Wrong Side of History Newsletter #69

Political violence and the boredom of barbarism

Good afternoon, and a warm welcome to all new subscribers. Since the last newsletter, I have written about how travelling might be making me even more reactionary; I wrote about colour-blind casting; Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City; the arrest of Graham Linehan; the horrific murder in Charlotte and America’s unusually high crime rates; the assassination and maryydom of Charlie Kirk; and the possibility of Right-wing cancel culture. I also appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast, which I crossposted.

On the issue of colour-blind casting, Netflix has just announced a new Swedish period drama starring an actor just born to play the role of an 18^th century Scandinavian monarch.

I also talked to Freddy Gray for the Spectator Americano podcast and appeared on the Daily Skeptic with Laurie Wastell.

The next Canon Club event is tomorrow, with Dr Bijan Omrani talking about Euripides. We’ve moved to a slightly bigger venue (next stop the O2) so if you’re a regular, this is NOT at the Sekforde Arms but at Conway Hall. The event is sold out, but we have more dates in the works.

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The news is still dominated by the murder of Charlie Kirk, arguably the most high-profile assassination of our lifetime. On that subject, Andrew Sullivan was in powerful form:

It is never “hate” to tell the truth: that men are not women; that children cannot meaningfully consent to sex changes; that an insane proportion of murder in America is committed by young black men; that affirmative action means promoting people who are not as qualified because of their identity. And it is not bigotry to be a fundamentalist Christian who opposes legal abortion.

Kirk opposed marriage equality — the cause dearest to my heart — to his last breath, but so fucking what? It’s a free society, and he can oppose a policy for reasons other than “hating” gay people. I would have loved to debate him on it, as I did countless fundies in the Nineties and Aughts. Kirk embraced MAGA gays warmly. He was, it’s true, slowly morphing into a full-on Christianist in the last few years, with eccentric views of the Founders and a garbled take on Tom Holland’s scholarship, but again ... so what? A free society allows for a variety of views, and I have found no personal animus, no individual cruelty, no rank bigotry — as opposed to Christianist doctrine.

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Aris Roussinos on the timid people who love violence.

The loudest calls for political violence, displayed on social media, come from those who would be more obviously the victims than the perpetrators of the outcome they demand: the physically weak, the mentally fragile, the beneficiaries of a stable society they proclaim the wish to overturn. Just as with the deification of Luigi Mangione, the assassin whose most prominent journalistic groupie is a woman of indeterminate age frightened to go outside without a Covid mask, I have seen calls for political violence coming from a paraplegic woman unlikely herself to be manning checkpoints late at night or digging graves for her vanquished enemies. The bloodcurdling rhetoric of these silly and unworldly people, demanding further assassinations on Bluesky as if ordering food from a delivery app, is discordantly removed from the reality of the political violence that would surely cull them first. The spectacle is so absurd that it seems almost demeaning to take it seriously.

Mangione’s fanbase seem to be mostly young women from well-off backgrounds, and while his looks play in part, there is notably a late tsarist tendency among younger American leftists to revel in political violence. Perhaps they genuinely believe they’re fighting ‘fascism’, or they find their comfortable and safe lives too anxiety-inducing and would rather the thrill of political and social breakdown. Old fuddy-duddy that I am, I think of Kenneth Clark’s wise words: ‘Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.’

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Derek Thompson on the sad, young and terminally online

The rise in solitude is especially real for young single men. A 2024 analysis of time use led by Liana Sayer at the University of Maryland looked at how men and women spent their downtime in "sedentary leisure" (e.g., watching TV, looking at your phone, playing video games) versus "active leisure" (e.g., playing sports). The group with the most "sedentary leisure alone" was single men without kids—by far. This group also has the fewest hours of social leisure time, active or engaged, of any group. On a typical day in 2023, for example, single men with no kids have more than four times the amount of sedentary leisure alone time as mothers with children.

‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ - the best piece of life advice there ever was.

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Joseph Heath on Antifa violence

Anyone who has spent time in left-wing activist spaces, for example, knows that Antifa is not really a movement, much less an organization. It’s just a general term adopted by young men who have a somewhat excessive appetite for violence, and yet don’t want to be mistaken for mere hooligans or thugs. So they adopt the more high-brow goal of “fighting fascism” and gravitate to the left. Talk to any of them for a while and it’s pretty easy to tell which end is the cart and which is the horse. And yet many people on the left find these guys sometimes useful to have around, and so are willing to overlook this aspect of their motivation.

This tension between surface justification and deeper motive can be observed, not just with our appetite for violence, but with many other anti-social impulses. It can be seen quite clearly in the case of in-group solidarity (what Jonathan Haidt calls “groupishness,” or what people used to call “tribalism”), which creates one of the fundamental tensions in identity politics. Everyone likes the feeling of have a side, or being on a team. The pleasure comes not just from the warm sense of belonging, but also from the feeling of antagonism and hostility toward those who are on the other side, or the rival team. And yet because this sort of groupishness is a source of conflict, especially in pluralistic societies, we are normally called upon to suppress it in the service of universal values. There is, however, an important exception to this, which arises in the case of oppressed minorities. If you belong to such a group, it allows you to exhibit partiality toward the interests of your group, and so to indulge your atavistic impulses, without formally violating any universal principles. For example, it gives some people an opportunity to enjoy all of the visceral satisfactions experienced by racists, without the danger of actually being called a racist.

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The Anglology substack on whether assassinations work

On the most basic level, Charlie Kirk has been silenced. He will be very hard to replace: his combination of intelligence, articulacy, and youth is very rare. Contrast his style with the blabbering incoherence of Donald Trump’s actual cabinet. It had taken Kirk 13 years to build an international profile, and he had perhaps another 40 years of work ahead of him. Political figures are not widgets or chartered accountants who can be switched out and replaced. After the murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, his party collapsed within a few years. In the absence of Abraham Lincoln, the victors in the American Civil War were unable to hold together, allowing the resurrection of racial apartheid and one-party rule in Dixie.

I suppose the counter to that argument is that Kirk has become a very powerful martyr, and an inspiration to many, but in Fortuyn’s case it certainly ‘worked’. There is also the fact that failed assassinations usually have the opposite effect.

I was reading the excellent Rawhide Down during the week of Kirk’s murder, having heard author Del Quentin Wilber on a The Rest is History episode. I especially loved this moving passage.

To ensure that he got plenty of rest, his White House staff strictly limited the number of visitors. Not until April 6 was anyone outside the president’s closest circle permitted to see him; that afternoon, Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, came by to pay his regards. O’Neill—Reagan’s political nemesis—entered the room and walked straight to the bed, where he grabbed the president’s hand and kissed his head. Then the Speaker knelt and together they recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“The lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Speaking through tears, O’Neill said, “God bless you, Mr. President. We’re all praying for you.”

It speaks so well of both men. The attempt on Reagan’s life certainly made him more popular and, Wilber argues, perhaps a better president, focussing his desire to prevent nuclear war as part of God’s plan. Trump certainly became stronger politically after the Butler shooting, in part due to the iconic power of the photograph taken by Evan Vucci (unquestionably one of the photos of the century so far).

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Matt Osborne wrote about the determination to view the assassin as coming from ‘the other side’, noting that:

For the first time in recorded history, ‘the left’ needed proof that someone was really transgender. Thus the extreme efforts to paint the victim of an assassination as an extremist worthy of death, first, and then treat his killer as right-coded, second. Reporter Jemele Hill, for example, has suggested that “Charlie Kirk was the victim of a white supremacist gang hit.” If you were wondering how the assassination of John F. Kennedy by a confirmed communist resulted in decades of ridiculous fables assigning blame to the CIA and a murky conspiracy of Vietnam warmongers, this is how.

Only 10 per cent of Democrats think that Kirk was killed by someone motivated by left-wing beliefs, while almost a third think his killer was a right-winger, when the former seems far more likely to be true. A new conspiracy theory is born, but then a majority of Americans still believe some sort of JFK plot, and Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to believe in conspiracy theories. (The 9/11 skew looks interesting, since I recall that back in the 2000s Democrats were way more likely to believe it was an ‘inside job’; perhaps this just reflects how the two groups have changed in their attitude to the deep state).

Kirk’s memorial service was an impressive affair. His widow made a powerful display of forgiveness towards the killer, illustrating a central difference between Christianity and its progressive-secular heresy. (A subject I wrote about a while back.) Trump, true to form, struck a rather different tone.

Photographs taken by a friend at the memorial service

One of the strangest elements to the story is the old man who falsely claimed to be the shooter, obstructed police, and turned out to have child porn on his phone. Where do they find these people?

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One reason why conspiracy theories are going to thrive is because no one reads anymore, the subject of a James Marriott post on the post-literate society:

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

I suggested to James that he should organise a Hasidic-style phone bonfire. Would probably do us all a lot of good.

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On the same subject, Wessie Du Toit on the end of mass literacy

The picture among school pupils suggests that further declines await. Last year, the National Assessment of Education Progress in the United States found historically high rates of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-olds and nine-to-ten-year-olds with “below basic” reading skills, with negative trends evident across race and class lines. In both the United States and the UK, fewer children and teenagers are reading for enjoyment.

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Janan Ganesh on the rise of the western refugee

On the other hand, the reason I have had a safe and more or less comfortable life is that people in charge of my welfare quit not one but two countries when things got hairy. (Neither decision looks rash in retrospect.) I mustn’t preach serenity to others when my existence has hinged on the opposite: on vigilance.

So what is the advice for an anxious reader on either side of our troubled north Atlantic? Have a plan, that’s all. You will almost certainly never need or choose to act on it but, if nothing else, the peace of mind might see you through what is going to continue to be a mentally frazzling time.

A lot of younger people talk about where they’d emigrate to escape economic stagnation, political instability, housing costs and general enshittifcation. The problem is that all the other English-speaking countries have the same problems, as does most of western Europe. Poland is mentioned a fair bit, but its social and demographic trends are all following in the same direction. And wait until you hear about the neighbours.

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Noah Smith on bluesky-ization.

Practically all the important progressives — academics, commentators, activists, politicians — are on Bluesky, talking to a much smaller audience than they used to have on Twitter. But what they say just doesn’t seem to matter at all. “They’re dragging your ass on Bluesky” is a statement that strikes fear into the heart of practically no one. A mob denouncing you as transphobic, racist, misogynist, etc. on Bluesky will have essentially no chance of negatively impacting your career.

I’m planning to discontinue my ‘X’ premium account, partly because the suppression of substack links annoys me, and partly because I think the monetisation system is having a profoundly negative effects on politics; the more outrageous the content, the more money you make. As much as I approve of Musk breaking taboos on some issues, his tweeting is incredibly irresponsible and inflammatory, and getting worse. But it’s the only game in town.

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Ned Donovan on policing London

I grab the radio and assign us. There’s a small pride in pressing the button first, a smaller guilt when you can’t. Resources are thin: two boroughs, hundreds of thousands of people, one police station and one response team sometimes barely into double digits of officers some days. Just a few years ago the same area had six response teams operating out of six police stations, but that was before the cuts.

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Starmer: A sociology

His relative good looks masks how old he actually is, how much he is, the last politician of the post-war consensus: a man who thinks an algorithm is something tangible, who knows the internet only through the BBC intranet. There is something faintly East German about him, managerial, grey, censorious. A British Honecker (He even looks like that apparchik).

Starmer is an end-of-consensus figure, representing a system about to see a radical change, one way or the other.

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On the subject of the dying consensus. In Cologne, writes Katja Hoyes:

Everyone, from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the far-Left Die Linke, has signed a “Fairness Agreement”, pledging not to talk about migrants in connection with “negative social developments such as unemployment or threats to domestic security”. This is likely to backfire spectacularly.

I think I understand the rationale for this worldview: that anti-immigration sentiment creates a vicious cycle in which newcomers are more likely to be feel alienated and unwanted, and so fail to integrate to the norms of the host society. It has the benefit of being unfalsifiable, since Germany (or any other country) can never do enough and prejudice will always exist. I just don’t think it works as a model, especially when the actual data on migration is so pessimism-inducing.

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Ian Leslie on suicide as a bargaining tactic

According to Edward Hagen, a leading evolutionary psychologist, the answer to this conundrum is that most suicidal behaviour isn't actually about dying. It's about negotiating. Hagen argues that both depression and suicidality evolved as strategies to compel others to renegotiate social arrangements. He calls this "the bargaining model of depression."

In the ancestral environment, humans lived in small, highly interdependent groups. If you were being treated badly, your options were limited. Switching social partners was difficult to impossible - you couldn’t just leave town or find a new group to hang with. Any outright confrontation risked violence and physical harm.

So when someone found themselves trapped in a situation where they felt others were benefiting from their efforts, but they were receiving little in return, the most viable option was to advertise their distress by withholding social contributions, thereby forcing others to recognise the problem.

I mentioned to Ian that I noted a strange Sri Lankan tradition in John Gimlette’s Elephant Complex:

Suicide, it seemed, was the perfect revenge. Even the threat of dying could wipe out debts, bring lovers home, or blow away the constraints of caste. Every year, for over a hundred thousand Sri Lankans, an attempted suicide was an expression of outrage. It might be no more than frustration at the disappointments of adult life, a wife’s imperfect cooking, perhaps, or her overbearing brothers. Meanwhile, some six thousand a year were dying (drinking weedkiller, mostly, or domestic bleach). To kill yourself was to kill someone else, at least in part. Once it was even a criminal offence to outlive an adversary, where he took his own life. ‘By their law,’ wrote an English officer in 1803, ‘if any man causes the loss of another man’s life, his own is forfeit.’

Quite a bizarre custom, and filled with bad incentives.

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Helen Andrews talks feminisation:

Feminisation equals wokeness. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of feminisation. Think about everything that wokeness means: valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy. All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine.

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More folk beliefs of the upper normies: Europe was a backwater before colonialism.

IN BRIEF

The excellent Works in Progress is now available as a print magazine.

New study shows that 22 per cent of the Roman founders had blue eyes, but this fell to 4 per cent during the height of empire.

The hysteria about Canadian residential schools has turned out to be completely fake.

Christopher Caldwell interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Well worth your time; I’ve never actually listened to Tucker’s podcast before and the adverts seem so amusingly American to me, all health supplements and home security that you’d never get a ‘loicence’ for in Britain.

Horrific murder of prison guard by ex-con, in revenge for exposing his affair with a female warden. Further reason why we should not put young female guards in men’s prisons.

Darwin’s unexploded bomb continues to tick.

Great Realignment latest: ‘Voting intention by school type. Big Reform lead among those who went to a state school, Tories best result among grammar school alum & Labour actually have a fairly big lead among private school attendees, consistent in other recent polls’

‘Adolescents in modern societies spend most of their time with peers of the same age, unlike in traditional cultures where they interact with younger children and provide care for them. Evidence suggests that the lack of mixed-age interaction increases aggression, defiance, attention seeking, and risk-taking behaviors.’ - Via Rob Henderson

‘A survey of 500 pilots by the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) in 2013, after two pilots of a full 325-seat Airbus 330 fell asleep in the cockpit at the same time during a long-haul flight into the UK, found that nearly one in three pilots said they had woken to find their co-pilot also asleep, and over half admitted to falling asleep on the flight deck.’

The percentage of Americans saying college is ‘very important’ has fallen by half in 15 years.

French pensioners now have higher incomes than working-age adults. History’s greatest Ponzi scheme, and the same across the west.

‘Artists generally had richer parents than doctors. Doctors, dentists, and surgeons: generally upwardly mobile, doing better than their parents. Designers, musicians, and artists: generally downwardly mobile, doing worse than their parents.’

Countries by the Year they Experienced the Highest Number of Births.

The meme was correct: liberals and conservatives have different moral ‘heat maps’.

‘Waymo is so safe that if every car was driven like a Waymo, about 9% of America's life expectancy gap would disappear.’ Wow!

On that note, as a final reminder, I’ll be heading to the US next month, so get in touch if you’re in the Washington DC area, Charleston, Austin, San Francisco or New York. Have a nice day!