Sunday West: October 2

The strange death of conservative England (again)

Good morning. In Britain the ruling Conservative Party has had a ‘challenging’ week, ie disastrous, with polls putting them 30 points behind Labour following the mini-budget. On Monday I wrote about how the party’s policy on immigration is the exact opposite of what most voters desired in 2016 and in the elections since (nice to be cited by the great Andrew Sullivan). On Friday and Saturday I experimented with the two-part essay, with part one and two of a piece about why denial of human nature continues to grow.

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Elsewhere, the Russia situation continues to get more alarming as Vladimir Putin gave a blood-curdling speech including a jibe at ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ (doesn’t he realise how problematic that term is. Educate yourself, Vlad).

My not-especially-interesting view is that, while the Russians had some legitimate gripes, once you start an invasion you’re in the wrong; just as if you take the first swing or pull out a knife during an argument, your entire case disappears.

But I dislike the idea that scepticism of NATO expansion or policy equates to Putin-loving, and in the National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes about being on the Peter Hitchens wing of the Russia debate, believing that goading the old bear has been an unwise decision. MBD is one of the top conservative columnists, and a good guy, and it’s worth a read.

Dougherty also wrote a piece on why the divisions between American and European conservatives are slightly false.

Buckley, National Review, and the conservative movement they represented were extremely attentive to Europe, and generally cheerleaders, not critics or opponents, of various European right-wingers and nationalists who were resisting communism — from Cardinal Mindszety in Hungary to Francisco Franco in Spain. This was because Buckley’s conservatism shared civilizational roots with these figures that extended beyond the Scottish Enlightenment. Buckley ran Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — an Austrian monarchist — in NR’s pages. This was a man who (like many on the continent and a few in the States) saw liberalism not as the clear vision of the Scottish Enlightenment, but as the bloody revolt against God launched with guillotines in Paris. I reject entirely the implication that I’m betraying the conservative movement because I still pay attention to figures such as Ryszard Legutko who were part of the anti-communist resistance in the 1980s and are now involved in Poland’s conservative, nationalist government. This is continuity, not change.

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James Marriott of the Times writes about the decline of our middle class.

The rising middle class was a crucial check on the absolutism of the Stuart monarchs. In the previous century, educated women led the campaign for female suffrage. Property rights, a free press, individual liberties — we owe these things to the agitation of the middle class. So what happens when the middle class starts to dissolve at the edges? Well, you may find you’re living in a very different country. For many, the bourgeois staples of home ownership, a family and financial security are becoming inaccessible. A 2019 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that whereas 70 per cent of baby boomers earned middle-class salaries in their twenties, 60 per cent of millennials did. This year, pollsters found six in ten Britons under 35 thought “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament” was a good way to run the country. As Moore said: no bourgeois, no democracy.’

Yikes, those kids (and American polls show something similar). Democracy’s all very well, but it’s weak, and it’s decadent. You need a strong leader.

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But then this is hardly surprising. I wouldn’t like to be be a zoomer because, with the cost of housing being what it is, they don’t really have much of a future. No wonder they’re such a bunch of communists, as Matt Goodwin writes this week.

About 75 per cent of 18-35 year old Zoomer graduates in Britain plan to vote for liberal left parties at the next election —Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the greens, the SNP, or Plaid Cymru. Just one in five plan to vote Conservative (though they remain about thirty points less likely to vote than the much larger Boomer generation). As I wrote in a previous piece, about three-quarters of Zoomers want to Re-Join the European Union while two-thirds think Brexit was the “wrong decision”. In Scotland, at least six in ten want to live in an independent Scotland. In America, only 22 per cent plan to vote Republican in the midterms.

Clearly, these views and loyalties may change over time —and research suggests they will. But even if Zoomers do become more conservative as they age they are still starting from a much more liberal position than any other generation on record. And this is especially the case for young, university-educated Zoomer women who are rapidly becoming even more liberal and left-wing than their male counterparts.

Contrary to what some complacent commentators will claim, this degree of radicalism is pretty new. Younger people, historically, haven’t been that anti-Tory at all. I’m just slightly annoyed because my 2020 book about conservatism being on the way out was published just three months after a huge Tory election victory — yet the underlining forces are there, and even without the current leadership the Conservatives face a demographic tsunami. We are doomed! In your face, Flanders!

Thanks to Jon S for the link (although obviously I subscribe to Matt’s substack, and you should too.)

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I am extremely late to this excellent piece by Paul Kingsnorth on the monarchy.

What, after all, is the point of a monarch in the modern world? There is really only one: to represent a country and its history; to be a living embodiment of the spirit of a people. As such, the throne represents to its critics more than some putative offence against ‘democracy’: it stands for something whose very existence is increasingly contentious in its meaning, form and direction: the nation itself.

Follow him here if you don’t already.

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N.S. Lyons is one of the most interesting writers out there, and his latest article, in City Journal, is excellent; it’s on one of my favourite themes, the conservatism of the new progressive ruling class.

Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).

Humor is similarly something that today’s hectoring class can’t quite produce. Real humor tends to play off the ironic gap between expectation and reality, or between the social pretense of propriety and the obvious. Satire, in particular, is a form of transgression that points out the falsities of illegitimate authority. Saul Alinsky may have correctly advised young left-radicals that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” against the establishment, but now the Left has itself become the establishment. Would-be comics who attempt, like the dull Soviet state satirical magazine Krokodil, to “correct with laughter” by mixing ideological regime propaganda with jokes simply end up being what the kids nowadays call “cringe.” The shackles of ideological dogma essentially block off the creative inspiration necessary for producing compelling art.

If you don’t follow his substack you’re literally an idiot.

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Helen Andrews asks why journalists and writers are so often charmed by murderers.

It happened to William F. Buckley and Edgar Smith (who, disappointingly, reoffended soon after his release), and Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott (ditto), and William Styron and Benjamin Reid (ditto).

Of the many examples of charismatic killers who won over seasoned journalists, one is particularly relevant here: Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who shot two FBI agents in the head at close range after they were wounded in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in 1975. Peltier has long been a left-wing celebrity due to spurious claims that the FBI set him up. His number one champion, who wrote the book on his case, was Peter Matthiessen—Sarah Koenig’s stepfather.

I’ve written about this before, and the most horrendous case involving Mailer and the poor young man who had his life violently cut short because of the egotism and naivety of the artist.

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Imagine living in a society where the established media just pumped out obvious lies to back up their insane egalitarian ideology? Unimaginable.

As Rob Henderson writes, the purpose of propaganda in communist countries wasn’t to convince.

This is from a fascinating paper titled Propaganda as Signaling by the political scientist Haifeng Huang. The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. People get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense the authoritarian regime wants them to believe.

And yet regimes often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda. Huang observes that propaganda might actually be counterproductive, because the official messages often contradict reality. Why display public messages that everyone knows are lies, and that are easily verifiable as lies?

Or as Theodore Dalrymple famously put it: ‘Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.’

Anyway, CLICK, wow yet another woman arrested for sex offences. Wow, this keeps on happening, wonder why…

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Substack are now publishing lots of open letters-style debates between writers. In this one, Noah Carl and Konstantin Kisin debate the West’s response to Putin.

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Yuan Yi Zhu writes about the BBC cutting the world service. I wonder if the Beeb are deliberately targeting their most high-brow and respected service in order to protest proposed cuts, or is this me overthinking things? The BBC also produces loads of low-brow garbage it could easily shed, not to mention much of its website, which can often veer into Teen Vogue territory and is obsessed with racial neurosis to a tedious degree. But their fixation with youth, and this middle-aged belief that they have to stay relevant because it really matters what 12 year olds think about the world, prevents them from doing the right thing.

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‘Social media has been one the most effective mediums at eroding the respect towards professionals.’ So writes Tony Dawson at The Critic.

And probably none more so than lawyers (journalists have also suffered reputational decline from Twitter, although they were never exactly respected) 'If lawyers become so intoxicated with politics that they lose sight of a sober assessment of the law, public confidence in the profession will continue to diminish’.

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