat. Steve Sailer gets far less attention than Curtis Yarvin because he doesn’t have any wacky esoteric beliefs about absolute monarchy or whatever; he just notices patterns, which polite society considers bad form when making massive policy decisions with far-reaching consequences for every aspect of our lives.

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David Rozado on why the Great Awokening is global. There is indeed no escape.

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Ned Donovan on the curious case of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides.

With growing concern at the exploitation of indigenous labour and lack of authority, the British and French governments eventually agreed to formalise the administration of the New Hebrides, but neither wished to give up their perceived rights to be responsible for it. As a result, a condominium was formed, where both Britain and France had equal roles in government with separate legal systems, separate police forces and even separate financial set-ups.

Someone in the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides could decide they wanted to be governed by British immigration rules but be tried in the French criminal courts while setting up their business according to the British registration system. All documents had to be signed by the Resident Commissioner appointed by each country, who operated out of their separate compounds marked out by their respective flags that flew at the exact same height – until a junior British official on their first day was tricked into letting the French one fly higher. 

Bemused Australians in the New Hebrides renamed the Condominium “the Pandemonium” – which was understandable when one country has two police forces with different uniforms, two health systems and two entirely distinct systems of law. To add confusion, the two police forces would regularly swap duties to not give any impression of seniority.

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Finally, I was also interviewed by the Swiss magazine Schweizer Monat, here in German and in English.

A thread on why and how the West became rich.

The similarities between wokeness and fourth-century Christianity (a comparison I am fond of)

And a new paper shows that ‘before the Counter-Reformation, Catholic and Protestant cities had comparable numbers of scientists per capita. Afterwards, Catholic cities experienced a persistent relative decline. Counter-Reformation's search for heresy was a negative shock to science.’