The rising tide of nationalism around the world has left the old-standing liberal order in a precarious position. Today, competing geopolitical powers China, Russia and the US all have nationalist leaders who share a healthy disregard for the multilateral system, allowing trade wars to rage and supranational bodies to crumble. Similarly, in an increasingly divided Europe, once a bastion of liberal-internationalist values, leaders are now proudly identifying themselves as nationalists, which others describe as “a betrayal of patriotism”.

This clash of worldviews has thrust the ‘open versus closed’ debate into the spotlight, but perhaps no face-off has been quite so fiery as the one between Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist and Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism. In a debate at Princeton University, Stephens describes nationalism as a “dangerous” ideology that bleeds into darker forms of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, whereas Hazony, who featured on Giles Fraser’s Confessions last year, calls Stephens’s worldview “smug and condescending”. Instead, he argues that the world is governed best when nations pursue their own independent interests. Video above… ...  Continue reading

Walking through Victoria Station, and seeing giant television screens portraying apocalyptic scenes of Australia on fire, it did strike me that this is exactly how I imagined the future when I was younger.

It is a future filled with overwhelming anxiety and alarm, so much so that, according to a YouGov poll large numbers of young people don’t want to have children because of climate change.

I’m sceptical that global warming is the real reason here; rather it’s probably more a general feeling of pessimism, which does reduce fertility. (I imagine the sort of people who don’t have kids for the sake of the planet are probably the sort of people whose children would be best able to fix the problem, but never mind.) ...  Continue reading

If you multiplied Islington by four and plopped it next to the Pacific, you’d end up with a city a lot like Vancouver. The largest city in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC for short) seems tailor-made for the liberal elite.

Free movement is the city’s fabric: there’s a running joke that no one who lives in Vancouver actually grew up there; 67% of the population were born outside BC, 45% outside Canada. In most Vancouver constituencies, Left-wing candidates won sizeable majorities in October’s federal election. There are more Extinction Rebellion chapters within 100 miles of the city than in the whole of BC’s two neighbouring provinces put together. (Cost of living is exorbitant, naturally, and gentrification rampant; inequalities are increasing.) ...  Continue reading

Every so often, the Left engages in an agonised debate over whether it is possible to be Left-wing and patriotic at the same time. The debate has kicked off again as Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, has written a piece about how Labour lost (because of Brexit and the “broken political system”, obvs; Ctrl-F “Corbyn”, zero results, unsurprisingly).

In it she makes a somewhat vague case for a “progressive patriotism”, based on “unity and pride in the common interests and shared life of everyone”, and also sugar and spice and all things nice. To my slight surprise this inoffensive-to-the-point-of-vacuous suggestion has caused all sorts of friendly fire incidents. ...  Continue reading

I’m not actually a huge fan of initiatives, however well-meaning, that target individuals according to their skin colour. At a time when society has apparently never been more certain of the need to break down racial barriers, we seem, in many respects, to be doing everything possible to build them up. Indeed, so obsessed are many of today’s socio-political influencers with race, it strikes me that they would do well to be reminded of the injunction by Martin Luther King that people should be judged not according to the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

So I have some sympathy with the leaders of two top private schools – Dulwich and Winchester – in their decision to reject a large donation from a former pupil, Professor Sir Bryan Thwaites, who had intended for his money to fund scholarships for disadvantaged white boys. I can well imagine, upon being notified of the gift, their sharp intake of breath and the question immediately forming in their minds: why only white boys? ...  Continue reading

Welcome to the roaring 20s and the Age of Aquarius. Predictions are a fool’s game, obviously, but one likely event in this coming decade will be China becoming the world’s largest economy, ending the century-and-a-bit period of US hegemony.

It may be as early as this year or perhaps at some point later in the decade.

I’m extremely pessimistic about Beijing’s growing power, but then I’m not Cheery McCheeryface at the best of times; I suspect a lot of people who have spent their lives in a state of adolescent rebellion against the United States and all its highly visible faults (and there are many) may finally come to appreciate that in terms of global top dogs we were quite lucky to have America in charge. ...  Continue reading

A barometer for the 2010s: the top five climbers and fallers in the world of ideas over the last decade…

Down 👇

Objective reality 

The postmodern notion of reality as constructed largely by power gained serious political traction in the 10s. Donald Trump popularised the term ‘fake news’ in 2016 and it entered the OED in 2019. Writers debated whether biological sex is socially constructed. Even quantum physics dunked on objective reality in the 10s.

Double liberalism

Thatcherite economic liberalism was overlaid by a new social liberalism under Blair. This formed a 00s consensus in which political passion seemed to have been replaced by a dispassionate, evidence-based approach. But if the aftermath of the 2008 crash has (slowly) challenged the hegemony of economic liberalism, popular pushback against open-borders globalisation (including Brexit) has reignited debates about belonging, meaning and the limits of radical individualism. ...  Continue reading

Labour politicians are making fools of themselves over the issue of patriotism.

While their working class supporters (and ex-supporters) have no problem with the p-word, the professional Left can barely allow it to pass their lips, and soon get into difficulty when they do.

Why do they struggle so much?

I think the answer can be found in two George Orwell essays, written during the Second World War: “The Lion and the Unicorn” in 1941 and “Notes on Nationalism” in 1944.

The first was written close to the moment of deepest national gloom. February 1941. After Dunkirk and well before El-Alamein. Attlee, Bevin, Greenwood and Herbert Morrison were in the Cabinet; the memory was fresh of the part they had played in handing Churchill the keys to Downing Street. But not all in the Labour movement had embraced the idea of patriotism; many were still in thrall to the supranational creed of Communism. ...  Continue reading