What will become of the Sensitive Young Men?

Wrong Side of History round-up #59

Happy New Year to my 17 subscribers in Taiwan and eight in the People’s Republic of China (most, I’m assuming, British or other Anglophones but still, ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’ and all that).

I will be in Berlin and Dresden next week, so drop me a line if you’re around. I will also be visiting Charleston, South Carolina in March, and plan to also see Savannah and other locations in the region. I’m already meeting a couple of subscribers in South Carolina, so do get in touch.

It’s been ages since the last round-up, during which time I’ve written a fair few articles, starting with my defence of an insufferable liberal elite; I started posting on Bluesky, but have since lost interest a little bit, seeing all the same problems as old Twitter. When it comes to it, I prefer the abusive atmosphere of a football terrace circa 1985 to the calculated cruelty of an elite girls’ school. I wonder if left-liberals have exited Twitter in large enough numbers to lock themselves out of the main conversation but not enough to form an effectively large alternative ecosystem.

I wrote the case for handing back the Elgin Marbles, which Ian Leslie generously cited as a positive reframing which changed his mind. (Always worries me when people say that - what if I’m totally wrong?) I also wrote about how the Conservatives will have to do a Khrushchev-style denunciation of Comrade Boris Stanleyvich for his errors.

Paul Morland and I have also put out more episodes of the Canon Club, on Thomas Mann, Vincent Van Gogh (which I also wrote about) and finally Dmitri Shostakovich, released this week.

I also started a series on Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, and despite three posts - here, here and here – I’m still not finished. I promise it will conclude in the next couple of weeks.

I wrote about the case for a global sanctuary city, on the issue of cousin marriage, why young professionals might soon be leaving Britain, on visiting Christian Syria and the increasing dominance of Indian-Americans.

I finished the year on a happy note, writing about the amazing medical breakthroughs of 2024, and, over Christmas, on truth in the old myths.

On a less cheery subject, there was grooming gang scandal, how its impacted Britain’s overseas reputation, how its newfound prominence represents a vibe shift, the comparisons with the Soviet Union’s dysfunction, and on how the Macpherson inquiry had an impact.

I also started a series on the cheery subject of the Black Death: parts one and two can be found here. I appreciate both dissent and corrections, and will thank everyone who helped with comments at the end of the series in a special acknowledgements section.

I also wrote about the different ways that people talk about billionaires interfering in politics, based purely on whose side they’re on, and about Trump 2.0 and whether Britain can have its own ‘Project 2029’.

Britain is a Parliamentary system, which makes it both harder and easier to change things, but mostly easier. By 2029, Trump will also be gone, which will make it easier for European conservatives to advocate those policies. Although Trump is very funny, his behaviour can still shock - speculating on whether the tragic Washington air disaster was the result of DEI was incredibly crass (he may turn out to be correct, but it’s neither the time nor the place).

I’m already looking forward to possible future president J.D. Vance sparring with Britain’s commentariat. His putdown of Rory Stewart - ‘the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130’ - is apt of so many people, and midwittism is never more apparent than when people with a very vague grasp of Christianity begin opining on it. (The basic problem is that Britain’s genuinely intelligent people are drawn into finance, vastly better paid that journalism or politics.)

I’m quite optimistic about Trump’s domestic policy, and the influence it might have on Britain, while nervous about his foreign policy, especially if it leads to the withdrawal of funding to prisons guarding ISIS. (I appreciate that there are issues, but foreign aid gets an unfairly bad name). The tariffs on Taiwan seems like a bad idea, as does his suggestion that Palestinians be sent to Jordan and Egypt (this would place immense strain on the Hashemite kingdom - very bad idea!) Then there is the strange talk about buying Greenland (why would you want it?), which is deeply unsettling to many Europeans. I’ve recently been finishing Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ War, which has a section about some of the outlandish plans of expansion by 19th century Southern politicians, so perhaps it’s just in that fine tradition.

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I have been doing the podcast run: I was on Louise Perry’s, talking about Rotherham, and spoke to Laurie Wastell at the Daily Sceptic on the same depressing subject. Most recently, I was on Spectator TV on the mysterious question of how many people live in Britain.

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Interesting piece in The Point by Mana Afsari on the Sensitive Young Men drawn to Trump.

‘We barely enjoy refreshments and cocktails before the news spreads: Donald Trump has been shot. One guest spends the rest of the party apparently comatose or on Twitter; others (young conservatives, too) continue as normal, trying to avoid the subject; a summer intern and Project 2025 aspirant begins filming his live response on his smartphone. I realize that I had underestimated the sincerity and intensity of the personal attachment of many young men to Trump. At the end of the night, Alex turns to me, and asks, “The party was fun, really. Really, it was nice… But why does no one care? They nearly killed him.”

‘I press him after the election to explain what he meant that night. “I personally identified with him … Well, no—the extent to which they were trying to stop him represented the extent to which people have tried to stop me.” By “me,” I think he means young men inside and outside of the academy, and in the broader culture, too. His formative educational and collegiate years were spent in the political fallout of Trump’s first presidency—cancellations, COVID, nationwide protests and political violence; his early academic career, now over, had been characterized largely by the proliferation of DEI and antiracism initiatives.’

‘To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty’. I wonder how many people born at the turn of the millennium will remain heavily affected by lockdown and the Floyd protests.

The Sensitive Young Man is also a British phenomenon

Louise Perry on sexual repression and civilisation

One very masculine and (we must assume) also very autistic anthropologist who deserves to be better known is J.D. Unwin. Born in Suffolk in 1895, Unwin served in the First World War, spent several years conducting fieldwork in Abyssinia, returned to take up an academic position at Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his academic career to the study of sex. His magnum opus, Sex & Culture (1934), was published two years before Unwin’s death at the age of just 40. Described by Aldous Huxley as “monumental” and a “work of highest importance”, this long, dense, highly academic book was a big deal in its day, even if it has long since been removed from reading lists at SOAS.

Unwin hypothesised, contra pop Freudianism, that sexual frustration might be a very good thing – a well of creativity and dynamism, not of neurosis. At scale, he suggested, severe sexual repression might in fact be essential to the rise of civilizations, and sexual permissiveness might invite their fall.

Anthropology could be such an interesting subject.

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Aris Roussinos on the new political winds of the 2020s.

‘What is the Left’s project, what are its big ideas now it has broken its political and intellectual power through its catastrophic self-derailment into identity politics? It is a difficult question to answer, but also a pointless one: it simply doesn’t matter, and is unlikely to for the next few decades at least. One might as well ask what is next for Baathism.

‘The sudden and dramatic seizure of power by Syria’s former al-Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a moment of wider political significance than mere regional analysis assumes. Over the decade-long course of the country’s bloody civil war, the assumed end state for Syria was one or another totalising 20th century ideology — whether liberal democracy, Baathism, or Salafi jihadism was preferred aligning with the sympathies of the beholder. Yet instead the new power on the throne seems, so far, a purely pragmatic technocrat, a centralising moderniser closer to Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele or Mohammed Bin Salman than anything in either liberal or jihadist theories of governance. In this sense, al-Jolani is perhaps a bellwether of the coming post-ideological century. Simply put, the central political question is “If you were to found a new state in 2024, what would it look like?” Certainly, the 20th century liberal democratic model is no more attractive than the 20th century Baathist model. Perhaps, by its very nature, results-driven technocracy is non-liberal, even if it isn’t necessarily illiberal. Perhaps, the new Syria even offers glimpses of our own society’s future.’

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Two Sams – Bowman and Dumitriu – on ways to make Britain richer. Dumitriu is Head of Policy at Britain Remade, which was pleased by this week’s announcement by the Chancellor.

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Guy Dampier on political charities funded by taxpayers.

Oxfam is by no means the only charity following an activist model. There are more than 170,000 charities in Britain, with a combined income of £96 billion. Last year it spent £94 billion. (The Ministry of Defence cost £53.9 billion in the same period, by contrast.) Many of these charities are small – around two thirds have an income of £100,000 or less – but about 9,000 have an income of more than £1 million. Although many of them do good work, others are more interested in using the moral authority of charity to push left-wing ideas.

Sometimes the government even helps them. The group Conservative Way Forward looked at the charities opposing the previous Conservative government’s efforts to stop the illegal small boat crossings, and found that between 2017 and 2021 they’d received £203 million in taxpayer funding. Take Asylum Aid, which in its annual report is very proud of its role in blocking the plan to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda.

This has been a complaint for a long time, and the subject of my friend Chris Snowdon’s book Sock Puppets.

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A good read in the Pimlico Journal disputing the idea that the First Amendment guarantees free speech. I have read articles to the contrary, but it’s an interesting counter to a narrative many (including me) are fond of.

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Long but interesting post by Tom Forth on why the North of England is poor. I wonder how much it is just geographic determinism: the North is far away from the markets of Core Europe, the area stretching from the Netherlands to Lombardy which has been the continent’s richest region for centuries. London is close, and the economy and culture of the south-east has historically been very influenced by the Low Countries. As far back as the 15^th century at least, the relative poverty of the North was commented on both by southerners and by foreign visitors like Polydore Vergil. I suspect that it goes back further, even before William the Conqueror’s controversial regional development policy.

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Janan Ganesh on Carter moments.

I am increasingly convinced of something that we might call the Carter Rule: rich democracies need a crisis in order to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on drastic reforms until their nation is in acute trouble. The chronic kind isn’t enough. Reaganism was on offer before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and fresh thinker in office. But the electorate wasn’t fed up enough at that stage to entertain a total rupture with the postwar Keynesian consensus. There had to be more pain. The parallel with Britain in the same period is eerie: an air of malaise, a false start or two at reform, then a galvanising humiliation (the IMF loan of 1976) that at last persuades voters to give carte blanche to Thatcher. Things had to get worse to get better.

Understand this, and you understand much about contemporary Europe. Britain and Germany are stuck with flawed economic models because, in the end, things aren’t so bad there. The status quo is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the upfront costs of change. And so the merest cut to pensioner benefits or inheritance tax exemptions incurs public wrath. Now contrast this with southern Europe. Much of the Mediterranean has reformed its way into economic growth (Spain), fiscal health (Greece) and high employment (Portugal) precisely because of the brush with doom that was the Eurozone crisis circa 2010. Essentialist arguments about the “character” of the south, about its work ethic and so on, turned out to be nonsense. Forced to change, it did.

Feels like we’re in one of them.

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I visited Sir John Soane’s Museum last week - a marvellous little corner of London. Here’s Sir John’s design for the Palace of Westminster from the 1790s, made during Britain’s great Augustan era of Rome-obsession. I’m glad we went for Gothic, but here’s a thread on alternative ideas for SW1.

The Japanese are growing hundreds of cherry trees in Britain, as tweeted by the country’s newest social media star.

The president of Finland and the PMs of Norway, Sweden and Denmark were pictured dining together. As one wag put it, ‘Clearly a photo-op, no true Scandinavian would feed a guest in their home.’

Between 1400-1700 ‘at least 20% of all scientists came from the Clergy; since post-Protestant Reformation clergymen consisted of somewhat less than 1% of the population, they were over 20 times overrepresented as scientists compared to the average men.’

A French ‘leftist theatre faces bankruptcy after opening its doors to 250 African migrants for a free show... and they refused to leave and remain in the building five weeks later.’ A somewhat heavy-handed metaphor, but I’ll take it.

‘In the last few years, Bhutan has begun depopulating. Thanks to Australia’s easy international student visas, young people are leaving. It loses 1-2% of its population per year.’

A good example of what Paul Collier outlined in Exodus, of how many people will move from poor to rich countries if allowed. Collier cited the example of Turkish North Cypriots, whose citizens had the right to move to wealthier Britain; at the same time, citizens of (even poorer) Turkey had the right to move to North Cyprus. After only a couple of decades, there were more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus, and here they were now outnumbered in their homeland by Anatolian Turks.

When the kingdom of Ahoms defeated the Mughal empire in 1667, they put up a victory pillar stating they were ‘victorious in the war waged by the Yavana,’ or Ionians. An interesting example of how names have stuck – see also Franks as a generic name for Europeans.

On that subject, which is of huge interest to me, the centre of Europe changed from Greece to France after the Umayyad conquests, as illustrated by a map of coin flows. As the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne said, ‘The West was bottled up and forced to live by its own means, in a vacuum’.

Some nice examples of beautiful recent American college architecture.

East Anglian to Yankee evolution mapped by surnames; an interesting representation of the Albion’s Seed theory (I wrote about the Borderers a while back.)

A nice new Dutch development and some beautiful Victorian pumping stations (I’ve added my own) . The Argentinian one was built by the British.

Ozempic and similar reduce household grocery spending by 6 per cent, partly driven by a reduction of snacks purchases. The dieting industry has also been hugely affected.

I highly recommend A Real Pain, which I saw this month – the perfect mix of poignant, thought-provoking and occasionally very funny. Go and watch it. I also rewatched Interstellar for the first time since seeing it on release; I thought at the time that Christopher Nolan’s film was a flawed masterpiece, aided by an exceptional sound track (I think Hans Zimmer is great, as the nine followers of my Spotify playlist will know). It was even better the second time around, and I’ll write about it at some point, with the caveat that the physics obviously goes completely over my head.

I recently read Eric Cline’s 1177 BC, and enjoyed this little story. In the 15^th century BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III marched his men for 10 days from Egypt to Megiddo, winning the earliest battle of which we have actual accounts.

There were three routes to Megiddo - better known as Armageddon -and his generals advised either the northern or southern route, since the middle one was vulnerable to ambush. Thutmose, however, replied that this is just what the Canaanites would be expecting, so if he went through the middle route he could take them by surprise and win. He was correct.

Some thirty-found hundred years later, General Edmund Allenby tried the same tactics as Thutmose III, in September during World War I, with the same successful results. He won the battle at Megiddo and took prisoner hundreds of German and Turkish soldiers, without any loss of life except for a few of his horses. He later admitted that he had read James Breasted’s English translation of Thutmose III’s account, leading Allenby to decide to replicate history. George Santayana once reportedly said that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, but Allenby proved that the opposite could be true – those who study history can successfully repeat it, if they choose to do so.

There’s a lesson there.