And so, yet another failed leader has been sacrificed as an offering to the British public, as Labour carries out an internal coup to stave off an electoral revolution. But even as the Lancastrian usurper secures his hold on Westminster, disbursing sinecures to his faithful retainers, there is no particular reason to believe he will be any more successful in office than Starmer. After all, many of those today celebrating his successful coup were just as feverishly exultant, two years ago, over the coming Starmerite golden age. If they were better judges of the country’s mood, we would not be here today.

Like an incoming headmaster turning around a failing school, Burnham told us Westminster is “broken” in his landmark devolution speech, using language apparently no longer the preserve of Right-wing populists. But will future historians characterize him as a continuity figure, carrying out necessary reforms to save a failing system from itself, or as an agent of total change? His manifesto-by-proxy, The Productive State, which aims to flesh out his much-invoked but nebulous Manchesterism as a program for governance, claims him for the latter role. As it states, the public “ask now for only what is obvious: major, even fundamental changes in British society” to cast off “the meanness and frustration of long years of stagnation and decline”, unabashedly adopting a “declinist” framework still mocked as a Right-wing fantasy by backwards-looking elements of the Labour Left. Indeed, the paper notes, “Labour have hitherto not delivered on that demand. If that feeling does not change, the electoral consequences will be severe and lasting.” That much is true. Yet what is perhaps more interesting than the structural economic reforms the paper suggests, is that its writers frame their socialist ends in postliberal terms, quoting Polanyi and appealing to national sovereignty and state resilience to make arguments postliberals were condemned for a decade ago.

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How to save postliberalism

By David Goodhart

As the foreign policy writer Lily Lynch recently observed, “Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus.” The same may be said of the domestic political and economic order so drastically reshaped to fit the vanished dreamworld of globalized liberal capitalism. And so, The Productive State observes, “in an era of weaponized interdependence — where access to energy, critical minerals, and essential supply chains has become a tool of geopolitical pressure”, the question of ownership of vital infrastructure “is a strategic one, which cuts to the heart of live debates about sovereignty in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world”. National sovereignty, state capacity and resilience in a world of global competition rather than co-operation, in which Westminster failure “wears down the basic democratic expectation that public institutions can identify the needs of the public they govern and act to meet them”, eroding the state’s legitimacy: these are Lexiteer arguments of a decade ago, now championed, perhaps too late, by those who would in 2016 have scorned them.

For in economic terms, there is very little, in The Productive State’s condemnation of neoliberalism as the agent of national decline, that could not be said, or has not already been, by Reform’s planner-in-chief and prominent postliberal intellectual, Danny Kruger. That there is such an overlap between The Productive State and postliberal arguments is hardly surprising, given British postliberalism’s intellectual descent from socialism. Even still, it is of note that Burnham’s only open challenger, so far, is the Blue Labour-endorsed candidate Al Carns, standing on a platform of industrial renewal through sensible energy policy in the service of national security. Even if Farage has shied away, recently, from his tentative support of nationalization for key infrastructure, postliberalism already appears to dominate the economic argument, ahead of the next election.

But the arguments for national sovereignty, domestic reindustrialization, energy security and a strengthened state have been won by the deteriorating security environment rather than the esoteric pronouncements of post-liberal commentators: both the former Thatcherite Farage and the Labour soft-left now converge on them for the credibility to advance their own projects. Reform’s Zia Yusuf publicly threatens the prime beneficiary of actually existing British neoliberalism, the outsourcing giant SERCO, for its insufficient zeal in carrying out future mass deportations. The postliberal Labour MP Jonathan Hinder declares, “Put cheap energy before clean energy. Drill for our own oil and gas in the North Sea. Back British industry, by scrapping self-harming Net Zero policies. Seriously start to rebalance our economy away from London. Stop the boats.” The next election will be fought on firmly postliberal territory, quite divorced from the ineffective theorizing of the movement’s intellectuals.

For we live, now, in the unmanaged postliberal order brought about by liberal hubris. A decade ago, Brexit offered Westminster the breathing space to break with liberal nostrums in a controlled and sober way, listening and acceding to the democratically-expressed demands of the electorate. Instead, the Brexit vote was treated as the mindless revolt of unlettered proles, manipulated by social media algorithms and a malign network of populist demagogues. Back in the heady days of Brexit discourse — and I have cause to remember this well — to argue that liberal fantasies of enlightened cosmopolitan governance had seen the capacity and legitimacy of individual states dangerously weakened, threatening the basic political order itself, was reviled as something akin to fascism by those who have only latterly awakened to reality.

Again too late, the very same commentators who, only a year ago, mocked the inter-ethnic violence predicted to result from mass immigration as the product of rightwing fever dreams, introducing the “nightmare” prospect of “hardened borders,” now panickingly declare that “we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few… because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence”. This crisis is apparently no longer a hard-Right fantasy: through gritted teeth, the writer comes to the conclusion, presented as novel, that “the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it”. A year is, evidently, a long time in British political commentary. We cannot, perhaps, ever expect Britain’s liberal Left commentariat to admit that they were wrong, even as they belatedly adopt positions their social standing once rested upon condemning. But Burnham’s ideological malleability — delicately phrased — is such that he can easily adopt much of Reform’s message of a broken, dysfunctional Britain in renewing an establishment consensus he affects to despise.

One obvious danger for Reform is that Burnham, not shy of exaggerated displays of cultural Northernness, will cast them as the party of arrogant, spoiled Southeast England. Early trial versions of this approach, such as moving part of his Prime Ministerial court to Manchester, seem designed more to inspire a kneejerk reaction from his foes than to tangibly improve British governance. But it is difficult to extrapolate too much from his Makerfield win: Burnham is genuinely popular in the Northwest, and simply presented the fastest route to ousting Starmer. Hanging a general halfway through a war is rarely a sign of impending victory; even still, for Reform, the path ahead is uncertain. Running a prominent national-populist intellectual failed in Gorton and Denton; but so did running a no-nonsense local plumber in Makerfield, where a strategic section of the Red Wall has been found electorally wanting. Should Reform now lean into its end-of-pier, ITV1 Red Wall aesthetic, or attempt to woo the middle classes, among whom it has rapidly become the default party of the Right?

It is perhaps in pursuit of a newly radicalized middle-class audience that Farage has begun to write on Substack, focusing on territory simply untouchable to Labour. The Burnhamite manifesto declares that “Reactionary politics… is fundamentally a politics of shrinkage and exclusion: drawing the circle of belonging tighter, withdrawing provision from those deemed undeserving, turning scarcity into a weapon that disciplines and divides,” positing instead a program of mass abundance rolled out by a revitalized British state. Farage’s message is simpler and clearer. As he asserts, the effect of current social housing policy “has been to redistribute the nation’s stock of social housing away from the White British populations who originally inhabited these areas”. Indeed, as he writes, extending Reform’s critique of mass immigration further back in time than has lately been deemed acceptable, “When Labour and Conservative politicians opened Britain’s borders after the war, it would have been simple to maintain a basic principle: the British people paid for these homes, should be housed in them, and newcomers will have to be patient as they earn their way in.” Perhaps addressed at a downwardly mobile, younger middle class, the dangled prospect of redistributing prime urban real estate may yet outweigh fashionable moral poses.

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Here, on the once-perilous ground of immigration, is the obvious dividing line at the next election, between parties with otherwise converging economic worldviews. As Burnham’s first headache, the spat between his future ministers over Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, shows, immigration is a source of internal conflict within Labour, caught between an awareness of the public will and its own internal morality, while it is Reform’s very reason for being. To win over his party, Burnham may, as he has hinted, be inclined to abandon Starmer and Mahmood’s ILR reforms, intended to quietly disperse what even the BBC now calls the Boriswave. Yet as clear-eyed, Blue Labour-adjacent commentators like the Labour Realists observe, “the Labour Party cannot transfer the costs of a Conservative mistake on immigration policy onto the British people and win the next election”. It is, simply, in Reform’s greatest interest for the Boriswave to become, as soon as possible in the public’s eyes, the Burnhamwave. Reform’s pitch on the Boriswave, already the Party’s prime line of attack against Burnham, is clear, as Zia Yusuf writes: “If Burnham tries to make the Boriswave permanent, we will reverse it: abolishing ILR, rescinding residence rights of those dependent on the state, and reforming the immigration system so that no Government can ever behave so recklessly again.”

The logic for Reform in the coming election — which we may now expect at any date from Burnham’s formal coronation — is therefore to go further, and harder, on immigration than would have been imaginable even two years ago. There is little ground on which Burnham can fight — on housing, on the NHS, on crime — in which his party’s near-religious sympathy for mass immigration has not poisoned the well. Every new social housing development Burnham promises can, and will, be presented as a source of local danger. The future of British politics, long-delayed, is finally upon us.

For Labour, there will never be a better time for an election than now — but for Reform the attractions are less clear. The Party’s declarations of the urgency of new elections do not fully convince, given its recent electoral setbacks and still nebulous program for government. Yet for both the calculation will be the same: the longer the country has to experience the operation of a Labour government, the more attractive a Faragian reformation will seem. With both parties deploring the dysfunctional brokenness of Westminster politics, victory will come to whoever can more convincingly capture the revolutionary mood. Burnham wants a decade to complete his project: but so did Starmer. Like the violent storms attending Starmer’s downfall, Britain’s decade-long, suffocating political climate now seems ready for dramatic resolution, clearing the air for years to come. The heavens are opening up over Westminster: even in his Manchester fiefdom, Burnham is unlikely to escape the flood.

By the usual scholarly standard, Hungary: A Short History (2018) was a failure. But it doesn’t take much for the reader to figure out its real purpose. Early on in the book, Stone recalls that he knew the then-Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, back when he was a student at Oxford in the Eighties: “he has gone on to great things.” Among the pictures inserted in the book are two showing Orbán at different stages of his dramatic political ascent. The point of the book is to present Orbán as the happy culmination of Hungary’s unhappy history. Orbán had fought valiantly against “Official Europe”; he fought, during the migrant crisis of 2015-16, for “national survival”. Hungary, Stone explains, “had already had a Moslem occupation”, under the Ottomans. If Hungarians had now been delivered from such a calamity a second time, they had Orbán to thank.

Norman Stone died in Budapest — and where else? Conservative intellectuals in the 2010s swam the Danube as surely as now they swim the Tiber. What Berlin was around this time for anxious, artsy, digital nomads, Budapest was for the kinds of people who love Wagner and hate brutalism. In both cases, the expats gained local infamy for never learning the language; Stone, a virtuoso polyglot who knew Hungarian already, was atypical in this respect. Stone had advised Thatcher on European affairs; he spent his final years as an affiliate of the Danube Institute, run by another alumnus of Thatcher’s Downing Street, John O’Sullivan. 

As the Right-wing intellectuals began to move in a more postliberal (and Catholic) direction, the “illiberal democracy” which Orbán was building in Hungary became all the more alluring. Here, the Postliberal International crowed, was a little beacon of hope, a flicker of that old Europe, which elsewhere had been trampled over by Brussels and modernity. Hungary was a quaint little land, a land of Baroque castles, folk dance, and King Saint Stephen. It was a land filled with common sense, oikophilia, and serious Roman Catholicism, as embodied by that most serious papabile, Cardinal Erdő.

No matter that Hungary is less Christian (42.5%) than even Vermont, America’s least Christian state (45%). No matter that Hungary’s fertility, for all Orbán’s much-hyped “family policy”, is about the same as Britain’s, pitifully beneath the replacement rate. No matter that Hungary is one of the poorest countries in the EU — indeed, for a certain kind of postliberal, this is really rather a good thing, because poverty is godly, a triumph over luxury and Mammon. Orbán earned the praise of the Right-wing intellectuals by securing the border, by taking the fight to Brussels, by banning same-sex marriage, and, more recently, by making overtures to Putin. He kept them warm with talk of culture, values, and God.

Orbán’s Budapest had pretty cathedrals and “Scruton Cafés”; it had Old World gentility and Mitteleuropa charm. It had, too, the finest (and best-funded) network of Right-wing think tanks and institutes anywhere in the world outside America. In his master’s thesis, Orbán dealt with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci: he understood that the populist Right needs “organic intellectuals” of its own, and that it needs to aspire to cultural hegemony. From his firsthand experience of communism, he knew what cultural and intellectual power the state could wield, and the urgent need for the Right’s own patronage network. So he set about building an entire ecosystem from the ground up. Aside from the Danube Institute, there is the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private university and talent incubator. Orbán’s government gave it $1.7 billion— 1% of the country’s GDP — and a satellite in Brussels, for the purpose of monitoring the beast up close. Orbánist postliberalism was becoming a globe-spanning enterprise. It was to rival goulash and the Rubik’s Cube as Hungary’s top cultural export.

“In 1989, we thought Europe was our future,” Orbán declared in 2019. “Today, we know that we are the future of Europe.” It was a tremendous weight to place upon a nation of less than 10 million. Orbán was clearly flattered by his global celebrity, and hoped, this time in vain, that it would provide some electoral advantage. Throughout his campaign, the great and the good of the international Right would come to praise him and the country he had built: winners (Meloni, Milei, Netanyahu) and losers (Mateusz Morawiecki, Liz Truss) alike. The website for “CPAC Hungary 2026” announces that, although “Brussels and Kyiv” might not like it, “Europe and the world stand with Viktor Orbán”. There was thus a pronounced globalist streak to Orbánist nationalism.

Americans, especially, would sing their encomia. The conservative intellectual Rod Dreher, a key player in the conservative Budapest scene, garlanded Orbán with the highest compliment he knows, by drawing a rather strained parallel between his life and JD Vance’s — these were the two brightest stars in the postliberal firmament. Both Orbán and Vance were country hicks, sneered at by the liberal elites: Orbán’s hometown Felcsút, apparently, is the Appalachia of the Carpathian Basin. Both managed to break into the elite, studying at Oxford and Yale respectively. Both, then, spurned the social class into which they had raised themselves: they chose rather to be loyal to the people who raised them. If this brings a manly tear to the eye, let it not be diminished by the revelation that Dreher was on the Orbán payroll: how much art and beauty, after all, has been the work of court sycophants?  

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Such, anyway, was the Budapest bacchanalia, 2010-2026. For his first order of business as prime minister, Péter Magyar will pull the plug. Already he has announced that he will investigate the state funding of MCC and CPAC. It’s not hard to imagine the Orbánist think tanks and institutes being turfed out of Budapest, much as Orbán turfed out the Soros-funded Central European University in 2018. The CEU upped sticks upriver, to Vienna; who knows where the Orbánist institutions will go, or which other European illiberal will attempt to pick up Orbán’s mantle. Slovakia seems a plausible contender; it would not be surprising to see the Postliberal International descend upon Bratislava. Prime Minister Robert Fico is rather similar to Orbán, even in his physical appearance; he supported Orbán in the election and tends to align with him within the EU, including on Russia. He might, however, now look upon Orbán as something of a cautionary tale, and consider the possibility that the ambitious and expensive intellectual project was ultimately a misfire.

Indeed, at least for the duration of the Trump administration, the intellectual Right still has a Mecca, and a money spigot, in Washington, DC. Against the glitz and glamor of the “cruel kids’ table”, we impoverished Europeans have little to offer, except for winding streets and old stone. Vance, of course, was an Orbán booster during the election, and is close to Dreher and Budapest’s postliberal circle. He undoubtedly hopes that the network which Orbán cultivated in Budapest will swing behind him, in full force, in 2028 — and indeed that, if he does become president, he can hit the ground running with friends and connections in high places in Europe. Vance had already been supplanting Orbán as the darling of the intellectual Right — and unlike Orbán, he’s a Catholic, to boot. Without being anchored in Budapest, one can imagine the old network relying more on American financial support, and becoming even more Americanized. CPAC probably gives us a hint of what this would look like in practice: more strobe lighting, more God. 

Magyar, meanwhile, is now faced with the difficult task of uprooting all that Orbán laid down. He is, as is widely observed, hardly a pin-up for liberals and Europhiles, who are cheering him only because they see him as a relative improvement. Now, as prime minister, he has to go to war against what is, in effect, an Orbánist deep state. He has to take on politically compromised and infiltrated universities. He is staring down the state broadcasters, telling them that they will not receive a penny from the taxpayer until they have restored their “public service character” and can guarantee “objective, impartial reporting”. Already he has announced his intention, in a bracingly ruthless manner, to dispatch the incumbent president, an Orbánist placeman. Even if he succeeds in all this, Orbán might not be gone for good. Trump’s comeback in 2024 will doubtless be on Magyar’s mind; as will the Right’s victory in the presidential election in Poland last year, less than two years after the liberal Donald Tusk became Prime Minister. 

Encouraged, and often handsomely remunerated, by the Orbán government, the international Right-wing intelligentsia has paid careful attention to Budapest. They have hoped to learn various lessons — about policy, tactics, and the difficult business of statecraft. But the new Hungary, Péter Magyar’s Hungary, might prove to be of interest, too. If, for example, Reform UK wins the next election in Britain, they will be met with open hostility from the universities, the civil service, the BBC, the bishops, the judges, the Lords, perhaps even the Crown. There is still much for the Right to learn in Hungary, if only they know where to look.

Perhaps it’s simpler: we’re just out the other side of the experiment with mass-media democracy, and mass-mobilization warfare. In other words, this is the West’s first fully post-liberal war. And in this new age, politicians have simply stopped feeling they need to give electorates an explanation.

The liberal order was supposed to be a global utopia of rules. Under this optimistic regime, states would avert open conflict by adhering to international norms — and even, latterly, spread the norms at gunpoint in order to globalize their adoption. Starmer’s stubborn adherence to this disintegrating raft of proceduralism has been greeted with Trumpian contempt. And perhaps we might also note that these rules are, themselves, a historical anomaly. Until the 20th century, leaders gave little thought to what ordinary people wanted, when weighing the necessity of conflict. For most of history before mass-casualty munitions, such decisions were seen as the preserve of specially educated elites.

But over the mass-broadcast age that began with radio, and continued until the digital revolution, it came to be accepted that the general public ought to have a say. In his account of the run-up to the Second World War, the historian AJP Taylor describes a dynamic in which “public opinion” became, for the first time, a meaningful factor for politicians in their decision-making, even on war. It’s not a coincidence that over the same era a new type of official communications — more colloquially, mass propaganda — also emerged, to shape “public opinion” in the desired direction.

This was genuinely necessary, for over the same industrial period, war itself also became a mass phenomenon: both mass-mobilization, and mass-casualty. If you’re going to ask all your citizens to mobilize either for combat or the war effort, you do need some form of general public consent. The climax of “total war” in this style came between 1914 and 1945: an orgy of industrialized weapons-manufacture, death, and destruction, that only ended with the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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Memelords rule the White House

By Poppy Sowerby

After this cataclysm, the world lived for decades in the comparative hush of Mutually Assured Destruction. Meanwhile, the broadcast-media legacy of “total war” entrenched a belief that electorates should be involved in any decision to fight. Especially in the USA after Vietnam and Watergate, the “third estate” came increasingly to understand itself as an indispensable component in the democratic settlement: both speaking truth to power, and at times cutting power back down to size.

In time, this also had a reciprocal effect on the way war itself came to be mediated. I vividly recall the considerable effort, after 9/11, to present the invasion of Iraq as legal and democratically mandated. By contrast, what feels strange about the current conflict in Iran is that it is just as real — real deaths, real refugees, real flames, real international economic chaos — but no one seems to have paid any attention to rules, or indeed “public opinion”, before embarking on it. And now here we are.

But perhaps this is fitting. Over the past two decades, both warfare and communications have mutated at warp speed. And one of the key characteristics of this revolution, which has happened through digital innovation, is a paradoxical mix of apparent decentralization covering real centralization. Think of the way social media “disintermediated” local newspapers in theory, in favor of “citizen journalism”, while in practice handing overall control to a handful of platforms and their oligarchs.

The same now seems to go, too, for war. Especially since the frenzy of drone innovation catalyzed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, combat has been “disintermediated” away from human-manned artillery or soldiers, toward partially or fully autonomous weapons. Since Trump’s “major combat operation” began, for example, the Gulf states surrounding Iran have undergone heavy attack by drones and guided missiles, most of which has been repelled by equally high-tech automated interceptor systems. All of this is controlled by a comparatively small battery of experts, and supplied by a small number of firms.

Meanwhile, the field of domestic war communications also feels increasingly swarm-like, computer-generated — and indifferent to interference by the masses. The White House X account broadcasts grainy explosion footage mixed with high-gloss edits drawn from video gaming, action movies, and (really) Spongebob Squarepants, adding to the sense of high-tech unreality with AI-animated “Founding Fathers” imagery. Blaze Media founder Glenn Beck, too, has trotted out his “George AI”, a CGI rendition of George Washington dressed as a tech bro and trained on data “writings from the founding era”, to explain the importance of what the White House trumpets as “peace through strength”.

This is perhaps also the context in which to understand the recent standoff between Trump and Anthropic. The CEO of the AI firm, Dario Amodei, objected to his system being deployed by the US military to power fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Trump retaliated by threatening to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”. Negotiations are ongoing; but the clear impression is of a US Department of War leaning full-tilt into the new high-tech arms race, and that will brook no dissent. Online, too, just as Amodei’s objections to the weaponization of Claude have been dismissed, so too have protests from Ben Stiller, over the use of his cinematic work for war propaganda. The White House “Epic Fury” movie edit is still live.

This indifference to older norms, and seeming preference for vibes-based comms over clear messaging, has prompted a cacophony of secondary debate. This now occupies everyone’s newsfeeds; meanwhile, the “major combat operation” rumbles on. And who knows: perhaps there really is a robust national-interest rationale for the attacks, from an American leadership perspective, and those in the know simply aren’t saying. But whatever prompted the attack, it’s clear that the broadcast-media machine is increasingly irrelevant to such decisions.

Much as heavy artillery now takes second place to nimbler, cheaper drone swarms, so has mass media been disintermediated by a maelstrom of CGI edits, AI propagandists, bot-farms, and “citizen journalism”. And perhaps that’s the point: the aim is not clear messaging but a debate so hyperreal that messaging as such is impossible. Above the din, meanwhile, the postwar fiction of “the people” having any kind of democratic say in warmaking has been quietly shelved.

In the premodern era, war was for elites, with ordinary peasants only mobilized in extremis. Of course, the consequences of war were frequently devastating for those peasants; but by and large such decisions were taken over their heads. We seem now to be approaching a post-industrial retread of the same dynamic, in which warmaking is once again an elite choice, and everyone just has to live with it.

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By Mary Harrington

Some reports are now suggesting that Trump expected a quick operation, comparable with Venezuela, and not Iran’s determination to make it a regional war. And yet networked warfare will tend in that direction: the arrest of two self-radicalized “Islamic State” fighters in New York City last Saturday, for trying to detonate a nail-bomb at a Right-wing protest, is a harbinger of the vectors by which high-tech warfare, energized by memes, is likely to metastasize.

For the internet’s other core characteristic, along with centralizing real power, is dissolving physical distance. Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have become both advertising channels and organizational tools for the global people-trafficking industry; meanwhile studies suggest that the internet’s power to connect people instantly across distance inhibits migrants’ assimilation in host countries.

Scaled up, the picture this presents is of increasingly diffuse, unassimilated, intermingled, and digitally networked populations across the globe, who hold (putting it mildly) a range of views about any given war, in any given place. In such a world, where communications are instantaneous, and populations linked more by ideology or ethno-religious affinity than geography, every battlefield is also potentially everywhere.

So we’ve exited the age of utopian globalism. But not (as Trump seemed to promise) for a return to moderate nationalism. Even if (as we all now hope) Trump is planning to end the war soon, what’s emerging as the post-liberal new normal is instead a volatile, hypermobile, high-tech and radically post-democratic form of global networked tribalism — but with sleeper cells, and autonomous suicide drones. God help us all.

And yet the problem is so much deeper than bad candidates. It’s the problem of a decrepit regime — a collection of functionaries and placeholders, who’ve reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation and are now incapable of running the world which they have made. Like all elites, they developed the habit of backscratching and logrolling. And, like all elites, they soon lost touch with the people beneath them.

That explains the striking number of destructive liberal policies, which have wreaked havoc across the West. San Francisco, a bastion of social liberalism, is so addled with homeless encampments on the streets and drug addicts snorting fentanyl in public, that even progressives have had enough. Sweden, once a by-word for social harmony, now suffers from the highest rate of death-by-shooting in Europe, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The British northern cities that powered the Industrial Revolution are plagued, in their ethnic enclaves, by cousin-marriage, honor punishments and grooming gangs. The response of all too many liberal intellectuals to these tragedies is to demand more of the policies that led to them in the first place. The triumphalism of the Nineties has been the common man’s loss.

This has provoked a growing number of intellectuals on both the Right and the Left to proclaim the death of liberalism. The most familiar argument is the Marxist one that liberalism is a ruling-class trick, and that the harsh realities of exploitation and imperialism underlie their treacly words about “freedom” and “democracy”. A more interesting, and more influential, argument is being made by the New Right — many of whom call themselves “postliberals”. They argue that liberalism proved a disaster, not because good ideas were badly applied, but because liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

In his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, the political theorist Patrick Deneen wrote: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.” Liberal regimes succeeded when they were disciplined by traditional ideas about virtue and civility. But their core belief — that we are all rights-bearing individuals, answerable primarily to ourselves — inexorably destroyed the civilizational constraints that gave it strength. Liberal individualism generates self-indulgence and anomie. Equality of opportunity produces a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with little of its noblesse oblige.

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The bulk of these postliberals are headquartered in the United States. A group of followers of Leo Strauss, based in the Claremont Institute in Southern California, relentlessly expose the faults of the “liberal regime”. Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a leading exponent of the idea of the “unitary executive”, argues that the job of the state is to promote good government rather than to protect liberty as an end in itself. The US vice-president declares himself to be a postliberal. There are so many products of the Claremont Institute in the White House, the administration, and Congress that they are fondly known as “Claremonsters”.

Postliberalism has plenty of supporters in Britain, like James Orr, a Reform advisor and Cambridge philosopher of religion, and the Reform MP, Danny Kruger, who propose a faith and flag-based conservatism as a solution to the disillusionment of modern life. Both are devotees of Roger Scruton, the late conservative intellectual, who fulfills a similar role to Leo Strauss in British postliberal circles. Far more belong to the Blue Labour tradition, like Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, John Milbank and Philip Bond. (John Gray, the most intellectually significant of this group, has retreated from postliberalism of late.)

Their critique predominates at a time when the current liberal establishment is the most decadent it’s been — when, in the words of the American historian John Patrick Diggins, “few live for liberalism, but many live off it”. This all comes at a time when the forces of illiberalism are stronger than they have been at any time since the Thirties. The world’s second-biggest economy, China, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; its biggest democracy, India, by an illiberal strongman; its most battle-tested war machine, Russia, by a man who wants to bury the liberal order; and its most important liberal power, the United States, is, at best, an uncertain friend of the liberal order that it created after the Second World War. Donald Trump is an instinctive rather than a cerebral politician, but almost all his instincts are illiberal, sometimes astonishingly so. Trump has declared, like an absolute monarchy, that the only constraint on his actions lies in his own conscience. He has not even bothered to pay lip-service to international law in his wars of choice in Venezuela and now Iran and the wider Middle East.

Yet the postliberal influence owes much more to luck than substance. They fail to address the material problems that plague the post-industrial wastelands that they excoriate: Deneen’s follow up to Why Liberalism Failed, called Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future, is notably short on workable policies. They have no answer to the question: what happens to populism when it’s undisciplined by liberal constraints? The experience of the Thirties suggests nothing good. It is time to mount a defense of liberalism before it is too late.

***

It’s impossible to defend liberalism without starting with a definition of what we are defending. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been associated with the shrinking of the role of the state when it comes to both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair produced a widely admired bourgeois-bohemian (BoBo) synthesis by combining the Thatcherite deregulation of the economy with the Sixties deregulation of morality. The strength of the postliberal argument is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.

But the BoBo synthesis is only one possible manifestation of liberalism. You can have big government liberalism as well as small government liberalism, moralizing liberalism as well as permissive liberalism. (John Maynard Keynes was no less of a liberal than Friedrich Hayek.) All are linked by three core beliefs: that society starts with the individual rather than the collective; that truth is only reached through open debate; that power is so dangerous that it must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing, and power from being constrained, is illiberal.

During its long history, liberalism has suffered from several near-death experiences, but it has always revived. It has done this by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its fundamental principles. One example is particularly germane to our current predicament — namely, New Liberalism, which emerged at a time in the late 19th century, when the laissez-faire liberalism of the Victorians risked being swept aside by the emergence of a new world of organized trade unions, mass political parties and authoritarian nation states. A group of intellectuals, such as T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas, dreamed of a liberal state — more interventionist while not sacrificing the principles of individualism and divided power. A remarkable group of New Liberal politicians followed — such as David Lloyd George, R.B. Haldane, and Winston Churchill, who revived the moribund Liberal Party and built the foundations of the welfare state. The First World War and the rise of Labour eventually led to the Liberal Party’s “strange death”, but liberal ideas were absorbed by both ascendant parties under the influence of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.

In the Twenties and Thirties, liberalism risked being stamped to death by jack-booted fascism or communism. “The liberal state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal,” proclaimed the socialist-turned-fascist Benito Mussolini. But the Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War, constructing the Iron Curtain, and remaking the world according to a new collection of liberal principles. In the Seventies, the postwar regime gave way to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis only to revive under the influence of the neoliberal revolution.

It’s understandable that people are angry with the liberal establishment and disillusioned with centrist promises. But the alternatives from both the Right and the Left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to his billionaire friends, entrenching crony capitalism and passing big tax cuts, while providing his populist base with rhetorical puff balls. He didn’t even make significant progress with his “beautiful wall”. During his second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and both postliberal and illiberal thinkers in the ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East, sending stock markets into a tailspin. Meanwhile, in Britain, Reform’s economic policies are an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and Left-wing statism.

The radical Left is even more impractical. The Green Party’s policies, so entreatingly presented by Laura Spencer, the victorious candidate in Gorton and Denton, are a JCR laundry list of wishes: spending funded by taxing billionaires, the legalization of drugs and pornography and, almost as an afterthought, nice things for the environment. Not only that, but the radical Left is also blind to the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration, and the development of parallel societies. Spencer not only brushed aside worries about immigration as “racism” but also distributed pamphlets in Urdu and extracted political capital by posturing over the war in Gaza. The noisy fight between the far Left and far Right is often a distraction from collective problems like fixing governments that require concerted effort and careful thought.

The only way forward is to reinvent liberalism just as thoroughly as previous generations of liberal reformers did to address new problems, while discarding established shibboleths if they happen to get in the way. If we fail, we will be swept aside by the radicals of the Left and Right; if we go off half-cocked, we may end up making the problem worse. The last attempt to revive the radical center was made by Emmanuel Macron, who only entrenched and deepened France’s divisions. His failure is not only the result of his divisive, vain and self-glorifying character, but — more importantly — because, as a creature of the neoliberal revolution, he focused on yesterday’s solutions, economic deregulation, rather than addressing today’s problems: the tensions between the center and the periphery, and the failure to assimilate immigrants. Liberals must be bolder and more self-critical than the Man in the Élysée. We must also be more consistent. Such a reinvention must start with three strategies: rethink, reposition, and re-articulate.

First: rethink. Today’s liberals need to break with their four-decade fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The Epstein affair should provide both a reason for such a break and a spur to self-reflection. The Epstein Files have not only exposed how many neoliberal heroes, from tech-billionaires to illustrious economists, have feet of clay, but also the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence and self-gratification that lies at the heart of the BoBo culture.

Today’s liberals must also reapply the core principles of liberalism as they encounter old sins in new forms. The tech giants are not only amassing market dominance of a sort that we haven’t seen since the robber barons, but are also using that dominance to misinform and manipulate individual citizens. Left-wing identitarians are offending the basic principles of individualism by treating people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals, even applying different selection standards to different groups, or by canceling people with what they deem to be heterodox opinions.

The biggest weakness of today’s liberals is that they have become the establishment — the heads of Oxbridge colleges, Quangos, the BBC — and they have all the attendant weakness of an establishment. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the same vigor with which the Greens and Reform challenge it, but in the name of liberal principles rather than identitarian ones. Why have the heads of universities betrayed the sacred principle of free speech? Why has the grooming-gang inquiry been bogged down in procedure and vacillation? Why is groupthink spreading in NGO circles?

Every successful reformulation of the liberal creed, from the New Liberals, through the managerial capitalism of the Forties, to the neoliberal revolution of the Eighties, has involved the sweeping away of a decadent elite and the creation of a new cadre of reformers. Today’s radical liberals must muscle aside the existing liberal establishment — that is, the Davos establishment — before the populists do it for them. Radical liberals also need to be willing to forge alliances with groups that their elders have made a career demonizing. Conservatives such as Roger Scruton turned out to be right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about the dangers of the over-concentration of economic power. Liberalism has a wonderful history of reviving itself through unexpected alliances.

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Third: re-articulate. One reason why liberals were so successful in the past is that they were so good at communicating. John Stuart Mill was a master of clarity. Lincoln wrote like an angel. Gladstone held his audiences enthralled for hours. Today’s liberals have entirely lost the art. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats, with wooden phrases about diversity being our strength taking the place of “the laws of dialectical materialism”. Eurocrats have invented their own language of “attestation” and “decommitting”. Academics write for constipated referees who hold their fates in their hands. Corporations produce bureaucratic blather. The current leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is better known for his theatrical stunts than any particular argument or opinion.

There are two reasons for this failure: being the establishment, liberals largely talk to each other rather than to the public, academics to academics and Eurocrats to Eurocrats. Being a decadent establishment, they don’t really believe what they are saying. They are repeating formulaic phrases in much the same way as Soviet bureaucrats repeated such phrases — to protect themselves from criticism and curry favor with the even more powerful. The simple fact of breaking with the establishment should be enough to take care of the dead-prose problem: once people start believing what they say, and once they start speaking to the public rather than experts, they discover the language that they need.

Once they’ve recovered their spirit, our reformed liberals need to take to the public square. Diplomats need to be willing to advance the case for open societies and religious toleration in the UN and other such forums. Politicians need to speak out more loudly against illiberal practices such as shouting down speakers in universities, persecuting people who “blaspheme” against Islam in schools, or practices such as arranged or cousin marriage.

What often passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self. But liberalism has revived from near-death experiences in the past— and it has revived precisely because liberals have rediscovered their ability to reapply their philosophy to fresh problems and put their arguments into new world. Liberalism properly conceived is the only reasonable solution to the great problems of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talents. Ignore the siren voices talking about postliberalism. Resist the superficial glamour of the twin populisms of the Left and Right. It is time to begin the patient but exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age. Centrists of the world, unite!

The task of political scientists during the 2010s was to spin a mythology in which the elites could cocoon themselves. “The extent of Russian-backed fraud means the referendum is invalid,” said one social scientist; Brexit was a “tsunami of bile” vomited up by the Murdoch press “that has downed and drowned a once great nation”, said another. All this was par for the course in Goodwin’s old milieu. In his most recent book, Bad Education, he reveals that one of his colleagues at the University of Kent gave lectures in a “Bollocks to Brexit” T-Shirt. You can hardly blame him for wanting to leave that sordid world behind.

He has left it for the no less sordid world of politics. When Goodwin, as a young scholar in the late 2000s, first embarked on his academic research into the radical Right in Britain, it was in the manner of Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees; now he is swinging from tree to tree as Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. He has been plotting his entry into electoral politics for some time. He had promised that, once he had got to 100,000 subscribers on Substack, he would launch a party of his own. It’s probably for the best that Reform snapped him up before he reached that milestone: what with “Advance”, “Reclaim” “Restore”, and “the Conservative and Unionist Party”, the last thing the British Right needs is another vanity project splitting the vote.

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Academics tend not to fare well in the political domain. A dozen years ago, when still deep in the weeds of the Right as associate professor of politics at the University of Nottingham, Goodwin co-wrote Revolt on the Right with Rob Ford. The book’s early drama involves the trials and tribulations of Alan Sked, the LSE historian who set up UKIP in the Nineties. Sked was no good at politics: he was “only interested in obscure constitutional issues, and had little grasp of how to run a campaign”. Having written several books about political campaigns, Goodwin is today at some advantage — though it will still be a tall order for Reform to win in a constituency which is over a quarter Muslim. It is presumably for this reason that he has so far toned down the strident anti-immigration views for which he has become notorious, such as his claim that people from ethnic minorities born and raised in the country were not always British.

Sometimes Goodwin’s unusual 15-year journey, from liberal political scientist to Right-wing pundit and thence to Reform politician, is presented as a Damascene conversion — or, by the more cynical among his critics, the product of audience capture, ego, or grift. His earlier academic work does, however, contain some seeds of the Substack and the GB News show that have since come to flower. Goodwin himself describes his early endeavors as having argued that “the people voting for things like Brexit had legitimate grievances over issues such as mass immigration”. His 2018 book, National Populism — co-written with his former doctoral supervisor, Roger Eatwell — did not shy away from addressing those “legitimate grievances”, and neither did his public interventions around that time, including for UnHerd. That he had some sympathy with the grievances of his subjects was sensed, in fact, rather earlier, by the BNP’s Eddy Butler, who wrote in 2011 that the young scholar might have “an element of empathy with [our] aims if not the means”. “Perhaps,” he conjectured, “the hours of interviews he has undertaken has had a Stockholm syndrome effect.”

Largely on the basis of conversations with Butler and his ilk, Goodwin has for a very long time been banging the drum — or sounding the alarm — that there exists in Britain far broader support for the radical Right than the elites and political scientists would wish to think. Already in his first major book, New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party (2011), one can sense his frustration at the complacency of other political analysts, who believed that “extreme Right parties like the BNP will never attract and sustain mass support”. There existed, for parties on the radical Right ranging from the extreme BNP to the more mainstream UKIP, a natural constituency of “angry white men”. Goodwin has been consistent, throughout his career, that this constituency could not be easily ignored.

Notwithstanding this degree of consistency, the younger Goodwin certainly cut a different figure in the public sphere from the one he cuts now. He was happy, for a time, to add his voice to the elite chorus. In 2013, during the Cameron era, he argued in the New Statesman that UKIP’s popularity had little to do with immigration concerns after all, and that everyone in the country would be happier if we had simply stopped talking about the subject altogether. He would surely include his past self in the “elite failure” which was in his view responsible for the riots of summer 2024.

Likewise, where now he paints a gloomy picture of demographics and integration, his earlier work tended to sound the hopeful note that social cohesion and tolerance would triumph. The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (2010) — another collaboration with Eatwell, and one markedly different from National Populism — ends with a point about “the football” that prefigures the preoccupations of the Southgate Era: “Squadloads of young fans play soccer games on their Xboxes and PlayStations which feature the slogan ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Soccer’, and they are the future.” The presence of black players in the England team seemed a sure sign that liberal multiculturalism would win the day, and that the natural constituency of the populist Right would die out eventually. The “angry white men”, the “losers of modernization”, would stay forever in their place: a “quiet revolution” in attitudes about immigration and diversity would leave them as yesterday’s men.

Goodwin’s stated positions were elite ones then, and in a certain sense they remained so. You would hardly know it from all the criticism lobbed at him from the sequestered and low-powered faculties of sociology and political science at Britain’s middling universities, but his interpretation of Brexit, set out immediately after the referendum, has more or less dominated discussion and steered policy for the past 10 years. His analysis tended, at least initially, to devote more attention to the economic and cultural depression of Britain’s “Left Behind” than to any specific concerns over immigration — and this, in essence, was the logic that allowed Boris Johnson to combine his “Levelling Up” agenda with unprecedented levels of immigration. Indeed, there is a moment in Values, Voice and Virtue, his 2023 polemic against the “new elite” that drove the country into the ground, when Goodwin sheepishly admits that the true meaning of Brexit — that it was, in essence, a scream of the “Left Behind” — had been grasped by Theresa May and Nick Timothy in the damp squib campaign of 2017.

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Goodwin’s books are markedly Blue Labour in places, with all the anti-Thatcherism and anti-liberalism that this implies. Values, Voice and Virtue contains some praise for Peter Shore, even Tony Benn, and trots out the well-worn Lord Glasman narrative about how the socially-liberal Blairites — the lanyard classes — betrayed Labour’s working-class base. Goodwin, like Glasman, describes himself as economically Left and culturally Right. He will want Reform to pursue this political sweet spot, and to realize what he has long prophesied as the “great realignment” — the potent combination of social conservatism with economic interventionism. That alignment was supposed to occur with Brexit, and then it was supposed to occur with Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019. These, in Goodwin’s view, were two false starts, two wasted opportunities — the latter, with the “Boriswave”, amounting even to betrayal.

Will Reform, with Goodwin’s assistance, at last bring the great realignment to fruition? It seems quite likely that he will once again be disappointed. Nigel Farage is on the economic Right, and Zia Yusuf even more so. As are all the recent arrivals from the Conservative Party, with the exception of Danny Kruger. The presence of such people and ideas in the Reform coalition — low tax, small state — is something that Goodwin’s model of politics, with the “great realignment” as its logical terminus, has always struggled to accommodate. One of those interviewed in Revolt on the Right is John, a 64-year-old factory-worker from Nottingham; he voted for the Tories under “Maggie”, shifted to Labour after she resigned, came close to voting BNP in 2005, and backed UKIP in the EU elections in 2009. Goodwin (and Ford) used this example to substantiate what is in effect a “postliberal” theory of modern British politics, to tell a certain story about the “Left Behind” and the “losers of modernization”. Does it not matter, here, that John is a Thatcherite?

Clearly Goodwin believes that Reform’s current popularity is the product of material grievances on the ground; clearly, too, he thinks those grievances have much more to do with immigration than he used to. But he also knows, to quote from an article he wrote when he was 26-years old, that parties have the power to “influence their own destiny”, and that their fortunes depend as much on “organization, personnel, and propaganda” as to the conditions that push and pull ordinary voters in various directions. For someone with considerable ambition, or an appetite for power, this would quite naturally provide a strong incentive to quit merely observing political trends and to enter the fray in order to shape them. “Many people”, he says at the end of Values, Voice and Virtue, are “searching for a radical alternative… the only question that remains is what form this radical alternative will take and when it will arrive”. This, really, is how all his books have concluded, even the ones he wrote back when he was cooped up in the Ivory Tower. He used to have to go into the field to see what form it would take. Now, he can fancy himself in the mirror instead.

It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colorful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

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Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilize reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavors of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalized liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

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As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalization, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanized nations on Earth, and the one which urbanized earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

In this respect, at least, I was a class traitor: I didn’t much like The White Lotus. Despite some deft observations, it wore its moralizing too heavily and seemed a little hackneyed: rich white people behaving like monsters once again, blind to the ways in which they were instrumentalizing underpaid ethnic servants. Or maybe it was just too close to the bone — what else was lockdown for the better-off among us but a kind of holiday from real life, being waited upon by harried immigrants? Either way, in my work life there were already lots of white people telling me about the problematic toxicity of other white people, and I felt in no mood to be hectored on my nights off.

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Five years on, those days are well behind us. The wave of white-on-white verbal knife crime seems to be in abeyance too, though the delivery drivers are still around. White Lotus 2, a sex farce set in a Sicilian hotel, has been and gone, and the third series is onscreen. Now five episodes in, creator Mike White has dropped both the cruder farcical elements and the facile takeaways, and given us something more subtle and intriguing. And his vacation reading in between shows seems to have included a lot of Michel Houellebecq.

The most obvious connection between White Lotus 3 and France’s famous post-liberal Cassandra figure is Platform, his satirical take on Western tourism of various toxic kinds. Like the novel, the series focuses on the holiday industry in Thailand, and both stories contain a gun attack on cowering guests at a luxury resort. There are lots of other suggestive references: bald, pot-bellied men wanly predating on cheerful, young Thai women; parodically docile, beatifically smiling hotel workers, throwing the miserable moral dissolution of visiting tourists into even starker relief; the tourist world merging with a criminal one at the edges; and even a lubricious Québécois prostitute who is quite possibly a tribute to Platform’s most memorably sex-positive character, Valerie, mown down by Islamic terrorists at the end of the book.

As in Houellebecq’s world, having destroyed nearly every form of unsought association with other people, rich visitors nominally in search of “wellness” at the White Lotus pay for simulacra: paid massages instead of loving caresses; fake religion through reiki, yoga, and dabbling in Buddhism; a veneer of sociability managed by drinking constantly and swallowing pills. But equally, there is little overt judgment, and the consumer in search of entertainment gets to vicariously enjoy the fruits of hyperliberalism as well as its poisons. In Platform, readers can get cheap thrills from the prolonged descriptions of transactional sex. In White Lotus 3, endorphins are similarly stimulated by all the lingering shots of luxurious interiors and glittering beaches. When the action shifts to more poverty-stricken locations, the pain of transition is visceral.

And of course, as on holiday, the greatest pleasure is eavesdropping on other people’s dysfunctional relationships. One particularly delicious dramatic grouping involves three “close” female friends on a trip of a lifetime, nimbly shifting patterns of allegiance and attack depending on whoever has just left the room. But the most compelling parallel storylines involve a rich Southern family called the Ratliffs, and a very Houellebecqian couple: Rick, a seedy, aging drifter, and Chelsea, the upbeat, young, hippy girlfriend from whom Rick is constantly trying to escape.

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So far in the series, each of these subplots has produced a dramatic moment much discussed on social media (I therefore disclaim any responsibility for the spoilers). In the first, there is an incestuous kiss between two male members of the Ratliff family. In the second, we witness a monologue from a friend of Rick’s about autogynephilia. In their own way these scenes suggest that, once social dislocation gets a grip for good, basic human urges for love and connection are bound to run anarchically amok.

The proximate cause of the incestuous kiss between the teenage Ratliff boys is drugs and the excitement of a Thai festival, at which they are getting high along with Chelsea and the Québécois sexpot. The distal cause, however, is that the family patriarch has decided they should all put their phones away and connect properly with each other on vacation. (Even more hilariously, this is just an excuse — he’s really trying to avoid his family seeing some shameful news about him on the internet.) Shorn of the usual crutches of internet porn and scrolling, the bored older brother makes it his mission to get his younger sibling laid, feeding him protein shakes to buff up his puny body and render him more attractive to women. All the unexpected mental attention backfires, and the younger brother starts lusting after his newfound mentor instead — all in all, a terrifying warning for any parent considering reducing their offspring’s screentime.

The conversation about autogynephilia, meanwhile, happens at a Bangkok bar. Rick has met up with an old friend from back home, who explains to him he is now off the booze after a midlife crisis. In Thailand with “money, no attachments, and nothing to do”, he claims to have become “insatiable” for “Asian girls”. “After about a thousand nights like that, I started wondering, where am I going with this? Why do I feel the need to fuck all these women? What is desire? … Maybe … maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls… you know?” Rick doesn’t. The friend specifies: “I got it into my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked … by me, and to feel that”. Adventures wearing lingerie and perfume followed, as did being “railed” by guys that looked a bit like him. “Then I got addicted to that … and at the same time I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing, and I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me, and I’d think ‘I am her, and I’m fucking me’.”

In recent years, some of us have become more familiar with the narcissistic spiral that is a man becoming aroused at the idea of himself as a woman, and especially since it often requires the nearby presence of actual women as props to keep the fantasy going. But rarely have we seen the libidinal hall of mirrors described so boldly and accurately on camera; and nor perhaps the yearning for spiritual transformation around which it skirts, so to speak. “Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor … am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” the friend asks. Eventually, he says, he gave up on such deep metaphysical questions and “got into Buddhism” instead.

Writing Platform in 2001, and describing scenes of Islamic terrorism in tourist spots known for hedonism, Houellebecq foresaw a hyperliberal future and yet few believed him. The Bali bombings happened only a year later. Watching White Lotus 3, you sometimes also get a disturbing premonition of imminent, barely suspected social hazards lurking under present habits and especially those supercharged during lockdown: adolescents with “no attachments and nothing to do”, left to their own devices, quite literally; an increasingly warped cultural sensibility that reduces whole people to collections of breasts, genitals, and protein-amped biceps; and the dilution of intra-familial bonds, until people living in the same house barely know what love is supposed to look like anymore.

Traditionally when on vacation, you get a chance to step out of the quotidian and see things more clearly — or so the platitude goes. The characters in White Lotus 3 tend to suggest otherwise. Still, we viewers in the real world can keep our eyes open to the unfolding effects of hyperliberalism, though it remains unclear whether we can do anything other than helplessly watch.

But all these arguments have now been decisively won, so swiftly and totally that it is apparently difficult for liberals to remember that they ever held different views, let alone denounced the ones they now profess.

Yet while the world has moved beyond economic liberalism, leftover liberals still run the West. Like a post-Communist state where the old nomenklatura, having hurriedly adopted the mantle of liberal capitalists, still run the show, a great, historic revolution has occurred but the same people remain in charge, having suffered no retribution for the catastrophic mistakes their failed idealism brought in tow. A massive clear-out is long overdue: and no more absurd an illustration can be found of the immovable fatberg blocking our political future, the sheer ideological inertia preventing reform, than Britain’s failing water companies.

The failed status quo our politicians contort themselves to defend, like some ancient pillar of our constitution, was itself a bold act of political change. Thatcher’s privatisation of the national water supply was a course of action so daringly radical, so intuitively wrongheaded that only one other nation on earth, Pinochet’s Chile, took the same path. As in so many other aspects of national life, Britain carried out a reckless experiment on itself which failed. Like so much else of Westminster’s tinkering with a country which in retrospect seems to have functioned perfectly well, the failure was so disastrous that the error cannot be admitted, let alone rectified.

The results fulfilled none of the stated aims of privatisation: competition among providers did not lower costs or improve services, as instead the spoils were portioned out among regional monopolies; no new infrastructure was built, as profits were extracted as dividends, with crippling new debt added on top; precious national resources, whether the public’s wealth or Britain’s famously over-abundant supply of water, were squandered. Yet if the water supply systems of every other country in the world provide insufficient comparison, we possess a control group within our own borders, studiously ignored by London commentators. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, water remained under state control: bills are lower (in Northern Ireland, non-existent for domestic users), infrastructure is not notably worse, and taxpayers have not been saddled with extravagant debt purely to pay out dividends.

In this sense, the oft-made liberal claim that Britain urgently needs to decolonise itself may be correct, though not in the way its adherents think. Exploiting a country’s resources and extracting the wealth of its people solely for the purpose of enriching foreign shareholders is how you run an unloved colony, not a nation. It is striking that it is only England, the submerged nation where Westminster’s writ runs unchallenged, with no viable nationalist independence movement to force the central government to keep voters relatively happy, that has been forced to submit itself to looting by the water companies. That it is Thames Water, whose turbid assets flow past the Palace of Westminster itself, which appears closest to collapse is surely no accident: it is the richest portion of the colony that was latched onto first and most tightly, and was thus the first to be sucked dry. In Britain, just as all distances are measured from Charing Cross, dysfunction radiates out from the centre. The aim of any form of radical politics must surely be, while preserving the Union, to find a way to liberate Britain from Westminster, and from the reliably servile comprador class that scurries along its endless corridors, looking for unguarded family silver to sell.

After all, no voter would actively choose the economic model we have. But as Thames Water’s looming collapse reminds us, we are not governed according to our political desires, instead we are ruled through absolute and open disregard for the popular will. As a recent YouGov poll shows, 69% of the British public, including 66% of Conservative voters, believe the water supply should be run as a public utility, while just 8% believe that things should remain as they are. Like renationalising the railways, a policy which 67% support, bringing water back into public ownership would be wildly popular, yet is viewed with as much distaste by our ruling caste as public hanging (which would, it must be said, also be fairly popular). Yet as the urgent attempt to find some last-ditch alternative to renationalisation shows, both parties still cower in fear from granting the electorate its desires. Viewed objectively, the function of Westminster politicians is not to deliver the policies that voters want, but to frustrate them. A Britain that reflected the majority politics, both Right and Left, of its people, would be a very different and far more liveable country: this should be the postliberal horizon.

Even as British postliberals flirt with a poorly-defined national conservatism, it is the Labour Left pushing tangible improvements to the common good, even if its experimental progressivism makes it an enemy in the cultural sphere. If the Conservatives are unable to conserve anything of value, Labour may at least, through recalibrating the nation’s economy around the now-atrophied power of the state, achieve conservative ends. Family life would be better served by increasing pay, by building houses, and by widening access to childcare than by mocking the latest progressive culture war innovation on Twitter. On home ownership, fearful of the state they were elected to manage, conservative intellectuals provide timid, stuttering suggestions, tinkering at the edges of policy: what if we built nicer-looking houses, or devised a complicated system of street votes so local planning committees wouldn’t object to new development? Instead, Labour proposes to cut this self-imposed Gordian knot through the simple expedient of the state buying land cheaply, relaxing planning restrictions and building houses, just as a Conservative party that knew how to win elections used to do.

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Effectively a conservative variant of socialism, postliberalism has always struggled to reconcile the two halves of its worldview: the post-industrial working class is, in truth, significantly less socially conservative than the tweedy intellectuals professing to speak for them. Equally, the Left’s suspicion that postliberals will always be distracted from pursuing the economics of the common good by shallow nods at social conservatism is often more accurate than we would prefer to think. Yet by fundamentally rejecting the narrow parameters of the liberal worldview, it is afforded a welcome degree of detachment from the rounds of partisan politics: with no particular loyalty to either viable party, postliberals can flit between whichever promises to implement the greater part of its ideal programme. Yet while its synthesis of economic radicalism and social conservatism may double the chance of at least some of its demands being implemented by one of the two Westminster factions, it also offers twice the opportunity for disappointment.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

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A few years ago, I declared that the Conservative party represented the best hope for postliberal governance: back in 2021, it really did seem that “the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged”, a party “already making postliberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial North”, so that “whether we like it or not, postliberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did 40 years ago”. As events proved, I was profoundly mistaken.

Since 2019, postliberal intellectuals have been given to loudly claiming that it is easier for the Right to move Left on economics than for the Left to move Right on culture: but the Conservative party’s public suicide has dramatically revealed the flaw at the heart of this analysis. Just because a particular course of action is the easiest to follow, the one that will be most warmly rewarded by voters, does not mean that our politicians will do it, even in our notional democracy. Through its destructive decades-long love affair with economic liberalism, the Conservative party entirely burned through the foundations of conservatism, rooting up its future voting base like noxious weeds. Sometimes the dead hand of ideology is just too strong, strangling even the most basic instinct for self-preservation as it pulls a party, and a nation into the grave.

The Conservative party can be safely written off for now as a spent force: the current overriding danger is that Labour will fail in turn, and for the same reasons: its leadership also still in thrall to the same dead ideology and the tiny minority of voters who still adhere to it. If anything can rival the uselessness of a Conservative party that conserves nothing, it is a Labour party too timid on the economy to save Britain from its downward, perhaps terminal spiral.

A Labour party already watering down its most ambitious economic pledges serves no purpose at all: the party’s sole appeal is its willingness to harness the power of the state to productive ends. Labour’s cautious retreat from offering free childcare, its delicate dance to avoid renationalising rail and energy at the time of greatest political opportunity in decades does not bode well for Starmer’s prospects as a bold reformer. Who is he trying to win over? When even the Times, the nation’s arbiter of boring status quo centrism, can run leaders lambasting the failure of privatised water, when, even the Reform party can offer a more convincing path towards renationalisation than Labour, something is going terribly wrong with Starmer’s vision. The political stars have aligned, the nation is in agreement: for him to squander this opportunity casts doubt on Starmer’s fitness for leadership, and on the idea of Labour providing a meaningful alternative to Tory dysfunction at all. As Labour’s exiled king Jeremy Corbyn observes with all the piercing clarity of the simple-minded, “It’s really not that complicated: stop bailing out private companies and bring our water into public ownership instead.”

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Indeed, through bringing about the wave of renationalisation voters from both parties desire, a Corbyn government in 2019 would perhaps have achieved a greater postliberal synthesis than the futile Johnson show delivered. A Corbyn government that invested in state capacity a whole parliament ago may perhaps have arrested the decline sooner, and stolen a march on the new world economic consensus. Through ramping up state direction of the economy to compete in a world whose economic order has been reshaped by China, and by the looming need to replace fossil fuels and the infrastructure grid underwriting modern life which depends on them, the rest of the world is already moving towards something approaching war economies: only Britain remains the last holdout, the unchanging hermit kingdom of extractive, borderless neoliberalism.

No other developed country would permit its wealth and resources to be looted by foreign investors, or its utilities to be run by foreign states. Britain’s future is not bright: as the global situation deteriorates, the decisions made in the next few parliaments may be all that staves off collapse. Like Chekhov’s gun, in Britain the power of the state is an unused weapon waiting to be wielded: the only question is who will seize it first, and to what ends. With the Conservatives eliminated as an option by their own record of governance, it is the decisions made now by Labour that will determine the nation’s course in the decades to come.

We might wish Labour were led by someone bolder, but for now Starmer is there all there is: his stance on how to handle Thames Water is thus the first great test of our inevitable government-in-waiting. The pressure from the Labour Left to commit the party to renationalising water should therefore be actively supported by those of our political tribe: not only is it desirable in itself, and supported by the vast majority of voters, but it will finally mark the symbolic death of Britain’s old, failed order. And if Labour should fail too, following the Conservatives into political oblivion, at least then may come the time of real politics. Like the shifting establishment stance towards globalisation, when the change comes, it will be swift and total: in the coming waves of crisis lie political opportunities just waiting to be seized.

In King Charles, we have a post-liberal monarch who furiously rejects the marketisation of ever more aspects of human life. There are, in his writings, elements of the “Tietjens Toryism” of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, whereby the paternalistic concern of the central character, the “last surviving Tory”, for social harmony and widespread prosperity delineate the point at which “the High Toryism of Tietjens [meets] the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left”.

Yet on the other, baleful side of the ledger, we have been foisted with a career politician who seems to view the laziest Left-wing caricatures of Toryism as a political roadmap: a pure zealot of unrestrained capital with no vision of the good beyond libertarian think tank pamphlets and a burning faith in the might and power of the market’s invisible hand. Alas, Truss’s faith in the markets is not rewarded by the markets’ faith in her: the invisible hand has already reached down to flick her from the history books.

Her plan for massive borrowing relied on the faith of international opinion that it would be amply repaid by her simultaneous tax cuts for Britain’s very richest, and an economic boom occasioned by vague promises of future reforms. To pay for her budget, and for its unintended consequences, the Government now looks set to slash spending on the infrastructure and research and development projects on which long-term prosperity depends. Unfortunately for Truss and for the country, the international markets, the IMF, the Bank of England, and those notorious Left-wing radicals the Financial Times and the Economist recoiled in horror. When even the Telegraph warns that the ”Peronist policies” of a “a careless, ideological government” set on “a course of sheer madness” put “this country in serious jeopardy”, we can be certain that we are in a new era. There are fashions in economics as in all things; outside the Conservative party, the rest of the world has firmly rejected the Seventies dogmas that brought Britain decades of stagnation and underinvestment — even in a far rosier international climate than the one we currently inhabit.

It is like the story of The Monkey’s Paw: after so long demanding a Conservative leader committed to bold and decisive action, the one the party chose was a suicide bomber. The only questions now, surely, are how much harm she can cause the country in the time remaining, and whether she will bring down the Conservative party with her. Because Truss forgot that the British public also has a vote. Dreading an economic winter harder than anyone has previously experienced, the voting public looks to have decisively rejected Trussonomics, and will deliver Labour the greatest parliamentary majority in British political history. The story of the past few years, from Brexit to the 2019 Conservative landslide, and now Labour’s coming victory, is of a British public desirous of radical change, and of a political class struggling to comprehend what this means, let alone how to deliver it. The Conservatives were elected on a simple mandate to reform Britain’s failing economic model and slash our current, record-high levels of immigration; instead, Truss is doubling down on both.

It is a matter of great, cosmic irony that in the same week Truss lost the Red Wall with a platform encapsulating everything the Brexit vote was against, Keir Starmer won it back with a postliberal message, centred on direct investment in state capacity, public services and home ownership through the simplest supply side reform, housebuilding. The libertarian think tanks who so gleefully rushed to take ownership of her budget when it was announced, must now take ownership of the results: they have destroyed the party they have hollowed out and stripped of any vestiges of Tory thinking.

Though a disaster for the Conservative party, the mini-budget was, apparently, a triumph for the IEA, the free-market think tank which has long advanced this ideology — as well as having groomed Truss and Kwarteng. And as the party has been warned time and time again, what they have cooked up is as repellent to ordinary voters as it is to traditionalist Tories.

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The ideologues have crashed Britain, and the Conservative party, into a cliff, and the party now requires time out of office to relearn Toryism from first principles, shorn of the libertarian accretions that have driven it to chaos and the edge of extinction. The wreckers must be entirely driven out from British conservatism, in whose stolen clothes they have made mischief for far too long. But until then, there is no Tory case for voting for the Conservative party. A party that puts its own short-term survival above the national interest has no business running a country.

It is the tragic irony of British conservatism in 2022 that just as the only reason to now vote Tory is to own the Cons (like the IEA’s Julian Jessop and Kristian Niemitz welcoming Truss’s push for massively increased immigration), so does the only means of restraining the self-destructive zealotry of the economic liberals now seem to lie within the Labour Party. Some of the warmest responses to Starmer’s conference speech, in which he warned that “decline is not inevitable” and promised that the Labour Party is now the party of reindustrialisation, national self-reliance, home ownership and support for ordinary people came from Tory commentators aghast at Truss’s radical liberal vision.

It is those Tories representing the party’s paternalist social conscience who have been most struck by the contrast between Truss’s wrecking ball and Starmer’s softly postliberal vision. For as Gavin Rice of the Conservative Centre for Social Justice think tank observes, “Starmer just laid out a postliberal Brexit: controlled immigration, pride in community, democratic control, buying, making and selling more in Britain and the potential of active government. Tories shouldn’t be allowing them to control this turf.” But this is the path they chose, and when the voters punish for them for it, the party only has itself to blame.

It is remarkable to observe that Truss’s mentors in the IEA still found time to release a paper — Taking Liberties: Why postliberals are wrong about personal freedom, by Jamie Whyte — denouncing the rival postliberal trend in conservative thought: the very same political philosophy whose faintest echoes have rewarded Labour with the prospect of a historic landslide. The paper did not gain much traction, true: it was a poorly argued mishmash of philosophical sophistry against an amalgamated strawman version of very distinct political tendencies. But that they thought it necessary to release is in itself indicative of where the intellectual energy now lies within conservatism, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Yet the paper presents a fascinating insight into the worldview of a crankish doctrine the British public so visibly and overwhelmingly rejects. Throughout, the author rejects any notion of a common good, the essential building block of both modern postliberalism and traditional Toryism, associating the idea with compulsion at the hands of the state. So, the author writes, postliberals “believe politicians should take a view about the good life – specifically, the postliberals’ traditionalist view – and use the powers of the state to make sure that people live it”, in what he describes as a “proposed way-of life authoritarianism”, and a “regime in which politicians use state power to make them live ‘the good life’”.

To reach this conclusion, the author conflates the two very different American and British postliberal strands of thought, currently at war with each other through a heated exchange of open letters in the American Conservative. He adopts the framing of the harder-edged, American postliberalism’s vision of the Catholic-administrative state to condemn British postliberalism, which is in truth a conservative variant of socialism, infused with a traditionalist Tory discomfort with modernity, and drawn from our nation’s distinct historical path. British Postliberals, like other social democrats, do indeed believe that the nation’s good as well as prosperity would be enhanced if everyone were to be given support by the state to settle down, form families and own their own homes: this is, or was, a very basic tenet of Toryism, too. But this is quite a different thing from state compulsion: there will be no roaming squads of tweed-jacketed postliberals forcing otherwise happy singletons to marry, and frogmarching them into suburban semis.

But then, even this very basic expression of the common good is a vision of hell to the radical IEA liberal, who warns that “policies that cause more people to marry, perhaps by way of tax incentives, can still harm them. For being in a good and sound marriage involves forgoing other sources of happiness. John might also gain happiness from travelling the world alone” or “from seducing strangers at nightclubs”. Indeed he might. Yet reordering the British economy, and the lives and prosperity of the British people, around our hypothetical John’s mission of global seduction is simply not conservatism in any form, and a party that can prioritise this philosophy over the national good fully deserves the disaster coming its way.

But even as the paper asserts that the postliberal claim that liberalism leads to social atomisation and the construction of obstacles to the formation of family life is false, it argues against state support for those who wish to do so, in the seeming belief that helping those who wish for a secure and settled domesticity to attain it will somehow impinge on John’s absolute freedom. We should be clear: a postliberal government would not prevent John, or other liberals, doing as they wished with their own lives; it would instead simply support those who wished for the very basic goods of home ownership and domestic comfort and security to attain them. Yet even this is apparently anathema to the IEA, and we must now sadly assume, to our own notionally conservative government.

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Coercion by global market forces is, simply, no liberation. It is this exact vision, of the entirety of social life from the family to the nation being subject to and torn apart by the destructive power of the unrestrained market, that postliberals as well as British voters reject; and it is precisely this outcome which liberals in their purest form, like Truss and the think tanks which formed her worldview, try to summon into being through ever more painful rites of destruction and self-sacrifice. If earthly salvation has not yet been attained, then ever more of what society holds good must be hurled onto the flames: this is neither politics nor economics, but the frustrated religious impulse that drives all liberalism.

Like communists, who wave away the misery and destruction every attempt to apply their vision in practice has so far entailed, free market fundamentalists like Truss and the think tanks around her assert that the only problem with their failed vision is that it has never yet been properly applied. Instead, guided by Tory pragmatism, postliberalism rejects fantastical visions of the future in favour of a future partly shaped by the forms of social and economic life that existed before capitalism: a world which was far from perfect, but whose failings are known and therefore capable of being effectively ameliorated.

But as it stands, there is no home for postliberal Tories, always wary of the free market as a force destructive to tradition and social order, in the Conservative party that now exists: instead, we must be grateful that when given free rein, the libertarians have discredited their doctrine as electoral poison in a few short and tumultuous days. Just like the state funeral, Truss’s accession was itself a great symbolic moment. It marked the nadir of Tietjens Toryism as a philosophical tradition within the Conservative party, and the total victory of a radical form of economic liberalism which, like an alchemist turning gold into lead, has transmuted 2019’s electoral landslide into disaster. If any Tory case can be made for Truss, it is a purely accelerationist one: that the catastrophe she has brought in tow may finally exorcise Thatcher’s unquiet ghost, and allow the party — or whatever form of conservative politics succeeds the party that put her into power against so many warnings — to reflect upon what Toryism actually means.

But until then, it is Starmer’s Labour, which learned the lessons of Brexit and 2019, that has rejected radical economic liberalism and pledged to deliver the common good. Certainly, there is still space for him to lose: just as the Conservatives failed to restrain their economic liberal extremists, so must Starmer restrain the extremist social liberals in Labour’s ranks whose views the ordinary voter deems equally strange and repulsive. But on basic bread and butter policy, the contrast between a Labour party pledging to build more homes, and a Conservative government about to lose many Britons the homes they already own is absolute.

If they achieve just this one aim, let alone their promises to deliver a Brexit that works for the entire country, or to return manufacturing capacity to British shores through state investment, then Labour deserves to win the landslide victory the Conservatives chose to squander. In choosing Truss, the Conservative party chose to make the Tory case for Labour.

“The radical right is the true ‘other’ in our culture. Unlike the radical left, its authors are not found in university curricula, and sometimes not even in university libraries,” writes Rose, a scholar of modern religious thought. “We picture them in cabins in Idaho broadcasting over shortwave radio, not as scholars or artists who can read Sanskrit.” But this is a false image. Whether one supports or loathes their ideas, many such thinkers are indeed deeply erudite, devoting their lives to studying the human condition as they see it.

Reading A World After Liberalism, another radical-Right thinker came to my mind, a contemporary figure marginal to the public yet boasting a devoted following online: the pseudonymous online poster and author “Bronze Age Pervert”. Known as BAP for short, he has built a committed fan base of young men — including junior staffers in the Trump White House — and drawn the attention of some iconoclastic conservative intellectuals.

After reading Rose’s book, I decided to finally pick up Bronze Age Mindset, BAP’s self-published manifesto from 2018. I wanted to get a sense of the prospects of the radical Right in its fight with liberalism today. But on a personal note, I also wanted to see what it was that so many people, including young men of colour I know, find so radicalising about the book.

At its core, Bronze Age Mindset is about the promotion of masculine strength and virtue as a means of bringing about political change. The world at present, according to its author, is sunk in a form of decentralised tyranny, ruled over by “bugmen” (a rough approximation of the Nietzschean “Last Man”) as well as matriarchal tyrants empowered by feminism and democracy. Beauty has been effaced from human society and the natural world is being despoiled.

The hypocritical supporter of liberalism, a physical weakling with a bad conscience, “pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned out and beautiful”. In a style influenced by the norms of online debate, BAP punctuates each of his philosophical arguments with insults, blaming “obese high-fructose-corn-syrup-guzzling beasts” for suppressing masculine energy and acting as bad stewards of Earth’s natural treasures.

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America must optimise or collapse

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In the classical world, of which BAP is enamoured, he argues that a strong man could live to his full demonic potential. But under our modern Leviathan, no such greatness is possible. The liberal order suppresses the masculine will to power, using the dead weight of democracy to crush the true male elite of every Western society. In this degradation of strong men lies the degradation of society as whole. Over time, the entire culture of a liberal society becomes a gigantic monument to slave morality, exalting weakness and infirmity as its highest values. Falling deeper and deeper into decay, liberal civilisation simply lies prone for an external force to eventually deliver it the coup de grâce.

Bronze Age Mindset is funny and even surprisingly sentimental at times. In one memorably zany passage, it asks the reader to imagine a version of Mitt Romney “capable of acting like he looks” — one who becomes a piratical man of adventure who attempts to engineer a coup in the United States, sleeps with Vladimir Putin’s wife, and then dies fighting the US empire alongside wild tribesmen in Afghanistan. The thought-experiment is intended to make a serious point about a connection between physical ability and the will to power that has been lost in the modern world.

The book alternates between extreme disdain for people of other cultures and races and sympathy or even admiration for them; what’s constant is his extreme anti-feminism, which I suspect explains much of his appeal to young men. This is a book avowedly written by and for men, aimed at calling them to a particular conception of themselves and their role in the world. From an intellectual standpoint, simply accusing his work of being racist or misogynist does no good, even if those terms would probably stick in a public debate, because BAP self-consciously writes from the pre-liberal perspective of classical civilisation, where such terms had no meaning.

A more interesting question is whether BAP’s basic belief — that a resurgent masculinity will inevitably rise up and shatter the foundations of liberal society — makes sense in the 21st century. Upon reading him, one must conclude that it doesn’t. Trapped in its nostalgia for the “Bronze Age”, the book fails to take into account the most important variable driving human affairs: technology.

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Welcome to fully automated luxury gnosticism

By Mary Harrington

In the past, as Bronze Age Mindset notes with relish, physical strength and masculine will were primary determinants of political outcomes. But in the modern world, the link between physical prowess and the ability to exercise power has been severed. No great strength or courage is required to press the fire button on a Reaper drone, the signature weapon of the 21st century. No masculine virtue will be needed to operate the armed ground-based robots of the near future. Even a basic unwillingness to take life can be overcome with technology that conceals the humanity of those targeted, or with new weapons that kill autonomously without the need for human input.

But the decline of men’s role in the world goes deeper than warfare. Even now, progressives are consciously planning for a future where men’s most basic procreative functions can be made obsolete through genetic engineering. Like the religious holdouts in Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, I find such a possibility unsettling, and I expect that many others around the world will similarly recoil. But our discomfort will not stop the march of technology. BAP makes no attempt to grapple with any of these dynamics. He is an autodidactic student of history with so much contempt for the present that he barely even analyses it.

Bronze Age Mindset draws haphazardly from fields as diverse as environmental biology, political history, zoology, occultism, and theology, while evincing an underwhelming commitment to intellectual rigour. This is a book of “exhortation”, BAP tells his readers up front, which is clearly true. He ends his work with a call for revolution against the global Leviathan followed by an “era of high piracy” led by physically powerful and ruthless men.

BAP is roughly the white male equivalent of an African-American “hotep”, who uses a pick-and-choose version of ancient and modern history to further his primarily goal of boosting the morale of disillusioned young men in his target constituency. Though his book overwhelms the reader with superficially impressive facts and arguments, I found that many of them, upon closer inspection, were wildly reductive or simply untrue. On topics in religion and sociology with which I happened to be familiar, I came away mystified by many of his claims.

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Is the New Right a grift?

By Park MacDougald

The Leviathan opposed by BAP and the older radical-Right thinkers profiled by Rose is showing signs of senescence. Unlike in the late Soviet Union, however, today there is no plausible replacement on the horizon. Even Rome stumbled onwards for hundreds of years after Nero.

But while the thinkers of the radical Right may not pose a serious threat to liberalism, studying them does offer a tangible benefit: a deeper understanding of the human condition. The cult popularity of a book like Bronze Age Mindset, which calls young men back to an atavistic fantasy of themselves, also helps us see how adrift many of them feel in the modern world. The radical Right is not a movement to flirt with. But studying its thinkers can help us see the fault lines that exist deep beneath the world that we take for granted.