The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was conducted incompetently, and triggered widespread strikes and outbursts of violence. A shaken Tsar Nicholas II was forced into concessions which, once calm was restored, he later tried to revoke. We consider the attempted reforms of Prime Minister Stolypin — a figure now often forgotten abroad, but who continues to loom large in Russian memory.

And of course, we consider the disastrous effects of World War I; the hunger in the cities; and the first revolution of 1917 — which overthrew the Tsar, but did not stabilise the battle fronts with Germany, nor achieve stability in a disintegrating empire. All of which set the stage for the return from exile of Lenin, who had plans of his own.

Its culture (music, literature, painting, iconography) is dazzling in its brilliance. Yet the country’s size and severity; its tyranny and tragedy; and the enormity of its sufferings and the suffering it has inflicted — is inflicting right now — on others: all compel us to come to terms with the central, conflicting characteristics that make up ‘the Russian idea’. For, precisely because those elements are irreconcilable, the result is generally harsh rule, in which some aspects are suppressed — until they boil over at some point into savage violence.

In this episode, we consider the nature of this witches’ brew at the turn of the twentieth century.

As I write, the internet is awash with chatter about him:

• I-told-you-so’s;

• tacit defences posing as mere faint damnation;

• sneakily implied racism pretending to be mere attacks on reverse racism

... and more besides.

I shall not re-visit any of the points that are made better — or, mostly, more contemptibly — elsewhere. I want to say something(s) else.

For anyone who has been hiding in a parallel universe for the past few days (by which I mean, basically, Nebraska), Jason Arday was, until Wednesday, Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, having been appointed in 2023. Famously, he was, at 41, the youngest black professor at that institution, where he was lionised (it seems reasonable to say); has been a trustee of various august bodies; and has appeared multiple times on prominent BBC radio and television programmes.

And he was a total fraud. Like Claudine Gay, the disgraced former president of Harvard (who still clings to a position as professor there), Arday committed serious plagiarism in his PhD thesis and fabrications in his other published work. Unlike Gay, Jason Arday is a Walter-Mitty-style fantasist about the rest of his life, too: his accounts of his own biography — whether of victimhood or of astonishing achievements — strain credulity,1 have little basis in evidence and, in several cases, are demonstrably false. Despite strenuous attempts at suppressing discussion, the evidence has piled up and, this week, he resigned — though still rejecting any “acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”. (In this universe, you understand, there is no such thing as facts. No ‘did you? or didn’t you?’ ‘Truth’ is the preserve of ‘fascists’. No: there are only ‘narratives’.)

So far, so unoriginal. What points do I wish to make here that others are not making?

There on merit: ethnic minority academics (and other senior public figures)

In the first place, there is the taint that this case will inevitably extend to other non-white academics — or judges; or senior police officers; or headteachers etc. — by undeserved association. Some of them — and this will apply more frequently to certain ethnicities than to others — had to overcome greater socioeconomic difficulties to make their way in life than will have been the case for most (though again, not for all) of their white peers. If I am (say) a black judge, will my achievement now be dismissed as ‘probably a DEI hire’? And my legal findings be suspect accordingly? Incorrigible racists, of course, will talk that way no matter what any of us say or do, or whatever does or does not transpire, even had such a person as Jason Arday never existed. But what of the ideologically uncommitted majority, those who merely want to have confidence that authority figures know what the heck they’re doing?

Appointing Arday — a clear case of a DEI hire whose actual merits would never have brought him so much as a doctorate, still less a professorship at Cambridge — is an injustice to every ethnic minority person who has achieved eminence on the basis of real diligence, skill, intellect, and competence, and deserves not to have a shadow of doubt cast over it by the contorted logic of DEI policies and their frequently scandalous outcomes.

Plagiarism and the death spiral of the academy

Higher education as we have known it is doomed. Economic realities; the advent of AI; declining literacy; demographic collapse — and yes, the vice-like grip of anti-truth ideology: all spell the collapse of the humanities over the next few years, and very possibly of the sciences too in the longer term.

For all but the last of those issues (the ideology), there may, perhaps, be no remedy. At least, I am pessimistic on the point. But there is one other lethal problem — that of plagiarism — that actually can be addressed. Leaving aside all issues of race, or of regnant ideologies, universities can at least punish plagiarism, and strip degrees and positions from those who are guilty.

If Arday’s defenders in Cambridge, or Claudine Gay’s in Harvard, truly believe what they are saying (which I don’t for a moment believe they do — but let that pass), that the accusations of plagiarism are part of a witch-hunt against black professors, their response should be to extend that witch-hunt to white faculty and white PhDs. Let’s clear the lot out. We have an oversupply of people wanting to teach in higher education in any case. Let’s seize the opportunity to ensure that the PhDs we do grant, and the faculty we do employ, are people who have actually achieved something real, and are in the strongest position to educate the rising generation.

Quite apart from the ideological poison revealed by cases like those of Arday and Gay, it has become clear that academic integrity and intellectual solidity don’t matter to those who run our universities. Ideology does.

Well, then. How can you complain if the public have lost confidence in you? That’s not the mere howling of a populist know-nothing mob or of the far right: that’ll be the logical deduction of moderate, reasonable people.

And, as I mentioned a moment ago, plagiarism is the one mortal threat to academia, in its current perfect storm, that lies within easy reach of being put straight.

A question of trust

We live in a time when public confidence in all of our institutions — universities; courts; police; the press; politicians; and in democracy itself — is in a state of free-fall. The reasons for this have been rehearsed extensively elsewhere, and there is no space to reiterate such discussions here. We note merely the fact of it.

And, of course, the rise of far-right populism is to no small extent predicated on that lack of trust. If our inherited institutions are not reliable — if they have become the fiefdoms of people inimical to ‘us’ — well, perhaps the garrulous-if-questionable fellow behind the microphone, who keeps uttering “You, my friends” a little too often, might be worth supporting. After all, how much worse could he be? (Hint: a lot.)

The same goes for online disinformation — whether Putinesque, or from any other source. All aim to confuse us, and to instill fundamental mistrust in the meritocratic bodies that have guided us well in the past.

And the universities’ obvious mendacity in cases like that of Arday seems to confirm the rightness of that withdrawal of trust. The whistle had been blown on his PhD plagiarism a while back. But Liverpool John Moores University conducted a ‘confidential’ (why?) investigation, and returned the verdict, not that there was no plagiarism (about which there was seraphic silence), but that the doctorate stood. What? What the heck?

The bodies for which Arday served as a trustee and poster child; the BBC which, of all the professors in the country, singled out him to host the Today news show; his alma mater and Cambridge University: all hastened to enthuse about a person whose self-promotion and lack of academic rigour would have made him questionable in any other case.

Really: why should we trust them?

And yet. We absolutely need to have confidence in our public institutions, if government by consent is to be perpetuated. We need to know that the public square is in safe hands, if public order is to be maintained. And we need to be confident that education is real education, if we are not to accelerate our retreat into private realities and proliferation of conspiracy theories — which then go on to infect our politics and make them ever more irrational.

All of this is at stake, and has been materially harmed by appointing, promoting — and then defending — Jason Arday.

Circling the Wagons: Suppression of the Facts

It will come as no shock to anyone that Arday’s principal pedagogical approach was ... Critical Race Theory. As Wikipedia notes, his “research has focused on race and higher education, intersectionality, mental health and education, and decolonising the curriculum, neurodiversity and cultural studies”. His publications (leaving aside questions of authorship and fabrication) tell the story:

• “Fighting the Tide: Understanding the difficulties facing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) doctoral students pursuing a career in academia” (2020)

• “No One Can See Me Cry: Understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education” (2021)

• “Attempting to Break the Chain: Reimagining inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy” (2021)

• We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope and Neurodiversity (Princeton, 2025)

In September 2025, Times Higher Education — no right-wing rag — was warned off making allegations of plagiarism by a letter from Arday’s lawyers. Astonishingly, the paper’s journalist, Jack Grove, found himself the subject of a police investigation, and was warned not to contact Arday. That investigation lasted several months and absorbed significant manpower and money — and this at a time when police resources are stretched to breaking point in combatting actual crime. (But then, the police are another body in which public trust has been seriously eroded.)

As recently as last month, Cambridge University was dismissing questions of plagiarism and asserting that Arday was “the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”. It was an almost exact echo of Harvard’s defence of Claudine Gay. An open letter signed by 10,000 supporters, including the heads of Jesus College (where Arday was a Fellow) and Wolfson College (another constituent college of the University of Cambridge), denounced the “entirely false allegations of plagiarism” and attempts by “right-wing media ... to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career”. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, was another signator, and as late as this week — by which time the truth had become undeniable — he was still defending Arday.

There is a pattern here. The devotees of the regnant ideologies — which are all spin-offs of Foucault’s deconstructionism — are simply shameless. That word should not be understood as a mere angry denunciation. It means that they are quite literally unembarrassable. No amount of exposure or public falsification can push them into a retraction. For if, as Foucault maintained, there are only words, and no possibility of truth, then it follows that being exposed as a fraud or a liar is meaningless. If your foes think themselves to have scored a victory — well, let them. Just keep up the pressure and try harder next time.

Back in 2017 and 2018, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted a series of twenty hoax papers to academic journals. These were arguing for nonsensical propositions, but were couched in the language of ‘critical social theory’ and sexuality studies and their associated jargon. By the time the trio were rumbled, four of the articles had been published; three more had been accepted; six had been rejected; and the remaining seven were still under review.2

The journals’ response? Shamelessness. The editor of one was “deeply disappointed” at the tricksters, whose “fraudulent academic material violates many ethical and academic norms”. The editor of another decried such “flawed and unethical research”. (The object of this particular research, of course, was not at all the supposed content of the article — but his journal.)

Ideologues of all shades have never been famous for their sense of humour. But they have sometimes been capable of contrition. Those, however, for whom words are only ever a battle for power are incapable even of that. As Arday himself put it in an article he wrote (or perhaps did not write) in 2020: “Higher education is a battlefield and the causalities of this inequitable war continue to be fatigued battle-weary people of colour within the academy.”3 Well, some people of colour, anyway. Others are getting on with producing work of real value.

Feeding the Far-Right Beast

Perhaps the most teeth-gnashing aspect of all this is that such incidents are doing the work of the far right for them. Their central plank is that the institutions of society are a conspiracy against the beliefs and interests of the populace. One insightful definition of populism is that it posits collusion between an unpopular élite and a social out-group, against “You, my friends”, the honest sons of the soil — and presents itself as the champion of ordinary people against both.

And almost nothing better fits that construction (or ‘narrative’ as Arday would put it) than cases such as this. Those who had been inclined to such a view are likely to feel vindicated.

The far right crowd proffer a road to nowhere, of course. Or rather, to the end of an open society. Like communists, their vision could only be enacted by drastic use of force, and the incessant creation of new enemies. But then, the same could and should be said of university deconstructionists. If facts are a chimera, if truth is ‘fascist’, and if words are mere masks for power, then discussion is at an end, and the only mediation between us is force.

If the Arday saga brings any public benefit at all, it will be because it acted as an unignorable warning light about what is wrong. But that requires us not to ignore the warning. Not to treat it (as the academic authorities might wish) as an unfortunate incident, following which all goes back to the way it was before. We need to press on, to tackle the disease of which this was a high-profile symptom. And in that endeavour, push-back from The Unembarrassables can be expected.

* * * * * *

I am an optimist when it comes to racism. Relatively speaking, anyway.

I do not at all agree with the Rousseauean drivel that we are born naturally tolerant and accepting, and “have to be taught to hate”. All history, and all current experience, show the opposite. People are tribalist. Left to themselves, they will, at best, fear those who do not look like themselves. But it may be much, much worse.

In what sense, then, am I an optimist? Because people — and I’m thinking here especially of children — can learn not to be racist. And quite easily, too. Literacy and numeracy are not natural. Nor is politeness, or bodily hygiene. Yet, with good examples constantly reinforced, success rates can be close to 100%. My son’s best friend in school at age six was a Sri Lankan boy — and lo, the path was set. My younger daughter, while still a toddler, had a circle of little friends, and attended a birthday party, in which she was the only non-ethnically Chinese child. The people to whom we gave hospitality in our home came in all shapes and colours. It was great.

Is there racism in Britain? Indubitably. And there always will be. But it has long been reduced to a functional minimum. Low single digits, would be my guess. Surveys consistently suggest that Britain is one of the least racist countries in the world. That is not to say it is no problem at all. If I am from an ethnic minority, and interact with dozens of people each day, then, statistically, most days I will encounter someone who is less than friendly — and every few days a person who is downright unpleasant.

Yet it is a century and a half since Britain had its first Jewish Prime Minister — the Tory Benjamin Disraeli. In more recent times, its first three female Prime Ministers and its first non-white Prime Minister have likewise all been Tories. Its current (Labour) Home Secretary is Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim of Pakistani extraction, while the leader of the Conservatives is Kemi Badenoch, whose parents came to Britain from Nigeria.

In a word, the ‘narrative’ that Arday presents is unpersuasive. Not because racism is extinct (it never will be), but because it is not decisive, even for its unfortunate targets. Tackling the residue does not justify upending our curricula, abandoning meritocracy, and casting social cohesion into a perpetual churn. The gains for the beneficiaries are not worth the losses — even for them. And worse, such moves feed the very beast they claim to expel. They’re doing so this very week.

And so it was with the Renaissance. Print and the demand for original sources (Bible, Church Fathers) intensified the already growing religiosity of late-mediæval societies. Yet its emphasis upon human agency — ‘man, the measure of all things’ — and the beauty of the human body led also in a secularising direction.

In this final episode of the series, we examine this dichotomy — and its implications.

How did this shift in self-perception come about?

It was that demand for robust thinking that built the modern world. And it’s the slow abandonment of that demand — in favour of feelings and new dogmatisms — that is (literally) deconstructing it.

In both cases, the artists of the Renaissance aspired to a rebirth of Greek and Roman antiquity. The confident, opulent Italian city states produced people more in control of their world — even of nature — and so, when they painted, they painted nature IN. Leaning back into classical antiquity, when they built, they sought to recreate the achievements of their long distant ancestors.

Here, we trace the revolution’s course and its aftermath. Following the predictable crackdown, János Kádár (the new leader imposed by Moscow) pursued a softer approach over the following three decades such that, when the Communist system finally collapsed in 1989/90, Hungary was well placed to make a rapid transition to a market economy and rule of law. Yet the bitterness of the past was not so easily shaken off....

Germany dominated the economies and politics of central Europe — so keeping distant from Hitler was scarcely an option. But Hungary hoped that the Führer’s determination to destroy the peace settlements that followed World War I would allow it to regain its own ‘lost territories’. And, however repulsive, the Nazis at least seemed a bulwark against Communism.

At first, these calculations proved correct. Hungary regained some of its former territories without even having to fight for them. But the price was the requirement to join Germany’s attack on the USSR in 1941. When it became clear, by spring 1944, that this enterprise would end disastrously, Hungary’s attempt to extricate itself from the war merely produced a Nazi takeover and the unfolding of the Holocaust of Hungary’s Jews.

The following winter, the worst fears of Hungarians were fully realised. Destruction and death; mass rape by Soviet troops; half a million civilians taken away to perform forced labour in the USSR. And, over the next three years, the imposition of a Stalinist régime.

What was left of the country experienced five different régimes in eighteen months from October 1918 through to spring 1920. It was a turnover that included a Communist revolution, invasion by Romanian troops, and a right-wing backlash. At the end of it, the new Hungary claimed to be a kingdom (as it had been until 1918) — only ... a kingdom without a king.

Few things united Hungarian public opinion during the interwar period — but concerning opposition to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, they were as one.

It was a stance that would lead the country’s Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, into dangerous alliances, as he sought ways to reverse the verdict of Trianon.

In this series, we look at Hungary’s tumultuous, and mostly tragic, twentieth century. And in this, the first episode, we consider the long view — where Hungary came from; why it fits so uneasily into its geographic neighbourhood, despite being physically at the centre of Europe; and why its recent tragic and bitter past bleeds into present politics, both domestic, and international.

Few outside Hungary will mourn Viktor Orbán’s ousting (and neither do we!), but we need to understand why, for so long, there has been such significant support in the country for his disruptive policies.

But is that really all the Crusades were? The conflicts with Islam had deepened enmity in a way that endures down to the present: even today, Westerners and Muslims are mutually the definitive ‘other’ over against whom, in a sense, they define themselves. (Anyone who doubts this need only read the Narnia children’s stories to be reminded of how our stock images of the dar-al-Islam are reflected in the Calormens!)

Furthermore, trade, culture, and intellectual life were all enhanced by the prolonged contact that inevitably came along with actual fighting. These very comments are marked by Arabic numerals — and computing itself (let alone YouTube!) would presumably be impossible were we still saddled with Roman digits. Aristotelean thought, reintroduced to the West by interaction with the Muslim world, would come to dominate late medieval Christian theology — and, at least arguably, still colours the ways that Westerners think today.

In this episode, we scrutinise the balance sheet.

“Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it”, Mark Lilla warned his fellow-liberals back in 2016. Indeed, they had just lost the presidential election to Trump — and it was at least arguable that public exasperation with leftist identitarian obsessions was part of the reason.

What goes around, he meant, comes around. As indeed it does.

The Trump administration is overwhelmingly male; with nary a black person in view. And if it has any gays, then I haven’t been paying close enough attention to notice.

As I wish to make clear here, Lilla’s point can be applied in other arenas than identity politics. In several areas, the left is now being forced to lie on a bed of nails that it had itself painstakingly prepared for its foes.

Beyond rationality

I have just today been informed, by a MAGA person, that I am suffering from ‘Trump derangement syndrome’. It won’t cause me undue loss of sleep. The term, of course, was coined by the Orange One himself. (Who else? His every utterance is self-referential, so the shape of the world — or, in this case, the human psyche — must be cut out accordingly.) But he might just have a point in respect of those — and they are many — who think they have not signalled their own virtue with sufficient clarity if they have not posted a dozen times on the subject, often taking care to use expletives as they do so, every twenty-four hours.

That said, ‘TDS’ is an idiotic concept. For if a person is ‘deranged’, then there is no purpose in arguing — or even discussing — with them. Their utterances are the merest eruptions of a sickness. A ‘syndrome’. But the coining of such a concept is a right-wing equivalent of what has been, in recent decades, a line of attack from the left.

Homophobia, anyone? Islamophobia, perhaps, for dessert? With transphobia to wash it all down? These terms were coined to undercut arguments against ‘normalising’ homosexual behaviour, or gay marriage. Criticisms of Islam and doubts about its ability to meld easily with pluralist, democratic norms were silenced the same way. Feminist outrage that the hard-won gains of the past two generations were about to be cast aside so as not to hurt the feelings of those who genuinely were suffering from a mental delusion: this too was to be disarmed by the verbal trick of adding the ‘-phobia’ suffix.

For a phobia genuinely is something irrational. Arachnophobia (irrational fear of spiders) is not a very serious mental ailment — unlike, say, narcissism — but, given the near ubiquity of spiders, it can harm the life experience of those who suffer from it. Hence there are therapies and treatments (none of which I am remotely equipped to evaluate) to ease or eradicate the condition. Not even the sufferer genuinely believes that spiders are truly a danger. Not outside of Australia, at any rate.

Attaching the ‘phobia’ suffix to one’s favoured group is a way of sidestepping rational — or even irrational — debate with those who demur. It is to insist that the doubters are suffering from a condition analogous to arachnophobia, or agoraphobia. Though you notice that the wielders of the politicised neologisms do not quite believe it themselves: no one, after all, gets angry and indignant at an arachnophobe. The leftists were merely asserting that their new fetishes were above and beyond debate. Case shut. So shut up.

And ‘TDS’ is merely the same brain-dead, intolerant ploy come back to bite them. Nothing to discuss here, folks.

Beyond ‘truth’

The same goes for truth. For decades, leftist academia has been spewing mocking scepticism about this commodity. (To declare my hand here: even I doubt whether truth is a thing, in the Platonic sense. But I have no doubt at all that certain statements, claims etc. are true.) Michel Foucault, by contrast, held that all claims to ‘truth’ were mere power plays and social constructs that should be ‘challenged’. And by now almost all of our managerial and governing classes have been taught during their student days to accept this analysis as axiomatic. Or, one might almost say, as ‘true’.

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ pushed in the same direction. Essentially an expansion of Lenin’s famous “Who? Whom?”, no actions are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in themselves — but only in terms of which identity group is favoured or harmed by them.

For the left, it all seemed a wonderful stratagem. The shape of reality itself would surely yield to the new, fashionable idealisms — for there was no ‘reality’ other than what we asserted it to be. Grammar; logic; mathematics; history: all were mere ‘discourses of power’, demanding to be reshaped or rejected entirely, in favour of discourses that would favour identities that had been disfavoured (allegedly, actually, or a little of each) in the (predictably) dark and unutterably wicked and unenlightened past.

And yet, now. We are faced with a right-wing régime that has fired all experts, pooh-poohs mere evidence as ‘woke’ propaganda, and replaced experienced specialists with ignorant placemen [sic] whose only qualification is loyalty to the Great Leader.

It was only a couple of years ago that the American Constitution was being excoriated on the left as an inherited, limiting manifesto written by slaveholders.

The Trumpian administration has duly obliged them. All constitutional checks and balances have come under assault. The courts are — so far, and only just about — holding the line.

Make no mistake: the left started this. The undermining of rational debate. The attack on truth. And the right is finishing it.

The Final Apostasy

Finally, to cut the left a little slack:

Back in the 1970s, the fundamentalist world was awash with books (The Late Great Planet Earth) and films (Left Behind) and songs (”I Wish We’d All Been Ready”) about the imminence of ‘the rapture’ and the advent of the Antichrist.

Its scenarios, being both laughable and biblically flimsy, need not detain us.

But its depiction of the ‘man of sin’ — who would bring chaos and war, and deceive many —and an apostate church who would acclaim him: well, that looks now more like a description of (many of) the fundamentalists themselves.

All of which goes to show that, if you talk poisonous nonsense for long enough, the story will end in a way you didn’t suspect. If you play such games, be prepared to lose them.

15 million (!!) people can’t be wrong, right? Hold my beer….

More than any other single event, it is the disgraceful Fourth Crusade that has generated emotional and psychological distance between the West and the Eastern Orthodox world, with the latter seeing itself (delusionally — but never mind that) as spiritually superior; and seeing the West (with some justification) as just so many overbearing, well-armed barbarians. Such perceptions have strong echoes down to the present. Even unreflective inhabitants of Orthodox countries today have, at a visceral level, this kind of perception — even if, unlike some of their sketchier monks, they might struggle to articulate it in so many words.

Today, most of us consider the Crusades as a whole to be a misguided series of enterprises. In this episode, we consider how the Fourth Crusade came to be diverted so far, even from that, original goal.

A friend of mine, Igor Dimovski, has asked me (in response to my recent posts about Doug Wilson and Christian nationalism):

“Do you think that Calvinism is in any way connected to the authoritarian and nationalist views of Wilson and precluded some of his peers to see how far right he went?”

Here is my attempt at an answer.

In true academic fashion, it runs the full gamut from ‘No’ — to ‘actually, Yes’.

No (1)

Firstly, one should remember that not all (perhaps not even most) Christian nationalism in the United States is to be found among the Reformed churches. At least as large, in terms of sheer numbers of people, is the so-called ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (also ‘Dominionism’ and the ‘Seven Mountain Mandate’). Unlike Wilson’s group, the NAR is neither a denomination nor a formal church cluster, but a generalised movement.

The NAR is preponderant among some Pentecostals and charismatics — traditions which, whatever one thinks of them, should at least be immune to this sort of stuff. They baptise believers, for goodness’ sake — which should be as clear a sign as any (especially to themselves!) that they think ‘church’ is for the converted alone ... and hence that Christianity is not a program for running society-as-a-whole. Not Christian nationalism. Not anything else, either.

But we are dealing here (and I say this as a card-carrying charismatic) with people from whom coherent thought is not always to be expected; who might move in almost any direction if the man at the front shouts loudly enough and imperiously enough into the microphone; if an Old Testament text can be sufficiently twisted into a spurious ‘mandate’ for New Testament believers. Indeed, only thus could so many of them ever have lined up behind a president whose lifestyle, behaviours, and style of politics violate everything in which they are supposed to believe.

No (2)

Secondly, though I myself am not even Augustinian — still less Calvinist — it has to be admitted that Calvinism, perhaps especially in America, has a certain appeal that is far from unwholesome. Many evangelicals, especially those in higher income brackets, flock to it as the principal alternative to what we might call the sweaty, tin-tabernacle end of the spectrum. The Reformed churches appeal because they have a place — have always had a place — for culture, art, literature, and the life of the mind. Even in the fundamentalist heyday, in the very decade of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, the Presbyterians’ most famous spokesman, B.B. Warfield, had no problem with the theory of evolution. With notable exceptions, the Reformed camp represents an escape from the legalism and the crassness of the gospel halls and the frothy fellowships.

For this reason, Calvinism-and-water (the ratio of dilution varying from person to person, and from group to group) has long been the default theology of evangelicals as a whole. If any of them at all had anything serious to say beyond ‘precious thoughts’ and legalistic denunciations, then its underpinnings were to be found in some soup or other, more or less concentrated as the case may be, of Reformed theology. The rest of us have been — to our occasional embarrassment and more frequent irritation — tolerated weaker brethren.1

Actually, Yes (1)

However, the cultural-intellectual upside is simply an effect of the more serious downside. Despite the best efforts of its present advocates to generate a post facto rationale, it is simply intellectually dishonest to turn one’s gaze away, even for a moment, from the origins of Reformed thought — in, astonishingly enough, the Reformation.

The Protestant Reformers sought to replace the Catholics’ ‘wrong’ compulsory, persecuting, society-defining church ... with their own ‘right’ compulsory, persecuting, society-defining church. And the entirety of their thought was a theologisation of that endeavour. In their labours, they leaned heavily upon Augustine who, a thousand years earlier, had constructed most of the tools they needed. Fully 50% of the references to ‘Church Fathers’ in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (surely the most influential work of Reformed theology ever produced!) are to Augustine.

In the early fifth century, it was Augustine who did most to theologise what was then still a new phenomenon: a Christian state. To justify such a monstrosity, in Christian terms. For a full explanation of this, see my article, here.

So of course a Calvinistic church will be ‘holistic’: society as a whole is the thing it was designed to shape! It will endorse the grand fallacy that whatever state one happens to live in (and we are dealing here with the U.S.) is somehow an analogy of Old Testament Israel. (It is a fallacy — because it is the church of actual believers across the whole world who constitute the equivalent of Old Testament Israel. The equivalence is spiritual — not territorial or political.)

Actually, Yes (2)

The Calvinistic churches in America — Congregationalist; Presbyterian; Dutch Reformed, and others — brought with them the Reformed template from their homelands. Most important were the Puritan settlers of New England, who were quite clear that they were establishing a ‘holy experiment’; that they constituted a new Israel. The idea became widespread. Almost two centuries later, even Thomas Jefferson (no orthodox believer) insisted, in his Second Inaugural Address of 1805, that it was God “who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life”. (For more on this, see here.)

To be sure, American Calvinists had to adapt themselves to the realities of life in a land where, despite their ardent wishes, pestiferous miscreants of many religious hues persisted in joining them. “All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists and other Enthusiasts,” declared Nathaniel Ward in 1647, with not a little sarcasm, “shall have free liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.” At first, the New England Puritans imprisoned Baptists and hanged Quakers — but in the end, they simply had to give it up. The land was just too big; the incomers, too various. By 1789, the American Presbyterians had amended the Westminster Confession — surely their most precious creedal statement — to eliminate the 1646 English original’s demand that government enforce orthodoxy and punish misbelievers.2

By the turn of the twentieth century, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), the noted Dutch Prime Minister, theologian, and friend to the United States, was influential in reinventing Calvinism — in his homeland and in America — for a democratic age.

And yet. The original purpose of Calvinist theology is not easily to be brushed aside. It is a rationale for a godly commonwealth. A program for society. No matter how American one might be, one cannot be a Calvinist — certainly not a Calvinist who has spent half a lifetime soaking his mind in Augustine, the Puritans, the Institutes etc. — and not feel this.

Finally

The Reformed theology of Doug Wilson’s outfit is supercharged, of course. The new atheist Christopher Hitchens, who debated Wilson (and liked him) described it as “weapons-grade Calvinism”. Most significantly, it includes a postmillennial eschatology: a belief that it is the saints who bring in the ‘reign of the saints’, with Christ returning only after (hence, ‘post-’) they have done so.

That’s not a doctrine that Calvin — or any of the Reformers — taught. Postmillennialism emerged only in the early seventeenth century (a fact which, by itself, is sufficient to refute it; it can by no stretch of the imagination be imputed to Christ or the apostles). Adhered to by many ardent Puritans during the period of the English Civil War and Republic, it added a streak of social instability to the amillennialism that has, in all other times and places, been the consistent position of all state churches: Catholic; Orthodox; and Protestant alike. But it does, nevertheless, demand a Christian state and society — only, one which is yet to be achieved by the political (perhaps military-revolutionary) exertions of ‘the saints’. Hence, the instability.

Postmillennialism became standard fare among evangelicals from the eighteenth century until the later nineteenth. But during that age, its eschatology was more about fuelling Christian missions around the world than in seizing control of governments. Nowadays, its greatly-reduced redoubt is the ultra-Calvinistic groups — like Doug Wilson’s — wanting a ‘Christian America’.

Rousas J. Rushdoony (1916-2001) was the most influential of these theonomists, urging ‘Christian Reconstruction’, i.e., re-structuring the United States as a Calvinist commonwealth — a sort of vastly over-sized Geneva. In doing so, Wilson and other Rushdoony-inspired Christian nationalists are pursuing what has always been the central thread of Reformed theology. Calvinist ‘normies’ may not like it — but the would-be theocrats are merely following through on what was always the central premise of their whole system.

No one, of course, should hold their breath that such a vision will actually be fulfilled. Even Wilson is sufficiently cautious, when grilled in interview, to posit its achievement a couple of centuries in the future. But we might well hold our breath about the damage that will be caused — that is being caused — very much sooner than that.

Who am I writing this for?

• Leftists? I will persuade no one.

• MAGA types? Ditto. (Though if I sow the seed of doubt in their minds, this will not be wasted. But, in reality, they likely won’t read beyond the headline.)

• Myself? To explain to myself why I, the deepest-dyed conservative, am so appalled at Trump, at MAGA, at the ‘new far-right’ in Europe? But all these issues have been clear and settled in my mind for a decade. I have no need to persuade myself of anything.

• As a sort of embarrassed, public self-justification? Those are always the most suspicious and pitiable of literary exercises. They rightly invite ridicule. And in any case, I have never made any pretence of holding moral high ground — whether in politics or anything else. I’m every bit as bad as you. And then some.

No. This is written for conservatives.

For people who (if Americans) could never bring themselves to vote for the party of wokery; of big government; of Western self-loathing. Perhaps some of you (again, if Americans) even voted for Trump between gritted teeth. Or stayed home on polling day in the forlorn hope that this horrible mess would all somehow go away. And if you were nervous then, by now you are looking on, appalled and sickened to your very bones. (If you are Europeans, you have been appalled for a while. And fearful that the same horrifying choices will soon be forced upon you too, in your own countries.) A number of you have confided your anguish to me. In these times, what is a conservative to do?

And here is what I want to tell you.

The grounds for rejecting Trump, MAGA, and the European far-right are precisely conservative. You are not a limp moderate — a ‘CINO’ — for responding as you do. Indeed, the ‘CINO’ label rightly belongs to the Trumpians — for there is nothing conservative about them. It is an outrage that they wrap themselves in conservatism’s flag. You are not ‘tilting left’ in repudiating their nonsense.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with discussing Trump. (You smart people are all capable of doing the mental leg-work necessary to apply the same points to your own countries.) And then compare what we see with what conservatism actually means.

These claims about him (character, behaviour) are not contentious. They are but the briefest summary of what we’ve seen all along. He is:

1) immoral;

2) bigoted;

3) socially divisive;

4) vindictive;

5) boorish and childish — lowering the tone of public discourse;

6) creating instability;

7) trashing continuity and disrespecting tradition.

That’s seven decisive stripes against actual conservatism — any one of which would disqualify him.

Mutatis mutandis, the same points could be made about equivalent movements in Europe.

Let’s go over those points one by one.

Immoral

Conservatives believe in upholding morality — both public and private. They believe that their leaders, while inevitably imperfect sinners like the rest of us, should not be glaringly worse than the rest of us — whether in deportment and foul language; sexual peccadilloes; financial corruption; or lying. Now look at what you see....

Bigoted

Conservatives believe in generosity of speech and respect for others. Whether or not a given conservative is personally devout, he or she nevertheless tacitly accepts that all people are created in the image of God (or at least endorses the practical, everyday consequences of that belief as a working postulate) — and so thinks that barely concealed scorn of others on the basis of ethnicity or nationality or sex is not merely distasteful and bad manners, but actually wrong, morally, and harmful to the harmonious public life which is (or should be) our most precious resource.

Socially divisive

Conservatives certainly do not believe in ‘social unity’. For that is a goal consistent only with some variety of tyranny. What they do want is easy relationships between the many different kinds of people that inevitably make up our societies. (In a different universe, I would have used the word ‘diversity’ there — but that term has been hijacked by the left, precisely to exacerbate those relations; to insist upon their idea of ‘justice’ being dispensed with an eye-dropper, in case anyone gets too much; and to let you know that your freedoms, even of speech, or to raise your own children as you think fit, are to be set at naught against the assertive claims of those who identify as ambisexual wombats. Their alleged ‘medicine’ actually heightens the ills it claims to cure. And, admitted or not, does so designedly.)

Trump and co. represent a backlash against the excesses of the left. They are playing the same conflictual game — only for the opposite team. But the game itself is a losing game. It is a ticket to nowhere. Conservatives, above all, understand that society, like a marriage, cannot exist on the basis of incessant mutual recrimination. That ‘justice’, this side of the Last Judgment (if, like me, you believe in that sort of thing), is inevitably imperfect — not least because we shall never agree on its content. In its absence, therefore, we shall have to accept social peace. Not a ‘Carthaginian peace’ (’victory’ for some faction or other, with the rest cast into the mud) — but something we can all, at least, live with.

Vindictive

Conservatives understand that the possibility of a civilised existence depends upon social harmony (in the cautious sense that we have just indicated). Even our personal relations should, ideally, be non-abrasive, and generous. And the same applies a fortiori at the level of government. We cannot be doing with a man who says, publicly and in a religious gathering, that he hates his enemies and wants to destroy them. If the central argument against political correctness is that it leaves no place for forgiveness, exactly the same point applies to the far-right.

Boorish and childish

Conservatives know that our lives will be much better when we feel respected. When men are given the special dignity that applies to men; women, the special dignity that applies to women. (Being accorded such honour is no small part of what makes us better men, or better women.) That all of us should feel threatened and diminished when decorum is trampled upon. And most of all, when the trampling is done by those who occupy the highest offices. This is no way to live.

Creating instability

Conservatives know that civilisation is a thin veneer painted over the face of barbarism — of our animal natures. Stability — and, therefore, the physical safety of each one of us — is best secured by its incessant reiteration. Giving that sense of security, both actually and in public words, is the central task of those entrusted with government.

Even the police and the military are there precisely to ensure that we seldom need them. Anything in excess of that is tyranny; anything less is an invitation to chaos — which in turn will be rectified by tyranny.

This being so, the politics of incitement — of creating enemies — is the enemy of us all. For a sense of insecurity causes each of us to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to lash out. This is why all change, even necessary change, needs to be gradual and incremental. Our ability to feel comfortable in our own skins is what makes civilisation possible. (Indeed, that last sentence is almost a tautology.) For that reason, even reversing leftist excesses needs to be done gradually.

Trashing continuity and disrespecting tradition

Tradition is not the obscure mumbo-jumbo you have been brought up to believe. Traditions are the accumulated wisdom of distant ages — the solution to problems that we have long since forgotten were ever problems. Clearly, society and circumstances change, and on occasions tradition may need to yield accordingly. But the burden of proof is always upon us; the assumption of soundness, with the tradition. Simply to obliterate tradition on grounds of commonplace rationalism; or currently regnant dogma; or because it is inconvenient to something we really, really want to do, is to invite the long-forgotten problem to re-emerge.

Worse, it gives us a sense of meaninglessness and rootlessness. This point does not need arguing: it is the central psychic problem of our age, among the young even more acutely than among the old.

Clearly, our public institutions are potent symbols of the (quasi-)permanence that we all need in order to feel at home in the world. To push back against their checks and balances, or to override their importance in favour of a single overbearing leader: this is to make ourselves chronically insecure, and vulnerable to the whims of a person who has already demonstrated his capriciousness.

* * * * * * * * * *

To reiterate, Trumpianism in America, and the angry far-right movements in Europe, are the very antithesis of conservatism. Everything that actual conservatives treasure and seek to uphold is either ignored by them — or even vilified.

Genuine conservatism consists of the emphases urged by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century, and represented in modern times by Russell Kirk (in America) and Roger Scruton (in Britain). Its notions of patriotism are about love and willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of others — not belligerent or triumphalist flag-wearing; it is a disposition, not an angry fetish.

To be conservative, it is not merely permissible to repudiate the demonic new movements of our times; it is actually necessary.

The medieval West and the Islamic world were very different civilisations. Not just different religions, but different ways of life and thought, different art — and different military equipment. The Crusades tested these differences against one another.

As we noted in the last episode, the First Crusade was by far the most successful of these ventures. The structures established by it — the Crusader states of the Levant — later came under severe pressure. And so further expeditions were launched to bolster them.

In this episode, we consider the failed Second Crusade of 1147-49, and the partially successful Third Crusade of 1189-92.

A single by-election proves nothing, of course. All manner of false dawns have been declared on the slender basis of mid-term voter dissatisfaction played out in the idiosyncratic environment of some particular constituency. Come a general election, when an actual government is being chosen, the very same locals will act differently. And even if they do not, their quirks will be drowned in the sea of 650 constituencies, all selecting the party they despise least.

Heck, I was brought up in Orpington, whose eye-popping by-election in 1962 (where the Liberals seized a previously unassailable Tory seat), remains, sixty years on, the town’s chief claim to fame — and was cited yet again this week as a point of comparison for the Greens’ latest triumph in Gorton and Denton. The 1962 upset was the harbinger, of course, of precisely nothing.

And yet.

The two most recent by-elections — in Caerffili and Gorton — appear to bear out what the discerning ruminator over the political tealeaves might in any case have come to suspect.

The first of those contests (in this case, not for the Westminster Parliament seat, but for the Welsh Senedd) was won by Plaid Cymru, the left-ish Welsh nationalist party, back in October. And, as we saw a few days ago, the Gorton and Denton seat was won by the Greens — a party which increasingly says very little about environmental issues, but emphasises instead left-wing economic and ethnic minority grievances. (Oh, and leaving NATO.1 And legalising cocaine.) In both cases, Reform UK had been expected to win: it has been ahead in national opinion polls — by a wide margin — for a year now, beating an incessant drum-beat against too-high immigration and its associated issues.

But Reform’s national lead — mostly around 10% — has held against an almost impossibly fragmented political landscape. Britain’s first-past-the-post system is, like America’s, designed for a two-party system. Before World War I, those two parties were the Liberals and the Conservatives. After 1918, the former were swiftly ousted by the rapid rise of Labour — and the Tory-Labour duopoly has held for most of the time since. That duopoly started to fray around the edges from the mid-1970s, when a significant number of frustrated voters turned once again to the Liberals, notwithstanding the fact that their votes were often (or mostly) wasted. In consequence, all single-party parliamentary majorities since 1975 have been secured on the back of, at most, 43% of the popular vote.

The fragmentation has gathered pace over the past 15 years. An extreme point was reached in 2024, when Labour won a landslide, in terms of seats, on the basis of just 33.7% national support. Even more tellingly, more than 42% of voters in that election supported someone other than the Labour-Tory duopoly. To judge by the green seats in the House of Commons, Labour had an overwhelming mandate. To judge by popular sentiment, it was hardly a mandate at all: two voters in three didn’t want them.

It is this continuing — nay, intensifying — circumstance that has given Reform UK its strong lead in opinion polls. Support for both Labour and the Tories has collapsed since the general election: both are now polling in the high teens. (So: non-duopolist support is now an overwhelming majority of the public.) The Greens and the Liberals are each scoring in the mid-teens. Nationalist support remains buoyant in both Scotland and Wales (increasing, in the latter case). So 30% in opinion polls has been more than enough to give Nigel Farage’s outfit a commanding lead over everyone else. If all this were to be transferred into votes at the next general election, he would be heading into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister

Except that he won’t be. Not — and I want to stress this — because “a lot can happen between now and the election”. (Well, obviously.) But for two other crucial reasons.

In the first place, Reform can’t get much above 30%. That appears to be their absolute ceiling. This might still be enough to see them home if the present fragmentation continues, but for one other factor.

For, in the second place, most of the remaining 70% of the electorate seem pretty desperate for Reform not to take power. They evoke more hostility than most die-hard Tories feel for Labour. More, even, than die-hard Labour voters feel for the Tories. (And the latter is saying a lot!)

It was this factor that saw Plaid Cymru win in Caerffili. Like Gorton, the constituency had been a rock-solid Labour seat for a century but, given the deep unpopularity of Starmer’s government; given the ability of Reform to appeal to white working-class voters; and given the awareness of how this might play out in the by-election, a lot of people who could not bring themselves to prop up Starmer, yet feared a Reform triumph, defected to Plaid Cymru.

Mutatis mutandis, the same dynamic played out in south Manchester last week. Suddenly, Labour simply could not win, even in its heartland. Yet the prospect of a Reform victory galvanised left-wing voters to stave off such a calamity by voting Green — a move made all the easier by the fact that, for many natural Labour supporters, the Greens’ radical left-wing agenda is closer to their own views than is Starmer’s cautious restraint.

To show my own hand here, I was troubled by last Thursday’s result, because of what it portends. A vote for Labour would, in the current circumstance, have been a vote for moderation. Even a Reform victory would, in my view, have been preferable. Not because I have the least sympathy for that odious entity — but because a narrow by-election win would have been even more meaningless than Eric Lubbock’s triumph in Orpington in 1962.

Try as they might, Reform cannot, and will not, get past 30% or so. (Which is a good thing.) And a pattern is now emerging. The 70% will make judgments about who, at a local level, has the best chance to beat them — and rally behind that party. Plaid in the valleys of South Wales; the Greens in south Manchester. Perhaps the Liberals in other areas.

The Tories are showing no signs at all of recovery. I doubt the prognostications of some that their present plight is terminal — but they can safely be ruled out as significant contenders for power for the next decade or so. Only a minority of the party were actually ... you know, conservative in the first place — but at least they provided a haven in which genuinely conservative voices had a major public platform. As in the U.S., conservatism is currently in eclipse. In America, it has been destroyed by a cancer that has taken over what was its natural home; in Britain, it has been boxed out by the rise of Nigel Farage’s new party. In both countries, extremism is ascendant: in America, within the dominant parties; in Britain, as in most of Europe, by the rise of new forces on the far left and, most forcefully, on the far right.

Had Reform succeeded in Gorton last Thursday, it would have been by splitting the left-wing vote sufficiently (between Greens and Labour) that they could steer down the middle. And the analogous hypothetical would have held true in Caerffili last October.

But they didn’t. The real significance of the Greens’ triumph is that it yanks British politics decisively to the left. After the next general election, tactical voting at the local level will ensure that there are significant numbers of non-Labour left-wing MPs with whom any Labour leader will have to treat to secure a parliamentary majority. And, in the meantime, voices on the left of the Labour Party itself will become louder, arguing — with some reason — that the party needs to move left in order to garner votes that would otherwise go to the Greens, or Plaid, or Corbyn’s new Your Party.

In sum, I expect — with trepidation — the next election to yield a coalition that is well to the left of centre. It will be the product of the 70% doing whatever is needed to keep Farage out of Number 10. Low-productivity Britain, already sclerotic, over-managed and under-defended, may be about to get worse.

Today, we look upon the whole episode (or rather, series of episodes — for there were a number of them) as utterly obnoxious. And how could anything like this be reconciled with the teaching of Jesus?

Without dissenting in the least from these judgments — and we do not! — honesty requires us to enquire how and why the Crusades ever happened in the first place. Schoolboyish ‘explanations’ about ‘propaganda’, ‘brainwashing’, or cynical manipulation by a few powerful men: these won’t cut it. Pro tip: they never do! (This is the line of rigorous questioning I imposed on students. “Given that Eastern Europe in the 1940s wasn’t populated principally by psychopaths — how come so many were willing to fight for the Nazis?” Always ask the HARD stuff!)

So — WHY? And how did the First Crusade work out? In this episode, we take a look.