In the previous posts (part one, part two), we examined the origins and nature of the technocratic form of government and the elite who implement it, as well as the populist reactions to it. In this post, we look at how the technocrats are trying to maintain power and try to draw some conclusions about how things will continue to develop.

Sites of Conflict

Strategies for Maintaining Power

Fascist Allegations

Conclusion

Further Reading

Sites of Conflict

The power of populism lies in direct democracy, mobilising the voice of the people. Technocrats therefore attempt to impede democracy through lawfare to remove candidates or prompt further elections until the ‘correct’ result is obtained.

The populist leader as might be seen as the ‘unconventional cop’ who breaks the rules to fight for justice in a broken system. He is legitimately seen as breaking the system by its adherents (the technocrats) as well as legitimately being seen as fighting to save it by its opponents (the populists). This is necessarily subjective.

Technocracy manifests in slightly different ways in different societies, as does populism. However, certain areas of conflict appear across the West, stemming from the nature of these ideologies. The power of technocracy lies in bureaucracy and the judiciary, the control of society by unelected experts through interpreting rules, sometimes creatively. As a result, the most contested areas tend to be where technocratic beliefs conflict with working class realities at the point where the conflict can be adjudicated by the judiciary. Mass immigration is the most obvious issue in this category, but judicial reform and the balance of power between the different branches of government (executive, legislature, judiciary, and sometimes the bureaucracy too) can easily become a permanent crisis zone where both sides push to maximise the power of ‘their’ branch, something that can only be done by reducing the power of one or more of the branches relative to the others (i.e. constitutional power is a zero-sum game).

Immigration

Immigration, as noted, is perhaps the biggest factor in the rise of populism in Europe and America. Although elite media tend to stress immigration to the West as a constant across time, this is not true. From 1964 to 1997, annual net immigration to Britain was under ten thousand and was sometimes even negative (i.e. more people left the country than came to it). However, from 1998 to 2007, net immigration jumped to the hundred thousands. Similar patterns can be found in other Western countries.

In Britain, the rise of the era of mass immigration was spearheaded by Barbara Roche during her time as Minister for Asylum and Immigration. Initially speaking of wanting skilled immigrants to alleviate skills shortages, as well as to deal with the problems of an aging population, Roche introduced changes allowing all asylum seekers to stay in Britain, regardless of whether their claim was verified, because, “Removal takes too long, and it’s emotional.”1 She thought that existing immigration law was “racist” and the debate around immigration was “toxic.” She explicitly stated that her aim was to transform British society. I suspect that similar beliefs lay behind changes to immigration policies elsewhere in the West, even if not explicitly stated.2

Mass immigration as is a “luxury belief” as defined by Rob Henderson, something that allows one group to signal elite identity and virtue (i.e. virtue according to the values of the elite) while not paying the cost that is borne by people lower down the social hierarchy.

By importing cheap labour from abroad, the middle class benefit from lower prices both for goods like fruit (often picked by immigrants) and for services like care for the elderly (often provided by immigrants). By increasing the supply of labour, immigration inevitably suppresses the price for labour i.e. wages in unskilled industries. This is basic economics and has nothing to do with racist rhetoric about immigrants “stealing jobs.” Typically, it is defended with the statement that the native working class “won’t do those jobs,” a snobbish statement that overlooks the way that the market naturally finds workers for unpleasant jobs by raising the wage-rate, something artificially suppressed here.

Mass immigration also increases demand for public services like schools and hospitals as well as housing. The middle class largely escape this, either by living in wealthier areas not subject to mass immigration or by using their wealth to choose private options instead of public ones. Even if these services can be expanded given time, in the short-term, economic factors are fixed and can not be increased. The problem is made worse by the middle class wanting to keep taxes lower and to prevent building new houses in the areas where they live (NIMBYism), straining resources further.

However, there are deeper problems than these merely technical ones. As I wrote in this post:

The doctrine of multiculturalism, intended to let different groups maintain their own ethnic and religious identities in the West without assimilating, led rapidly to ghettoisation; the importation of ethnic and religious feuds from elsewhere in the world (particularly Muslim antisemitism); and then on to the decline of social capital, the unmeasurable, but very real, feeling of trust and mutuality that has allowed most Western states to govern themselves for the last century or more with relatively little overt government intervention, while still raising significant tax revenue and spending on public projects because of a sense of public good will and community. Instead, we have seen the arrival of sectarian politics, as demonstrated recently by the election of Islamist MPs to the British parliament on an anti-Israel (antisemitic) platform…

Worst of all is the arrival in the West of radical Islam, as noted above. Not only does radical Islam disavow assimilation, forming its own enclaves, like those of many other ethnic minorities, it rules them by its own laws, often imposed on others (those who enter from outside and internal dissenters) and aims at establishing a national theocratic presence. The West has imported terrorism, child abuse, “honour” killings, female genital mutilation, misogyny, homophobia and antisemitism and now has no easy way of removing them, primarily because of human rights laws prohibiting making people stateless or returning them to a country where they are in danger. Even when these do not apply, there are plenty of “human rights” (read: criminal rights) lawyers willing to intervene to prevent deportation on spurious “human rights” grounds. British law technically requires the deportation of criminals who have committed serious crimes (those carrying a one year prison sentence or more), but this is rarely implemented.

In a number of Notes on Substack, has written about Third World attitudes to state, society and clan, based on his own experiences growing up in the Middle East. In the developing world, there is little experience of the welfarist forms of government that exist in the West, with the idea that the state should care for all its citizens. Rather, governments tend to be kleptocratic and autocratic, extracting resources from the populace to enrich those in power and their clans. There is no idea of the commons, that some things (roads, parks) belong to everyone equally. Instead, everything belongs to the ruler, someone who takes what he wants from the populace and punishes those who complain, sometimes brutally. This creates an attitude where the populace logically and understandably seek in turn to extract money from the state, including by fraud, if they think they can get away with it; they would certainly feel no compunction in using things that would be considered common property in the West, such as parks, for personal use in such a way that no one else would be able to use it afterwards. Furthermore, in such societies, the clan and not the nation is the dominant group. People extract wealth for their clan, disregarding other clans.

These attitudes do not vanish on leaving the developing world and arriving in the West. As has written regarding Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota, from this point of view, immigrants who attempt to get as much money from the state as possible for their family and clan are acting morally, by their lights. Westerners see welfare fraud as a misuse of the commons, extracting shared wealth intended for the whole community for personal use, but to the fraudsters, they are reclaiming stolen wealth for the group that would really care for them if time was hard: not the state, but the clan. To describe this process is not to claim, in a racist fashion, that immigrants or black people are wicked or that they come to the West primarily to steal, but to point out the effects of allowing large numbers of people from societies with very different values, whose understanding of how society works proceeds from very different fundamental assumptions to enter the West without taking care to assimilate them. However, even saying this is considered “racist” from a technocratic point of view, as fundamental to the technocratic worldview are the assumptions that all cultures are morally good and essentially the same with only superficial differences, and that to say otherwise is be racist. This is why immigration from other Western countries is much easier to manage, as the understanding of the state and the commons is the same, although even this leads to strains on resources.

The doctrine of multiculturalism, that all cultures are equal and that attempting to assimilate immigrants to the dominant culture is morally wrong, combined with fear of being thought racist, has lead to further problems of crime and Islamist terrorism. The failure of the British police and state to deal with decades of Pakistani grooming gangs is in part the consequence of the Macpherson Report into policing in 1999, which found the British police to be structurally racist and created a culture where fear of being thought racist undermined policing.

As Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe) and many others have noted, Islam is the most serious fracture point in contemporary Europe, with religious violence, honour killings, FGM, violent homophobia, violent antisemitism and support for terrorism being common in Muslim communities, but few politicians or police will even name the problem for fear of being accused of being racist and “Islamophobic,” or even being attacked, like Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Sir David Amess and others. Indeed, the state and the police go out of their way to appease the Muslim community, apparently fearing the consequences of angering millions of young Muslim men.

Even beyond the risk of violence, Murray notes multiculturalism Europe has created a fractured, “pork barrel” identity politics, where politicians attempt to get whole blocs of votes from particular communities (NB Muslim communities in the West often effectively vote by family or even tribally, with patriarchs directing others how to vote) through appeasing them at the expense of other communities. It is hard to understand the extent to which parties like the Labour Party in Britain and the Democratic Party in the United States have turned against Israel in the last quarter of a century without seeing this factor in play, although there are other reasons too. This type of politics creates its own middlemen in local and national politics as well as NGOs and the law, with a vested interest in keeping problems going to justify and continue their own roles.

All this results in traditional Western communities changing in indefinable, but obvious, ways. In the contemporary West, it’s hard to measure social capital in a place, the level of trust and whether it feels like a familiar home, so politicians, economists and journalists have ignored these things in favour of quantifiable factors like economic growth, the numbers of people on benefits, productivity and so on (the McNamara Fallacy, as noted above). Only belatedly does declining social capital show up as increasing crime, declining property prices and the like.

When people, especially the working class, say that their communities feel less safe and less welcoming than they used to because of mass immigration, they are frequently told by technocratic politicians and journalists that they are wrong to feel that things are getting worse, even that they are stupid and being misled by “demagogues.” However, the fault lies with the technocrats and their over-reliance on quantifiable data over subjective emotions, as well as their assumption that only that which can be recorded statistically is important. Of course, the areas where technocrats tend to live tend not to have high levels of immigration, so they do not see any of this first-hand.

Murray quotes an Ipsos poll from July 2016 that asked “Would you say that immigration has generally had a positive or negative impact on your country?” In Britain a mere 36% said it was positive, but this was high compared with Sweden (24%); Germany (18%); and Italy, France and Belgium (all 10-11%). It is hard to imagine any other policy this unpopular being pursued this dogmatically by a notionally democratic ruling class.

However, mass immigration has become tied to both national economic and welfare need and, more importantly, to the technocratic elite’s sense of self as cosmopolitan, global, cultured, open-minded and tolerant people, as well as to try to atone for layers of post-imperial and post-Holocaust guilt, a sense the West has to atone for its sins and even for its wealth and its high-trust, liberal, democratic societies, which are assumed to be “stolen” somehow from the developing world.

Thus, we see members of the elite saying things that seem, to those who don’t share their values and viewpoint, utterly reckless. For example, Andrew Neather, a former speech writer for Tony Blair, stated that mass immigration, which started during Blair’s time in office was a deliberate policy to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity” and render their arguments out of date (Douglas Murray points out that it was also expected to create pro-Labour electorate). Neather retracted this claim, but it seems unlikely that he made it up out of thin air.

Similarly, Sarah Spencer, a pro-immigration academic, has argued that nationality no longer rests on “allegiance” and is “pure symbolism”. Society can’t be bound by “universal values or single loyalties” but through “mutual enjoyment of rights and responsibilities”. The only surprising thing here is her use of the word “responsibilities” for individuals, as technocrats usually focus on autonomy for individuals and only on responsibilities for the state.

Murray cites statistics that show that Swedes who move out of “multicultural” immigrant areas are the most likely to say how important it is to live in them. He notes that during the 2015 immigration crisis, leader of Scottish Nationalists; the Labour Shadow Home Secretary; and various actors and rock stars said that they would take in refugee families. One year later none had done so. After Murray’s book was published, the Ukraine War broke out and, anecdotally at least, Ukrainian refugees were taken in by members of the public. However, this may be an exception that proves the rule, as, unlike most refugees in recent years, Ukrainian refugees were Christian and law-abiding, with a shared European heritage, making them more culturally similar easier to support.

Even without mass immigration, a society based on diversity of lifestyle and openness to difference would arguably end up with communities and sub-groups with increasingly little in common, leading in term to reduced civic solidarity and a danger of identity politics. However, mass immigration of people from societies with very different political structures, religions and moral values only accelerates this.

The fact that, for decades now, politicians have talked endlessly about reducing immigration, but, other than Donald Trump, have not done anything substantial about it is perhaps the main reason for the public’s loss of faith in politicians and political institutions.

Over time, the image of society portrayed by politicians, journalists, fiction writers, academics and even religious leaders has slipped further and further from the ‘lived experience’ of most people. Reality looks almost nothing like the images we see on television, even in news programmes (the notorious case of a race riot being labelled as “mostly peaceful” while buildings could be seen burning in the background in 2020 being only the most extreme example). A Soviet level of doublethink is necessary for most people to accept the ‘official’ state of events. Only the technocrats and the upper middle class elite in general, ensconced in rich, exclusive communities and institutions, can believe the lie.

The consequences of these unintegrated worldviews become potentially ever more disastrous the more immigrants enter the country. The War Studies academic David Betz has noted several fault zones in Britain based around immigration: multiculturalism and social disintegration (no shared identity or community); competition for scarce resources on ethnic/racial lines; “asymmetric multiculturalism” (where white identity is seen as inherently racist and disadvantaged through affirmative action, doubly so for men); a divide between more cosmopolitan city dwellers and more traditionalist and patriotic people elsewhere; an elite disconnected from the public; and highly polarised politics. He sees serious civil unrest and even civil war in the next few years as very likely.

Brexit

Brexit was related to immigration, a statement that seems obvious now, but would have seemed unlikely when Sir James Goldsmith founded the first British Eurosceptic political party, The Referendum Party in 1994. This was very much a fringe party voicing a fringe concern. The EU used to be fairly popular in Britain. Over the last thirty years, anti-EU sentiment in Britain has moved from middle class conservative free traders like Goldsmith, who resented EU regulation, the EU tariff wall on non-EU goods and the EU’s move towards becoming a federalised European super-state, to ordinary members of the working class (not just the white working class) opposed to mass immigration. The realisation of freedom of movement (open borders) within the EU catalysed this process: now asylum seekers who entered the EU far away, in Spain or Greece, could move on to Britain, and it was legally impossible for any British government to stop them.

The EU is in many ways the ultimate technocratic project, an attempt to stop another European war through integrated trade and, eventually, in a distant, but hoped for future, a federal European state and government. Its organs of government are thoroughly bureaucratic and technocratic, with real power resting with the appointed (by national governments) EU Commission and not with the directly elected EU Parliament, not least because the former initiates legislation, not the latter. It is therefore inevitable that Brexit has become emblematic of the political disruptions from 2016 onwards.

In Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, Paul Embery argues that the Brexit vote gave the British working class a chance to voice their discontent with the technocratic elite that had come to dominate both the Conservative and Labour Parties. Brexit voters were largely poor and from deprived areas, with income being a good predictor of voting preferences. Approximately one third of non-white voters voted to leave the EU. Brexit voters wanted to reclaim sovereignty, particularly over national borders; to control immigration; and to reassert democracy over unelected technocrats Brussels, but also over the British elite. Working class voters saw their votes as taken for granted by Labour, particularly since the party’s move to the political centre in the nineties under Tony Blair, but suddenly they had a chance to voice their concerns over the direction that the country was going without voting for a Conservative Party that they saw as even less in line with their values, needs and desires.

However, the response from the technocrats was largely to tell them that they didn’t know what they had voted for. Symptomatic was the prominent Labour MP (and future Cabinet Minister) David Lammy, who referred to the referendum as “will of the people bollocks”. He also called some pro-Brexit Conservative MPs “Nazis”. Again and again after the referendum, pro-Remain MPs, journalists and academics insisted that no one really knew what Brexit would entail, how it would happen or what they were actually voting for, and that the vote was therefore invalid. Whether they meant to say that working class people are too stupid to be trusted to vote is irrelevant; that is how it was interpreted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the result was a collapse in support for both Labour and the Conservatives, especially when the latter (under Boris Johnson) actually increased immigration (primarily from outside the EU) after Brexit and while the former (under Sir Keir Starmer) seem to be moving back towards the EU in trade deals, but in even less politically-responsive ways than full EU membership, i.e. by technocratic regulation. The result is the rise and rise of Reform UK, although whether they will be allowed to take office by the technocrats remains to be seen as yet.

In terms of shifting the Overton Window (the boundaries of permitted political discussion), Reform leader Nigel Farage is the most successful British politician since Margaret Thatcher. Whether he can translate that into institutional reform remains to be seen as of time of writing.

Judicial Overreach

Under regime politics, constitutional checks and balances, the balance of power between the executive, legislative, judicial branches of government, come into question. The judiciary is comprised of members of the technocratic class: middle class, managerial, with a universalist education. They have the technocratic perspective and, as the judiciary becomes politicised, they use their rulings to create de facto law.

gives numerous examples of judicial overreach in Britain, of which I will just pick two. Immigration makes frequent appearances in McGrogan’s writing, often because of the failure of courts to deport immigrants who have committed serious crimes in Britain and therefore, according to existing legislation, who ought to be deported to their country of origin. The reasons for not deporting them are invariably given from a perspective of human rights and are often specious. For example, an Albanian convicted of money-laundering was allowed to stay in Britain because of the adverse effect this would have on his family life, as his family would not follow him back to Albania because his son is autistic and could not cope with emigrating. This case seemed particularly ludicrous, as the original reason given for why the son would be distressed was that he could only bear to eat British chicken nuggets and not Albanian ones. It is ridiculous that someone convicted of a serious crime, one that probably supports violent, organised crime of some kind (gangs, terrorism) is allowed to stay in Britain to avoid facing his family with a difficult decision.

As McGrogan says:

“What is, indisputably, in the public interest is that foreign residents and visitors should be deterred from committing crime by the threat of deportation. And this is what the law should reflect. It should not be in the hands of judges to weigh up when the law should work towards this outcome and when it should not, and it should be for politicians to accept communal responsibility for harsh outcomes where they exist, by pointing to their legitimate role as elected lawmakers.

He blames this on the legal focus on human rights, which he sees as inherently political and therefore rightly the domain of elected politicians and not unelected judges:

Human rights law is always and everywhere destructive of good governance. There is a simple reason for this: of necessity its application requires the weighing of concrete rights against the abstract public interest, and in the human mind what is concrete almost always trumps more abstract concerns. But good governance is all about abstract concerns, because its only proper focus is, precisely, what is in the public interest. This places human rights law and good governance on a collision course, with disastrous consequences.

The second example of judicial overreach is from European Court of Human Rights ruling on a case concerning climate change. Ruling on whether the Swiss government bore responsibility for the effects on individuals of global warning, it ruled that the Swiss government should be made to reduce its carbon emissions as:

from the perspective of human rights, the essence of the relevant State duties in the context of climate change relates to the reduction of the risks of harm for individuals. Conversely, failures in the performance of those duties entail an aggravation of the risks involved, although the individual exposures to such risks will vary in terms of type, severity and imminence, depending on a range of circumstances. Accordingly, in this context, issues of individual victim status or the specific content of State obligations cannot be determined on the basis of a strict conditio sine qua non requirement.

[Emphasis added.]

McGrogan pithily interprets this as essentially saying:

Yes, the individuals in question couldn’t prove they were harmed and yes, the causal link between the acts or omissions of Switzerland was tenuous and indirect. But we shouldn’t really care about pedantic, fussy lawyers making objections about silly, archaic, outmoded concepts like the rule of law. What is the law for other than to make people do things? And the Swiss should be made to reduce their GHG emissions. Case closed. Switzerland caused the claimants harm because we said so.

Generalising from this and other, similar cases, he further writes:

What it suggests is that commitment to the rule of law - and commitment indeed to the idea of judicial process as such - is becoming critically weakened in what is supposed to be its heartlands. We live in a time during which intelligent, educated people have convinced themselves that, if the cause they believe in is ‘right’, then the law simply ought to realise it. The most basic elements of law recognised since classical antiquity can be turned on their head or ignored in the interest of realising desired outcomes. And courts are thereby reduced to simply parroting dogma and ordering its implementation.3

The most explosive showdown between technocratic judges and populist politicians occurred in Israel in 2023. In Israel, immigration is not an issue in the way that it is in Britain, Europe and the USA and the overreach in question was more expansive, but also harder to pin down.

Yonatan Green, speaking on the Israel from the Inside podcast argued that the Israeli Supreme Court is widely seen as the most activist in the world. He argues that the “Reasonableness Doctrine” that it created for itself essentially allows the court to veto government policy on broad grounds i.e. if it disagrees with the policy or the likely outcomes by finding them “unreasonable.” It has also created a de facto constitution (Israel has no written constitution) by declaring certain laws to be “Basic Laws” without parliamentary/ministerial input. Other examples of judicial overreach include the failure to implement a death penalty for terrorists that Israel already has on its statute books because of procedural opposition from lawyers and judges.

The Netanyahu government attempted to limit the power of the Supreme Court as well as to take greater control over judicial appointments. The different parts of Netanyahu’s coalition had very different motives for this (the Religious Zionists wanted to end court-imposed limits on settlements beyond the Green Line; the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) wanted to make their military draft exemption (decades-old, but technically temporary and subject to renewal) permanent; and Netanyahu himself was presumed to want to end his corruption trial), but they were united in opposition to the court as well as in a view of themselves as representing a silent majority of the population who were opposed to what was presented as a small, Tel Aviv-based clique of secular, Ashkenazi, technocratic judges, academics and journalists.

The Judicial Reform therefore threatened to split the country on multiple axes: technocratic-populist, but also ethnic (Ashkenazi Jews versus Mizrahi Jews) and secular-religious. Unlike attempts at confronting technocracy elsewhere in the West, large numbers of people from Netanyahu’s natural constituency of the mainstream right sided with the courts, from dislike of Netanyahu and suspicion of his aims; from a sense that, while judicial reform was necessary, the suggested reform was too sweeping and gave too much power to the executive; and fears of the consequences of the Haredi draft exemption and settlement expansion that seemed likely consequences of the reforms going through. Massive protests disrupted and divided the country for nearly a year before the 7 October attacks and the subsequent Gaza War postponed the confrontation, but it threatens to reignite at any moment, particularly given the likelihood that the government will try to force some reform through before elections later this year, elections in which most parties in the coalition are expected to do badly.

Executive Overreach

This should not be interpreted to mean that constitutional overreach only goes in a technocratic direction or that only the judiciary is guilty of it. There have been examples of executive overreach too, perhaps including the Netanyahu government’s attempted judicial reform. These are harder to distinguish from ordinary politics and so labelling them may be more controversial. However, when President Trump pinned a message to his Truth Social and X accounts declaring, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”, it was clear that something beyond normal politics had happened; this is the language of a regime politician attempting to change the balance of power between the executive and the other branches of government. Note the phrasing: not that it is not necessarily a crime to save your country, but that saving your country is never a crime i.e. the ends justify the means in saving your country.

Eli Lake cites Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation (“fishing trip”) into Republican lawmakers under Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s attempt to prosecute political enemies like James Comey as worrying developments in executive power. Lake notes the spiral of tit-for-tat lawfare here:

The problem is that one party’s politicized prosecution becomes a justification for the other party when it is back in power. Over time, the norms that protected our justice system from the vicissitudes of executive power erode to nothing until the rule of law is replaced by the rule of power. Arctic Frost has contributed to this vicious cycle.

Other Trump executive orders that push on the boundary of constitutionality include levying tariffs and going to war without congressional authorisation (both a grey areas; many presidents have done the latter by claiming to be using force, not going to war).

Niall Ferguson sees the fact that American courts are dealing with nearly 400 cases involving the Trump administration as a positive sign that the checks and balances of the Constitution are working as designed. However, Roger Partridge argues that the administration is deliberately overwhelming the courts. Clearly, it is hard to describe the fight for dominance between competing arms of government from an unbiased point of view, particularly with a figure as polarising as Trump.

This is part of a pattern of executive overreach in the USA in recent years, under both technocrats and populists. Biden retroactively pardoned family and administration members; Trump gave a blanket pardon to 6 January rioters. Biden and Trump both fired bureaucrats in controversial ways. Most chilling was the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline by his administration, a fact now admitted by those involved in memoirs, but still largely undiscussed in the mainstream media.

The problem is not just American. Before his sudden fall, Sir Keir Starmer’s government in Britain had tried postpone or cancel local elections that Labour was set to lose; tried to end trial by jury, a fundamental constitutional change not in the Labour Party manifesto; engaged in reform of the House of Lords in a way that would remove his opponents; ennobled his supporters so that they could sit there; tried to introduce Digital ID (on the grounds of child safety), again, something not in the manifesto; and tried to force through controversial ethical legislation (ending abortion limits and introducing assisted suicide), even though the parliamentary convention is that controversial ethical legislation of this kind is not whipped and is left to the consciences of individual MPs. None of this is illegal (even the attempts to cancel elections was just about legal), but it showed a government using a large parliamentary majority to force through unpopular legislation while ignoring that it had won a relatively small share of the vote (Britain’s first past the post electoral system sometimes handing large parliamentary majorities to parties that only won a slender plurality of the votes).

With both judicial and executive overreach, we might imagine a locked door of constitutionality that leads from the clearly legal to the legally dubious. The technocrats have spent years “picking the lock” with legal and procedural knowledge and going through at will, quite legally, but not very morally. The populists can see this “cheating” within the letter of the law and, lacking the procedural expertise to follow suit, attack the door with sledgehammer. The essential point is that both behaviours, picking the lock and knocking it down, are damaging to the constitution and respect for the institutions of government in the long term.

This is speculation, but I think it is sound: in a conflict between the executive and/or legislature against the judiciary, the populists will always favour the elected executive/legislature against the appointed judges. Likewise, they will accept some strong-arming of the media by the executive, at least up to a point, because they always favour elected politicians over the unelected and uncontrollable media. They have a desire to control society through democracy, not through expert regulation. This is not about a Fascist “strong leader,” but about someone the electorate can actually replace.

I think there is a snobbish and accusatory “middle class technocratic gaze” that views working class politics through a hermeneutic of suspicion. For example, the desire for accountability is misunderstood as a desire for a strong leader; the desire to control borders is seen as racism; fear of radical Islamic terror is presented as Islamophobia. This is more than an attempt to smear enemies. Alternatively, voters are presented as too stupid or too mislead by misinformation to understand what voted for. In this way, the technocrats can claim the moral high ground while opposing the popular will, by telling themselves that they are resisting Fascism or doing what the electorate would want if it was more intelligent and not misinformed.

Other flashpoints

Other flashpoints where the reality described by technocracy fails to match the actual experience of ordinary people include the admission of trans-women (men) to women’s sports and safe spaces, and the repeated assertion that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam; that it is, in fact, opposed by Islam. Every time one of these topics appears on the news, you can almost hear another person having their illusions shattered and joining the ranks of the “deplorables.”

Strategies for Maintaining Power

David Goodhart argues that one of the reasons why politics is more difficult (and, we might add, fuelled by anger) now than it used to be is that when politics was primarily socioeconomic it was easier to reach compromises. It is relatively easy to split the difference on issues like public spending or wealth redistribution. When it comes to issues of identity, immigration, and national sovereignty, it is much harder to compromise. These topics are more emotional.

Technocracy is described as a “liberal democratic” mode of government, but this is only true so long as the population agrees with the elite and votes accordingly. Once they disagree and vote and protest against technocracy, it has become increasingly illiberal and undemocratic, while describing populism as the sole source of illiberal and undemocratic ideas in society. In truth, there are, or can be, illiberal strands in populism, but it relies on direct democracy for its legitimacy, so the technocratic response modulates into a critique of “the tyranny of the majority,” and disruption of constitutional “checks and balances,” fears not expressed when technocratic parties won elections and engaged in constitutional reforms.

In the absence of liberal democratic means to suppress dissent, other methods are used. The technocratic elite attacks those against diversity and openness as “deplorables” (Hilary Clinton), “clinging to their guns and religion” (Obama) and racist “gammons” (a comment aimed against the British working class, especially those in favour of Brexit). Most of the legacy media supports this uncritically, even the notionally conservative outlets. Those who disagree are stigmatised. Lawfare, the use of the legal system to overturn elections, to prevent unwanted candidates standing, or to pursue them through the courts for minor or fictitious reasons, generally makes it not worth anyone’s while to oppose the regime. Donald Trump, Binyamin Netanyahu and Marine Le Pen have been prosecuted, and while any individual case might seem valid in itself, if sometimes trivial, the overall impression is of the persecution of opponents of technocracy. This is reinforced by attempts in some states to remove Trump from the ballot in 2024 as well as the overturning of the election of a populist candidate, Călin Georgescu, in Romanian presidential elections by the courts and the prevention of his standing in the rerun elections.

Again, while any individual case may be legitimate, the cumulative impression is the use of law as a weapon of control. Democracy is suspended to save democracy. Freedom is removed to save freedom. And so on.

R. R. Reno argues that the elite sees populism as a moral threat, not a political challenge. If you see “racists,” “misogynists” and even “Fascists” poised to take control if you lose power, there is a strong incentive to use emergency measures to stay in power. The technocrats see only questions of diversity and inclusion, not social atomisation, the decline of the family and the decline of community and social capital.

As we saw above, populists largely do not have access to the levers of power, the bureaucracy and judiciary, even if they take control of the executive or the legislature. The option of lawfare is therefore only open to the technocrats themselves.

Fascist Allegations

The allegations that right-wing populism is the same as Fascism needs to be examined in more depth as it is perhaps the most effective and certainly the most frequent strategy used to keep populists out of power.

Reno notes that, since World War II, the West has seen nationalism, patriotism, religion and traditional morality (especially sexual morality) as leading inevitably to Fascism. Fascism is wrongly equated with rootedness, tradition and authority. This is seen as a binary (perhaps the only binary the technocrats still support): there is an open society or there is Fascism.

The result is an ongoing Fascism Scare in the West similar to the Communist/Red Scare of 1950s America. During the 2019 General Election, Labour Shadow Cabinet member Dawn Butler said that Labour faced “the fight of our lives to save our country from the far-right,” apparently referring to the nationalist feelings aroused by the Brexit debate, which the election was supposed to resolve. When Labour lost the election, it led to a Conservative victory and the most ethnically-diverse British Cabinet in history and later, after fall of Boris Johnson, to the first British government where none of the four Great Offices of State were held by a white man. However, none of this changes the narrative of an imminent Fascist takeover and we will undoubtedly see it returning at the next election.

This rhetoric has contributed to the anger and hysteria present in Western politics, as well as to the three assassination attempts on Donald Trump (that we know of).

Despite what Karl Popper and others have said, the difference between open and authoritarian societies is not binary. Just like an chemical can exist as a solid, liquid or gas, so too can societies be rigid (totalitarian), extremely individualist (gas) or something in-between. Decades of trying to make our society an individualist gas need to be reversed. This doesn’t mean our societies will not still be fluid and individual, let alone that they will be rigid and totalitarian.

Theorists of authoritarianism, like Theodor Adorno were politically blinded in not including left-wing and technocratic authoritarianism in their analyses and only focusing on conservatism and Fascism. They also wrongly stereotyped small-c conservative practices and institutions as Fascist. The family is not Fascist. Traditional religion is not inherently Fascist. Listening to traditional wisdom is not the same as being too scared to think for oneself. As Christopher Lasch argued about elites, technocracy has arguably decreased independent thought about politics and society rather than increased it, as these things are left it to “experts.” Imposed COVID lockdowns and the havoc that ensued were the result. The final redoubts of technocracy, particularly in academia, do not seem to be bastions of free thought at the moment, with a tiny percentage of conservatives on campus and the cancellation of anyone who dissents from the orthodoxy.

Meanwhile Popper’s vision of the triumph Enlightenment view of nothing between the individual and the state, ironically also comes close to Mussolini’s Fascist vision: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” except for giving a certain role to the notionally free (but heavily-regulated) market and replacing Fascist militarism with an army of bureaucrats.

In a period of regime politics, where the limits of the power of the executive and the judiciary are contested, alongside a focus on the flashpoints of immigration, identity, race and religion, it is easy for technocrats and progressives to persuade themselves and others that this is a question of Fascists trying to seize power to control, expel or murder on racial grounds. This is simply not true, but repeatedly presenting figures like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage as Fascist normalises the term and erodes any power it might have had against genuine neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes and his followers.

Conclusion

Just as Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution is mostly about the pre-Revolutionary French regime, with little on the Revolution itself, and just as Karl Marx’s Capital says much more about capitalism than about socialism, this essay has said a lot more about technocracy than about populism and even less about what the clash of the two may entail. Prediction, as the physicist Niels Bohr said,4 is difficult, especially about the future. However, I feel I owe my readers some kind of tentative look at what might happen next.

In John Crowley’s science fiction novella, Great Work of Time, an attempt to change time in hundreds of tiny ways to prevent the fall of the British Empire eventually results in the creation of a perfect empire which can never fall or do harm: an unchanging forest on a planet with no humans. Ultimately, the only stable human situation is one in which humanity does not exist. Those who think they are most able to “improve” society are those most at risk of destroying it.

My first rule of politics is: every solution works, until it doesn’t. Balance of power geo-politics worked until World War I. Victorian laissez-faire capitalism worked until the Great Depression. Keynesianism worked until the Oil Shock. Neo-liberalism worked until the Financial Crisis. Now it’s unravelling, faster and faster.

Are we going back to the thirties or just back to the seventies? Both decades saw serious social, economic and political instability in the West, but the former was much worse and resulted in much more sweeping political and economic change.5

The technocratic state has reached the point of diminishing returns in its authoritarian harm prevention. By now, entropy has taken over and attempts at minor reforms just generate more inefficiency. The fact that Sir Keir Starmer’s supporters can’t point to anything positive about his two-year premiership other than primary school breakfast clubs proves the point that technocracy has run out of ideas and ways of implementing them.

As noted, technocracy intends to oppose harm, but lacks nuance and misses passive and second-order harms. As Hayek noted, it is a “fatal conceit” to believe that limited, fallible human beings can understand and control something as complex as human society. Society produces emergent order from millions of autonomous human decisions; this can not be replicated by a bureaucrat or expert in Whitehall or Washington.

The world faces the problem of an increasingly functionally illiterate (post-literate) electorate, something never seen before, as historical franchise expansion coincided with rising literacy. We now have empty slogans, conspiracy theories and one minute social media videos instead of lengthy prose journalism or meaningful political speech as in much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have already mentioned war scholar David Betz’s fear of civil unrest in Britain, which is obviously related to this and also to the suppression of legitimate debate on many topics, particularly immigration and Islamism, which increases the likelihood of violence and extremism across the West.

Beyond the problems discussed already in this essay, particularly mass immigration and multiculturalism, other structural problems remain including poor productivity in Britain and welfare systems in Britain and Europe that increasingly resemble Ponzi Schemes with no more buyers. Education systems everywhere were struggling even before the advent of smartphones and AI helped children opt out of learning anything and still pass. I wrote about the particular problems of Britain’s NHS in an earlier post and those comments still stand. Geopolitically, the Pax Americana is faltering under external threats and internal discontent and it is not clear what comes next. The full extent of the disruption of the COVID lockdowns is still unknown.

In a settled, democratic society with established political values and traditions, it is perhaps possible to negotiate different viewpoints pragmatically and technocratically without relying on force, but as traditional values recede under the onslaught of “the open society,” hastened by mass immigration from very different cultures with different metaphysics and ethics, the system breaks down, a victim of its own multicultural success. With no common values or political traditions, politics itself becomes a search for values, purpose and meaning, even identity. Politicians can guide that search for the common good or for sectarian benefit. The latter is easier, but more destructive in the long-term. It is the path that has been taken until now. However, a more value- and meaning-laden politics will require more inspirational, cultured and philosophical leadership than is currently the case. In a word, it will require transformational leadership.

The historian and social scientist James MacGregor Burns distinguished between transactional leadership and transformational leadership: the former addresses people’s interests; the latter connects goals with moral values to raise both leader and followers to a higher moral level. Rabbi Lord Sacks gives examples including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, saying that all transcended narrow partisanship to unite a fragmented polity through moral leadership at a time of crisis.

No such transformational leader seems present in the West today. Instead, transactional leaders act in the interests of those who elected them, often at the expense of their opponents’ followers. Politics then becomes a series of acts of spite and revenge against opponents (again, Donald Trump is the epitome of this trend) and not an attempt to govern in the interest of the country as a whole and to unite different interest groups behind a common cause. The rise of the populism of both right and left is the result, as is the (re)appearance of Marxism and Islamism as alternatives for people who see no help coming to them from the mainstream.

Hysteria around “Fascism” prevents legitimate and necessary debate about the balance of power between the executive and the judiciary, as well as of sensible immigration policy. The suppression of debate about immigration for so long has led to genuine, if fringe, racist ethno-nationalist calls for “remigration,” a euphemism for stripping law-abiding citizens of their citizenship and forcibly deporting them. However, the cure for bad ideas is bringing them into contact with good ideas, not suppressing them. This goes, even more so, for openly neo-Nazi voices like Nick Fuentes and Darryl Cooper, often platformed by supposedly more moderate fellow travellers like Tucker Carlson. Suppression just makes them stronger by casting them as victims. Only rational debate can defeat them — if we are still able to engage in it in a post-literate age.

The West needs to return power to democratically-accountable politicians. Experts will still advise, but policy decisions must be taken by elected politicians, not judges, lawyers, scientists or bureaucrats. Whether we can reach that point without civil unrest (or worse) in much of the West first remains an open question.

We are told that decreasing democracy will look like Fascism or Marxism, but it might look more like an early modern royal court. Legislatures might lose power and become less representative, losing legitimacy as the numbers voting fall (probably from cynicism and despair rather than legal constraints). Power will be held by unelected and unaccountable figures. There will be informal ‘royal courts’ around powerful figures. Ordinary people won’t vote, but a certain amount of (“mostly peaceful”) rioting and destruction of property to ‘let off steam’ might be tolerated at times of political stress.

Technocracy has existed until now in a framework of liberal democracy, just like classical liberalism did before it, despite seeing levels of taxation and regulation unthinkable and illiberal from the point of view of a nineteenth century classical liberal. The question is whether the post-technocratic world will still be liberal (in the broad sense) and democratic or — what? Authoritarian? Totalitarian? Quasi-Medieval? Perhaps the answer depends on whether technocracy goes quietly or fights to the death, with resultant civil unrest or civil war, as well as whether nationalism, far-left identitarianism, Marxism or something more moderate replaces it.

The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

— J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5: Z’Ha’Dum

Further Reading

Embery, P. (2020) Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. Polity Press.

Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R. (2021) Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World. Cambridge University Press.

Lasch, C. (1996) The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. W. W. Norton.

Murray, D. (2017) The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Bloomsbury Continuum.

Reno, R. (2021) The Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism and the Future of the West. Gateway Editions.

Rodrik, D. (2002) Feasible Globalizations. Available at https://drodrik.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/feasible-globalizations

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Why Now? Cracks in the Technocratic Façade

Role of Social Media

Why Now? Cracks in the Technocratic Façade

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and particularly since 2016, there has been a widespread feeling of Western society and politics unravelling. I think two things are happening at once and it is hard to prise them apart:

1. There has been a genuine collapse in support for liberal democracy as it has existed since World War II (not necessarily in support for liberal democracy per se); growing official and unofficial (socially-enforced) restrictions on free speech (begin with the left’s cancel culture); a growing movement against open borders and mass immigration; increasing stresses on the international order (Ukraine, 7 October); and an increasingly partisan legacy media.

2. At the same time, there has been a moral panic on the left and elsewhere around ‘Fascism’ and the supposed collapse in support for liberal democracy as a concept. This is analogous to the Red Scare in America 1950s. Just as there were Communists who infiltrated the administration (e.g. Alger Hiss) as well as the media and Hollywood , but figures like Joseph McCarthy used this to create a panic and smear others for political gain, so too there are Fascist or quasi-Fascist figures on the right, but far more who have been smeared with this term for nakedly political reasons.

It is therefore necessary to analyse what has happened very carefully, looking at why there has been a loss of support for the status quo and where the key areas of conflict are.

We can see the technocratic programme developing in stages. In the thirties and forties, it aimed primarily at helping the working class. From the eighties, it began to focus on a particular slice of the working class: the aspirational, entrepreneurial, upwardly-mobile members of the working class, alongside middle class. The rest of the working class was abandoned. This was the appearance of the neo-liberal “flavour” of technocracy, where the state moved from control of certain industries to privatisation under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and, for a while, the reach of the state shrank a bit. Mrs Thatcher in particular managed to reach “Basildon Man,” the self-employed member of the working class, previously Labour-voting, while leaving whole towns to post-industrial “managed decline” (the origin of this now-overused phrase, first used, I believe, for Liverpool). This distinction between those members of the working class who adopted the “correct” values of the atomised, socially-, economically- and geographically-flexible1 worker and those who retain older values of tradition and place is more important now than ever.

From the nineties, figures like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and their successors have orientated left-wing parties more and more towards the middle class, often at the expense of the working class, while assuming they can carry the working class with them as a birthright. Symbolic of this was Barack Obama’s “guns and religion” comment about the working class mentioned in the previous post, as well as Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment on working-class Trump supporters, both of which came across as elite, upper-middle class politicians sneering at their working class base, whatever the intention may have been. Only marginally better was Gordon Brown being caught referring to a working class woman who complained about immigration as a “bigoted woman” on a microphone that he did not realise was still live.

Policies like mass immigration, globalisation and net zero benefit the middle class more than the working class while identity politics often side-lines the traditional working class in favour of “niche” identities that allow members of the middle class to signal their virtue, while doing little for the most vulnerable in society. It is worth looking at some of these policies in more detail.

R. R. Reno refers to Branko Milanovic’s understand of global income changes under globalisation. In short, the Western middle [and working] class are losing from globalisation while the Western elite (who I would describe as the upper-middle class and above) are gaining from it. The elite have a firm place in the global economic system; most of the middle and working class do not. Most of the middle class face economic stagnation and fear losing their jobs to the developing world in a global economy built on offshoring labour. I would add that those who are able to travel can become “digital nomads,” moving country to find work, but this appeals more to the young and discourages marriage and child-rearing. Relevant here again is the concept of “elite overproduction” that we mentioned in the previous part of this essay, the idea that there are more university graduates in the West than there are good graduate jobs for them to fill, resulting in middle class dissatisfaction with the structure of a society that promised them rewards for hard work, yet failed to deliver.

Reno notes that the elite stigmatize the non-elite as lazy and bad workers, the classic refrain that “white working-class workers won’t do low-paid job X,” resulting in a need for foreign workers, when the reality is that domestic workers would do that work if the market wage rate wasn’t artificially depressed by importing cheap labour from abroad. He further notes that the elite are often left-wing and are willing to subsidise the native poor with benefits, but won’t change the global economy to increase employment opportunities at home instead, essentially resulting in cheap goods alongside high taxes and government spending to fund welfare. Missing here is the idea that work, even low-status work, can build independence and self-esteem in a way that welfare can not even if net income is the same.

Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman, in their book Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World also note that stagnant wage growth and growing inequality can lead to political polarisation and liberal democratic “backsliding” and then on to opposition to economic integration and technological change. It is noteworthy that their political orientation towards populism is the opposite of that of Reno, Haggard and Kaufman understanding it as risking liberal democratic “backsliding” towards autocracy. The fact that they agree with Reno on the causes of the split between the upper-middle class elite and the rest of the nation is therefore significant.

The economic growth driving this social polarisation is that which comes from accepting the tenets of economic globalisation in the post-Cold War period. This was described by the journalist Thomas Friedman as putting on a “Golden Straitjacket” by accepting global trade, low taxation, privatisation, deregulation and reduction of national sovereignty in order to remain competitive in international markets and to be a part of global organisations like the World Trade Organisation and the European Union. Many countries did exactly this in the nineties and noughties and, as Milanovic suggests, it brought increased prosperity to many in the developing world as well as to the elites in the West, but to many others in the West the result was stagnation at best.

The stagnation was political as well as economic. As Friedman said back in 1999, “As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket, two things tend to happen: your economy grows, but your politics shrinks.” The economy grows from boosted international trade, but the political options shrink as many possible policies (tax increases, nationalisation, immigration restrictions) are removed from play as to implement them would be to take off the Golden Straitjacket and either require withdrawing from organisations like the WTO and EU (as with Brexit) or becoming uncompetitive in a brutally competitive global economy. We can see in practice that, in the post-Cold War period, mainstream Western parties often converged on similar policies and more radical alternatives were pushed to the margins of the far-left and far-right.

Dani Rodrik, in his paper Feasible Globalizations, spells it out: you can not have global economic integration, democracy and the nation state. At best you can manage two of the three. In the period between World War II and the end of the Cold War, Western countries limited economic integration to allow for democratic policy alternatives and low levels of immigration, but with the advent of globalisation, economic incentives led to mass immigration, eroding national differences, and ceding much real political power to unelected international bodies, eroding democracy. Rodrik does not state this, but we have seen this pattern before, with rise of modern nation states and national economic integration in the early modern period leading to the decline of local autonomy and regional variation in a manner somewhat analogous to this. However, while the rise of the nation state generally happened at a popular level, with national loyalties slowly replacing local ones, there has been no formation of a popular global identity and most people outside the technocratic elite still maintain national loyalties and are often strongly attached to them.

Whether you approve or disapprove of this depends not just on whether you are a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ in the global market economically, as discussed above, but also on your social and professional positioning, whether or not you see yourself as someone likely to attain position in the many international bodies created by globalisation and the NGOs, thinktanks and academic positions that cater to them, alongside the legal and financial services necessary to service the whole of this infrastructure.

Haggard and Kaufman argue that the resultant political polarisation between the globalisation winners and losers reduces the incentive to compromise in national legislatures, leading to ineffective government, leading in turn to distrust and dislike for the institutions of government. This would presumably in turn drive further polarisation. They also note that “anti-system” outsiders like Donald Trump might now be more attractive as a leader, alongside “majoritarian” conceptions of politics, with the charismatic outsider mobilising support through rallies, social media and public appearances rather than through conventional channels and ruling for the majority who elected him and not the country as a whole. It is easy to see this pattern occurring throughout the West today.2

Political polarisation has been particularly pronounced in the United States of America. Congressional delays and shutdowns regarding the budget have become the norm in recent decades, going back to the seventies, while the Democrats changed the rules of judicial appointment confirmation from needing a 60% majority to a simple majority during the Obama era, making it easier for judges with more extreme views to get confirmed. This in turn was a response to Republicans trying to block all Democratic Party judicial appointments, creating a tit-for-tat polarisation process.

Haggard and Kaufman see political polarisation as beginning in 2000, but we might see Ken Starr’s attempts to impeach President Clinton as the beginning of a process in which the legitimacy of almost every subsequent president was challenged and/or his enemies attempted to remove him from office before the end of his term by impeachment. After the attempt to impeach Clinton, there was the controversy regarding the 2000 election and the Florida recount; the conspiracy theory (fostered by Donald Trump) that Barak Obama was born in Kenya and was thus ineligible to be president; Russiagate and two attempts to impeach President Trump; the 6 January 2020 riot and Trump’s apparent attempt to prevent Joe Biden being recognised as the winner of the presidential election. We might also add the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline (now admitted by those around him) and the lawfare to try to keep Trump of the ballot in 2024. All of these are both symptomatic of political polarisation and drivers of further tit-for-tat polarisation.

What many of these things have in common is the use of the technocratic machinery of power, including the impeachment process, to force or delay budget legislation, judicial appointments or even to remove a sitting president or, in the case of the Biden cognitive decline cover-up, to keep an incapacitated president in power as a frontman for unelected officials. They represent power transferring from representatives elected democratically to serve a set term to shadowy figures, not always elected, who can manipulate the machinery of official procedure to get an outcome wanted by the elite, but not necessarily the populace.

Polarisation has proceeded apace since Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. Haggard and Kaufman have noted that Trump has pushed on the boundaries of the constitution with an over-use of executive orders and subsequent to the book’s publication in 2021 he has been accused of several illegal actions, including imposing tariffs, going to war with Iran without Congressional approval and illegitimately using the National Guard. However, this ignores the fact that Obama and Biden also used many executive orders to bypass Congress, that the National Guard was used in a similarly borderline-legal way for school desegregation in the fifties, while many presidents in recent decades, including Democratic ones, have used the military without Congressional approval. Clearly, this is part of an ongoing conflict between the executive and the legislature over the balance of power between them.

As well as economic troubles and political polarisation, there are structural faults in the nature of technocracy too.

Technocracy as a whole is subject to The McNamara Fallacy. Named after former US Secretary of Defence (and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War), the fallacy refers to his tendency to focus entirely on measurable, quantitative data and to ignore intangible factors that could not be easily quantified. During the Vietnam War, McNamara focused on the far larger death counts of Viet Cong guerrillas than US soldiers and concluded that the US was winning. However, he ignored intangible factors such as the high morale of the Viet Cong, who were fighting in a cause the believed in and who had widespread support in the countryside, as well as the low morale of US soldiers, who were far from home and increasingly felt that the war was pointless, immoral and unwinnable. Moreover, the focus on death statistics created the temptation for US commanders either to kill surrendered Viet Cong or Vietnamese civilians and claim them as deaths in battle (to commit war crimes, in other words, to boost the statistics) or simply to fabricate data and claim it as unverifiable due to the vagaries of war. In the latter case, there is an element of Goodhart’s Law, named after the economist Charles Goodhart, that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," in other words, to hit the target, people will manipulate the data or even the reality in unforeseen ways. Technocracy is subject to this flaw too.

As we will explore in the next section, mass immigration is the area that has most clearly been subject to the McNamara Fallacy, with a decline in unquantifiable social capital and the ‘homeliness’ of a place ignored in favour of economic growth (often not equally distributed). Unsurprisingly, it is the most contentious issue in our cultures today and the one where the divide between technocrats and populists is most obvious.

Since 2016, the public has pushed back against the idea of a society based on technical expertise rather than politics. The ignored have found their voice.

Key events in showing the divergence of technocratic ‘reality’ and real reality were mass rapes on New Year’s Eve 2015 into 2016 in Germany by immigrants and growing awareness of the Pakistani grooming gangs in Britain, both things covered-up as far as possible by the authorities, very successfully in the latter case; the suppression of dissenting voices around COVID and the diverging restrictions in Western different countries and in the same country at different times, particularly the permission tacitly or even explicitly given by technocratic experts to racial ‘protest’ (rioting), even though large groups of people coming together was seen as reprehensible a day previously; as well as the cognitive decline of President Biden, something very visible in video clips circulating online, but not mentioned at all by the authorities or most of the legacy media.

COVID in particular was a moment of pure technocratic control, a time when experts were able to micromanage a population at the most basic level in the name of public health, while suppressing discussion of whether those policies were correct. It culminated in many countries in restrictions on movement, enforced masking, illiberal vaccine mandates and, in Canada, the incredibly illiberal state freezing the bank accounts of striking truckers.

Again, the experience of COVID varied between the middle and working classes. For middle class families with large homes and gardens, working in sectors that could easily become work-from-home jobs, lockdown was, at most, inconvenient, but for working class families with small homes, small or no gardens, working in sectors such as retail or hospitality that could not be done from home and facing job uncertainty even with government furlough programmes, it was uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking, while these sectors took much longer to recover after lockdown and furlough ended, increasing long-term employment anxiety or unemployment.

I will confess that I was extremely COVID-compliant at the time, but, in retrospect, the suppression of discussion, the inadequate nature of the information provided to the public3 and the failure to appoint any kind of serious, critical commission to analyse what happened and what went wrong and to learn the lessons of the pandemic to prepare for future pandemics indicate a lack of seriousness, a sense that social control was more important than disease prevention, that the public was not trusted to understand what was going on or to make informed decisions, while the apparatus of the state was seen as infallible and incontrovertible. Even when figures like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock were sacrificed to the cause, the ideal of perfect state control was upheld, despite clearly highly imperfect agents of that control.

Other technocratic failures include failing to predict and prevent the 9/11 attacks, the failure of the Afghan and Iraq Wars and the disastrous US withdrawal from the former, the 2008 financial crisis, the failure to predict the Arab Spring and then the failure to predict that it would largely be repressed, and finally the failure to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.

Credentialism has been fatally undermined. The crisis of legitimacy for technocracy is partly based on the fact that it is now very clear that technocracy is simply not working and the experts don’t know what they’re talking about any more — or they do and are being deliberately deceptive. The abandonment of scientific methodology in favour of the same politically-motivated practices that have undermined the humanities is a classic example of this. How can they exhort us to “follow the science” when they themselves prostitute science to ideology by claiming, for example, that there are no physiological differences between men and women, resulting in men in women’s sports and rapists in women’s prisons?

Role of Social Media

One potential cause that deserves discussion on its own is the role of social media. The period of growing political uncertainty has coincided with the explosion in the use of social media in the last two decades. This is a correlation, not a definite causation, but it is easy to see why social media may be a contributing cause.

Social media is generally understood to be a key cause of political polarisation. Algorithms sort people into echo chambers according to political beliefs; memes and one minute video clips erode nuance; and infinite scroll presents a constant menu of rage-bait. You can see the shift in the careers of key populist politicians.

In Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu was essentially a hawkish neo-liberal in the first stage of his career, noted for opposition to the Oslo Peace Process and liberalisation of Israel’s telecoms, fostering the hi-tech “Start-Up Nation.” In the early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, he became notably more of a populist, eventually allying with extreme voices like Itamar Ben-Gvir and attempting to rebalance Israel’s constitutional order in favour of the legislature and executive at the expense of the judiciary (see the next post for why this is classic populist behaviour).

Donald Trump stood in the Reform Party presidential primaries in 2000 before withdrawing; his style of politics was not in fashion yet. His eventual winning of the Republican Party presidential nomination and then the presidency in 2016 was enabled by his huge social media presence, which bypassed the scorn for him in the legacy media, disrupting the base of the Republican Party that had been focused for decades on big business and the religious right by winning over white, working-class voters.

At a deeper level, the brevity of social media posts and the distraction caused by internet phones is thought by many commentators to be creating (or to have already created) a post-literate culture, one where text is secondary to imagery and where public debate has less depth and context. People become less able to follow a complex argument or to reason in depth. Vocabularies and sentence lengths have shrunk, further reducing the ability to construct, follow and critique arguments. Emotion trumps cognition, as can be seen easily online.

Again, this is correlation, not causation, but worryingly plausible. Conspiracy theories thrive in this environment. G. K. Chesterton famously remarked that when people lose their belief in God, they don’t believe nothing, they believe in anything. Perhaps the same applies when people lose their faith in liberal democratic government: any alternative, however brutal or unsuccessful it was in the past seems better than nothing (Communism, Fascism, Islamism). It is worth noting that the previous great crisis in liberal democracy, in the twenties and thirties, coincided with the arrival of radio and ‘talkie’ cinema; in other words, with a decline in print culture and the rise in a more emotional broadcast culture. The arrival of printing itself in Europe in the late fifteenth century precipitated over a century of religious and political upheaval. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan famously observed, is the message and when the medium changes, the message changes too.

The message of social media is anger, aggression and paranoia. The constant action leads to reaction, pushing and people and parties apart. The hair-trigger nature of social media discourse leaves people feeling constantly under threat, with talk of imminent coups and totalitarianism made worse by presence of actual extremists online. Algorithmic echo chambers can lead to self-radicalisation, but with no consequences because of online anonymity. Abuse is gamified as people compete to “win” likes, followers and shares with put-downs and trolling. People see the most extreme 1% of the other side, politically, and mistakenly think it represents the whole, while the most extreme 1% of their own side creates a permission structure to push the Overton Envelope of political acceptability further than ever before, something increasingly done deliberately by politicians (e.g. the Obama administration’s creation of online “permission structures”).

The legacy media, politicians and academics have worsened the situation by describing a reality vastly different from people’s first-hand experiences. George Orwell (Looking Back on the Spanish War) wrote that “however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back”. Social media has allowed a large group of people to blind themselves to the truth that exists behind their backs and instead to inhabit a world that runs according to their ideology. While Orwell saw military efficiency as a check on totalitarian fantasy (even Stalin couldn’t deny scientific truth in a way that would stop his guns firing and his bombs exploding), the social media world, to those who live in it virtually continuously (journalists, politicians, and academics) is a hermetically-sealed paradise that truth can not enter, not least thanks to the ‘block’ button.

One might posit Newton’s Third Law of Social Media: every action leads to an opposite and greater reaction, and so on ad infinitum, in a never-ending cycle of escalation.

In the next post, we will look at the main areas of conflict between technocracy and populism and try to predict what lies in store for Western societies and political systems, as well as making suggestions for further reading. It is scheduled for 23/08/2026.

EDIT: Part Three: The End of Technocracy? is now up here.

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Normal Politics vs. Regime Politics

Technocracy as a Form of Government

The Open Society

Anatomy of an Elite

Populism as Opposition

Introduction

It is not a new observation to note that the current age, the one we have been in since 2016 or perhaps 2008, is one of political upheaval, perhaps the most intense such period since the 1930s and 40s. Political change is being driven by extremely rapid social, cultural and technological change.

Popular analysis tends to frame this in terms of individuals or small groups, country-by-country. The analysis is either that “Trump/Farage/Netanyahu [to pick the three countries I’m most familiar with] is a Fascist!” or that some small progressive elite is ruining the country. I want to go deeper and also broader and look at changes across the West in recent decades and why the post-Cold War settlement is breaking down.

This is primarily a work of synthesis. While I do make original points in what follows, my main aim is to synthesise and develop the approaches of a number of public intellectuals who have suggested a more nuanced understanding of the current moment.

I am focusing primarily on the countries whose politics I know best i.e. Britain, the USA and Israel. I will mention other countries at times, but I am aware that not everything I say can be generalised, so please bear this in mind.

This is an extremely long essay, so I will be posting it in three parts, one part being published each Sunday for three consecutive weeks.

Normal Politics vs. Regime Politics

The political scientist Charles Kesler argued that there are two very different types of party politics that appear in a democracy at different times. At a time of ideological stability there is what he calls “normal politics.” The policies of different parties are really very similar and they compete as to who can manage the institutions of government the best. However, there are times when the political order itself is brought into question by social or economic change. Kesler calls these periods “regime politics.” The values and ideology underpinning the state are seen as flawed and parties compete by putting forward radical solutions to the problems faced by society. (I wrote about this in more detail here.)

David T. Courtwright, in his book No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (published in 2010, as we began to move from a period of normal politics to one of regime politics) argued that the right won the economic argument of the seventies and eighties; the left won the cultural argument; and the centre won the political argument, a succinct summation of the normal politics of the post-Cold War era, the 1990s until the Financial Crisis of 2008 or the great disruptions of 2016 (Brexit and the first Trump presidency), a period of neo-liberal capitalist economics, socially liberal culture and moderate politicians.

As indicated by Courtwright, right and left were no longer the salient division in a political system that treated most questions as settled by both those on the former left and the former right. What governed was a system I refer to as ‘technocracy.’ For a long time, there was no significant opposition to this mode of government. What has slowly emerged since 2008 and has been catalysed since 2016 is a populist opposition to technocracy.

Technocracy as a Form of Government

Technocracy is rule not primarily by elected officials (although these may still exist to accord legitimacy), but by experts. Their rule is legitimated not by popular election (although they may be elected too) or even by intelligence per se, but by expertise as shown through credentials: technical knowledge of some aspect of government, law, public policy or high finance. They enforce a certain form of society at all levels, aiming at a comprehensive level of socio-economic control through an emphasis on legal procedure, procedures that are often only indirectly laid down by the legislature and specified in detail by the technocrats themselves.

Technocrats can be experts in administration: civil servants/bureaucrats, economists, lawyers and even scientists who advise and administer the complex machine of modern government and manage it in such a way that the policy of elected officials is only implemented if they agree with it, otherwise very different things happen, often without the public realising. They can be legal experts: human rights lawyers, government prosecutors and judges who administer law. Judges can be considered part of the machinery of government in a very direct way at times of judicial over-reach, when they interpret the law in such a way as to be effectively creating new law or making the implementation of the law diverge from the intent of legislators. They can be the financial experts: the central bankers, financiers and monopoly capitalists who create society’s wealth and who compete for lucrative government contracts in economies where government tends to contract out much of its activity.

At a lower level of society, technocrats can work in Human Resources, implementing the Diversity Equity and Inclusion law that forms the core of much left- and even moderate right-wing social and employment legislation. They also have a role in running the credentialism on which the system depends: deciding whose credentials are valid and whose are not. They are the think-tank staff who propose policy and the academics who formulate and transmit the ideology of a secular age. The academics are also responsible for passing that ideology on to the next generation. The technocrats are also the NGO staff who exert influence through expert advice and campaigning.

Even elected politicians can fall into the category of technocratic experts. Figures like Rishi Sunak (a former financier) and Sir Keir Starmer (a former human rights lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions) legitimise their rule not through bold leadership strategies, radical policies or personal charisma (they certainly don’t have that!), but through their experience in the technocratic world. This is essentially managerial politics, not ideological politics.

These groups form an interrelated elite, a group of middle- and upper-class individuals who studied at the same elite schools and universities, work in the same institutions, wine and dine with each other, marry each other, send their children to the same elite schools and universities, cover for each other when necessary and employ each other after they’ve publicly fallen from grace (e.g. Starmer appointing Lord Mandelson as US ambassador). They have the same political and moral code (there is no real morality outside politics for them), which is secular, rationalistic, individualistic, managerial, multicultural, socially (and sexually) liberal and also economically liberal (in the sense of free markets and free movement of people) except at the left fringe, which toys with socialism, although the discourse here has largely been moved away, cleverly, from inequality of wealth to other forms of inequality that wouldn’t be solved by raising taxes on the rich and powerful. This elite prides itself on its kindness, tolerance and pluralism, right up to the point someone says something that offends against these values, at which point they are shut down as “unsafe” or even “Fascist” and, if possible, prevented from ever intruding in public life again.

The prophet of technocracy was not Karl Marx, but H. G. Wells. In The Shape of Things to Come (published in 1933), Wells imagined a technocratic dictatorship of scientific experts that would would voluntarily dissolve itself when it had brought utopia and was no longer necessary. It is a pleasant dream, if you think you will be one of the trustworthy technocrats. As the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton put it, “Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.” What the technocrats don’t want is people “clinging to their guns and religion” (to quote former president Barak Obama) relying on their own weapons (and, by extrapolation, their own resources generally) or on God instead of on the state and its credentialed servants.

Technocracy has seen a move from the liberal idea that “the state should do no harm” to the idea that “the state must stop all harm,” an impossible goal. It opposes harm, but lacks nuance and misses passive and second-order harms.

Technocracy is above all a form of government that seeks to rule through regulation and procedure rather than primary legislation.1 This gives it a furtive character, always introducing things quietly through obscure bureaucracy rather than through the executive or legislature. For example, in Britain, the raft of independent “regulators” that have appeared in the decades since the privatisations of the eighties and nineties (OFCOM, OFWAT, etc.) point to the idea that things need regulation; not government control or outright banning, but rather gentle, but persistent management by experts outside of society who can judge between different parties (usually between consumers and producers) and prevent extremes of price (too high or too low) or bad service from arising. Individual choice may be OK for personal life, but the monopoly markets need regulation whereby a bureaucrat imitates the presumed actions of a market that was truly free, with no monopoly distortion.

Related to this is the idea of ‘sin taxes’ (as they are called in Britain), taxes on ‘unhealthy’ goods like sugar, alcohol, tobacco and petrol. Here, two technocratic impulses join up: the desire to ‘nanny’ the individual and ‘nudge’ them into a healthier lifestyle that would (it is assumed) reduce pressure on the health service and also the desire to raise large amounts of tax revenue via indirect taxation of goods that are very price inelastic, meaning, that people continue to consume them in similar amounts even if the price rises drastically (no one ever stopped driving because petrol was too expensive). These two rationales are, of course, utterly opposed to each other, one wanting to reduce consumption, the other to maintain it, but as the rationales are usually unstated, particularly the second one, no one really notices or complains. Similarly, the British government is introducing “energy efficiency” standards that will effectively outlaw many tumble dryers. This is the kind of procedural legislation that operates stealthily. No government would make a manifesto promise to outlaw many cheap tumble dryers; rather, a drive for environmentalism and energy efficiency is made to do the difficult work of rationalising something that will be a nuisance to many people and a real hardship to the poorest.

It’s important to understand that technocracy is not politics. In a sense, it is the opposite of politics. If politics is the art of balancing the needs and desires of different groups in society, technocracy is about applying abstract laws of economics, human rights and nebulous “science” to society. It insists that it is beyond political judgment, dealing with things that are known to be true universally or at least by sensible, educated, good people (“In this house…” signs in America are a good example of what it is assumed that “everyone” should know). It assumes that scientific knowledge is complete and beyond doubt; that the laws of economics are as accurate and predictive as those of the natural or even the physical sciences; and that human rights are inherent, obvious and never conflict with each other. It relies on basic unstated and possibly unconscious assumptions such as prioritising economic growth over full employment or human welfare as the basis for economic policy. This is simply not how the real world works, but the assumptions are unchallenged

credits the German (and, at one point, Nazi) jurist Carl Schmitt with debunking the idea that technological progress or expertise could produce a mode of government that would abolish politics in favour of expert control. Rather, technological advancement has intensified politics and it is a delusion to believe otherwise. However, this delusion is the soul of technocracy.

In order to understand where the delusion has come from, it is necessary to look at the history of technocracy.

The Open Society

In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, historian and social critic Christopher Lasch argued that the emergence of a modern elite occurred in the early twentieth century with the creation of the professional political, civil service and journalist classes that legitimised themselves on the basis of their scientific, detached, informed and analytical mode of operation. They were not partisans, but an objective observers and reformers (in the sense of forming again) of society.

The early technocratic reformers appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, figures like David Lloyd George in Great Britain and Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the United States, but it was the experience of the Great Depression and two World Wars that really encouraged the distinctive Western form of technocracy whereby central control and expertise is combined with social liberalism, unlike other corporate or planned economies and societies (e.g. Fascism, Nazism, Communism). In particular, Keynesian, demand-focused economics, which dominated American politics from the 1930s until the 1980s and British politics from the post-war period until the 1980s, appeared to provide a way of combining private capital with central oversight of the economy through monetary and fiscal policy. This period was therefore the heyday of ‘welfare capitalism’ that sought to tame the free market, rather than replace it, with a social safety net and government intervention to control unemployment via control of monetary policy in particular, sometimes combined with state control of certain industries.

After World War II, a second process was began by this elite in Western society, a process that R. R. Reno has described as the creation of a “paradoxically totalitarian culture of openness and weakening.” The atrocities of Nazism were seen as coming from a closed and authoritarian society that suppressed dissent, enforced conformity and made emotional use of moral principles to control a populace that cooperated from fear of freedom.

Thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Karl Popper and Frederick Hayek, although differing greatly in their ideologies and much of their political prescriptions for society, all agreed that society should be more open, with less control of individuals. This meant, not just a revival of classical liberal ideas of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and the removal of other aspects of state control of the individual, ideas under attack in the thirties and forties by both far-right and far-left, but also a transformation of society as a whole to remove controls created through enforcement of social conventions and traditions by families, communities (especially religious communities) and the media and academia.

Government was to focus on the individual, not notions of the “common good.” Objectivity and scientific method were to replace both tradition and metaphysical truths as the basis of policy. Popper argued that the work of government was technical, practical and social-scientific, not cultured or political-philosophical, while Hayek saw all kinds of collectivism as ending ultimately in serfdom.

The movement towards a unified, federal Europe, currently embodied in the European Union, was part of the same process, a movement to erode national boundaries and differences in the aim of creating a united continent that would no longer be torn apart by war. However, initially, it largely presented itself as a customs union, leading to controversy later on, particularly in Britain, as people who thought they were signing up to a customs union and a limited free market (The Common Market, as it was termed in English for a long time) found themselves inside a project to create a federal United States of Europe ruled primarily by bureaucrats through the European Commission (the real source of authority in the EU rather than the European Parliament, which has limited powers). This is in many ways the ultimate technocratic project: aiming to bring peace and prosperity to a continent riven by two World Wars by creating a heavily bureaucratised super-state.

This “opening” proceeded slowly at first, perhaps blunted by the fears of the early Cold War period and a lack of response from a public set in their ways. It accelerated significantly in the sixties, as the Civil Rights movement and especially the Vietnam War and the protest counter-culture it generated pushed the young to a rejectionist, anti-establishment position in the USA and also in Europe, with student protests advocating a much more permissive society, enabled by the invention of effective oral contraception and the liberalising of laws around sex and criminal justice (particularly the abolition of the death penalty) in many countries. The slogan “It is forbidden to forbid,” associated with the Paris student riots of 1968, sums up this attitude.

The eighties and nineties saw privatisation and deregulation in much of the Western world, but while this led to decreased direct state control of the economy, the state still imposed itself on the market through official regulation and bureaucracy, as noted above. The result was the privatisation of the economy and even areas that had once been seen as the appropriate domain of government by individualist conservatives, eventually producing the neo-liberal technocratic consensus of centre-right and centre-left, the dominant politics in the West at the present, a politics of open markets and open culture, with no wider civic, national or religious loyalties, only the self and the market.

Over time, this was accompanied in the social sphere as well as the economic sphere by multiculturalism (an ideology devised to deal with mass immigration to the West in the post-war world) and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mandates, the latter being particularly dominant in government, academia and multinational corporations.

Social control was increasingly wielded through the bureaucracy and the judiciary via regulation and DEI, not enacted through the formal political process by legislatures that were sometimes hostile to what was happening, but powerless to stop it. Again, this demonstrates the fundamentally technocratic nature of this system of government: rule through impersonal rules and regulations adopted and enforced by unelected bureaucrats and judges, not through people (either THE people, the demos, or their elected representatives).

Technocracy lent itself easily to the idea of mass immigration, being premised on the idea that people and cultures are essentially identical interchangeable, with only surface differences (food, music, art). To disagree and to say that cultures are different, let alone that some are morally better than others, is to commit the greatest sins against the open society: that of proclaiming absolute values and seeing one’s own society as superior. The very idea of the open society was predicated on the assumption that absolute values and patriotism, a sense of one’s own culture being superior, are the same as Nazism. Therefore the idea of mass immigration became emblematic of the open society and assault on mass immigration was seen as a return to Nazism.

The open society has been so successful until now because it was able to colonise parts of the Western elite class and to augment it with new members from parts of society that have grown under technocratic rule and it is to that new elite that we turn now.

Anatomy of an Elite

“Elite” has become a loaded word, criticised as divisive or even antisemitic. However, this criticism seems to come primarily from those who might accurately be described as the Western technocratic elite. Criticism of the term therefore seems self-serving, particularly when insulting terms for the white working class are used freely.

Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites anatomised and critiqued an elite that he saw as disconnected from most Westerners and their values and primarily self-serving in their political views, views which they are often able to implement given their high social standing. The book can be seen as a detailed critique of the technocratic elite and its policies, a critique all the more perceptive for being made in the mid-nineties, when the social and political trends that we see around us today were far from self-evident.

Lasch saw the elite as disconnected from the creation of goods, instead seeking control through “brain-work.” They do not want to coerce or persuade the masses, but to establish alternative institutions to avoid them altogether. The elites are “arrogant and insecure” and can not stand criticism of their own beliefs, scorning the masses who have more conservative opinions.

Lasch saw the elites’ loyalties as belonging to the political system itself, not its component parts (countries and localities, reflected in the subsequent Brexit debate). They have a psychological need to assure themselves that they rose through merit and intellect alone, even though this is often not the case, so they believe that they have no obligation to either their predecessors or successors; no sense of community across time or space; nor any understanding of contemporary civilisation as a product of change over time, not something created overnight by the elite themselves. They also see themselves as citizens of the world, not America or particular European countries. This is a key part of technocracy: legitimacy through merit, not background.

Lasch describes them as an aristocracy of talent with the vices of an aristocracy, but not the virtues, snobbery without reciprocal obligations. They have “compassion” for poor, but this is depersonalised through the state so that the burden of taxation to support the poor largely falls on the lower middle and working class. The top 20% of society largely do not use public services at all.

Lasch saw the left/right divide as breaking down as democratic discussion became limited to the “talking classes” who have become insular, unwilling to accept new ideas, instead categorising things as orthodox or heretical. They do not debate, but focus on exposing ideological deviation (something we now refer to as ‘cancel culture’), not self-criticism, calling each other “Fascist” or “socialist” instead of addressing any real issues. This breakdown in the left/right political divide within the elite has been clear for some time now in Britain, with the Labour and Conservative Parties often referred to as a “uniparty.” This was, as I have explored elsewhere, obvious in the debates on austerity in the twenty-teens, where polarised rhetoric hid the similarity of the parties’ economic plans.

To the elite, “How should I live?” is the most important question in life, but it is treated as matter of taste or personal preference, not virtue. Virtue and obligation are not in the elite’s vocabulary. There should be no moral demands on the self or others. However, social life requires such demands.

Instead of moral demands, Lasch saw that the market and state have been allowed to take over much of the role previously filled by community. This is in many ways the key belief of neo-liberalism or what we might term (slightly tongue-in-cheek), “late technocracy”: the idea that the market mechanism is so perfect that it should be allowed to solve all social and moral problems as well as economic ones. (This was not the view of earlier economists like Adam Smith.) The market and state can be managed by the technocrats in a way that individual social interactions based on personal morality can not be.

The journalist and commentator David Goodhart has also commented on the nature of the technocratic elite and its distancing from the populace. Goodhart describes the elite as “anywheres” (meaning, at home anywhere, with no national loyalty) and the masses as “somewheres” (with loyalties to a particular place). He tells the following story:

One of the experiences that prompted me to write the book came in 2011, when I went to an Oxford College dinner. I found myself sitting between the two most powerful non-elected people in the UK at the time: the head of the British Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, and the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, who went on to manage The New York Times.

I was chatting with Gus O’Donnell and told him I was writing a book about immigration… Gus O’Donnell said to me, “When I was at the Treasury as the chief civil servant, I used to argue for the most open door possible. I think it is my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.” I am reasonably liberal-minded, but I thought, coming from the head of the national civil service, this was extraordinary. I turned to Mark Thompson and said, “Did you just hear what Gus O’Donnell said—the head of the national civil service said it was his job to maximize global welfare?” And Mark Thompson said, “Well, I agree with him.”

This cosmopolitanism is not new. Already in The Mikado in 1885, W.S. Gilbert had ridiculed, “the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/All centuries but this, and every country but his own”. What is new is the prevalence of this viewpoint across almost all of those holding power in the West alongside a mindset that, while supposedly open to “the world” actually knows only identical, liminal spaces: airports, stations, conference halls, university campuses and shopping malls, places that are not really anywhere and definitely not somewhere.

Goodhart describes the centre-left and centre-right pursuing the same policies: globalization; expansion of higher education (at the expense of apprenticeships and technical education); the prioritisation of managerial, professional, and financial jobs; and being indifferent to deindustrialization, mass immigration, and national sovereignty. These policies all fit the profile of a highly-educated professional class that feels at home in elite spaces anywhere in the Western world, with no real loyalty to an individual place or culture and which seeks to reshape the world in its image.

Goodhart describes institutions that were meant to be politically neutral (for example, public sector broadcasters, universities, courts, and some corporations; one might add, the NHS, the police and the army) reflecting the elite worldview, to the dismay of those outside the elite. The promotion of Pride Month by government and many corporations is a good example, premised on a particular kind of public display of sexuality and, increasingly, gender fluidity, that not everyone shares. This erodes these institutions’ legitimacy, which was premised on neutrality or objectivity. The root of this is the apparent assumption that the views of the technocratic elite are objectively-known facts and that political activism is justified to make them known and to suppress “misinformation” (other views), when in fact these are often the subjective views of the technocrats and in need of public debate and can even be factually incorrect.

The growing distance between the technocratic elite and the rest of the native population has led to the emergence of populist challenges, as we shall see.

Populism as Opposition

Populism, the opposition to technocracy, is also not an ideology as such, but simply popular opposition to the technocratic elite in power. As noted by Lasch, elite morality has come to be something quite distinct from popular morality. Values popular with the lower orders of society, such as family, patriotism and religion, are mocked and devalued by the elite and the educational and media resources they control.

In reality, the picture is more complex regarding family and sexuality. As Rob Henderson has argued, elites often “preach the sixties, but live the fifties,” preaching unconventional, liberated lives (especially sexually), but actually making small-c conservative choices for themselves and their families (having married, nuclear families; paying for private education at fairly traditional schools and universities; accumulating wealth for their children and grandchildren). However, what matters is what the elite says and what message it broadcasts through the education system and the legacy media, not what it does in its private life, out of view of the public.

Immigration has emerged as the major fault line between the technocrats and the mass populace, so it is perhaps inevitable that until now, populist movements have crystalised primarily around the notion of nationalism and race in most places.2 There is a further break sometimes appearing between civic nationalists and ethnic nationalists, essentially those who see immigrants who assimilate to the dominant culture as the same as other citizens and those who see ethnicity as a key factor.

This has resulted in a populism focused on patriotism (at times, nativism), sometimes on traditional religion, and on traditional values. The focus is often on the personality-cult of a figurehead, often a disgruntled elite figure, something seen most clearly in Donald Trump. This is someone who knows how the system works, but is also opposed to it. For example, Nigel Farage used his experience as a member of the European Parliament to push for Brexit.

What may be happening now is an emergent left-wing populism, merging traditional Marxist class-based economic concerns with an identity politics embracing non-white, female, LGBT and Muslim identities alongside a postcolonial understanding of geopolitics centred on opposing perceived American and Israeli “aggression” and “colonialism.” This may be seen around populist figures like Zack Polanski, leader of Britain’s Green Party, and Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York.

These politicians largely ignore the traditional base of the Western left, the white working class, and focus on members of the middle class left behind by what Peter Turchin termed “elite over-production” (essentially, too many graduates for the number of existing good graduate jobs) and a housing crisis (ironically exacerbated by the mass immigration that this group dogmatically supports) alongside those who see their minority identity as a fundamental part of their political identity and want to see it as a basis for government and law, essentially to impose on others.

“Queerness” is an example, a political term embracing LGBT people who see their sexuality and/or gender as their defining identity and who want to “queer” society by disrupting its sexual and gender binaries and boundaries. LGBT people who simply see their sexuality/gender as a part of who they are and think of politics in other ways are not welcome in this movement. Likewise, Hindus, South-East Asians and Hispanics are increasingly seen as “white-adjacent” because they are less likely to play the identity politics game and are often socially and economically conservative, while only antizionist Jews are allowed in the movement. White, male identities are not allowed; white men need to find other, minority identities (e.g. queer, neurodivergence) or act as “allies” to others and not in their own interests.

It is unclear whether this “lower middle class woke populism” is a part of the technocracy that gave birth to it in academia (by providing the theoretical infrastructure to its adherents as well as their sense of entitlement3 and therefore their sense of disenfranchisement) or if it is truly a “successor ideology” to liberal democracy in its technocratic form (as Wesley Yang termed wokeness, from which this springs). Large-scale social engineering and wealth redistribution efforts, as figures like Polanski and Mamdani advocate, would logically require a technocratic infrastructure to succeed, yet everywhere in these groups the urge to destroy is uppermost; the need to build is secondary at best. In this regard they seem more like right-wing populist Donald Trump, whose appeal was based on destroying technocracy more than building anything new. That influencers like Hasan Piker are advocating criminal acts of theft and murder would further suggest that this is not technocracy, but a form of populist revolt.

There may also be a distinction between a technocracy still rooted in Enlightenment universalism and rationalism and which is cosmopolitan in nature, connected to developed economies everywhere (i.e. in Asia as well as the West); and a radical postmodern identity politics based on particular identities, critical of rationalism where it doesn’t serve its adherents’ purposes (e.g. regarding the trans debate) and focused on the Third World rather than the developed world. It may be that only time will tell whether this is a new evolution of technocracy or a radical break with it, but I increasingly favour the latter view.

In the next post, we will see why the last ten to fifteen years has seen the breakdown of the technocratic order. It is scheduled for 16/08/2026.

EDIT: Technocracy and Populism Part Two: The Crisis of Legitimacy is up here. Part Three: The End of Technocracy? is here.

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Thanks!

I’ve mentioned once or twice that I was writing a dystopian satirical science fiction novel, England Awokens: The Day After the Revolution. The style I was going for was ‘Jonathan Swift, Douglas Adams, Philip K. Dick and the Monty Python team get drunk and write a novel together.’

I abandoned it about a third of the way through the first draft, around eighteen months ago. This was for several reasons: I had much less time to write with a baby on the way, and this Substack was more financially rewarding and, I thought, better-written than the novel, so it seemed a better use of my time to prioritise that. Plus, both politics and technology seemed to be changing faster than I could keep up with to remain topical.

I’m reluctant to post first-draft material that I don’t currently have plans to continue, and I have very mixed feelings about what I wrote, but, as I have so little time to write at the moment and I don’t want this Substack to go entirely silent, so I thought I would post an excerpt.

The section below depicts a meeting of the British Cabinet in the wake of the assassination of the Prime Minister (assassination and AI were both things that were not terribly topical when I wrote the storyline, but which became more topical during the writing — yes, this story was brewing for a long time before I started writing). In the context of the story, VRAI is the Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence, a sort of immersive internet downloaded straight into your brain.

I would reiterate that I wrote this well over a year ago, long before recent shenanigans in Downing Street and Manchester!

Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts

Much had altered in the way that England was governed over the centuries, but some things had not changed at all, despite the Mostly Peaceful Revolution. One of these things was the centring of the executive branch of government in a in a deceptively small-looking house with a black door and a white number ten painted on it, on a small road off Whitehall (or Blackhall, as it was now known) now officially known as Algonquian Street, although still referred to by most people at Downing Street.

In a surprisingly small room at the heart of this building, sat a nervous male-presenting. The room was in the Georgian style, painted a pale yellow, with several pillars that were probably ornamental. Chandeliers with electric light bulbs hung from the ceiling. A couple of bookcases stood at each end of the room, laden with old-fashioned, leather-bound books (a rare commodity since The Mostly Peaceful Revolution and The Great Cancellation) and there was a marble fireplace in the middle of one of the long walls, opposite the windows, but the room was dominated by a vast green baize-topped table, laid out with more than twenty seats, each with its own paper, pen and blotter – a quaint formality, as no one took hardcopy notes any more. It was called The Cabinet Safe Space (formerly The Cabinet Room) and it had been, so to speak, the heart of the heart of English government for centuries. Cabinet meetings were still held in meatspace because of the fear of hacking or bugging by foreign powers, terrorists, dissidents and sundry other Fascists. Plus, it stopped Cabinet ministers surreptitiously recording proceedings and re-editing them for their memoirs or to blackmail other ministers. The Cabinet began to file in, alone or in knots of two or three, usually in conversation, a succession of serious-looking people of varied races and genders, all dressed in dark suits, except for one male-presenting, who was wearing a bottle green suit, apparently for the Wear Green, Go Green environmental charity fundraising day. No one sat in the Prime Minister’s chair, but a pen, notepad and blotter had been laid there as silent memorial. They walked over to their chairs. Vijay thought that some looked grief-stricken, but not many. One or two seemed pensive. Some were clearly plotting the succession, but trying to look like they were just making small talk.

The big beasts of the Cabinet, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Pembroke; Home Secretary, Aisha Khalifa; Foreign Secretary, Guru Singh; and Minister for Islamophobia, Tariq Hussein, all entered alone, looking around, sizing up the room and their prospects, while trying to look like they were doing nothing of the sort.

However, the Deputy Prime Minister, Norman Sayers, looked as nerdy and weedy as ever behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He clearly knew that he had no chance of becoming Prime Minister or even being a kingmaker for other candidates.

The Cabinet Secretary, a sombre-looking man with a painstakingly inconspicuous face, like most senior civil servants, opened the meeting with the traditional land acknowledgement.

“We acknowledge, recognise and honour the Catuvellauni, whose stolen land we are meeting upon, at the start of this meeting. We are humbled by the knowledge that we are settler-colonialists who need to check our privilege, listen hard to oppressed voices and do better. Only by acknowledging this can we move forward as strong allies to the Celts and all other colonised peoples in England.”

“As I say each meeting, the Celts were settler-colonialists too. We should be acknowledging the Bell-Beaker People as the true indigenous inhabitants of this whole archipelago.” The speaker was Tariq Hussein, the Minister for Islamophobia.

“You and your fucking Beaker People every time,” someone muttered, but no one would admit to noticing who and the meeting moved on.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Pembroke, spoke next. He was a fat man, usually looking jolly. Prime Ministers often appoint a fat, jolly-seeming Chancellor, to try to make the tax hikes and spending cuts seem a little less miserable. Theresa May had a tall, thin, miserable, cadaverous Chancellor who looked like an undertaker out of Dickens – big mistake. Or maybe the fat men were just to make the Prime Minister look thin in Cabinet photos. Never under-estimate the vanity of a politician.

“I think before we start, we should hold a minute’s silence in memory of the late Prime Minister,” he said.

There was a murmur of approval and all present folded their hands, stared at their blotters and spent a whole minute thinking about the Prime Minister, their next meeting, their mistresses or what was for lunch.

After a minute, they looked up. Before anyone could speak, the Chancellor stepped in again. He was not officially in the chair, but seemed to be making a play for it.

“The first item on the agenda is the assassination of the late Prime Minister.” He realised the Cabinet Secretary was glaring at him, met his gaze with an easy smile and carried on speaking.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that Johnnie Bull is the culprit.”

“Chancellor of the Exchequer, it is totally inappropriate to start this kind of speculation! I think this meeting should have had a trigger warning. It’s not appropriate to just launch into this discussion. Someone might get triggered. PTSD is an invisible disability,” said Aisha Khan.

There were murmurs of approval from around the table.

“I also think that we need to be very clear that this has nothing to do with Islam. We need a total crackdown on Islamophobic conspiracy theorists who are prepared to blame everything bad in the world on the ummah. It’s outrageous that, any time there’s any violence, the Muslims get blamed. When it’s far more likely to be a certain other ethno-religious group, mentioning no names.” This was the Tariq again.

“Quite right, Minister for Islamophobia,” said Nigel, taking control again. “We’ll have a crackdown on Jews living out of the ghetto. We can pull in a bunch of Fascists as well, no harm in that, eh, Minister for Islamophobia?”

“Indeed not, Prime Minister, I mean, Chancellor of the Exchequer.” No one smirked at the outrageous toadying – at least, not outwardly. The Chancellor, however, beamed like the cat who had just taxed 97% of the cream.

“I don’t think we should dismiss the Islamist threat so easily, Chancellor of the Exchequer.” This was from Taylor Rouse, a middle-aged woman with bright green hair who was Secretary of State for Green Energy. “The Islamists are vocally opposed to all Pride and gender-affirming activities.”

Before she could finish her statement, her voice was drowned out by many other ministers.

“No Muslim would do such a terrible thing. And if they did, it would be virtuous resistance in response to England’s historic imperialism and Islamophobia, such as the illegal Balfour Declaration, which sparked over a century of colonial oppression of our great friends the Palestinians.” Nigel again, trying to keep the support of the majority at the table.

“Quite right,” said Tariq. “Remember Palestine,” he added, ominously.

“I didn’t mean to criticise Palestine,” said Taylor. “Palestine will be triumphant! She will rise –” She broke off, interrupted.

“Palestine isn’t a woman! You misgendered Palestine!” A surprise entry from Clarabel Devonshile, Secretary of State for Culture Wars, Media and Sport, a thin, young, female-presenting (in fact, the youngest minister present) with a posh accent and a more expensive education than the rest of the Cabinet put together. “The idea that countries are automatically women is the type of outdated, retrograde, misogynistic, transphobic, imperialist nonsense that should have been abolished years ago.”

“Maybe the PM was killed by a TERF,” suggested the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Ibrahaim Ali, who was feeling peeved that he hadn’t had a chance to speak yet.

At the mention of the dreaded word TERF, the assembled Cabinet mimed throwing salt over their right shoulder as per standard superstition.

“Folkz, let’s calm down,” said Nigel. “I think we can all agree that Jews, Zios, what-have-you are the most likely and certainly the most useful potential assassins for the PM. The late PM. The late, beloved, PM. Home Secretary, maybe you could nudge Special Branch in that direction? Lovely. Now, the first thing we need to do is choose a new PM.”

Twenty-two pairs of eyes narrowed and focused on the Nigel, suspiciously.

“I think we should leave the Prime Minister’s successor to a vote among the Party, as per procedure,” said Taylor.

“In ordinary circumstances, I would agree,” said Nigel. “But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. The ship of state must not be seen to stumble at the first sign of danger or else we could all be marching to the front without a rudder.” He showed no sign of spotting the mixed metaphors, but several Cabinet members winced, then tried to look unperturbed.

“In short, we must pick a new PM pronto.” He looked around expectantly.

“It is certainly time for a Muslim PM,” said Tariq, pointedly.

“How about another woman?” said Taylor.

“Not a white woman,” said Tariq, hurriedly.

“The New Outlook requires discussion of the intersections of oppression: gender, race, age, species and religion. The late PM was an African-English male-presenting atheist of Christian ancestry. We have already had plenty of white women. I propose an Asian Muslim woman,” said Aisha.

“You mean, you propose yourself, being the only Asian Muslim woman here,” said Nigel.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Aisha, brazenly.

“I think she’s talking sense,” said Ibrahim, who knew he was too lowly and too clumsy a political operator to be able to put his own name forward. The best alternative was to pick a likely candidate and suck up to them in the hope of getting a plum job in the next Cabinet.

“What if we discuss some policy issues,” said Nigel, trying to wrest back control of the spotlight and find a way to inveigle himself back into the running. “Say, slavery reparations. Reparations were made to African-Englishpeople soon after The Mostly Peaceful Revolution, but what about former colonies?”

“I’ve long felt that we should send money to former colonies that suffered from slavery, such as those in the Caribbean,” said Tariq.

“I’ve long felt we should send white people out as slaves for labour on public works. Build roads and train lines and things. Quid pro quo. Anything else would be unfeeling to the formerly colonised peoples.” said Aisha.

“Who would you send?”

“Working-class white people, obviously. Middle class people are far too valuable to the economy and they’re loyal Party supporters too. Working class white people are lazy and racist, too easily swayed by populists and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Frankly, we’re better off without them.”

“What about some Party members, to show that we are willing to make sacrifices?” asked Nigel, stirring things up.

“Failed Cabinet ministers. Pour encourager les autres,” said Aisha decisively.

“What if an African-English minister screws up. Would you really send a black minister into slavery in the Caribbean?” Tariq, stirring things even more.

“African-English ministers don’t screw things up, like women, gays and trans ministers. And Muslim ministers. It would be the worst sort of racist populism to suggest they do and frankly you want to ask yourself why you just asked that.”

Tariq said nothing, but smiled. She definitely had potential.

“Would anyone qualify for removal under those criteria? I’m one quarter Sioux,” said Nigel, improbably.

“I’m one eighth Māori,” said Sally Orwell, speaking up for the first time.

“I’m one fifteenth Vietnamese,” said Taylor. She realised everyone was staring at her. “We’re a very close family,” she finished, embarrassed.

The improbability of actually sending any failed ministers into slavery seemed clear, which cheered everyone up. It was like the introduction of racial quotas in universities some decades previously; once you realised that most people had some kind of ethnic minority ancestry, if you went back far enough, the whole situation became beautifully malleable, from a political point of view.

“What about racist embryos?” asked Taylor, trying to change the subject.

“Abort them,” said Nigel.

“Impractical,” said Aisha. “All white embryos are conceived in an environment of white supremacy and so are inherently racist. We sadly can’t abort all of them. Aborting five million embryos a year would break the NHS. The only option is to educate them into anti-racism from their mothers’ – and fathers’ – milk, literally. We’re already funding research into psychotropic additives that we can put in milk to make babies more susceptible to anti-racist brain training techniques. We need to stick with that kind of progressive thinking.”

“What does the Home Secretary think about transracialism?” asked Ibrahim. By this stage, there was no pretence that anyone else was in the running.

“Fake-racials, as I refer to them. Race is fixed and unchangeable, scientifically-speaking. It’s not like gender. Frankly, fake-racials are just undercover Fascists stirring up trouble and I’ve always said as much. They are constantly micro-aggressing and hurting the feelings of real BIPOC. It’s unacceptable. We need to keep it illegal, regardless of what some Fascist agitators say. Anything else would be ignoring the feelings of BIPOC and legitimate mixed-racials.”

“What about species dysphorics?” asked Nigel. There was a little gasp from someone. Nigel knew that, unlike previous topics, this was a source of deep division within The Party and the community of the faithful generally. He was making a last play for the premiership himself.

There was a moment of silence as Aisha drew a deep breath.

“Species dysphorics have “insistent, persistent, consistent” feelings dysphoria. They should be allowed to amend their birth certificates to change their species. Anything else would be unfeeling. And if pet owners complain that some cats and dogs can vote and others can’t, we extend the furry franchise to pets who can write a cross on a ballot paper. We can’t be unfeeling. I’ll take a chance on trained monkeys voting.”

The Cabinet collectively exhaled. She certainly had balls (not literally, but there would be nothing wrong if she did). She was willing to take a difficult stance on the most pressing issue of the day. However, there was still a chance of a split in The Party.

“What would you say to Party members who didn’t accept this,” asked Norman, speaking for the first time in the meeting. He had no chance of becoming Prime Minister, so perhaps it was a legitimate question aimed at gauging the chance of factionalism.

“I would say that we are a party committed to discussion of many viewpoints and also that the facts of zoological science don’t care about their speciesist feelings.”

“What are your policies on gender?” asked Sally, guiding the conversation to less dangerous topics, perhaps fearful of a split in the Cabinet itself.

“I would introduce much stricter punishment for the use of objectifying language in VRAI that reduces people to biological functions. I would also ensure that all official forms use correct terminology for people who menstruate, people who used to menstruate, people with penises, people with penises who menstruate, enbies, intersex, pan-gender, pre-gender, post-gender, and so on. Some are still using the brutally reductionist and patriarchal ‘Male’ and ‘Female.’ There is no excuse for that in this day and age. We also need to fund more genetic research into full transition at a chromosomal level, which will hopefully lead to many more children and teenagers transitioning. As trans people have always been a crucial part of our political support, this is more important than ever.”

“What are your views on social security and pensions?” said Tim Browing, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

“We need to invest in children, because they’re our future. Unlike the elderly, who are the past,” replied Aisha, definitively. “So, it’s totally OK to tax them and then euthanise them when they haven’t got anything left to give. To give back, I mean. To society.”

“What about the representation of left-handed people in the media?” asked Sally.

“I support full representation for everyone. Every novel, film, play or TV show should be precisely in line with the latest census information, adjusted to reduce the regrettable over-representation of cis, straight and white characters in meatspace, of course.”

“What about economic policy?” asked Abubakar Oneyma, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, thinking about his own niche topic again, as he did in almost every Cabinet meeting, instead of taking the Big Picture of The New Outlook and focusing on important issues that affect everyone, such as race, gender and sexuality.

“Not terribly relevant to the job of a modern government. If we need to raise taxes without criticism, we can just get some friendly influencers to post about the need to pay more taxes.”

“Is there a legal right not to have someone yuk your yum?” Nigel was being facetious now, just registering his discontent at the way things were going.

“Yes, and a legal protection against someone shitting on your squee. Be serious, Nigel,” said Aisha sarcastically, pointedly using his name instead of his title as per protocol.

By this stage, it was clear that Aisha was to be the new Prime Minister. Between being black, female-presenting and Muslim, she had too many diversity points to be beaten by Nigel, however much he redwashed his white privilege with left-wing politics, plus she was a much cannier political operator. There was no announcement to the Cabinet. There never is in an oligarchy. It is just assumed that, if you matter, you know and if you don’t know, you don’t matter.

“Right, let’s get to the next item on the agenda,” said Aisha briskly. “Since VRAI went online about forty years ago, people have ossified intellectually. VRAI has been a perpetual outrage generator, keeping ordinary proles involved with politics at only the most mindless level of giving loves to blue tick politicians and hates to thought criminals to get the appropriate feels. It’s like we have created a generation of factory-fed sheep, mindlessly grazing and awaiting the slaughter. But there is a downside to this too. In theory, someone could use VRAI to whip up revolution against us. Unlikely, but possible. However, some tech geeks at a government lab have come up with something that might help bring VRAI under unified control. They say –” Aisha broke off as the lights went out, dim emergency lighting kicking in flawlessly after only five seconds of everyone sitting in the dark. Government buildings secretly ran on fossil fuels, but, to maintain appearances with the public, it was still necessary to have carefully timed power failures from time to time to simulate renewable energy sources. Obviously, in the panic after the Prime Minister’s assassination, no one had thought to change the timing of this power cut.

“Oh, well, we’ll have to stop there for now. Meeting adjourned, everyone. Fuck the Tories.”

“Fuck the Tories,” everyone echoed blandly, the ancient way of bringing a Cabinet meeting to a close. People began to gather papers and stand up, little pockets of conversation breaking out. Already, they would be politicking, manoeuvring for position within the soon-to-be-reformed Cabinet. Already they would be bitching about Aisha and gossiping about whether Nigel would be paid off with a plum job, put out to pasture where he might be a nuisance or even dealt with more drastically.

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I had a conversation with the Substack help bot and it seems there’s no way for me to pause subscriptions to my Substack made through the Substack App except by completely severing my Stripe account from my Substack account, which I don’t really want to do in case I ever want to restart subscriptions.

So, if you think you may have subscribed to me through the app, please turn your subscription to a free one! I’ll let you know if I ever restore paid subscriptions. I think two or three people are still paying me every month.

I still have little time to write, between a part-time job and being a full-time Dad, but this perhaps give too much time to think about writing. It’s better to just write, but most of the time, I can’t, but I can think.

Lately, I’ve been feeling frustrated with Substack, both the crowding-out of quasi-hobbyist writers looking for a break (like me) by professional journalists and the fact that I feel increasingly frustrated that the only posts I write that people seem to like are about antisemitism, whereas I want to write about other topics too (not instead of), more general political/social/cultural commentary, maybe even more philosophical or literary topics. I’m working on a big post (probably two posts) about technocracy and populism, which I think is the real political divide of the age, more than left and right. I think it’s good, but I also wonder about it vanishing without a trace on Substack. I do think there’s something to be said for writing for the sake of writing, even if no one reads, or for the sake of a small, loyal crowd of readers, but it can be frustrating to invest so much effort in something that so few people see.

Then I remember that, when I write about what I want to write about, it mostly turns into stuff about old British science fiction TV or other similarly obscure stuff. I think I possibly could turn that into actual cultural commentary, but I doubt anyone would read it.1 So, however, much I’d like to write about The Avengers (the 1960s British espionage/science fiction-adjacent TV series, not the Marvel Cinema “Universe”), Doctor Who novelisations or The Buggles’ only album, The Age of Plastic (which I’ve been obsessed with for some months now)… well, maybe I should not.

Actually, I say that, but I’ve been re-watching every (surviving) episode of The Avengers for well over a year now and was hoping to finish soon, but the last DVD was faulty, so I’m stuck halfway through the penultimate episode (although I have 26 episodes of The New Avengers to watch afterwards…), waiting for a replacement from eBay. It was during one of my favourite episodes, Take-Over. But, while The Avengers in its peak, the period it’s most remembered for, with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel alongside Patrick Macnee’s ever-present John Steed, seems too light and frivolous (delightfully so) to be analysed, Take-Over, it occurs to me from what I saw, has a chillingly accurate portrait of left-wing terrorists hoping to assassinate a bunch of politicians. Their motives hadn’t been explained yet and, from what I remember and from looking at synopses online, I don’t think they are ever made clear, but the psychological profile fits groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Fenton Grenville, the ring-leader, is posh, cultured and arrogant. He is visibly piqued when beaten at a classical music trivia game by Steed. Circe, introduced as his niece, which may not be true (or not the whole truth) “works hard to be a character,” we are told (be a character, not to have character); certainly she acts like an annoying “aren’t I a craaazy free spirit” attention-seeker — when she isn’t operating on hostages to put bombs in their throats. She says she was expelled from medical school, but I find it hard to see how she got in, unless a rich/powerful relative pulled strings. Sexton wants to open a super-exclusive restaurant. Like Fenton and Circe, he seems to be quite posh. Lomax just seems to enjoy hurting people. This is a fairly accurate portrait of left-wing terrorism (snobbery and violence) even if not made explicit, and absolutely not what you would see on TV nowadays, where more conservative writers keep a low-profile. (Take-Over writer Terry Nation most famously created the Daleks for Doctor Who and was one of the most high-profile TV writers of his era).

So, maybe there are things to say about all kinds of cultural artifacts, however obscure, and ways to say them that are of interest, if I’m brave enough.

The other thing I have written a lot of in the past, and am at times tempted to write here, is more personal, reflective posts. These also work well (not just for me, for writers in general), but there’s a real risk of giving too much away, either literally, in terms of personal information, or ‘performing’ your life online instead of living it, or becoming ‘captured’ by your audience and writing/thinking/doing what they want/expect. I’d like to write about my first year of fatherhood, of being autistic and resisting the grievance oppressor/oppressed claims of the neurodivergence movement, about resilience and more.

I’d like to write about my favourite books too, less formal criticism and more what they mean to me. That’s probably a safer option, although, as few of my favourite books are unknown, perhaps less interesting and worthwhile.

It’s frustrating as I like to think about things, to actually think them through, and writing an essay is the best way of structuring thoughts, far better than just idly pondering. I have so little time for writing at the moment, so there’s a lot more I’d like to write than I actually can write, and a lot of time to think about what I should write, which probably results in navel-gazing like this.

I have something very different planned for later this week, so stay tuned for that!

As I have now paused paid subscriptions, I’ve unlocked the post, so everyone can read it now. It can be found here:

I started this Substack for political thought about Israel, antisemitism and antizionism during the Gaza War without thinking much about what I would do when it was over. I don’t think any of us could even think of it being over back in the bad days of 2024 (and, yes, I know it’s not really over even now, but it’s less intense). I do still have things to say about antisemitism and antizionism, but I don’t really want to write only about antisemitism and antizionism, nor do I want to write about everyday party politics in Israel, Britain or anywhere else.

I have a (non-literal) stack of posts to write in various stages: some with pages and pages of research and planning already done, others in earlier stages of scribbled notes and some at the “Wouldn’t it be interesting/insightful/fun to write about X?” stage. My thoughts are moving towards general cultural and ‘deep’ socio-political critique i.e. not party political posts, but posts about how society as a whole is functioning, or malfunctioning in the West at the moment. I am doing this doing in a post I’m currently working on about the clash between technocracy and populism, which I think has replaced the left/right dichotomy in the West (and perhaps also feeds into Western perceptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict on a deep level). I also want to bring insights from Jewish thought into my “secular” critiques.

I want to continue my Theology After the Pogrom series reading classic works of Jewish religious thought in the aftermath of 7 October to find a way forward for Jewish life today. My next two texts will be Future Tense by Rabbi Lord Sacks and The Body of Faith by Michael Wyschogrod.

I’d also like to write about are the real forms of cultural hegemony in the West (which could also feed into Israel-Palestine writing), but lately I have purely cultural thoughts too, about old and overlooked books, films, TV programmes and music that I think have meaningful things to say today and I’m curious to see if I can write about them in a way that’s congruent with what I’ve written here previously and meaningful to my readers. It is a gamble, of course, as I might not be able to do it or might alienate people with new topics.

I have also mentioned over on the notes section that I started writing a comedy/science fiction satirical dystopian novel a while back. Although I’ve abandoned it (for now?) and although I’m more than a little wary of posting first draft material here, I’m thinking of posting some extracts here, if I think they stand alone and are amusing enough. (The acid test will be whether my wife thinks it’s funny enough when she reads it.)

If all else fails, I have a pile of non-fiction books on antisemitism, the Holocaust, Israel and the USSR to read, which I’m sure will inspire more posts when I get the time for more serious reading, baby-permitting.

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Assassination has become a serious problem in America again for the first time since the 1970s. This time, the majority of assassins and would-be assassins are drawn from the political left, most voicing a similar worldview, seeing one man with a gun as the only way of stopping an ineluctable slide towards “Fascism.”

What we have with Cole Allen and other figures on the American left is a kind of third-hand recollection of Pastor Niemöller (“First they came for the socialists…”) combined with the self-absorbed nature of contemporary life and the contemporary left in the social media era, the Hollywood-style assumption that the individual can do anything, provided his (or her, their or whatever) heart is pure. The result is a generation who believe that they personally can prevent Hitler II: The Revenge, something necessary because the generation of the 1930s singularly failed to do this the first time around.

It’s hard to know where to begin in critiquing this. The Weimar Republic didn’t collapse because people were too stupid or preoccupied to notice Hitler and what he stood for. It collapsed over a period of a decade or more because of deep-rooted social, economic and political problems to which no one had the answer. Many had tried before the Nazis. The real problems were outside Germans’ hands: the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I (particularly the reparations payable to the Allies) and the vulnerability of the German economy to the advent of the Great Depression in the American economy, plus the fact that few people in Germany supported the Weimar Republic, even if they could not agree on what to replace it with. One man with a gun, whether in 1922 or 1932, wouldn’t have changed any of that.

Even if Hitler had been assassinated before 1933 (or if the authorities had locked him up and thrown away the key after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923), there’s a very strong chance that Germany would have ended up as some kind of dictatorship, far-right or, just as likely, far-left (which presumably would suit many on the modern left, as long as they didn’t actually have to live in it).

As for killing him after he came to power, the failed 20^th July 1944 plot against Hitler (which nearly succeeded) led to 7,000 arrests and nearly 5,000 executions. That’s a lot of executions for a plan that didn’t even succeed. Similarly, the successful assassination in Czechoslovakia by the Czech Resistance (the real resistance, not the modern cosplayers) of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the highest-ranking SS officers and chief architects of the Holocaust, led to the murder of 1,300 Czechs, including 200 women. The idea that assassination is just a consequence-free game you can play is utterly insane. If Trump really was Hitler, the consequences of killing him would be catastrophic. The aristocrats and generals behind the 20^th July plot had a plan for taking power once Hitler was dead. Cole Allen would just have let the Twenty-Fifth Amendment kick in, leaving an administration headed by the most senior member of the Trump administration to survive the shooting pursuing similar policies with, it must be said, probably a great deal less chaos and scandal than the Trump administration.

The whole febrile atmosphere on the left speaks to a failure of the imagination, not a failure to imagine a possible evil, but rather the hallucination of an evil that simply is not there, combined with a melodramatic sense of destiny and a personal role in history in certain people (ironically, something they genuinely do share with Hitler), who believe that they alone, acting by themselves or in concert with others, can divert history from The Third Reich Redux to the longed-for left-wing utopia.

This is not 1933. ICE is not the Holocaust. However much it upsets you, deporting illegal immigrants (something unremarked upon by the left as much as the right until a decade or two ago) is not the Holocaust.[1] The Gaza War was not the Holocaust. However much it upset you, the tragic results of a defensive war against a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population is not a genocide. The fact that a majority of your countrymen and women voted for someone you dislike, someone you find morally contemptible, to lead the country, is not the return of Hitler. There’s a reason you can go on No Kings protests, but Germans in 1935 weren’t holding No Fuhrers protests. I promise you, you’ll have the chance to vote for someone else in two years’ time, whatever the increasingly-hysterical legacy media tells you.

What is needed, and not just in the USA, is a move away from rabid personal attacks and Hitler comparisons[2] and a return to actual discussion of policy. A return to boring politics, politics that doesn’t offer us the hope of personal redemption or a place in history, but which tries to keep the streets clean, the public services functioning well, the citizenry safe from enemies inside and out and the economy growing. It is that, and not wild fantasies of “resistance” and utopia that will get us through the genuine socio-political-economic upheavals of our era.

[1] For the record, the current explosion of Jew-hate in the world, much of it from the type of people who fantasise about killing Donald Trump, is also not the Holocaust. Only the Holocaust is the Holocaust.

[2] I remember when infringing Godwin’s Law was something to avoid and not the main debating strategy on the left.

You may have seen that there has been a spate of antisemitic arson attacks in London in the last few weeks, possibly connected to an Islamist group with links to Iran. Two synagogues, four ambulances from a volunteer Jewish ambulance service (a service run by Jews for the whole community, a fact obscured in reporting and debate) and the offices previously occupied by a Jewish educational organisation, which was no longer in residence, but still had a sign outside, have all been targeted, possibly by hired arsonists.

One of the synagogues attacked, Kenton Synagogue, was the shul I grew up in. I had my bar mitzvah there; my sister had her bat mitzvah there; my father was warden for a couple of years; my mother was on the Ladies Guild; both were given honours for their involvement (Chatan Torah and Eishet Chayil). I was a regular daily shul-goer (at least, when my mental health permitted it), led prayer services there and gave Torah classes until we moved out of the area eleven years ago. This seems very close to home in a way that previous attacks did not.

Thankfully, there was no serious damage to people or property in this attack, just some minor smoke damage to the building.

It would be easy to blame these attacks on the politicians, journalists, academics and public intellectuals who have placed personal, sectarian and political gain ahead of the truth over the last three years, spreading unsubstantiated and disproven blood libels about Israeli “genocide” and “war crimes” as well as “the Jewish lobby” — and it would mostly be correct to do so. Our political and thought leaders are, for the most part, cowards and weak men and women desperate to keep the lid on the country’s simmering ethnic and religious tensions or else to exploit them for personal or partisan benefit rather than telling the truth.

However, that is not my aim here today.

The rabbis saw Judaism as resting on three pillars: Torah study, prayer and acts of kindness. The arson attacks target all three: Torah study through the Jewish education charity; prayer through the synagogues and acts of kindness through the ambulances.

The Jewish response to darkness is not to take revenge, but to spread light, by defending ourselves physically and spiritually. The Community Security Trust (CST) and Shomrim see to our physical defence. Spiritually, we need to rebuild and extend all three “pillars.” If they try to stop us studying one chapter of Torah or page of Talmud, we’ll study two. If they try to stop us davening Shacharit (saying Morning Prayers), we’ll daven Shacharit, Minchah and Ma’ariv (Morning, Afternoon and Evening Prayers). If they burn four ambulances, we’ll replace them with five. We’ll spread so much light, the Jew-haters will have to wear sunglasses constantly.

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Anyone familiar with the discourse around Israel, antizionism and antisemitism, will be aware of the recurrence of certain tropes in antizionist and antisemitic writing. Sometimes these are openly antisemitic, such as the idea that Jews deliberately kill children. Other times, they function through suggestion, gaining power from the way they are embedded in longstanding discourse around Jews, such as the suggestion that Jews are materialistic, whereas the Palestinians are a strongly spiritual people, generally not said outright, but through implication. It is difficult to disprove such ideas, not least because they have no evidential basis to attack. They work as suggestions, tropes, memes, recurring images and ways of thinking about the Jews.

Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (originally published as Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition) by David Nirenberg provides a way of conceptualising these ideas.

Anti-Judaism was a book I had read a lot about in the secondary literature before I read it earlier this year. The popular summary of the book is that societies take all their negative aspects, the things they don’t want to be and can’t consciously admit to being, and label the resulting construct as ‘Judaism.’ I wrongly assumed this ‘judaism’1 is a kind of Jungian Shadow, the faults and vices of the antijew projected onto the jew. For example, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written by members of the Czarist secret police, projected the imperial ambitions of the Czarist government onto the jews; the Medieval Church and the Inquisition was worried about jews proselytising to Christians (despite Judaism being a non-proselytising religion), while themselves trying to convert Jews to Christianity; while contemporary Islamic fears that Israel plans to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Jewish Temple on the site resonate with Islam’s history of destroying places of worship belonging to conquered religions and building mosques on the site.

However, a more precise summary of Nirenberg’s thesis is that non-Jews in the West and Middle East use label of ‘judaism’ to ‘think with judaism’ and to discuss many different topics, including the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, or law versus love; the gap between the material world and spirituality; the nature of the finite and the infinite; particulars and universals, especially among human beings (loving one’s own people versus loving everyone); contracts and the extent to which human life can be contracted away to someone else; and even the ‘slipperiness’ of language and the difference between a word (a sound or sign) and what it signifies.

Judaism — the real Judaism — has much to say about most of these things, but the antijews are not interested in this, instead preferring to label their intellectual enemies as ‘Jews,’ based on non-Jewish readings of Jewish texts, primarily the Hebrew Bible. Almost invariably, these enemies are themselves non-Jews or occasionally dissident Jews like Baruch/Benedict Spinoza. Actual, practising Jews rarely feature and many of those non-Jewish (antijewish) thinkers featured in the book probably never met one.

What I mean by ‘thinking with judaism’ may be a little unclear. It is similar to the way that scholarship in the humanities has become a series of attempts to ‘think with’ certain authorities (e.g. Marx, Foucault, Butler and Said), applying their theories and methodologies to new topics. Thinking with judaism means using judaism as a lens to perceive a subject, essentially structuring a worldview around, and in opposition to, a perceived ‘judaism’. Just as Marx’s understanding of capitalism is still used in the academy, despite being disproven empirically, because it is politically useful to a left-wing, activist model of scholarship, so too the antijewish model is useful to activist academics and others to discuss many things, including (but far from exclusively) the modern State of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. Christianity uses judaism to think about salvation, law, divine love, election and supersession (among other things). Marxism uses judaism to think about capitalism. Nazism used judaism to think about cooperation as the antithesis of survival of the fittest. And so on.

Fear of jewish Ideas

This brings us to perhaps the biggest difference between antijudaism and other ‘isms,’ something most people miss. Anti-racists say that there has been racism for centuries, feminists say that there has been misogyny for millennia. This may or may not be true, but people do not generally use ‘black people’ or ‘women’ as categories to understand ideas very far from race or sex/gender, topics as diverse as the nature of law and its opposition to love; the morality of contract labour; or the nature of language. These are things that have no intrinsically Jewish content, yet for more than two thousand years, the Western and Islamic traditions have insisted on bringing judaism into these discussions, invariably stereotyping judaism in a negative way. It’s as if racists were trying to conceptualise contract law or linguistics through a lens of perceived black inferiority; it is just nonsense. Yet it is nonsense that will not die.

This intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) nature of antijudaism is also present in antisemitism, antizionism. judaism is seen as a contaminating idea unlike racism and other prejudices which focus on supposedly innate traits or types of behaviour. This intellectual aspect allows antijudaism/antisemitism/antizionism to exist in countries with no real Jews, because ideas can cross borders more easily than people, and antijudaism/antisemitism/antizionism is above all a fear of jewish ideas.

A particular worry of antijews is judaising, the active spreading of judaism. This is ironic, given that (real) Judaism is a non-missionary religion and had largely abolished religiously-inspired violence before most of the periods discussed in Nirenberg’s book, while Christian evangelising (and converting by sword in some of the periods under discussion), Islamic jihad, Enlightenment pretensions to universal meaning and Marxist revolution — all want a literally global spread for themselves that Judaism has never sought. Saint Jerome is quoted as fearing that the creation of ‘jews’ (not real Jews) from Christians would quickly outpace the conversion of Jews into Christians and this fear of “conversion” lies behind a lot of antijewish prejudice, the fear that jewish ideas would spread as much as jews.

Antijudaism of the Left and of the Right, Christians and Muslims

The book was published in 2013, when the world seemed very different. We didn’t expect terrorist armies to invade Israel, or a global response that celebrated a massacre of Jews and then blamed Israel for defending itself, or that the Western media would spend three years saying that Jews delight in genocide and the death of children, or that leading conservative commentators would spread Nazi-type libels about the Talmud.

Antijudaism has returned to both the left and the right and has morphed again, now emerging as a way to think about new ideas like foreign policy; the West’s legacy of imperialism; mass immigration; human rights; and just war theory. However, this time the ‘thinking about judaism’ is expressed not only in terms of non-Jewish readings of Jewish texts, but also in non-Jewish readings of the Jewish state and its history.

The far-right mainly trades in conspiracy theories, but they perhaps make some use of supposedly jewish ideas about contract and the ability of individuals to see themselves as economic units able to contract themselves away to an employer to understand mass immigration. This is seen as a result of belief in the economic interchangeability human beings, a ‘jewish’ understanding of capitalism. Hence the far-right slogan that “Jews will not replace us,” meaning, “jews will not replace us with non-white immigrants,” through their supposed understanding of migration, identity and capitalism, not that white people will be replaced with the jews themselves.

One potential point of future right-wing antijudaism is the concept of ‘alienation.’ Historically, both nationalist and Marxist antijudaisms have spoken about this in different ways. For nationalists, people are alienated from their homelands; for Marxists, from their nature, from other people and from the products they create by capitalism. Both these critiques could return, but the nationalist critique of alienation could gain force by revisiting the classic antijewish complaint of the alienation of words from their true meaning, something promoted by Jewish intellectuals like Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Another Jewish thinker, Judith Butler, began the alienation of sex from gender. There is ample scope here for right-wing antijudaism, but only if the right becomes more intellectual.

The left, which currently has a virtual monopoly on the creation of intellectual discourse through the academy as well as its propagation through the legacy media, uses the jewish state to understand imperialism, human rights, war and resistance, as well as universalism and particularism/nationalism. The jewish state is portrayed as the most imperialist, oppressive state, one uniquely nationalist and opposed to universal human flourishing and it is here that antijudaism meets antizionism. Of particular note is the way left-wing Jewish diasporist thinkers like Shaul Magid and Daniel Boyarin see the jewish state as something separate and antagonistic to a construct they call ‘diaspora judaism,’ something supposedly rooted in Jewish history and thought, but actually rooted in antijewish projections of judaism. Boyarin in particular sits at the confluence of ideas about judaism, the ‘slipperiness’ of language, antizionism and gender. (Both Butler and Boyarin are ethnically Jewish, but only Boyarin explicitly thinks much with judaism so ironically only Boyarin is a truly antijewish thinker despite being much more personally observant and committed to real Judaism than Butler).

The left presents the Palestinians as Rousseauian “noble savages” with an ‘authentic’ cultural (religious, culinary, literary and musical) tradition against a jewish state that has a military and nothing else. Israel and its genuine culture are erased from view. This parallels the antijewish use of the jew as representing the material world, the ‘dead, cruel’ letter of law, and justice or even vengeance as opposed to a supposed non-jewish (here, Palestinian) culture of love and spirituality.

Similarly, Christian antijudaism (supersessionism) is sometimes projected directly into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: the idea of jewish justice or even vengeance (“an eye for an eye”) is juxtaposed with a ‘Christian’ or ‘human rights’ perspective of empathy, kindness and forgiveness. This is often implicit in Christian responses to the conflict and occasionally explicit. The military doctrine of proportionality is often misused to reinforce this projection.

There is a need for more research on the antijudaism of Soviet Communism and Islamism. Both rely ultimately on a Marxist understanding of judaism as the spirit of capitalism and modernity, while the Islamist conception also draws on older ideas of jewish stubbornness, wickedness and corruption, particularly the failure, in Muslim eyes, of jews to preserve an accurate record of divine revelation. Note the Hamas Covenant, which blames war, revolutions and the fall empires since World War I on the machinations of the jews, as well as blaming them for spreading alcohol, prostitution and pornography globally. Here, the jew is the spirit of amoral capitalism, selling human beings for profit and is the underlying cause of geopolitical change, the economic base on which the cultural superstructure rests. It is true that Marxism and Islamism diverge in their assessments of the spiritual, but they start from the same point of the identification of the jew with the spirit of capitalism and the cause of its discontents.

One last point which I think is worth making briefly, even though it could be expanded to monograph length: in many antijewish intellectual systems, jews are linked to utopia and the eschaton (the end of the world). Jews (real ones) pioneered the ideas of utopia and the ‘end of history.’ Christianity, Islam, the Enlightenment, Marxism and Nazism found it impossible to think of utopia and the ‘end of history’ without think about jews. jews are presented as stubborn, either converting to the ‘correct’ ideology at the very last moment (Christianity, but also Marx) or needing to be wiped out in order for history to end ‘properly’ (Nazism). Either way, jews are the ultimate obstacle in the way of utopia, to be overcome by conversion or by force. This is a dehumanising belief that elevates antijudaism, antisemitism and antizionism from mere prejudice to murderous hatred, while simultaneously allowing them to pass themselves off as compassionate humanitarianism, the hope for the salvation of all mankind.

The Iran War and the jews

Since reading Anti-Judaism, Israel and the USA have gone to war with Iran and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, again. There has also been a significant increase in diaspora antisemitism, including a foiled attack on a synagogue that could have resulted in the deaths of over a hundred children. While some criticism of the war is legitimate, there has been much thinking with jews and judaism again, with the war blamed on nefarious jewish imperialism and illegitimate jewish diaspora influence, and the foiled synagogue attack blamed on the death of the attacker’s brother in Lebanon, without mentioning that the brother was a commander in Hezbollah, implying that motiveless jewish violence was the ‘root cause’ of the attack. Again, false conceptions of jews and judaism have been used to examine geopolitics and Islamist terrorism, with a ‘grieving’ (and, therefore, innocent, or at least provoked) brother being juxtaposed with groundless jewish violence and a war against a regime that is open in its desire to destroy Israel and America and a history of violence against them presented as one caused by jewish imperialism and deceit.

Until the non-Jewish world can look at itself and the geopolitical situation honestly, without recourse to false images of jews and judaism, there will be no end to the scapegoating of the jews, and, inevitably, the real Jews, for the world’s problems.

The Dual Loyalty Accusation

During the Second Intifada, in December 2001, Melanie Phillips appeared on Question Time. Question Time is a BBC TV programme where a panel of politicians (from all major parties) and public intellectuals (usually journalists and writers, sometimes NGO staff or scientists) answer questions from an audience about politics and current events. Israel came up, as it often did, and Phillips was in a minority of one in saying that Israel has a right to defend itself and that it doesn’t over-react to Palestinian terrorism. So far, so BBC.

Then came the shocking bit. One of the other panellists, the novelist Will Self, asked who she would side with in a war between Britain and Israel. I was used to hearing the “dual loyalty” accusation used against Jews by the far-right, but to hear it from a left-wing figure, was new to me.1 (Self then played the “I can say it because I’m Jewish too” card because he has a small amount of Jewish ancestry, even though he has never identified as Jewish in any meaningful way e.g. Jewish belief, synagogue attendance, Jewish-themed writing, or even any apparent awareness of, or interest in, Jewish history or culture.)

This attitude is now common on the left, (what’s left of) the centre-left as well as the far-left. The left takes pride in its lack of patriotism (e.g. denouncing flying the English or British flags as “far-right”), except when Jews or Israel are concerned, when they suddenly become rabid “Britain [or America] Firsters.” Note that non-Jewish Zionists are not questioned on their loyalty to their home state. Nor are hardcore Remain (or Rejoin) types asked who they would fight for in a war between Britain and the EU (the type of people who put FBPE i.e. Follow Back Pro-EU in their Twitter profiles to attract like-minded followers would absolutely act as a pro-EU fifth column in a war between Britain and the EU and wouldn’t even think of it as treason, but moral righteousness. No diaspora Jew thinks like this). Nor are those with what I term “flags of all nations” (Palestinian and Ukrainian flags alongside those for Pride and trans and sometimes others) in their social media profiles accused of dual loyalty. Progressives who show support for Hamas and Hezbollah on demonstrations are protesting in favour of terrorist groups proscribed by the British government, but are still immune to accusations of dual loyalty. Only Jews are open to this.

Nor is it just the left. Antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty allegations thinly veiled as antizionism have also moved from the neo-Nazi far-right to the populist right, with Tucker Carlson’s allegations that “Israel” controls American foreign policy being the most prominent example. Indeed, in America and perhaps in Britain, the boundaries between moderate-right and far-right, once carefully policed in a way that those on the left were not, are breaking down. As on the left, the spread of antisemitism, including the dual loyalty accusation, is symptomatic of the decline.

The question I want to ask about this is what is the reality? Not where do Jews’ loyalties lie?, but in era of identity politics, how do diaspora Jews balance loyalty to physical home and spiritual home? I want to examine this by asking, what is my identity? How do I balance these competing components of my selfhood, native patriotism and Zionism? I appreciate that this is a ‘dangerous’ question and that some may say that even asking it gives permission to the antisemites to voice the dual loyalty accusation, but I think the dangerous questions are the ones most worth asking.

The Prophet’s Advice

The journalist David Goodhart noted that much of contemporary politics is a debate between the “Somewheres” and the “Anywheres,” between those whose identity and sense of self is tied to a particular country and its values, culture, cuisine and way of life, and those who live a cosmopolitan life of travel and sampling of different cultures. The former are, broadly, working class and increasingly support populist parties, while the latter tend to be middle class and support established technocratic parties, particularly of the left. The latter are the political, economic and cultural Establishment in the contemporary West (although they deny it); the former, the underclass poised to revolt (hopefully just at the ballot box, but this seems increasingly uncertain).

I’m a Somewhere with a desire for “rootedness” and belonging — but where is that somewhere? Where do I belong? There are two obvious options, Britain/England or Israel, but neither is quite right.

We can frame the discussion by looking at a couple of core Jewish texts and concepts. In the sixth century BCE, prophet Jeremiah (Yirmiyahu) saw that the Kingdom of Judea, the remaining rump of Israelite settlement in the Promised Land, was facing exile. Knowing that the Northern Kingdom of Israel had been exiled by the Assyrians in the previous century and that its inhabitants had assimilated and been lost to the Jewish people, he provided a model for Jewish existence in exile, telling the Jews (as they would come to be known, from Judeans) to marry and have children, to build houses and plant gardens, and to pray to God for the welfare of the city to which they were exiled, “for in its peace [or prosperity], you shall find peace [or prosperity].” This is the source of numerous later practices and values, such as reciting a prayer in the synagogue for the non-Jewish government and the Jewish legal principle of dina demalchuta dina, which states that the law of the land has the status of religious law, meaning, that secular law is as binding on Jews as Jewish law (excluding antisemitic laws designed specifically to victimise Jews).

However, Jeremiah also noted that in seventy years, God would redeem the Jews and bring them back to the land of Israel. There is therefore a double edge to Jeremiah’s advice: settle down in the land of exile, marry, have children, build homes and business and pray for the welfare of the non-Jews, but be aware that this is not your home and that you will return to the Promised Land, and not in the distant future, but within the lifetime of the children alive today.

Fast forward many centuries, to the period after the later, Roman, persecution and exile of the Jews of Judea in the first and second century of the Common Era. Jewish return to the land of Israel was difficult, hampered by both restrictive, antisemitic laws and the economic backwardness of the region and the consequent difficulty of making a living there. While Jews have lived on the land constantly since biblical times, only with the rise of the secular Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century and especially since the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948, has mass immigration of Jews to the area been feasible. This has created theological and practical difficulties for Jews in the diaspora who are now faced with the “dual loyalty” charge and the pull of ties to both the state they live in and to a Jewish state that many diaspora Jews feel intense love for and identify with in addition to their state of residence. It is not possible to feel oneself rooted in two different soils — or is it?

Squeezing the Orange or Flying the Flag?

I recently read the following passage in an article on the liberal Substack Persuasion. Sarah Majdov wrote “I arrived in America as a refugee from Bosnia, and for a long time I viewed it the same way. Like an orange—to be squeezed for as much juice as possible, for as long as possible. That image only disappeared when I had children, and they entered their teenage years firmly and exclusively American.”

Regardless of whether this is the attitude of immigrants to the West today, it definitely was not the attitude of Jewish immigrants to Britain and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If anything, they sought to be more English than the English or more American than the Americans. Majdov’s attitude, that a country is a resource to be exploited, not a home to be built up, angers me. It would certainly have angered my ancestors who immigrated here2. The Jewish attitude was seen in the prayer for non-Jewish government3 (in Britain, for the monarch and his/her “advisors”), in singing the national anthem at Jewish celebrations (weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc) and at pro-Israel rallies. Attending pro-Israel rallies in Britain, you will see as many British Union Jacks as Israeli flags. This is not the case at anti-Israel rallies, where Palestinian and now Iranian flags are flown (as well as those of proscribed terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah), but not British flags.

Notes on Nationalisms

There is a difference between patriotism and nationalism. George Orwell saw patriotism as pride in one’s country, even the belief that it is the best country in the world, but with no intent to control others, whereas nationalism is tied up in the power instinct, the desire for domination over other nations.

I take pride in Jewish, British and Israeli achievements (probably in that order). I am patriotic for the Jewish people, more than the Jewish state, but also for Britain, its historical achievements if not its current state. I get annoyed if people criticise Jews, Judaism, Britain or Israel unfairly. I will even make partial defences of the British Empire, which is the ultimate heresy today (for example, the British Empire spent a huge amount of time, blood and money suppressing the trans-Atlantic slave trade and freeing slaves, more time than it spent participating in it). But, perhaps because I’m not a great traveller, either in Britain or outside it, I don’t have a strong sense of place, of home. I possibly have it a bit for London, but not for Britain or Israel.

Orwell took the existence of an English national character for granted. It is harder to do that now and anyone doing so is likely to branded as ‘Fascist’ by the left (ironically for Orwell, perhaps the most famous English socialist). National traits are not totally unique. In this way, they are similar to individual character traits. I am thoughtful, kind, intelligent and religiously observant (or so my wife says, anyway!), but that doesn’t mean I’m the only person who is either thoughtful, kind, intelligent or religiously observant, nor does it mean that that I’m the only person with that entire set of traits. National cultures, like personalities, are innate traits filtered through long histories and described in narratives, both historical and fictional, the interactions of which determine character and actions. Indeed, for both individuals and nations, what matters is less who you are and more what you do with who you are.

Jewish and Israeli national character have certain things in common with English or British national character including a love of personal freedom (which is not the same as political liberalism), a fondness for the underdog and a sense of longstanding cultural tradition and continuity (in Israel, this is a sense of Jewish character rather than Israeli character, which is obviously still relatively new). Both have a distinctive and somewhat self-mocking sense of humour that doesn’t always make sense to cultural outsiders.

However, there are also major differences, particularly if we distinguish Israeli character from Jewish character. Israelis tend to be forceful and demonstrative where Brits are quiet and polite; melodramatic where Brits are understated; and innovative where Brits are more traditional. British people like to keep themselves to themselves; as Orwell said, the worst insult in England is to call someone a “nosy parker.” Jews and especially Israelis, see each other as family and therefore licensed to offer unsolicited opinions on other people’s lives.4

It is also arguably the case that British national character is being eroded by mass immigration, particularly in big cities. For example, quiet and effective queueing, once seen as a quintessential English pastime, is becoming less and less common on public transport in London, although this may be due in part to overcrowding and inadequate planning by Transport for London as much as immigration from countries with no real habit of queueing politely. Civility is definitely being eroded, however, as seen be increasing litter, fly-tipping, public drunkenness, and public disorder and verbal abuse in London.

Of course, Jewish and Israeli character overlap, but are not identical, with Israeli character notably more proactive and courageous, willing to fight rather than preferring to conciliate, as well as having a street culture that feels a lot more like that of a Middle Eastern culture than the suburban bourgeois culture that characterises much of diaspora Jewish culture.

In these regards, I’m more British/diaspora Jewish than Israeli. Since 7 October, my wife and I talk a lot about whether we will have to make aliyah (emigrate to Israel) and the culture shock and the fact that our daughter would probably adopt a significantly different outlook and personality to our own is very off-putting. Frankly, Israelis confuse me, and scare me a little, so different are they to Brits and especially to the autistic, socially anxious person I am (although my wife is American, which complicates things further, especially as she’s strongly Anglophile). I love my Israeli cousins dearly, but I find them hard to understand much of the time (and not just when they drop Hebrew slang into the conversation). That’s partly personality and age gap (I’m nine years older than my eldest cousin, more than twenty years older than the youngest), but the experience of being in a constant state of war and having to serve in the military, alongside a more vocal and emotional public sphere, and a paradoxically laid back general culture, makes for a very different outlook.

Brain Versus Blood

I have a very intellectualised relationship with Britain5 and Israel – abstract and philosophical/theological rather than instinctive and emotional. I actually have a strong sense of a quasi-Whiggish narrative of an England that defends “negative liberty” (that is, freedom from repression and coercion, whether regarding speech, association or religion) and a Jewish and Zionist identity based around resilience and building a just society. Also, I have a kind of nostalgia for a vision of England that no longer exists and perhaps never existed, similar to the things that the band The Kinks sang about wanting to preserve in The Village Green Preservation Society (children’s comics, Victorian pot boilers, Tudor houses, small shops and so on) as well as in classic TV series like Trumpton, Camberwick Green and The Avengers.6

What I don’t have is a “blood and soil” emotional connection to land that my personal ancestors have lived on for centuries, not to Britain and not to Israel. My family have lived in Britain for longer than many Jews, since the late nineteenth century, but that’s still not very long. But, while I have family who have moved to Israel, it’s probably millennia since any of my ancestors lived there.

When wrote recently that, “I know it is possible to love a country that isn’t yours by heritage, that you can learn its rhythms and feel at home beneath its sky. But I also know that love is not the same as seeing your blood knit into centuries of its history”, I felt envious. That’s something I never had and never will have. A sense of interlaced geographical and genealogical continuity. Few Jews have this after the Holocaust and the forcible uprootings of Jewish communities across the Middle East in the 1940s and 50s.7

Jewish history expresses itself in repeated cycles of exile from, and return to, the land of Israel, something really unique in world history, but also disconcerting to live with. Since 7 October (with roots before then), I feel myself an exile twice over, from the land of my ancestors and from the land of my birth. I don’t fit in either any more and I worry that if the land of my birth decides it will no longer take me, living in the land of my ancestors will be the worst sort of exile: the exile from which there is no redemption, because there is no further “home” to go to. How can you go home if home does not feel homely?

Dual Identity

Postmodernism began with a turn to narrative, exploring how narrative is created and how it shapes the individuals and societies who tell it, but it ended up by censoring ‘grand narratives’ it deemed oppressive. There is no court of appeal for narratives cancelled in this way. The traditional British/English and Jewish narratives are in eclipse, seen as a foundation for imperialism, toxic masculinity, homo/transphobia and white/Jewish supremacism. They have been replaced from above with tikkun olam (for the Jewish narrative) and the multicultural “Diversity is our strength” (for the British narrative), alongside minority narratives that challenge their moral standing (the Palestinian narrative for Israelis and, to a much lesser extent, the Scottish, Welsh and Irish Catholic nationalist narratives for England). Tikkun olam and diversity are universalist narratives that argue that the English and Jewish people do not exist to support themselves (something deemed particularist and therefore “imperialist” and “white/Jewish supremacist), but to support others through “social justice,” mass immigration and the creation of a Palestinian state implacably hostile to the Jewish state, one dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state as a racist endeavour. The English and Jewish narratives are seen as irredeemable and hence their states are irredeemable too. Only dissolution, whether literal or essential (i.e. destroying the essence) can “save” them.

It is not just these narratives that are under threat, but the Western grand narrative is under threat, the civilisation that was formed from the meeting of Jewish ethics and theology with Greek science, art and philosophy.

The confluence of Israel and Greece, of Jerusalem and Athens, has always been contested, on both sides. In the Jewish community, a figure like Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in nineteenth century Germany, often seen as the father-figure of Modern Orthodoxy, the form of Judaism that seeks to combine strict, traditional observance with participation in wider Western culture, saw Jewish identity as two-fold, what he termed mensch-Yisroel, human-Jew, a person with a human identity and responsibilities to wider humanity and the world, but also a Jew with a covenantal relationship to God and to other Jews. However, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world largely sees Judaism as something to be lived in isolation from the wider world, focusing on building walls, not bridges.8 Similarly, the early Zionists thought that diaspora life would swiftly decline as all Jews moved to Israel.

On the other side, the wider West often has no regard for Jews or Judaism, as seen in the recent renewal of antisemitism on the American right and especially among Christian Nationalist. As Garry Wills noted, when Christian conservatives in America talk about “Judaeo-Christian society,” the Jewish bit is the Hebrew Bible, not the Talmud, Midrash and other rabbinic texts that fundamentally shape post-biblical Judaism. They are not interested in post-biblical Judaism and do not see it as part of their world. The supersessionist argument against Judaism still dominates much of the Christian world and the challenge that the State of Israel poses to this dogma (undermining the Augustinian view of Jewish weakness and poverty as a sign of punishment and divine displeasure) is undoubtedly a factor (albeit a largely unstated one) in Christian antizionism and exclusion of Jews from the public sphere. The left, on the other hand, blames Jews and the Hebrew Bible for many of the perceived faults of the West (imperialism, slavery, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.), resulting in a situation where Jews are too Western for the left and not Western enough for the right.

While Jews can not solve the problem of Christian or Western antisemitism or anti-Judaism, we can decide how we involve ourselves in the wider culture. A useful guide is found in a letter from the twentieth century Polish-American Haredi rabbi, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner. Writing to a young man who had spent several years studying in yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) and was now leaving to study medicine, but who feared he was going to be living a “double life” by doing so, with his medical studies being essentially different to his religious studies, Rabbi Hutner reassured him that there is a difference between a double life and a broad life. There is, he wrote, a difference between a life with contradictory elements, like someone who owns an apartment, but lives in a hotel, and a life with varied, but integrated, elements, like someone who owns an apartment with two rooms. While the former is confused and even incoherent, the latter is complex, yet has a unity.

While Rabbi Hutner does not make this point, just as medical studies can be seen as being in line with Judaism’s focus on preserving life, so too can loyalty to one’s state of birth and residence be in line with following Judaism and even supporting Israel, according to the principles that “the law of the land has the status of religious law” and of praying and acting for the welfare of the societies Jews live in. This is particularly true in a medina shel chesed, a “country of kindness” that treats Jews well. This is not dual loyalty, but complex identity. More broadly, this resonates with the semi-pluralistic “also/and” of Judaism that so confuses and even inflames some non-Jews used to an “either/or” mentality in religion, seen fundamentally in the limited, but real, pluralism of the Talmud, which seeks to “steelman” arguments and present them in their most coherent form and then to reconcile different opinions with each other and to preserve conflicting opinions, rather than to resolve them by choosing one at the expense of the other.

The Home We Build Together

My understanding of society is deeply influenced by the writings of Rabbi Lord Sacks, particularly for the notion of the ‘social covenant’ that builds civil society in a similar way to the way that the social contract builds the state. In The Home We Build Together he describes the changes to British society through mass immigration using the metaphor of buildings.

At first, Britain was a “stately home,” something owned by one group (the British) who let others (primarily Jews at this stage) live in it as guests — tolerated, not persecuted, but still outsiders (this corresponds to what is now called ethnic nationalism). Then, from the seventies, with the post-war mass migration, a move was made to a multicultural society, one Rabbi Sacks likens to a hotel, where different people (communities) function independently, with no interaction with each other. This social atomisation (not to mention radicalisation in some communities) creates the need for a new type of community, the home built together, through the integration of native British and immigrant communities in a shared socio-political project (somewhat equivalent to civic nationalism).

I could contribute to either British or Jewish/Israeli national project, but, as noted above, I am not a perfect or even good fit for either. There is the question of what could meaningfully contribute. Perhaps a Jewish critique of Britain and a Jewish critique of Israel? But this brings us back to the complex identity and perhaps to dual loyalty, even if my critique is intended to foster organic growth and improvement, not destruction.

Britain is my home, but Jews are my family and that family is increasingly based in Israel, as more Jews flee the West and as Israel develops as a specifically Jewish national culture where Jewish identity can be integrated into all aspects of national life, from the ease of finding kosher food to a calendar based around Jewish, not Christian, holidays.

I value community and the home we build together, but I’m always (as a Brit, as a Jew, as a community member) a slightly detached observer, an anthropologist doing fieldwork, a historian from the future studying a past epoch. I sometimes have an edge of irony, fatal to unthinking belief, although not to sincere, thoughtful belief. All of these things mean that I find it hard to fully integrate anywhere, in any country.

The Cat Who Walked By Himself

If I have to make aliyah I will feel myself, on some level, to be a refugee from Britain, but there would also would be a certain “rightness” to it beyond the many practical difficulties, a sense of homecoming, or at least of leaving one home for another. I feel this tension regularly in the request for the ingathering of the Jewish exiles to Israel in the thrice-daily Amidah prayer. It’s something I want, but I also find easier to imagine happening in a far-off, utopian, messianic future, when the practical issues can just fall away miraculously.

Fundamentally, I’m Jewish, but I’m also irreducibly British. I will stay British even if I have to flee to Israel. Unlike some olim (immigrants to Israel) who seem to leave their countries of birth behind without a second thought, I would still see myself as having duties and obligations to Britain. Whatever the situation here for Jews is now, and it’s bad, it’s not Czarist Russia, let alone Nazi Germany. I have benefited from Britain’s largesse and tolerance and therefore have obligations towards it even if it’s antisemitic now. This is the fundamental Jewish virtue of hakarat hatov (gratitude).

Even so, I feel a little like Kipling’s The Cat Who Walked By Himself, an exile wherever I go. In a sense, I am not a Somewhere or Anywhere, but a Nowhere who wants to be a Somewhere. Burge writes about the need for the West (“colonised” by Anywheres) to re-imagine home, but for me I have two homes, and I don’t feel at home in either of them.9

In Judaism, exile is conceptual as much as geographical. The “Greek exile,” whose end we celebrate at Chanukah, happened when many Jews still lived in the land of Israel. In fact, no Jews were forcibly expelled from the land in that period. In other words, in an unredeemed world, you can be an exile “at home.” Exile isn’t the opposite of home, it’s a recognition that there is still work to do, wherever you are, that there is something existentially wrong with world of violence and injustice and that, until that is repaired, our lives anywhere are provisional and contingent. It is in this way that I feel exiled from both Britain and Israel, restless and longing for the rest that only comes at the end of days, the time when all questions are resolved and everyone returns home.

My wife says that some mental health issues are easier to admit to in public than others. I’d argue that it’s also the case that there are ways of experiencing mental illness that more socially acceptable than others. People ‘perform’ mental illness in public and especially online. I don’t mean that people are lying about what they experience, but that there’s a ‘script’ of how to show depression, anxiety, OCD and PTSD.

In retrospect, I suspect that, while I did indeed suffer from serious depression for many years, my experience of being depressed and particularly how I spoke about it was subtly influenced by social cues I had picked up from other sufferers and from the media. It was not the content of the mental illness that was socially conditioned, but the public expression, the places I would admit to it and the places I would not admit to it, the symptoms I would talk about the ones I would not talk about.

For example, I was reluctant to talk about my extremely disordered sleep, for fear of being branded lazy, but did talk about suicidal thoughts and self-harm, to try to express the seriousness of what I was experiencing, but also chiming with a presentation of mental illness in men that is seen as actively self-destructive rather than simply passive, as I felt much of the time. Fiction, with its need for conflict, also favours destructive and self-destructive presentations of mental illness over the passive falling apart.

The cliché of “I’m so OCD,” focused on obsessive neatness, cleaning and hygiene care, accurately represents the experience of only a fraction of sufferers. I had religious OCD centring on Judaism’s dietary laws, a form of contamination OCD that focused not on the danger of germs, but of non-kosher food contamination (either outright non-kosher food or forbidden meat/dairy combinations). As with germ contamination fears, my fears grew out of control far beyond the degree of caution that Judaism requires. (Judaism, perhaps surprisingly, has a robust understanding of the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty and that actually sometimes “probably OK” is good enough.1)

I struggled with that for a couple of years, but I’m mostly over it nowadays. A more long-standing issue I’ve had is “pure-O” OCD, that is, obsessive thoughts without compulsive actions, mostly centred around religious and ethical thoughts. OCD thoughts about one’s ethical behaviour is sometimes termed ‘scrupulosity.’ This is something not generally spoken about or in the public ‘script’ for OCD.

In OCD in general and scrupulosity in particular there is an insistent fear that the mind is not trustworthy, that actions and thoughts can never be “good enough,” but must be pushed towards an impossible level of perfection. With scrupulosity, there can be a deeply-embedded fear of one’s potential for wrongdoing, even violence and sadism, even though this has never manifested itself practically. It is a fear that I can’t trust myself, that one day I may lose control of myself and act on “dark” thoughts, however fleeting and ego-dystonic (inconsistent with one’s values and desire) they may be.

In this sense, obsession is an illness of over-rationality or at least over-cognition. It sees dangers where there are none. This is where I think the topic of OCD has a parallel with my usual Substack topics. Politics, society and culture have felt somehow fragile since COVID and, for Jews (and perhaps some others) since 7 October. Some would stretch the origins of this feeling back to what I think of as the Year of the Great Disruption, 2016, with the votes for Brexit and Trump’s first election, and it is true that the political world was disconcerted by that and that many were angered, but I think the sense of fragility, the feeling that the world might suddenly just fall apart, has become much stronger since COVID.

(Almost) everyone agrees that there is something wrong with the West, if not the whole world, even if we can’t agree on what that is. The fear might be civil war, Fascism, Islamism, quasi-Stalinist technocratic dictatorship, AI brainrot, pornography-fuelled misogyny, climate apocalypse or something else. I think some of these fears are more grounded in reality than others. But everyone agrees something is very wrong in the world today.

If we compare with OCD, we see that this may not be true, at least not to the extent that we fear. Too many of us are over-thinking the world around us with inadequate data. In particular, there is an over-reliance on social media as a door into the mind of whole populations when actually it is a door into the mind of the most motivated (often the most angry, most anxious or just craziest) 10% or even 1%. (The statistic I have seen in various places is that 1% of the people on social media produce the posts, another 9% produce the comments and responses and 90% are totally silent.)

Historically, self-criticism has been a key feature of the culture of both Judaism and the West. Both respond to adversity (and there has certainly been plenty of that in the last seven years) with guilt and self-criticism, probing faults to try to improve in the future. Moreover, the human mind in general has a bias in favour of sensing danger, whether bacteria or Fascists, because the cost of a false positive (responding to non-existent danger) is usually much less than the cost of a false negative (not responding to genuine danger). This can all get out of control, plunging individuals and societies into a downward spiral of guilt, anxiety, despair and frustration, perhaps eventually mutating into the very danger it seeks to avoid.

All that said, I fear losing family in violence of some kind (whether antisemitic or otherwise) in a way that I did not three years ago. Most of all, I fear the re-ghettoisation Jews and random antisemitic violence. I feel torn between reassuring myself that 7 October-style events are rare (even historically — we tend to overestimate the extent of actual violence towards Jews in the long-term) and fear that they may be becoming more common. I fear violence of different kinds in Israel and outside it and I am unsure where we should be living, which requires predicting where we are least likely to be the victims of violence as well as balancing other factors like knowledge of the language and employability. It is also impossible to predict what sort of antisemitic barriers to entry my daughter will experience in this country when she enters the workforce decades from now. Hence, the question of where to live, whether to make aliyah, continues to be an open one, even if it is clear that, for now, we have to stay in Britain, for various reasons.

Of course, one could get hit by a bus or get an awful medical diagnosis tomorrow, in any country. Life is about dealing with uncertainty and fear. The only real solution for me to fears of both micro- and macro-level problems is the same.

The late eighteenth/early nineteenth century Hasidic rebbe, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, famously said that, “The whole world is a narrow bridge, but the fundamental thing is not to be afraid.” I sing this, in Hebrew and English (it’s better in Hebrew) to my daughter. Not being afraid isn’t ignorance. The Breslov Hasidim sung and danced in the Warsaw Ghetto knowing full-well what they were facing. It’s an existential act, a refusal to be intimidated by people or even by events, fate, destiny, history, call it what you will. It is a deep trust in the existence of meaning and the joy springing from that meaning even when facing death.

For now, I try to live in moment. I relish the now, the thing no one can take away from me. I delight in my daughter’s smile and joy. I spend time with my family. I focus on caring for them, as caring for them is the one thing I can control.

My time, energy and focus for formal prayer is limited at the moment, but I have started to focus on brachot, the many blessings Jews are supposed to say each day on food, drink and natural phenomena like thunder and rainbows as invitations to wonder, asking me to pay attention to the experience at hand, to be mindful of it and to connect to its Creator, God, through it.

With limited time, energy and focus, I can not afford to waste them. I have realised that I have autonomy over my emotions and especially over my responses. I don’t have to be made angry, upset or anxious by everything I read. Some emotional responses are unpreventable, but we have choice regarding what mental pathways to follow after seeing something angering or upsetting. I’ve spent a lot of time in group therapy and support group settings over the years and the most helpful thing I heard there was, “I am not responsible for my first thought, but I am responsible for my second one.” You can not always control your immediate response, but you can control your subsequent reaction.

The danger of the instant nature of social media is making the immediate response the final response. No one can “erase” you and the idea that we should depend on strangers online who hate us for our self-esteem is absurd. We can choose how to react to the world around us and that includes feeling confident walking away from hate-consumed people. We do not owe them a response, nor are we likely to change their minds. The sensible response is to invest time in people and things we care about and can influence instead of wasting it on those who hate us.

Things they let you advertise on the London Underground nowadays[1]: condoms (they’ve allowed that for years); the Scientology cult; the Campaign for Assisted Dying; awful pet-related adverts (one about “dog poo” that I didn’t want to see first thing in the morning; another referring to owners as a “good human”); egg freezing; and, now, abortions.

Read more

I do still read other people’s posts, albeit fewer than in the past, and I’m still a comment-writer. Perhaps it’s the lack of any other outlet for my thoughts, but I’ve written some extensive comments and notes on restacks recently, so I thought I would assemble another comment/note round-up post.

Apologies for adding less context than in previous posts of this kind. I just don’t have the time. Comments are edited lightly for intelligibility outside of their original context.

***

Excellent discussion of the problems of mass immigration from low-trust to high-trust societies from . If anything, the situation is worse in Britain and Europe, where more comprehensive welfare systems than the ones described by Burge meet a self-loathing elite convinced that the West is ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world, via imperialism and two World Wars, and that the developed world is “owed” access to the West’s bounty, which is merely the product of colonial extraction in the last five hundred years.

Underpinning this, as I’ve argued before, is the “blank slate” belief that human beings are basically good and that cultures are interchangeable; there is no sense that one culture can be morally better than, or even pragmatically different to, another. People are the same the world over and can be interchanged like other factors of production.

As a result, any critique like Burge’s is “flattened out” and treated as if it was saying, “Immigrants are criminals” and can then be dismissed as another product of Western imperialist thinking. The system carries on deconstructing itself and the victims of the extraction, the Western working class, turn to ever-more extreme politicians in an effort to turn it off.

***

The thought ’s post (about not having to perform emotions) sparks in me: perhaps the worst part of 7 October for those of us outside Israel was watching the world perform empathy for the Palestinians while ignoring, deprecating or victim-blaming the Israeli victims of 7 October and the ensuing war (mostly Jewish, but also some Druze and Israeli Palestinian). Alongside the usual run of non-Jewish famous non-entities, Jewish “celebrities” and secular “intellectuals” performatively renounced their Jewishness (whatever that means) or used their immense knowledge of Talmud and halakhah (Jewish law) to argue that Judaism prohibits self-defence – but only for Jews. “Resistance” against Jews is fine, even mass rape.

In previous Gaza conflicts, I felt a degree of empathy for Palestinians caught in the crossfire. That died on 7 October. I vaguely feel something for the very young children – but they are brainwashed to kill Jews from age five or six and after that, I feel nothing.

“Gazans are not Hamas,” we are constantly told, which is true, but an awful lot of Gazans supported Hamas on 7 October, even if they don’t now, and most who don’t still support the idea of destroying Israel, they just support another terrorist organisation, usually for tribal reasons. Those mobs shouting abuse at the hostages as they were brought to Gaza or turning up at those sick hostage release ceremonies were not forced there at gunpoint. They chose to bring their children to a celebration (there’s no other word for it) of the murder of a baby and toddler.

The worst part of this performative empathy for me is hearing other religious Jews imply that I’m a bad Jew for all of this. That all human beings are made in the image of God (true) and that therefore we should empathise with and even love people who want us dead (not true) and minimise the harm we do to them, even in self-defence, even if means leaving them alive to try again another day (absolutely not true).

And if the USAF and/or IDF drop a bunker-buster bomb on Ayatollah Khamenei soon and send him to meet his Maker, I will be very happy at the death of the wicked. I even said Psalm 94 this morning (“Their evil will be made to recoil upon them, through their own wickedness they will be annihilated; the Eternal our God will annihilate them”) to try to send the mamzer to the Next World that bit quicker.

***

Colonial Studies notoriously sees settler-colonialism as both inherently genocidal and “a structure, not an event.” That’s how its practitioners can claim that states like Australia, USA and Canada are actively genocidal. By arguing that Israel is a settler-colonialist state, the existence of Israel is inherently “genocidal” as the Middle East is portrayed as belonging to the Arabs. Everything you see online about Israel being genocidal is consciously or unconsciously downstream of this claim.

Of course, this argument itself is genocidal, as it erases Jewish history, not to mention all other non-Arab Middle Easterners (Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, Berbers, Druze, Yazidi, etc.) and ignores the bloody Arab conquest of the region in the early years of Islam.

***

The contemporary left has a real problem understanding that political problems are complex and reasonable people might take different views of the best solutions. Instead, they assume that they are “on the right side of history,” that their enemies are all “Fascists” and that if they lose a single election, “democracy is in danger.”

Ironically, the danger to democracy in the West increasingly comes from the lawfare of left-technocratic parties and judiciaries, the building of permission structures for left-wing violence, the delegitimation of moderate-right parties, and the failure of left-wing and moderate-right-wing parties to do anything about the mass immigration of people with contempt for Western notions of (small-l) liberalism and democracy, despite this policy being hugely unpopular with the population at large.

And, yes, some of these problems, or similar ones, are present on the populist right too, but in most Western states, institutional power and cultural hegemony remain with the left-technocrats.

***

It’s strange that a ruling Establishment (not just the Labour government, but the judiciary, lawyers, academia, media) that cares so much about the human rights of terrorists and rapists is so determined to treat innocent people as criminals. Perhaps, the only way to treat serious criminals as victims is to think of the victims of crime (the general public) as criminals.

***

Ruth Wisse on Jews and not despairing:

“The war against the Jewish homeland is no territorial conflict like Russia’s war against Ukraine, but a war to crush Jewish moral self-confidence and all that it stands for: the indomitable God and the people of Israel. We take up the fight better armed and under better conditions, but also against greater odds.”

I think that, as Jews, we underestimate the extent to which we are in a religious war, probably because so many Jews are not religious and are even embarrassed by religious language. Like it or not, to many people Jews are associated with the “God of Israel.” To people who object to that God and His morality (consciously or unconsciously), or who think He has rejected the Jews in favour of someone else, this association, which exists simply in Jews engaging in the religion they have practiced for over three thousand years, must be destroyed. The Nazis were quite explicit about forcing the Jewish God out of the world, but the idea lies implicit in much antisemitic and antizionist writing.

You don’t have to believe that the God of the Jews actually exists for this to be the case, merely to acknowledge the strength of that belief on human society and the determination of groups like some Christians, Islamists, Nazis, Communists and the like to break that connection.

On ’s article on Recycling Revolutions.

Fascinating. I’ve noticed this without having words for it.

I mostly watch 1960s and 1970s TV and listen to 1960s, 70s and 80s music, although I’m not from those generations (my wife finds this amusing). There was a freshness and willingness to experiment (not always successfully) that still comes through. I was a teenager in the 1990s, when the post-Cold War, fin de siècle mood was one of postmodern nostalgia (hence my ending up with the same tastes as my parents’ generation). This seemed to end with 9/11, but now seems to have continued, just with diminishing returns and an increasingly pessimistic view of the recent past, which went from being seen as gloriously fun to being understood as unending oppression and “resistance.”

Culturally, new films and TV series are likely to be remakes or revivals of old franchises (or “universes” as they tend to be called now). Postmodern mash-ups of multiple out-of-copyright characters are popular in prose and graphic novel format (confession: I’m currently reading Dracula Cha Cha Cha, the third of Kim Newman’s alternate universe sequels to “Dracula”, sprinkled with other fictional undead characters). This is about more than publishers and TV and film executives playing it safe. It indicates an audience more obsessed with the minutiae of existing narratives, particularly the ones they grew up with, than in putting in the effort to understand something new and original. (There is definitely a connection with cultural infantilisation and eternal adolescence here, especially among men.)

Politically, the past is misremembered on the left in particular to create a narrative of constant political progress, where every cause is eventually successful. The anti-Vietnam protests are remembered as more successful than they actually were. Movements that failed and fizzled out, such as the movement for unilateral nuclear disarmament (which was popular during the 1950s and 60s and then again in the 80s) or widespread fears that turned out to be alarmist, such as the overpopulation fears of the 70s, are quietly ignored. In this way a sense of continuity and momentum is created, a quasi-religious sense of being part of a movement that exists across time as well as space and is always “on the right side of history” (a popular, but meaningless phrase). The fact that some of the views held by that movement in the past would now be deemed “heretical” (the British far-left used to be hostile to the EEC, the forerunner of the EU, something unthinkable to the modern British left) must be erased, just as in a religion, earlier, now-rejected, dogmas must be suppressed lest they mislead the devout.

Where will this end? Here in Britain, there’s a widespread feeling of political, economic, social and cultural exhaustion with no clear sense of where we go next. People talk of wanting to see “the end of the twentieth century.” They mean the political and economic structures created then, but it could apply culturally too. Even the constant fears of “Fascism” look backwards for models to understand the present rather than trying to understand and critique the rising populist right on its own terms.

Thanks for a thought-provoking article!

***

It’s a certain type of Jew. Not the “As a Jew,” but the “Both Side Jew.” The type of Jew who is genuinely a Zionist, but can’t talk about Israel without talking about the “Two State Solution” and “Settler Violence.” Like the As a Jews, the Both Sides Jews are usually from the intellectual class (rabbis, journalists, academics, Jewish NGO workers), often religiously progressive and invariably politically progressive.

Towards the end of the war, there was a rally for the release of the hostages here in London. The leaders of Progressive Judaism in the UK spoke and started speaking about the need for a Two State Solution, the evils of the settlers, etc, and the crowd started booing. It was a rally for the hostages, they didn’t need to centre the Palestinians again.

Almost immediately, various Jewish organisations, including Orthodox ones who usually steer clear of controversies involving Progressive rabbis, issued statements saying how terrible the booing was and the need for decorum and respect for different views.

To me, it seemed like a little class struggle, that the Anglo-Jewish masses had finally had enough and were saying, “We don’t have to signal our virtue by performatively “empathising” with Palestinians all the time” and they got slapped down by the intellectual leaders of Anglo-Jewry were saying, “We’re in charge, we have the qualifications, and this is how we talk about Israel/Palestine. We need to signal that we’re not that sort of Jew.”

***

I think it’s worth seeing the delay of local elections in Britain in the context of technocratic administrations and courts across the West desperately using lawfare to keep populists out of power: the attempts to keep Trump off the ballot in the US before the last presidential election; the removal of Le Pen from the presidential ballot in France; the attempts to outlaw AfD in Germany; the corruption charges against Netanyahu in Israel.

Netanyahu’s counterattack, the proposed judicial reform (ultimately derailed, although perhaps not for long, by the 7 October attacks) was perhaps the most sustained populist response to a technocratic judiciary engaging in lawfare. Judging by the fact that it nearly brought Israel to a state of civil war and opened up the country to terrible armed attack from without, I am not at all hopeful about all other Western states getting through this period of “regime politics” without violence of some kind.

The technocrats are playing with fire in the belief that they are somehow immune to heat. They are not, but I worry that they will burn society down in the process -- they have already caused a lot of damage.

***

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Both Lottie and Jenny see the ingrained shame of the left as something replacing organised religion and, in this context, I think of seventeenth century Calvinist conversion narratives. In these, people would fall into deep despair, sometimes suicidal, thinking themselves utterly wicked and damned. Bear in mind that Calvinism taught that salvation is predestined, meaning that human actions can’t influence it. All you can do is wait for grace from God, if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you’re going to Hell, whatever you do.

Today, we see some progressive white people apparently falling into utter despair over their “white privilege” and progressive guilt. However, while Calvinism offered no solution other than waiting for a sign of grace, progressive political “theology” is a theology of “salvation” based on good works: going on protests; posting angrily online, including cancelling the supposedly-wicked; impeding law enforcement officers and so on. It does therefore offer a way out, but it is always subject to tension. The “believer” must constantly be showing that they are “doing the work” lest they be accused of benefiting from their “privilege.”

The result is the feverish atmosphere of the contemporary left, where everything sparks performative outrage and where action is based on visibility (especially online) rather than actual benefit to the disadvantaged. This is at least in part because privilege-language is about shame, which is based on how a person is perceived, while Calvinist conversion narratives proceed from a place of guilt, which is an internal state. While the inner process of guilt can be ameliorated by an inner feeling of grace, the public “shame” of whiteness can only be removed by public actions and must be performed continually in the eyes of onlookers so that it doesn’t “lapse.”

It would be interesting to know if there is a direct link between the significant influence of Calvinism on Christianity in the United States of America, particularly in the South, and this kind of progressive behaviour.

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It’s possible that Donald Trump has been watching this film lately.

Much has already been written about President Trump’s arrest/abduction of President Maduro of Venezuela: the questionable legality; the possible collapse of international law (if it ever really existed); the hypocrisy of progressives who would arrest a democratically-elected Israeli Prime Minister, but deem a Marxist dictator who stole an election sacrosanct. But I think there’s another element to this that has been missed and to see it, you have to compare with some of Israel’s most audacious operations in the Gaza and Iranian Wars (which were really two fronts of a single war).

Alongside the horrible slog of the war in Gaza, with troops fighting against Hamas house to house, were a number of audacious operations: exploding pager operation; the killing of Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders and their successors (and especially Netanyahu apparently approving the Nasrallah strike while in New York to address the United Nations, the site of so much antisemitism over the last eighty years and especially since 7 October); the killing of the Iranian Chiefs of Staff at the start of the Iran War; the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites not to mention the state broadcaster; and the attempted killing of Hamas leadership in Qatar. Not all of these were fully successful, but all made a big impact on a global audience either with viral video footage (pagers, news) or simply from reports.

What they had, which had been missing from Israeli operations for many years, was elan. A sense of bravado. The accomplishment of what seemed impossible, while making it seem childishly easy.

Similarly, the Maduro arrest was an audacious operation out of a James Bond film. This isn’t conventional warfare. This is warfare for the TikTok era, where the scale of the operation and the images produced go viral on social media immediately. Even when the operation is too fast to be filmed or hidden from view, the sheer scale impresses in the reporting.

Perhaps ironically, the most notable proponent of this attitude to warfare in recent history was Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden said that, when people see a strong horse running against a weak horse, they naturally favour the strong horse. As a result, he favoured “spectacular” terrorism that made Islam seem strong and imprinted itself on the global public consciousness. We have seen the Islamist Strong Horse again and again: 9/11, Madrid, 7/7, Mumbai, Bataclan, 7 October…

What Netanyahu and Trump are doing is presenting Israel and America as the “strong horses” able to beat Islamism and socialism at their own game, not just to defeat them, but to humiliate them, to show them as weak, cowardly and inept, as (to use a very Trumpian word) losers.

The strategic aim is not simply the battlefield victory (although is important; this isn’t warfare purely for the cameras), but to show the world that they should get on the winning side while they still can, lest they end up on the losing side, like Maduro, like Nasrallah, like Khamenei, like those Hezbollah terrorists who ended up literally impotent. Not just defeated or even killed, but humiliated in public across the internet forever. Rendered a laughingstock.

If this is a conscious strategy, then the target audience is the type of young man who might be thinking of joining a terrorist group or acting as a lone wolf terrorist not out of ideology, but for internet fame and glory. They are being warned that they will not get glory, but humiliation and that they should join the winning side.

Similarly, dictators worldwide now risk the kind of humiliation that can lead to riots and revolutions, as Ayatollah Khamenei is now finding out. While his focus on “Palestine” to the point of neglecting water security in his own capital city may have led to revolt by itself, his humiliation by Israel and America on the global stage in the summer showed his people that he had feet of clay, if not of cardboard.

The pager operation in particular made it possible for Jews worldwide to feel proud of the IDF again, not for its ethical conduct, but for killing antisemites with flair. It restored the loss of trust from 7 October and really put the IDF in a positive operational light it hadn’t been seen in since the Six Day War and the Entebbe Raid.

None of this answers the question of whether the Maduro arrest was a good idea, either morally or pragmatically. We don’t know what it means for America and its standing in the world, for its allies and enemies, and for international law (inasmuch as international law still has any standing). We don’t know how it will affect migration pressures on America’s southern border or the opioids crisis. Prudence is a quality sorely missing in the Trump administration’s policies; it is possible to be clever (or too clever by far) and still not be wise. Whether this operation was prudent and wise in the long run remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, the message of both Trump and Netanyahu is this: America and Israel are back.

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“The Jewish Question” is being talked about again, on the far-right and, I think, the far-left. What isn’t noticed is that, whenever the Jews try to solve it, the antisemites secretly change the question. This is particularly true of the As A Jews, the Jews who critique Zionism, supposedly from a position of privileged insider knowledge and unsurpassed bravery. It is they who are in a unique position to redefine terms in a way that non-Jews can present as an “authentically Jewish” response to Zionism.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, antizionism, particularly of the pro-Soviet, Isaac Deutscher[1], “non-Jewish Jew,” type, tended to say that the problem with the Jewish State wasn’t that it was a state, but that it was Jewish. In other words, states are fine, at least, in the interim era while we progress to full Communism. (They had to say this or else risk contradiction over their decision to support the USSR.) The problem was that Jewish identity was superstitious, backwards and reactionary. Like other minorities the USSR considered reactionary, it threatened to return to a pre-modern era of a patchwork of tiny, ethnic states that would reverse the dialectical movement of history, which was advancing away from “bourgeois nationalism” towards socialism. Plus, Judaism in particular was a backwards religion that preached nonsense. Science was the way ahead – as most Jews by this stage realised, traditional Judaism being apparently in terminal decline after the Holocaust. The Jews would be protected by progressive states like the USSR, not by their own puny army. Jews should look to the future and avoid being stuck in the past.

(Of course, by a strange coincidence, there was a one-to-one correspondence between nationalisms the USSR saw as “reactionary” and ones that were opposed to Soviet interests, just as there was a similar correspondence between nationalisms that it saw as “progressive” and ones that were pro-Soviet – like the Palestinians.)

Some people like this are still around (e.g. Noam Chomsky, if he can be said to be still around), but, increasingly, we see antizionism from people like Shaul Magid, Daniel Boyarin and Peter Beinart, Jews who are actively practising (some form of) Judaism. Their problem isn’t that the Jewish State is Jewish. Judaism is great! All ethnic and religious minorities are great! Diversity is our strength! According to Boyarin, Judaism is even queer, the highest accolade on the contemporary left! What’s a problem for them is that the Jewish State is a State, that it has a monopoly of force within its borders that it uses to defend its citizens. Judaism, they say, is morally tarnished by this and particularly by the morally compromising positions that the state is forced to take to defend itself in a hostile region. Better that Jews should come into the era of post-nationalist globalism, resettle in the “friendly,” multicultural, post-national states of the West and have their human rights guaranteed by international law and not by the “iron fist” of the IDF. If the Arabs want a reactionary state, well, that’s their lookout. The important thing is that Judaism says there should be no Jewish State. Jews should keep their hands clean.

According to either definition, antizionism, far from being a reactionary thing adjacent to Nazism, is progressive. Either it’s opposed to reactionary nationalism and backward superstition OR it’s opposed to human rights-violating militarised states. Antizionism is always totally in line with the current ideology of the far-left, because when the left changes, antizionism changes to keep up. As ever with antisemitism, the Jewish State, as the most visible symbol of Jewish identity, is that which we most hate. When what we hate changes, we switch to hate it for a different reason. Only the hate is constant.

I don’t have a solution to this constant redefining of the Question to prevent the solution. I just wanted to flag up that this is what is going on, so you can recognise it when you see it.

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[1] I’m using Deutscher as a shorthand for an atheist, Marxist Jew; I know his real views were more complex.

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife and I had a baby in the summer and this has obviously meant that I have very little time to write. I say “obviously,” but I didn’t really anticipate just how much it would affect us and for how long. There are some particular reasons why our life has been disrupted more than usual with a new birth, but suffice to say that I only really get time to write on my lunch break at work when I’m in the office. As this is only two days a week, and as I struggle to eat and type, this greatly limits what I can write, both in terms of quantity, but also in terms of the posts themselves.

I have about 40 A5 notebook pages of handwritten notes for the post I want to write about technocracy and a further few thousand words of typed notes for the same post, but I need significant quiet time to get those in order and to plan the essay before I can write it and I don’t have that sort of time or environment at the moment, either at work or at home. Hence, I have been writing things that I can plan and write relatively easily in a sort of modular way, writing the odd paragraph when I can, rather than making a strong, linear argument or else things short enough to write in two or three short sessions. This was how I wrote my essay about my political development, The Naïve Liberal’s Progress.

So, what am I planning for the relatively near future, given that I probably won’t get to the technocracy essay for a while? I’ve wanted for a while now to write about my complex relationship to Britain and Israel as countries, considering questions of patriotism and the “dual loyalty” allegation against Jews. As this will be a somewhat personal post, it will be paid subscriber-only (plus, as I said above, I feel the need to provide more for my paid subscribers at the moment).

I want to return to my Theology After the Pogrom series with Future Tense by Rabbi Lord Sacks, the book that introduced the metaphor of antisemitism as a mutating virus, an idea that is now treated as a commonplace that does not require referencing. The book has a number of other ideas about antisemitism and Zionism that make it relevant today, while other parts may seem over-optimistic after 7 October, so it will be good to reassess the book’s argument as a whole. After that, I’d like to turn to The Body of Faith by Michael Wyschogrod, perhaps the most important work of contemporary Orthodox Jewish theology that no one reads.

Shorter posts I’d like to write (that may or may not happen depending on circumstances) include one on post-literacy and the Jews (possibly taking in the growing Christian interest in “re-enchanting” the world, which I think is very Not Jewish); what Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Bribe can tell us about liberal Jews; whether Jews are The Hanging Stranger of Philip K. Dick’s short story; and a long post (or two posts) on British and Jewish humour about Nazism and Communism.

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I was a child of the nineties and grew up in the era where global peace and prosperity seemed not just possible, but probable. Like many Jewish families in Britain, various of my family members described themselves as “socialist.” In reality, they were really social democrats (and monarchists!), but there was an unspoken sense that we had to remember that we came from poor immigrant tailors in the East End of London and should care about “the poor.” My grandparents, while not immigrants, did grow up in East London and my paternal grandparents lived there for most of their lives; many of my forebears on both sides of the family were in the clothing industry. Politically, however, I’m really talking here about my father and his father as they were the family members who talked about politics most. We were also strongly Zionist, which didn’t seem terribly significant at the time, but would become so in the coming decades.

I studied economics at A-level (exams aged seventeen or eighteen), which demolished any sense I might have had about socialism working. At this point, I started defining myself as a liberal in a vague sense, blurring the line between classical liberalism and welfare liberalism as many people do. I might have gone on with this unquestioningly, were it not for two things. One was my Zionism and a reasonable (and constantly growing) knowledge of Zionist/Israeli history. The other was the repeated burnouts and depressions that characterised my twenties and thirties, culminating eventually in my autism diagnosis (in 2021) and my final realisation that I am not going to have the “classic” middle-class professional career, along with the status, income and financial security that come with it.

The Second Intifada, which began when PLO/PA leader Yasser Arafat turned down Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 1999 and lasted until 2005, saw the creation of the modern media narrative on Israel, that of Israeli brutality crushing innocent Palestinian for no reason. The maintenance of this narrative required exaggerating the brutality Israeli military operations and ignoring Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties alongside various Israeli peace proposals, while simultaneously downplaying Palestinian violence and ignoring Palestinian rejection of said peace proposals, against a sustained misrepresentation of Jewish and Israeli history to portray the Jews as interlopers in the region who have never been interested in peace, only conquest and expansion. In the process blood libels like those around the death of Mohammed al-Dura and the imaginary massacre that the media said took place in Jenin in 2002 were created.

Richard Landes’ book Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad covers much of this territory; I will just note that, for the first time, I noticed discrepancies between what I saw in the mainstream media and what I knew from elsewhere, primarily from the Jewish press and general historical reading, but also occasionally from elsewhere. Occasionally, a mainstream journalist would say something that did not accord with the standard narrative as when CNN’s Anderson Cooper admitted in a blog post (but, tellingly, not on air) that Western journalists covering the Second Lebanon War were threatened by Hezbollah to show only their narrative. Sometimes, it would be a politician who told the truth, as when (former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs revealed a serious Israeli peace proposal that the media had simply ignored. Once or twice, it was even Hamas, as when they belatedly admitted that Israeli casualty figures for one war, which showed predominantly combatant casualties, were correct rather than the predominantly civilian casualties Hamas had claimed at the time, an admission probably made to gain funding from their allies by presenting themselves as good “martyrs,” but which was picked up by the Jewish media, although not the mainstream media (they never made this mistake again).

This led to the beginning of the unravelling of my trust in the mainstream media, albeit at first limited to Middle East reportage, which I assumed was a particularly bad area, perhaps due to the complicated history of the region, to Western narratives of post-colonial guilt or simply antisemitism.

Simultaneously, I could see the anti-Iraq War movement being hijacked by the anti-Zionist movement, as if the two conflicts were somehow related. When I saw photos of anti-war protests in the newspaper, there seemed to be as many Free Palestine banners as anti-Iraq War ones. The implication, of course, was that Israel was dragging the West into “imperialist” wars in the Middle East and, as it was advanced by innuendo rather than argument most of the time, it was hard to counter. It’s hard to disprove a knowing wink.

Around this time, I started reading George Orwell’s essays seriously and understanding politics more seriously as about power and language, things that permeate culture. Orwell was a lot of things I’m not: socialist, atheist, anti-Zionist. Yet his understanding of the way totalitarianism operates, especially totalitarianism of the far-left kind (the kind building an alliance with the Islamists over Israel-Palestine) seemed pertinent and helpful. His understanding of the corruptions that the left is prone to as well as his analysis of the abuses of political language are still relevant and invaluable. I’m not going to go over that ground again (see my article here), but that helped reassure me that I was not imagining things, that the left could, and is, subject to corruption.

As time grew on, I became aware and irritated by the liberal hegemony of Western culture, without at first having the words to describe it. This was a slow process that unfolded alongside my political development. Whether it was the assumption in fiction that extreme individualism, in the sense of meeting the needs of the self, should always take priority over the needs of the community (particularly in stories about some kind of cross-cultural intermarriage that would likely leave offspring abandoning the minority religion/culture) or the increasingly lazy attacks on conservatives and religious people by “comedians” (but only on Jews and Christians, never on Eastern religions and definitely never on Islam) and a general refusal of cultural creators even to try to understand people with a more conservative mindset, it seemed that a lot was being presumed rather than analysed, and by people who prided themselves on their knowledge, open-mindedness and tolerance. It took me a very long time to realise that I was naming a political reality here rather than just a clash between my religious values and the secular culture of the world of the arts.

When the Financial Crisis hit in 2008, I became aware of the poor standard of presentation of economics in the media and by politicians. The Conservatives and Labour were presented both by the politicians concerned and by a mostly left-wing media (including the BBC) as two starkly different parties, one standing for fiscal austerity, the other for more public spending, but their manifesto spending promises seemed very similar to me. Another telling moment came when reading the economist Paul Krugman’s book The Return of Depression Economics. Krugman praised President Obama for increasing state spending and attacked British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Cameron and George Osbourne for cutting it, but a simple internet search revealed that, even after these policies were implemented, British government spending was a significantly larger proportion of GDP than was the case in the USA. That a Nobel Prize winning economist (and one with a newspaper column called, “The Conscience of a Liberal”) could make such an intellectually dishonest argument was deeply dispiriting, as well as making me wonder what other misrepresentations were passing me by because of a lack of knowledge or expertise.

By this time, my experience as a long-term user of NHS psychiatric care (which I wrote about here), perhaps the most dysfunctional part of the NHS, as well as someone who had been on sickness and unemployment benefits for some time, led to a general frustration with the lack of discussion of the practical and moral capabilities and limitations of the state; of the moral case for free markets; of the practical and moral need for fiscal discipline; and especially of the unacknowledged, soul-destroying nature of being stuck in long-term welfare dependency. The argument being made on the left was, at least implicitly, that the state can do almost anything; that it should do anything it can do; and that there could be no downside to its actions, because it helps people and reduces harm. The idea that welfare dependency destroys the soul, teaches learned helplessness and creates perverse incentives to stay unwell or unemployed was barely even mentioned by this stage, even to shoot it down.

Then came 2016, The Year of the Great Disruption. I was a “reluctant Remainer” in the EU referendum. I had previously been pro-EU and even in favour of a federal Europe, but the disingenuous nature of the arguments made for the Lisbon Treaty in 2005, which was essentially an EU constitution, but which was not sold as such (indeed, the pro-EU side denied it was a constitution) and was continually sent back for ratification when rejected in referenda across Europe, convinced me that the EU was undemocratic. Even so, I felt that the economic benefits argued in favour of staying in. When Leave won, I thought we should honour the vote and was disgusted and horrified at those in the technocratic class, both right and left, who wanted to use lawfare and legalistic politics to prevent a democratic vote being enacted. I realised that, if there was a second referendum, I would vote leave, as a matter of principle, to honour the outcome of the first referendum. The nastiness of the EU in all of this, clearly making an example of Britain to prevent other states leaving, just made staying seem more odious.

A similar thing happened with Donald Trump over the next eight years, as I moved from shock at his victory, to disgust as the years progressed with those who used lawfare and constitutional chicanery to stop him being re-elected (however, I don’t believe the “stolen election” conspiracy theories). At the same time, I was, unlike most in the technocratic world, even on the notional right, curious about why people had voted for Leave and Trump. This led to research on immigration and the discovery, obvious now, but hidden from me from a young age by the liberal technocratic cultural hegemony, that immigration is not a win-win proposition, but a win-lose one. The middle class benefit from cheap labour and defame the working class who lose from suppressed wages and falling social capital, not to mention rising crime and Islamist terror. I became increasingly sceptical of a legacy media that seemed unwilling to present the truth about many things, not just Israel.

Whatever trust I had in the mainstream media would be demolished in the years after 2020 as Western society seemed to simply unravel before our eyes, while those in power attempted to keep up appearances of normality.

In the USA, COVID was a party political issue, but in Britain, this was largely not the case, so I complied meekly with lockdown and mask mandates and looked askance at those who thought the pandemic was overblown. I trusted in the empirical, scientific process and its apolitical application by government experts who considered all the relevant data and outcomes. In this, I was utterly wrong. COVID was not a hoax, but the regulations it prompted were an example of social media-fuelled mass hysteria (in which I was caught up), something seen in many other events in this period. Britain’s own, ongoing, public inquiry into COVID recently stated what some said all along, that full lockdown was unnecessary. It is clear that the negative effects of lockdowns are still ongoing, in terms of disrupted education to a whole cohort of children; loss of social skills among a whole population; worsening mental health for many and the unnecessarily bleak, comfortless deaths of those in isolation. Moreover, under Boris Johnson, politicians and civil servants flouted the rules they imposed on others.

Most absurd of all (and something I was angry about at the time) was the widespread, expert-sponsored ideas that the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter riots were legitimate and even praiseworthy during lockdown as “racism is a public health issue” (despite the fact that no one has ever proved that Floyd’s death, tragic though it was, was a consequence of racism, nor is it actually the case that disproportionately large numbers of unarmed black men are killed by American police each year). The description of the riots in the media as “mostly peaceful” while fires raged in the background was a further indication of the corruption of the legacy media, which was now on a par with Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi spokesman dubbed “Comical Ali” during the Iraq War, who famously denied the presence of US tanks in Baghdad while they could be heard in the background. This is what the legacy media had come to, what it had actively embraced: a politicised version of “truth” that was no better than that in a dying dictatorship.

Over the next few years a slew of other scandals would break showing coordinated deception and outright lying on the part of the entire ruling elite in both Britain and America: politicians, bureaucrats, academics and others. There was the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the attempt by the Democratic Party to run a presidential candidate who was incapable of governing, not to mention their failure to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. And this went unchallenged from a legacy media that had pilloried President George W. Bush as a moron unfit for office for a few verbal slips. There was the continuing fallout from the Russiagate false allegations against Donald Trump and the cover-up of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. And all of this largely came out due to alternative (online) media, not the legacy media, which attempted to suppress these stories wherever possible.

Here in the UK, the Pakistani rape gang scandal and its even more scandalous cover-up by politicians of all parties at local and national levels, police, the NHS and the media slowly emerged into daylight. I doubt that the revelations about this topic are over and it is clear that the lives of thousands of working class women were sold for the sake of a nebulous concept of “diversity” and to prevent race riots about failed multicultural immigration policies.

In many ways, this was similar to the collapse of the mirage of normality that had been constructed around the trans issue. We had been told that few children were being given irreversible hormonal treatment or surgery and that men simply did not use false female identities to enter women’s safe spaces and molest them. Suddenly, it became clear that children were being given unnecessary and often untested treatments on a massive scale and that rapes had become common in women’s prisons. Again, this came out largely due to a handful of gender realist activists using online media, because the legacy media were too scared or too complicit to intervene. This story, like the COVID lies and censorship was, in many ways, more damaging to trust than others, because it was not party political, but involved supposedly neutral, apolitical medical experts acting on the basis of dogma rather than science.

This further example may seem trivial, but I think it is telling. In 2020, we were repeatedly told by the legacy media that Donald Trump was the first living president not to attend his successor’s inauguration. A year or two later, I discovered that this simply is not true. At least three previous presidents (John Adams; his grandson, John Quincey Adams; and Andrew Johnson) had all refused to attend the inaugurations of their successors out of pique. If the media can’t, or won’t, get such a basic fact right, how can we trust them? That all of this happened against a backdrop of panic in the legacy media about “disinformation” and the rise of “fact checkers” who turned out to be politically biased themselves only makes more clear the extent of the moral corruption in journalism.

Finally came 7 October, the Ground Zero for many Jews’ trust in the institutions of the West. Even before Israel had moved into Gaza, while there were still Hamas terrorists in Israeli territory, there was an outburst of mass antisemitism on the streets of the West; of media hatred; of Western politicians queueing up to accuse of Israel of “war crimes” with no proof; and of NGOs and the UN gaslighting the Jews about what happened, particularly about the mass rapes committed by Hamas. “Believe women” did not apply to Jews. In the years to follow, there would be widespread, uncritical use of Hamas’ casualty figures by Western politicians, journalists, academics and activists (the lines between these categories are no longer clear) even after they had been comprehensively disproven. Above all, this was the point where I moved from observing gaslighting by authority figures to being directly gaslit, alongside realising that the government and the police in this country might very well let me be murdered, and would certainly let me be intimidated into hiding my Jewish identity in public, rather than risk Muslims rioting or even just not voting Labour.

Since then, it has felt, not like Western civilisation is about to collapse, but that it has already collapsed and we are standing among the ruins, wondering what to do next, not sure that we are even still alive, while all around people are trying to carry on as if nothing has changed. A number of episodes of the classic TV series The Twilight Zone revolve around people who, we discover at the end, are actually dead, but in denial of this. That is what Western civilisation has become, an uncanny realm, haunted by the ghosts of the living trying to carry on as before.

And yet, standing amid the debris on 8 October 2023, I found myself “surprising/A hunger in [myself] to be more serious”. I had always read in Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Jewish thought alongside some serious fiction and non-fiction (mostly history, Jewish, British and European), but now I wanted to delve more into these topics, alongside philosophy and politics.

As a result of these things, I gradually moved away from the liberalism that I had felt so sure of, initially to a feeling of political homelessness, which lasted a long time. Although I started voting for the Conservative Party around 2010 (I think in the general election of that year), I didn’t really identify with them (I still don’t) and for a long time I groped around for alternative terms for my political beliefs. For a while, I borrowed George Orwell’s term, Tory Anarchist, and I still do sometimes use it as I do think it captures something about my thought. However, it’s fairly meaningless (I don’t think Orwell ever defined it, although he used it for himself for a long time) and describes an attitude as much as anything substantial. I suppose that’s part of the appeal of the term, but it’s probably not helpful inasmuch as political terms, when we need them (which is probably less often than we think) do need to have some kind of commonly-understood meaning, otherwise we’re just playing language games and “performing” identity with the postmodernists.

Last year, I read Roger Scruton (How To Be A Conservative) and his argument that conservatism is more a feeling more than an ideology, a feeling that we have inherited wonderful things from those who came before us that we have a duty to pass on to those who come after us. I realised that I have had this feeling all of my life, long before I started voting rightwards, and that it is part of the reason I was never entirely comfortable on the left. I love the past. I love old things. I love old quotes and old ideas. I want to preserve them, even if they aren’t of practical use to us, just for their own sake. (I wrote about this here.) I also realised that the so-called Conservative Party in Britain have not actually wanted to conserve anything for decades (Margaret Thatcher, although revered by some real conservatives, was probably the turning point, more neo-liberal revolutionary in effect than conservative, even though she was personally socially conservative in many ways). This made me realise that I have been a conservative for a very long time, even if the Conservative Party has not been.

Also important was reading on rejecting the concept of progress. This seemed shocking at first, but made sense on reflection. I accept that there has been scientific and technological progress, but not political progress, certainly not in a linear sense of constant improvement as defined by the left (albeit that they think it can be derailed temporarily by something they call “Fascism,” which means “things we don’t like”). As for moral progress, after 7 October and the reaction in the West, I no longer believe that we have come far at all since ancient times. Basic concepts like the sanctity of human life have been eroded in the West, alongside personal responsibility and objective truth. In their place, the ancient hatred of antisemitism has returned, disguised as antizionism. Similarly, the idea of innate human goodness, fundamental to liberalism and other progressive ideologies, has been disproven by the Holocaust and, although the West has proceeded as if this were not the case, 7 October simply underlines the point. Seeing people parading through the streets of contemporary Western capitals calling for genocide of the Jews, in the name of freedom, equality and “diversity” is a stark illustration of the failures of modern liberal and progressive thought, a failure to bring about the progress that they insist is part of the inevitable “arc of history.”

I remain a small-l liberal in the sense that I believe in liberal democracy, but this is itself a bedrock belief of Burkean conservatism and its desire for personal freedom from governmental interference in a stable social setting and the resultant illegitimacy of state restrictions on speech, association and religion and the desire for representative institutions. However, overall, I believe in small government, and the active promotion of traditional Western culture, the community and the family, and am a critic of mass welfare, fiscal irresponsibility, technocratic social engineering of society, multiculturalism and the politics of group identity at a level below that of the nation as a whole.

I fear my natural inclination is probably still somewhat technocratic, on some basic, instinctual level. After all, I’m elite university-educated, I value evidence-based solutions, am sceptical of the intrusion emotions in the public sphere (although the technocrats are kidding themselves if they think that hasn’t affected them as much as anyone else) and I think global cooperation is, in theory, a good idea. I still feel vaguely uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism or monarchism. Yet I interrogate myself on these points asking why I want them. Are they really the right answer to the question at hand or is it Hayek’s “fatal conceit” that society is simple enough to recreate at play again?

I am also aware I argue for a form of voluntary, local, conservative communitarianism that is, on some level, deeply conformist, while having a quietly non-conformist streak myself (that “Tory Anarchist” streak again). I have precisely this struggle with my identity as an Orthodox Jew who often feels a bad fit for a conformist community, but is stuck with it because I happen to believe deeply in it.

However, I think Nanny State technocracy has killed personal responsibility and community cohesion and initiative. The instincts of the populists (patriotism; monarchism; respect for religion; localism; community cohesion; traditional family values) are more natural, healthy and useful than those of the technocrats (republicanism and the desire for a “rational” constitution; internationalism and faith in highly corrupt international institutions and NGOs; militant secularism; professed indifference to or even hatred of family and country; multiculturalism; a notional and enforced “diversity” based on race, sex and gender, but not viewpoint; an eating away at the concept of the sanctity of life). Once populist values return, technocratic expertise can be reintroduced in an advisory capacity to democratically-elected leaders, as in the past, and with safeguards to prevent over-reach into government by experts. Political decisions must always be taken by elected officials responsible to voters and not by unelected advisors (as in COVID).

Yet, I am disquieted by the world today and not just by the battle between the technocrats and their woke spearhead against the populists, which has only just begun, and not just by the antisemitism erupting left, right and centre (in political as well as figurative terms). I have fears of a coming massive overcorrection and the growing popularity of far-right and antisemitic and Christian Nationalist views among some on the populist right, particularly in the USA. Populism, although right-wing, is often not conservative, if you appreciate the distinction. It often seeks to break down, not to conserve.

I am not part of the Very Online Right either and my encounters with them largely leave me cold, although I’m not sure why. I suppose they seem either frivolous controversialists or thwarted technocrats themselves. They use a lot of slang and refer to memes, neither of which I understand. Maybe this is the Groucho Marx thing of not wanting to join any club that will have me as a member, or a fear that they would not want to have me as a member after all.

Moreover, a lot of online right-wing analysis seems to be increasingly of a traditional Christian variety, even if not Christian Nationalist extremism, usually from people who have only just become religious. I think there’s desperate naivety (and zeal of a convert) in thinking that a Christian resurgence (if it comes, which is questionable) will reset our societies and solve all our problems. It’s Medievalism without noting the intolerance, obscurantism and, yes, antisemitism of the Middle Ages and especially the Catholic Church’s confrontation with modernity, in the sense of science and secular knowledge, in the Early Modern era (unsurprisingly, Medievalist C. S. Lewis is quoted a lot here; you could also look at contemporary Thomist Harrington again). There’s a difference between handing on the best of the culture of the past to our children and trying to live in the past without recognising its worst aspects. While I don’t think these writers tend to be antisemitic, there’s a real danger of naively not paying attention what the Christian Nationalists are saying as well as where their own ideas may lead. At a basic level, if we define the West as historically “Christian” (which up to a point, I agree with), what do we do with the non-Christians already living here? To ignore the Medieval Church’s treatment of its main non-Christian minority, the Jews opens the way to the return of intolerance and even violence.

Lately, I wonder if it is even possible to be a Burkean conservative any more. Controversial British politician Enoch Powell said that a conservative is someone who thinks that institutions are wiser than the people who run them. However, all our institutions have been captured by the technocratic, progressive hegemony. Populism often feels more like a revolt against institutions than an effort to reform them, and revolts and revolutions are distinctly unconservative. Conservatives favour evolutionary change. We are standing in the ruins and it is not clear what we can do to rebuild. The only way forward is restoration, but a restoration so drastic that it feels like building from scratch, albeit with old blueprints. Is this actually conservatism or something else entirely?

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Freya writes about Emma Watson, who claims that there is “violence” and “cruelty” shown by society to single women to force them to wed. Freya says that this is untrue. I thought Freya was probably right and that, whatever single young secular women experience is nothing to what single women and men experience in the Orthodox Jewish world. However, I am not a single, young, secular, woman, so I asked my wife, who used to be one. She said secular women are pressured to get married, but nothing like the way Orthodox Jews are pressured.

In the Orthodox Jewish world, an unmarried man is “on the shelf” at thirty; a woman, at twenty-five. Any older than that and people assume that you either have some weird personality issue or mental illness or that you are “too picky” and need to be shamed into marrying quick. Unmarried men and women are “boys” and “girls” whatever age they are, even in their forties, whereas a married nineteen-year-old is a man or woman.

I married two months short of my fortieth birthday, but mostly avoided this pressure because I wasn’t particularly well-integrated into the community, socially speaking, but I’ve seen how it affects other people. “Shidduch [Orthodox Jewish dating with arranged blind dates] blogs” used to be a whole genre in their own right, before writing online became a thing people did for money, not fun. They were mostly written by single women in, gasp! their late twenties and early thirties and were mostly complaints, not about the hapless men they were set up with, but about the coreligionists who would not stop accusing them of being “picky” or offering “helpful” advice.

Nor is this limited to the never-married. I have a friend from an older generation, a divorcee in his sixties with two adult children who has made clear that he intends never to remarry, but who I have seen field regular joking-not-joking comments from others that he should be looking to get married again.

But the real problem, in my experience, isn’t actually people giving patronising advice or rebuke, but being single in a society that is entirely geared around marriage and children. It’s incredibly depressing turning up to synagogue social events or Shabbat (Sabbath) meals and being the only person over the age of twenty not there with spouse and children (or grandchildren).

This raises the question of whether anyone can ever be free from peer pressure. Human beings are social beings. We care about fitting in and what others think of us. I’m very introverted (and autistic) and I still care about this. Many people care even more. If we think (as I do and the authors I named at the top do) that the West needs to rediscover Jewish-style family and community, is there any way do this without a return to public shaming, even unintentionally?

Just creating a social norm creates a social pressure in social beings. But the absence of social norms creates another sort of social pressure, a far worse one, in my opinion, even speaking as someone (eccentric autistic) who benefits in some ways from relaxed social norms (I couldn’t be a member of the very conformist parts of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community). The absence of social norms creates the pressure to be independent, rebellious, unique, self-created. Most people can’t do this, partly because, as I said, deep-down, most people crave community and “fitting-in” (and that’s not a bad thing), partly because, as Freya notes, most people find fulfilment in others, in relationships with friends and especially in caring relationships with family, not alone. So the paradox remains, along with the existential angst and the pressure (from outside or from inside), which can feel violent and cruel.

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