Sunday West: October 30

Is America ready for democracy?

Winter is drawing in, even if it was 22 degrees yesterday in London, and we reach the time of your year where we think about the dead. One of the most moving sights I remember is being in Poland around now and watching people bringing flowers to the graves of their relatives. I imagine it’s healthy to do so, which is why it’s a shame November 1 is not a national holiday.

This week I wrote about the hugely upsetting and depressing child sexual abuse scandal in Telford. Keep an eye out for Charlie Peters’ upcoming documentary, on GB News before the end of the year. There were a few angry comments prompted by this issue, and I’m asking that people please keep it civil and not get personal; if someone is not arguing in good faith, if you think they are trolling to get a reaction, just ignore them. Otherwise, I will have to start deleting comments, which I don’t want to do. It’s not that I’m especially ideologically committed to free speech or anything — I consider myself a just but absolute monarch on this site, a mixture of King Aragorn and Athelstan — it’s just that it’s more work for me.

On Friday I wrote about the terrible impact of high housing costs, an article originally appearing in the Chandler Foundation’s Social Investor magazine. For a much wider and deeper look at these issues, read The Housing Theory of Everything in Works in Progress. It really is an epic.

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In other news, two of my short history books, about Alfred the Great and the Battle of Hastings, are now appearing in paperback next year. This is only in the US, but I imagine you can buy them via Amazon anywhere. Even if you don’t like my politics, or if someone you know might not like them, these history books are quite politically neutral; indeed, I’m pretty liberal by the standards of the ninth century.

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Elsewhere Shadi Hamid last week wrote about whether liberalism and democracy can coexist, writing how 2000s-era American worries about whether the Arab world can handle democracy now apply to home.

Before liberalism and democracy began to diverge in the West, they were diverging elsewhere. Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East as well as Southeast Asiahave been laboratories of illiberalism. They were ahead of their time, offering a dark preview of a world in which culture, identity, and religion (“who we are”) replaced economic concerns (“what works”) as the fulcrum of political conflict. This is what made the trajectory of the Arab Spring so frustrating for many American observers. This was a world where the most important wars were culture wars. President Trump and his former advisers may not have realized it, but when they complained about the “deep state,” they were importing a concept born in the Middle East.

My views on liberalism and democracy are quite boring and predictable: both emerged in pretty monocultural societies and the latter is almost incompatible with multiculturalism or high levels of diversity. Sure, it can sort of trundle on, perhaps even without violence, but people will tend to vote on tribal grounds and large numbers will refuse to accept electoral defeat; tribal-based politicians also tend to be nastier and stupider, and less competent.

Although genuinely a nation of immigrants, the United States was not actually that multicultural before the 1960s, and for its immigrants it placed strong pressure to assimilate. The more multicultural it has become, the less stable politically; there are many other factors for polarisation, including things like the rise in narcissism, but that obvious one seems pretty underplayed to me. Instead of being a real country, American elites have sought to define the country by values, a ‘liberal caliphate’, but such an idea is inherently weak and intolerant. The good thing about un-diverse nations like 19th century Britain is that they’re secure enough to tolerate a lot of wacky eccentricity, rather than forcing ‘values’ on people.

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Writing a book can be an onerous task — there’s no newsletter next Sunday as I’m focussing on getting mine done — and sometimes the gods are just against you. Take pity on poor James Heale, co-author of Liz Truss’ timely-and-then-untimely biography.

It sounds fun, and maybe it will perversely turn out to be a surprise hit.

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Wessie du Toit writes about fake heritage.

None of this should be surprising though, since Battersea is just the latest instance in a trend for turning heritage into exclusive real estate. A similar fate has ironically befallen East London’s brutalist landmark Balfron Tower, originally designed by socialist architect Erno Goldfinger. Balfron’s council tenants have now been booted out to make room for expensive “heritage flats”, adorned with 1970s period fittings and décor. Likewise, in Manhattan, the art deco profile and interiors of the latest “skinny-scraper” on 57th street, also known as Billionaires’ Row, uses as its base the restored 1920s Steinway Tower. 

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I’m not sure what I feel about that. I’m a big believer in faking things when you can, but it’s true you can’t really fake some things — such as dying beliefs or taboos. Looking at Iran, Richard Hanania suggests that social conservatism can’t win.

What appears to be certain is that governments cannot force traditionalism and religion onto people that don’t want it, any more than they can successfully engage in economic central planning. As countries get wealthier and more urbanized, they become more secular. This is virtually a universal pattern, with traditionalist values seeming to be something individuals revert to when times are difficult.

Once people stop believing in something, it’s gone; even conservatives essentially accept liberal premises most of the time.

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In contrast, progressives really do believe in their new gods, as Mary Harrington writes.

You may scoff. But if something looks a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And when a movement with an instantly recognisable symbol, a distinctive metaphysics (identity precedes biology, all desire must be celebrated) and a calendar of feast days celebrated by governments, corporations, universities and public bodiesacquires the ability to punish those who deface its symbols, the only possible thing you can call it is an emerging faith - one with a tightening grip on institutional power across the West.

For while European courts will uphold a protester’s right to piss on a Christian altar, there have been numerous cases of British police visiting individuals who express gender-critical views. Graffiti on a Bristol rainbow crossing prompted a hate crime investigation. In America, meanwhile, Atlanta police felt so strongly about the defacing of a rainbow-painted street intersection they sent a SWAT team to arrest the man they suspected of defacing it.

Progressive ideas are dominant because progressive taboos are. But, as Hanania says, a lot of it is reversible by law, and he concludes with almost the reverse argument: religious people have more children so will outnumber the secular in the long term.

Eric Kaufmann has collected the data and applied the simple principle of exponential growth to convincingly show that we are heading towards a more religious future. In most countries, the effects won’t yet be visible in the next few decades, but we’re not going to have to wait for millennia either. Differential birth rates have already influenced the politics of Israel, and similar changes should eventually make themselves felt in other developed countries, whether or not any of us now alive will still be around to see it. Today, social conservatives are in a hopeless battle against secularism and modernity. But in the long run, it will be secular elites who find it impossible to mold human nature to their preferred specifications.

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This keeps on happening!

You might not know her name, but you’ve probably seen the video that made her famous. In 1973, actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage at the Oscars dressed in a beaded buckskin dress in place of Marlon Brando, after he was awarded Best Actor for his role as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.” Claiming Apache heritage, she spoke eloquently, to a backdrop of boos, of the mistreatment of Native Americans by the film industry and beyond.

You’ll never guess the twist.

In one of her final interviews, Littlefeather told The Chronicle that she took the stage at the Oscars because “I spoke my heart, not for me, myself, as an Indian woman but for we and us, for all Indian people … I had to speak the truth. Whether or not it was accepted, it had to be spoken on behalf of Native people.”

But Littlefeather didn’t tell the truth that night. That’s because, according to her biological sisters, Rosalind Cruz and Trudy Orlandi, Littlefeather isn’t Native at all.

She joins a long list.

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Finally, Post-Liberal Pete has a very interesting and useful thread on the Channel crisis, which has reached extreme proportions. I will be writing a post on this at some point.

Anyway, thank you for reading, and for your support, and for spreading the word — I should hit the 10,000 mark at some point in November, inshallah.