Being Brat was never going to be enough.(Kent Nishimura/Getty)
Anyone who doubts the robustness of American democracy need only dip a toe in the rolling seas of commentary following Donald Trump’s mind-numbing recapture of the presidency. Freedom of speech has burst its seams. But then, far from being American democracy’s nemesis, Trump is its cruel, absurd consummation. He is antic, unstable, selfish, unfocused, uncultivated, vindictive, sybaritic, seditious and socially and morally aberrant. And he is what my beautiful, shining promise of a land has come to deserve.
Let’s be clear about why Harris lost. She was an incumbent vice president who did not have the spine to separate herself from America’s unpopular recumbent president. The Recumbent did not have the character to help his incumbent vice president stake her own space. Harris was a mediocrity flung by fate into water way over her head.
As it happens, about two months before Biden was finally pushed aside as the Democratic nominee, Vice President Harris’s motorcade passed by my family and me as we sat before a red light at an intersection in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It was clear that Harris was set to take Biden’s place as nominee, and she was returning from a fundraiser in Provincetown, a few miles up the highway. As her black SUV, preceded by state police on roaring motorcycles, slowed down to be allowed through the red light we caught a glimpse of her. She was sitting motionless, like a stone, staring without expression, straight ahead. She looked like a stage prop in the process of being moved from a regional production to Broadway. And that is all she ever was. A prop.
At a time when America is gripped by fear, Harris was precisely the wrong person to aspire to the presidency. Americans do not fear civil war; they fear a country with, as Americans are fond of saying, “no guardrails”. They fear, simultaneously, constraints on their personal freedom, and they fear other people doing whatever they want. They fear science telling them what they don’t want to hear, and they fear science being unable protect them when what they hear frightens them. They fear school shootings, and they fear having their guns taken away from them. They fear censorship, and they fear speech they don’t like. They fear government telling them what to do and how to act, and they fear government unable or unwilling to act at their behest.
They fear American entanglement in wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East that no politician has bothered to explain to them. They fear nuclear war, which no politician or public figure will ever even allude to, with the exception of the logorrheic Trump, who may or may not have a rational fear of it. Harris sure did nothing to allay fears of total annihilation when she declaimed in her stump speech on the trail that America had an obligation to defend the liberty of other countries. That was the mechanical groupthink of liberal idealists who send other people’s children off to die. Trump got five military deferments during the Vietnam War, liberals mock. So did Biden. Nobody wants to fight a war, except for those who don’t have to, or whose children don’t have to. Like all people, Americans want a peaceful existence. It is beyond pathetic that the best Harris could do in her concession speech was to call on Americans to “fight”. But “fight” was Trump’s motto! In either case, fight for what? This is not 1861, or 1941. Americans want to live comfortably, fulfillingly and safely. They don’t want to “fight”.
In the lead-up to the election, Democrats tried to use a clip, from 2021, of Vance calling Harris, among other Democratic figures, a “childless cat lady” to prove Vance’s misogyny. It was indeed a ludicrous, callous, foolish thing to say about any woman, especially a woman as driven and accomplished and intelligent as Harris. But it was diabolically shrewd. At a time when America is under threat internally and externally, a woman was always going to be a hard sell. Especially at a time when men are feeling disempowered. Especially a short woman. And an unpopular incumbent. And a woman of not one, but two colours. And a woman with no charm or passion or original presence. But a woman who had no children of her own? At a moment when America’s children fear being shot in school, when American parents fear their children will die from an opioid overdose, or fear their children will not be able to hold their own in American society because college is so expensive, because college is so competitive, because every job is so competitive, because children’s neurological development seems to be slowing, because the internet poses countless threats and terrors to children, because the country is in a dangerous proxy war in Ukraine… In this atmosphere, a woman candidate for president who has no biological children of her own is not, in the eyes of most Americans, sharing their daily and nightly terrors.
It was painful to watch Harris, so far out of her depth, manically readjusting, in full public view, her public persona. It recalled Samuel Butler’s remark that life is like learning to play the violin and having to give concerts at the same time. But a politician’s persona should not be like that. Harris tinkered with her accent, suddenly dropping the home-girl intonations. The “y’all” disappeared. That dislocated grin slid around her face, now here, now gone, now back again, like a house guest who refused to leave. By the end of her campaign, she had hit her stride by imitating the oratorical style of Obama, sometimes so closely that it made you wince. It made you long for Obama himself, until you remembered that it was Obama who had stoked the fires of racialism in national politics in the first place, thus giving birth to Trump. You still longed for Obama.
The liberal establishment’s disconnection from American reality is breathtaking. Liberal pundits were shocked that Latinos came out for Trump in great numbers after a comedian’s slur about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Latin culture is among the most traditional, the most macho, cultures in the world. They don’t do transgender. Nor do they like the Democratic Party’s fetishising of black people. Black people don’t like it either. That’s why so many black men voted for Trump. They don’t like being white fetish objects; see American Fiction. But you cannot talk in this way about the reality of American life with the high priests of liberal piety politics. For them, all Latinos, from every Spanish-speaking country, feel solidarity not just with every other Latino but with people of colour everywhere. And if you are black, well, you think and act black like every black person. But these priests of piety need to plunge into ordinary American life and allow human imperfection in the form of “prejudice” to be, and attend to changing the material conditions that allow prejudice to thrive and become toxic. Liberals like to say that after the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, conservatives have put themselves into Americans’ bedrooms, but liberals themselves have been policing the insides of American heads. Come on into the ocean of American life! The water is warm! And getting warmer every day, even unto boiling.
Lord Acton said that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, near-absolute freedom inevitably tips and shatters into a billion degradations of freedom.
Why Trump? Because people drive murderously large vehicles without regard to red lights, stop signs or speed limits, even as other people cross busy streets so engrossed in their phones they don’t look to see if a car is coming. Because people are allowed to smoke potent forms of marijuana. Because you cannot get a human on the phone when you call anywhere. Because, as a black public school principal told me: “They wave kids through with high grades for the sake of equity which makes everyone feel good and keeps the test scores high for the real-estate market. Then the kids get to college, flunk out, and come back home with no future.”
Why Trump? Because literature, theatre, art, opera, film have been both flattened into the bottom line, and at the same time coerced into being mere tabulators of social justice issues. Because everyone is withdrawn into screens, into the emotionally numbing penumbra of psychiatric drugs, into their own customised reality. Because everyone is “kind” and “caring” to everyone else, all smiles the size of Manifest Destiny, until they feel they are not getting what they are super-entitled to. Because from the workplace to the highest echelons of politics, what people say means more than who they are and what they do. Because litigation, from the aggrieved citizen to the slippery Trump, has ritualised social disorder. Because there is a stronger sense of community and responsibility in the most remote Chinese village than in the entire US of A. Because instant gratification has become a right, and responsibility a repression.
Why Trump? Because the country is not, as liberals are saying now, turning authoritarian. In the falling debris of neoliberalism, each side yearns for an authority it can tolerate, even as it deplores the slightest exertion of authority on the other side. The Right wants government to enforce personal liberty at the expense of collective freedom. The Left wants to impose an idea of collective freedom at the expense of personal liberty. Both sides, and everyone in between, is God-bereft, meaning-starved, longing for connection and bedevilled by it.
After the dazing election, CNN put up a revelatory map showing, on a granular level, where Trump’s votes came from. They largely came from rural and semi-rural areas. I would think that was the same for my own state, New Jersey, which has voted for a Democratic president for 32 years but this year went for Harris by only five points. Pascal’s line sprang to mind: “The eternal silence of these infinite space frightens me.” He was speaking of the seeming implacable indifference of the universe. But that fear falls far more heavily in sparsely populated places.
The liberal strongholds are mostly in the densely populated urban centres and their environs. People can walk, bike or drive a short distance to grocery stores, schools, doctors, and other necessary places. In the rest of the country, people sometimes have to drive hours to buy food or clothes or to see a doctor. Liberals seem stunned that Trump’s three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan apparently had such a catalysing effect on the election. They shouldn’t be. Three-quarters of the people who listen to podcasts listen while driving. The long, changeless road and the long, intimate conversation depend upon intimate, unchanging patterns of living. The super-accelerating trends of contemporary America life, celebrated by liberals, who wish to shame everyone else into accepting cherished solidities melting into air, have a palpably alienating effect on people outside the liberal bastions.
Although the liberal media, having established woke culture, have now declared it played little or no role in Trump’s astounding victory, they are lying. Following the dissolution of American small towns in the Fifties, the disenfranchised young in those towns — like the disenfranchised blacks in the cities — were sent off to the charnel house in Vietnam. Now, in this second dissolution of small-town America, in which mind, not just body, is wrecked, young people are being sent off into virtual, psychological space, driven deep into their screens and themselves. Why not vote for Trump? He has captured the attention of the ones who ignore you. More important, he frustrates, enrages, and frightens the ones who frustrate and enrage you and do nothing to soothe your fears. Why Trump? Because he both fills the eternal silence of infinite spaces with the projection of indomitable power, and he drowns out all the condescending, proscriptive — woke — chatter that excludes you.
Americans believe in solutions. It is a blessing and a curse. Here is my suggestion, to my liberal friends, not for a solution, but for a workable modus operandi. Give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Do not, as you did four years ago, pounce on everything he says as evidence of impending political disaster. Do not impeach him. Drop the ridiculous, pointless alarmism. Do not get all middle school and retreat into the cool corner of the cafeteria and preen yourself, personally and professionally, on every instance of this monstrosity’s inevitable folly.
Save the attacks for the important moments, and then keep them dignified and rational and proportionate to the occasion. Be Trump’s friend. Stroke his ego. Oversized and fragile as his ego is, Trump will, as he did in his first term, fling away anyone who makes him feel small. Already, Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who says that he is “heavily involved” in his father’s transition into power, has declared that he does not want people in the new administration “who think that they know better than the duly elected president of the United States”. I give Musk six months. Robert F. Kennedy four months. Then, if Trump considers you his friend, he will come to you to have his faltering imperial ego re-stroked.
Above all, make no mistake about it. Trump arose from the deepest regions of American life. You want to rid the country of this Groundhog Day affliction? Start with self-control, self-denial, tolerance, and a workable idea of what is good for all. Then work your way up.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“For 13 years, Conservative Party leaders have traipsed up to one party conference after another attempting to spin the reality away: that we are a poor country where everything is expensive.”
Is that really the problem? This sentiment captures, in my opinion, the fundamental misunderstanding, shared by this author and many other political commentators in the UK.
The UK’s economic problems appear superficially to be technical problems – monetary choices, international trade agreements, industrial policy, etc. But underneath, at root, they are cultural problems.
A country that should be applauded for welcoming the poor and dispossessed from around the world, instead doubts whether it has welcomed them well enough…. A country that should be applauded for exporting the rule of law, human rights, modern standards of hygiene and education, etc., instead wonders if those exports were unduly coercive…. A country that should be applauded for sacrificing blood and gold to stop totalitarian regimes, minority oppression, slavery, etc., instead wonders if its sacrifices were all actually self-interested….
Why has every country in the West been riven by an onslaught of national self-doubt? Why is the UK undergoing a moral reckoning not unlike what Germany confronted in the post-war era? Was the Empire really as bad as the Nazis? (No.)
This needn’t be a Conservative issue; there have been plenty of national patriots on all sides of the domestic aisle in the history of the UK. But it will take a politician of courage and charisma to rewrite the false narratives, to wake the country from its coma.
“We” are poor though. That enormous current account deficit we’ve run for more than a generation was indirectly funded by sales of assets to overeseas investors. These overseas investors draw income from their investments, compounding the current account deficit and need for asset sales. Even your mortage is likely owned by an overseas investor.
The underlying problem though is capital creation. The UK has created few new assets (e.g., companies) compared to the USA, and this is the difference between overseas investment pushing an economy forward and overseas investment draining an economy of wealth by rent seeking. The UK has sold what its got and not replenished the capital account with new assets – unlike the USA.
The result is capital formation in the UK is now mostly controlled by overseas investors. It means capital investment in civil infrastructure often needs major inducements (that are detrimental to the wider economy), and the revenues are repatriated overseas. These are hallmarks of developing economies.
The sugar rush of consumption funded by the sell-off of assets has masked the worsening long-term economic prospects of the UK. The prognosis for most nations in the EU is similar.
This is one reason why immigration is promoted. The UK sells consumers so more people equals more consumers. Even as per capita GDP sinks, adding more people will prop up consumption and so support total GDP. Is it sustainable? No. Does it fix the immediate problem? Sort of. Does it get someone through the next round of the electoral cycle? Yes.
Very nice analysis.
Mr Clover is invariably on point and relevant. Unherd should have him as a contributor
Forgive me but I think
Mr Clover is actually a Ms Clover. And yes, very much on point. What to do though? Learn how to farm?
My poor eye sight. I read Nell as Neil. In answer to your question buy a farm in New Zealand if you can or Cornwall if you can’t
It is easy to overlook poverty if you are filthy rich, as Sunak is, and the other capital and overseas rent-seeking issues you mention have been engineered by people just like him in the City of London’s investment banks.
The Tories no longer are the Party of business other than banking.
Few of the current crop are competent to run the proverbial whelk stall and fewer have the experience of a hands-on business.
Yes Neil. Uniparty politicians have since the Blair Revolution spent 30 years disabled the one dynamic that offers prosperity – enterprise and wealth creation – which had been bequeathed by Thatcher. The Blairite System was supposed to build up the State and Public Sector in parallel with Enterprise. But that Way crashed in 2008. They have now played every conceibale card to inject supposed growth and all have failed – all are destructive bubbles. First QE & Bailout Magic Money. Then the Property Bubble. And then mass uncontrolled immigration of 8m which has smashed all those public services into failure and emergency measures. There are no more levers to pull. The Game is up. The greedy Blob State is ravenous and demands ever greater taxes, making the UK a desert for entrepreneurs and wealth creators. This is why all politicos noises are so trite and irrelevant. We are hurling along this high speed line – but the track has not been laid.
I’ve read something online similar to what you say in your first paragraph, namely that the massive expansion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) under George Osborne was fatally flawed because due to our EU membership at the time, the standard FDI conventions relating to head office functions, local economy trade etc were treated as EU-wide rather than UK wide. What this means is as follows: if foreign money buys a company in a particular nation, there are conventions that say that the business must maintain a minimum level of executive operation in that nation, and the existing trading relationships with other domestic companies must be preserved to a certain extent.
In the case of the UK’s post-2010 FDI, it was perfectly acceptable for an EU corporation to buy out a UK manufacturer, shut down all head office functions and cease all local trading relationships, turning the UK operation into nothing more than a warehouse for products and services now manufactured abroad, and using frictionless capital flows to repatriate all the profits to the foreign investors.
This actually happens in the EU a lot generally not just the UK but because most of the rest of where this happens is in the Eurozone, it doesn’t matter that capital is flowing out of one region and appearing in another – not, at least, from the perspective of the EU as a whole. In the UK, because it was never in the Eurozone, this defective FDI system eventually resulted in up to £20bn capital outflow per year, which sum must be compensated for in either borrowing or further FDI asset sales.
What I don’t know is whether or not this defective FDI system was fixed as part of the Withdrawal Agreement. I doubt it, given the persistent mess our public finances are in, but I could be wrong.
“The UK sells consumers”. By god I think you’ve hit the nail on head. Through this lens, everything about our predicament makes sense. We’ve been utterly sold out.
It is a great quote. I can hardly wait to start plagiarising it. Many thanks to Ms Clover.
This reminds me of the complaint in the US when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center. The Japanese owned a NY landmark, but the Rockefellers owned billions of dollars that had been Japanese before – and it turned out to be a great deal for the Rockefellers and a bad deal for the Japanese. The relevant question is what laws, principles, instincts, etc. govern the way those foreign dollars are spent.
While I don’t take issue with your analysis of the economic situation, I think you are either deliberately or inadvertently disregarding my point. If you get a bunch of Malaysians building residential blocks in London, they are spending more here than UK investors were willing to spend! But what does the UK do with their pounds? And the answer to that – the answer to why the UK has squandered the economic interest of foreigners – resolves to the grand national self-doubt that I outlined.
Is protecting the environment the key thing the UK needs to do? (No.) Is ensuring ‘equity’ for all immigrants the key thing the UK needs to do? (No.) Is forcing skilled tradesmen into sociology degrees the key thing the UK needs to do? (No.) All these ‘luxury concerns’ are born of disregarding what made Britain successful in the Age of Industry and Expansion – unfettering the economic potential of the bourgeois, releasing the great wealth of talent in the middle class from the limits of feudalism, through the rule of law, free markets, and the govt getting out of the way.
What has happened is that the talented middle has been re-shackled by feudal bonds, but the titled grandees are no longer called ‘Duke’ or ‘Earl’ but ‘Planning Officer’ and ‘Equity Administrator’ and ‘NHS Manager’ and the like. This is, I think, a cultural issue, not an economic one.
Or, to put it in terms more sympathetic to your comment, the UK is indeed ‘selling consumers’ – ie, serfs. But the govt cannot liberate these serfs… govt power can only *make* serfs, or one sort or another. The way out of this consumer-miasma is to get the govt the heck out of the way. Where is the Iron Lady when we need here?
What an intelligent insight (together with the original post). Some amazingly thoughtful pieces “below the line” on this major issue. I do wonder, though, how those who govern us seem collectively to be so blind to this narrative.
The US has many advantages, and its huge achievement was to mak the difference on the grand scale between living in relatively free societies and a totalitarian domination.
However it is currently a highly polarised dysfunctional disaster area, where also much public infrastructure is decrepit
This is so well put. To have a country, the people living in the country need to be proud of the country and it’s history. The UK has plenty to be proud of, including gifting the world with the best science and the best literature. As for the Empire, it was a force for good. Where would India be today but for the institutions that were gifted to India by the British.
Agreed… though I’m not sure I’d use the word “gifted”! Without a doubt Britain conquered India through military and economic force or threats of same. But – and here’s the part no one seems able to understand – this was a net positive (not an unalloyed one!) for the conquered people.
The problem is that Europe was permitted to rule itself every time they tried to conquer us up until H*tler went further than most.
If your civilisation was conquered by the British, made to lose its culture in favour of superior British mores, required to feel grateful for that inability to resist, and then crushed repeatedly in uprisings, you might feel that you were useless, that your history did not matter. Take a look at independent post-Napoleonic France, and that thought is reinforced. Traditional enemies of Britain accorded more privileges than your civilisation by virtue of being more civilised.
If you have no faith in your nation… isn’t that the same as what you say in your post? How can the nation exist in light of (well meaning and kindly) colonial era-wokeness emphasising your pointlessness?
Thus you might migrate to Britain. No point staying in a useless nation in which you can have no faith.
I do wonder if some 3rd world peoples are actually experiencing the same loss of confidence as us, and so they come here. They give up on their own nationhood, subsumed to a local variant of wokeness.
Our own people, subsumed in guilt, let them in.
How can people feel pride in the empire and have that coexist alongside our 19th century tolerance of European regimes? How can 3rd world peoples square that gratitude with their endless failures? How can we make sure their despair doesn’t translate to a trek to Britain?
“Just feel proud” is too simplistic, I fear.
Ah, yes, spoken like a perfectly uppity Brit.
True Britain like Canada where i live has a huge guilt complex driven by universities and in Canada by Trudeau and his so called liberals deep into woke and calling peopls they and we!. Britain should stop the whinging and be proud of its welcoming of so many immigrants and of its history as a colonial power which brought democacy education, infrastructure and medical systems to so many countries. OK, silly to leave the EU, immature and self-defeating having taken so long to go in..blame Cameron and silly Johnson. hey UK, grow up!
Dear Nell,
Careful, you are falling for a three-card trick concerning British morality and Justice.
A way of putting is to think as a person realising that it was some kind of Flashman toady who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The dastardly idea being to comfort us (and we desire to be comforted otherwise all is fear) so we were happy to read that things were going in the right direction even though it was and remained always cruelty that won, unbeknownst to us, whilst we interpret the world otherwise for comfort reasons – the need to fit in featuring strongly as we fear the vulnerability to being disliked if we stand out.
Look at Julian Assange. The system easily got the population to hate him and the reason for that is the same as Tom Brown – the population needs to hide from reality and the system needs them to need to hide so they won’t get in its way.
Rather than argue with people who have been effortlessly caused to decide that Assange was not a brave publisher taking on the evils of power after all, but a sex-creep and dangerous spy exposing our brave boys to danger, let me ask “How did the mass atrocities revealed by Chelsea Manning evaporate from public consciousness?”
Anyone who turns their back or whistles at the ceiling whilst victims are being created are unworthy of their own respect, but the cultural norm has no concept of this. We are a shameful society with shameful politicians for that reason alone.
Where are the grown-ups who realise they have a responsibility to defend their fellows?
That’s the magic of mind control. Ask yourself about British Justice when a remand prisoner is kept under conditions of torture (c.f. Nils Meltzer (UN Rapporteur on torture) The Trial of Julian Assange)
The thing is that if the system wants you got, then you will bel got you whilst the deluded public watch and then comfort themselves with copies of Tom Brown’s Schooldays – so to speak – it’s illusion.
The State Commits Crimes and you are to turn the other way. That is the reality.
Anyone who is content to believe mainstream culture will feel free and will not understand why others don’t, but if you expose the truth, difficult as that is, you will be in big trouble and with the approval of the tranquilised public.
Big Brother is here and has been for a long time. Wake up and be a man – or woman – if not you will dream until you die happy and pointless.
“A country that should be applauded for welcoming the poor and dispossessed from around the world, instead doubts whether it has welcomed them well enough….”
Really? WHO feels that way about it? What silo do you live in where you think THAT is the way Britain feels?
No, it shouldn’t be applauded for doing something so stupid and self-destructive. And a Conservative Party that has been complicit it in deserves to be despised, and is despised.
Where do we go from here?!
A Tory leader that even the Tories didn’t want (let’s not forget they chose Truss originally).
Scrapping HS2, a project that many said was a farce at the outset, has finally delivered on that by not being completed.
Another tinkering with education?! What is it with governments and education?! Is it part of the Prime Minister Must Leave Lasting Legacy Handbook?
I suppose it’s better than embarking on a war, although weirdly we are funding one so I guess that counts too!
And worst of all, our alternative is Sir Keir, Lammy, Rayner and their own band of lunatics. Although with Labour we do get the opportunity to see them find a spot for Eddie Izzard complete with dress, fake boobs and lipstick. Oh the grim pantomime of it all.
Good grief. Is this it?! Is this really the best we can come up with?!
Well if you’re either truly Labour, ie, helping the ordinary person live a decent life or truly Conservative, ie, letting people get on with a decent life without sticking an oar in, you could always join the SDP.
If they have a candidate I may well vote for them.
I find our two main parties are now so depressing. Both appear achingly dull and weirdly grotesque all in the same moment. That’s quite an achievement.
The dishonesty on both sides is breathtaking.
After electoral reform I may well. But first the organised crime group currently in office must be wiped out.
Who has piled money into Manchester on the basis of HS2 being built? It wasn’t scheduled to open before 2041 and its “most likely” project forecast date of opening was 2043. No one is investing on the basis of a new railway line opening 20 years from now.
Good point, no one running any business will be planning that far ahead.
Absolutely correct.HS2 in any event assisted London’s growth more than Manchester or Birmingham’s.
Disappointed PM did not talk more about his plans for NHS or social welfare reform nor why we had to have soviet style targets on EV car sales but if he has the courage to take on vested interests it’s a good start
As a resident of Greater Manchester I know of precious few local HS2 supporters whose enthusiasm for this pointless vanity project survived the prospect having swathes of the south of the city paralysed for the next 10 years with construction traffic. Not just inconvenient but fatal for many local businesses.
Even if the massive hole from the airport to the city centre was successfully created the other end of the line is in the suburbs of London. And all for what? The current train service takes a little over 2 hours and at full price is not cheap. Heaven only know what the high speed tickets would be for a slightly faster but hugely more inconvenient service. Well done Rishi for being brave enough to face reality in this instance.
After our reckless spending of borrowed money in the past few years (also partly down to Rishi),, we face increasingly high interest rates and this waste of taxpayers’ money cannot be sustainable. It will never provide any value to the north, what money is affordable would be best spent improving local infrastructure.
This is refreshing. Someone even more cynical and jaded than me.
He’s just a realist.
Perhaps i can join those 2 ideas up. My father always taught me thst a cynic is a realist with experience.
Here’s another – a depressive is a frustrated romantic.
And an expert? “Ex” is an unknown quantity and “spert” a drip under pressure.
The cynic is the optimists realist!
You can never be too rich or too cynical, to misquote the Duchess of Windsor.
When Sunak tries to sound sincere, the timbre of his voice is eerily reminiscent of Tony Blair’s voice when Blair tried to sound sincere.
That might be because people who are trying to sound sincere sound like people who are trying to sound sincere.
Hi René, There are various strategies for feigning sincerity. There is the Rob Ford (crack-smoking Toronto mayor) approach of sounding super-belligerent. There is Bill Clinton approach: when he denied having sex with Ms Lewinsky, or when he said that he didn’t inhale, he exaggerated the folksy Arkansas drawl. Then there is the Richard Nixon approach, e.g. the “little dog” speech: he dropped the register right down.
By contrast, the Sunak/Blair ploy is almost the exact opposite of the Nixon approach and the Clinton approach. Sunak and Blair constrain the throat to up the register, to make themselves sound innocent of the wicked ways of this world.
Peas from the same globalist pod.
No mention of the £150bn a year deficit bequeathed in 2010.
No mention of Covid.
No mention of Ukraine.
No mention of the scourge of identity politics.
No mention of the capture of institutions by the identitarians.
No mention of politicised, elitist, strike-shroud-waving dressed up as concern for “our NHS”.
Just sarcastic partisan nonsense masquerading as political commentary.
They’ve had 13 years to fix these problems, they haven’t managed a single one.
I’m sick of hearing how the Tories would have led us to utopia, if it wasn’t for those meddling civil servants. If Blair can work out to stuff it full of ideological bedfellows, why is it seemingly beyond the mental capacity of the Conservatives to do the same? If you’ve been in power for over a decade and can’t point to a single policy win then you deserve to be routed at an election.
They had 13 years to fix Covid and the war in Ukraine? I must have missed that.
Re Covid: they canned to Pandemic preparedness programme – that had been in development for years – just before the covid pandemic came into being; so yes they did have 13 years to fix a covid like situation and they crashed it!
It’s much easier to find civil servants who will go along with a bloated, expensive public sector that will provide lots of jobs and power for the civil servants in question. A traditional Tory government finds the equivalent trick much harder because it is effectively like looking for turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas.
Agreed. You might also have mentioned the years wasted by Parliament’s obstructive behaviour following the EU referendum.
But he mentioned a total ban on smoking tobacco! The Tory leader has got his proirities right (not!).
Never ending chaos is what the ‘Conservative’ party brings. Before somebody lobs the trope of ‘so you think Labour will be better’, no I don’t. That’s the problem, no good options.
This is what politics is all about. Different factions fighting for their own solution to the country’s economic and social ills. The same applies to the opposition parties. What is the alternative? A one party state with no opposition where the great leader enforces his solutions up to and beyond breaking point?
The approach is undoubtedly chaotic and the wrong sort of people tend to make the wrong choices but it is the least worst system currently available.
Since a period of stsaeism appears inevitable given capital constraints, a soft debt default, and a post cheap oil commodity environment, we had best be csreful the Dear Leader we elext.
That was my take on the article. I read about the u-turns, the flip-flops, the spin, the different warring factions within the same party…and just thought: “how is this different to any other democratic country?”
There is no doubt that the British state is in a dire condition and could work a lot better…but a lot of the complaints lodged in this article are bugs of the democratic system: they are not unique to the British state.
IMO what was seen at conference was a long overdue recognition that for far too long politicians have not been prepared to grasp some key nettles, slaughter some holy cows, for fear of offending what are now known as the WOKE, of being labelled all kinds of “ists” and because it was thought doing so would not be very British and make us look bad on the world stage. As a result we have had years and years of standards slipping, post-truths being allowed to infiltrate the national conversation, the civil service, the education system and seen everything that most in the country hold dear being diluted and corrupted by a globalist liberal narrative. All the time the populace, who in general are a commonly sensible lot, have been silently praying for someone to raise a signal that they recognised the folly of inaction. This, in a small way Rishi, and his strong multi-racial team, has done and whoever gains power in future needs to follow through and get the country back on course and believeing in itself again. Out with the WOKERY and pseudoscience that has infected so many areas of life; in with common sense British values, personal responsibility, intolerance of crime, shirking and social disruption and incentives for personal and corporate enterprise and the family and an intolerance of those who don’t buy into being British.
If it wasn’t for “wokery” and pseudo-science Labour couldn’t exist. What you see is what you get.
UK et al have had a one party, one ideology state since John Major in 1991 – they are called “globalists” or “WEF ‘droids” or whatever epithet you choose. They do as they’re told yet their media displays “these are our policies, if you don’t like them we have others”
What we’re seeing is a huge conservative pivot. It’s like they have just realised they have much more freedom of action post-Brexit. They’re not tied to shadowing the EU policywise (surprising that it’s take this long mind). And from that anything is now possible – eg dropping the triple-lock on pensions. Too little too late? Or crazy time on policies? Possibly both, not least because it also pretty clear that they are quietly panicking at the government’s parlous financial state (council bankruptcies, pension cuts, hiring freeze – probably to be followed by cuts, HS2 cancellation). But by reversing course, they are busting out of the Westminster paperbag of policy ‘norms’ which may allow more imagination to be applied going forwards.
This might sound convincing, if there was any evidence of the current leadership having any imagination. I haven’t seen any.
Many truths in this eviscerating article. Sunak the Management Consultant Prime Minister being one of them – and he’s not even good at that. He shuffles deckchairs on the deck of the sinking ship whilst we the hapless passengers desperately hope that the rescue and salvage team will show up before we go under.
Geez lighten up. I’m not a hug fan of Sunak and it would take a miracle for me to vote Tory again at the next election but this feels like someone with an axe to grind.
Scrapping a monumentally wasteful infrastructure project that nobody wanted up until last week? What a monster!
Crafting policies around what he believes would be good for the country? The arrogance! Anyone would think he’s the Prime Minister!
Although I’m no fan of Sunak’s Tories, I think this article is overly harsh and misses a crucial issue on both HS2 and Net Zero, namely that since neither of these agendas were ever the subject of genuine democratic choice or debate and that they were only kept alive politically because of that, Sunak can hardly be criticised for killing them off through executive fiat.
The reality is that both these stupid, pointless public policies could readily be seen as unworkable and worthless even on a high-level look at the numbers. If Sunak has made a decision based on the numbers instead of the politics then he is the first decision-maker to actually make a fiscally correct decision in respect of them. The fact that both carry vocal political opposition is irrelevant: the people shouting and complaining are wrong, and have been visibly and obviously wrong for some time.
The word “presidential” was the key here. What happened to a Cabinet with joint responsibility and the Prime Minister just the first amongst equals? The answer, I fear, is that it is no longer possible (for any party) to populate the Offices of State with MPs who have the experience, aptitude and skill to run a Department. The PM’s office is forming all the policy itself and there is no proper scrutiny or thinking through the consequences.
It was a little distracting because ‘Presidential’ in the US means being subject to a host of checks-and-balances that the PM is not subject to. While the UK has moved closer and closer to a separation-of-powers system like the US, the PM still has way more power over the national agenda than does the President.
At least he’s tryng to kill off HS2, a monster with more lives than Freddy Krueger.
This seems to be the project that many commenters didn’t want until it is actually scrapped, suddenly scrapping it seems to be a bad policy. This does seem to be a case of the government always being in the wrong in some eyes.
Rather Puritan and meddling, though he is right to divert the bullet train money to local services.
For my tuppence, I reckon his wife would cut taxed rather than raise them to cripple large sections of the British economy already paying a high cost for the proxy war.
The Tory Party is awash with Woking Class enthusiasts who have embedded this evil at every level in British institutions – political, governmental, educational, corporate, managerial, medical, etc., etc.
Under normal circumstance this comment could be discounted as a grumpy old man yelling at the clouds – but unfortunately this kind of random screaming is now official Tory policy. Not that it matters since they will be gone soon enough and left to the tender care of Suella Braverman and other assorted nutters.
The only nutter evident in this discussion is you!
For this ex Party member of the Conservatives, the real brain bender is that despite the absolutely catastrophic decay of the party, it’s not impossible that it might, just, win yet another term in office.
This speaks volumes about our political class. It lies in the gutter, while still managing to look down on everyone – as it descends inexorably from the gutter to the sewer, where it really belongs.
I so wish that we had the humility to learn from others. Having lived for several years in Switzerland I would hope that we would look there to see how to do decentralisation and appreciate its advantages.
Issues with a horizon beyond 5 years need cross-party debate and agreement. Unfortunately we have politicians who refuse to do this in the hope that will have an enormous budget with which to play with their friends.
He’s toast and he knows it. This time next year he’ll be relaxing on a California beach while the nutters fight it out for what is left of the Tory party.
The funniest (and saddest) part is watching them try to find someone else to blame for the last 13 years – utterly pathetic.
Hold on now, Sunak is a banker and hedge fundie, not a management consultant. Let’s keep this stuff straight.
Unfortunately, the great fraudulent towers of bullsh*t are not empty of any substance. They are so brimming full of just one substance that it must be why the water companies (aka sh*t companies) are having to pour so much of the bovril into Britain’s rivers.
Just as the water companies are too full of debt to nationalise, so the tower is too full of The Substance that not even Hercules with the assistance of Flash Gordon could cleanse it.
If, among the many towers that populated his world, Tolkien had included the Tower of Sh*t in the Land of Cr@p it would be the most noisome of all, spewing pestilence and miasma, the source of noxious gases that gave life to every will-o’-the-wisp.
From atop the Tower, the Wizard would speak of opportunities that heaping up more dung affords and the Weather-prophetess issue her predictions that were stale news in another age of Middle Earth.
Instead of combating the Tower as was his wont, the warrior Faragorn joins it, hoping to turn it into a tower of violets. Whereas there’s more likelihood of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe converting to Islam and King Peter fighting for Putin than the Tory Tower becoming ‘a proper conservative party’.
He certainly loves a strawman. I was never convinced with the choice of Sunak but felt he could step up, listening to him now with his vision of ‘change’ and new way of governing is just a hefty dose of face/palm. He’s created a path certain to lead to defeat.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that defeat. Look at what he’s up against. Really look at it. It’s abysmal.
No need to look very hard, I certainly can’t disagree with that. Yet somehow even Starmer seems to have more credibility according to the polls.
It doesn’t matter who steps in and out of leadership, UK is a fantastic place to live by any standards. These problems as the author called them are just typical of a rich country trying to overachieve and have grand plans and outraged citizens fat from having every conceivable comfort and benefit that the system can provide, are so complacent and intolerant that even if policies have no effect on them, they have a view, usually negative and look to blame someone, anyone, everyone.
So what if Sunak is going back on the HS2 promise- sometimes after passing of some time, it’s not justifiable to continue in that direction. So mid game, perhaps different tactics needs to employed.
This country has only Chiefs , No followers. The better thing to do would be allow a leader to show his/her vision, their party to get behind them and the citizens to make effort to show support at least to start with.
The country voted for Boris. Why? Even after Covid policies disaster? I was shocked. Perhaps everyone got spooked by the opposition leadership.
At least Now a new person (definitely a more honourable person) is in control, he is aeons better than his predecessor. But he cannot please everyone. So long as he does right by the majority who need help, I don’t really mind if he changes his mind repeatedly as long as the focus is trying to do right by the most needy people and steering this country onwards and upwards.
I can’t endorse everything you’ve written but this rang true: “These problems… are just typical of a rich country trying to overachieve and have grand plans and outraged citizens fat from having every conceivable comfort and benefit that the system can provide….”
Ultimately, the UK remains one of the world’s richest and most successful societies. It had better not squander the legacy prior generations have gifted it. ‘Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’ applies to countries as much as to families. Anybody been to Argentina lately?
HS2 was bonkers, and needed to be abandoned.
Like an impoverished student’s car failing the MoT, buying the same old model and keeping the old one for spares. Sunak is car One. Car Two has a few month’s MoT left and the guy who sold it had a mate at the garage.
The pre-ordained, inexorable conclusion of 13 years Populist Right Wing struggles with its own contradictions.
13 years of scapegoating others too, with that theme paradoxically and shamelessly accelerating the longer they stay in power. Utterly utterly pathetic and embarrassing. A Govt full of people who want to make out they haven’t been in power. Dire.
But what was slightly refreshing was reading all this on UnHerd. This lot in power and their supporters been heard for too long.
If you think the Tory party is “populist and right wing” you are deluded. There is not a fag paper between them and Starmers staggerers.
They’ve been running round spouting Populist slogans for 13yrs my friend.
I fear you are like the old Communist blaming the Politburo for not being communist enough.
I had my doubts about Sunak, but for a tiny bloke he does have a set of stones.
He’s not as irretrievably stupid as his predecessors I suppose
Why go to the conference if you believe the should not be held. Who in their right mind believes promises from a politician especially about something they will deliver at some future data. We should remember Chamberlain claiming peace in our time but the warmonger Churchill was having none of it. And we are still at war in Europe.
Don’t worry lads, you’ll soon have Braverman or Truss or some equally lunatic, swivel eyed loon at the helm of the good ship Tory! What could possibly go wrong?!?!?
A lefty complaining about swivel-eyed loons on the Right. The stupidity involved in making such a remark is almost spectacular.