Over the past 15 years, Gramsci’s so-called “interregnum” passage has been quoted and repeated ad infinitum. This is because it speaks so appositely to our current condition: an era of economic stagnation, collapse in liberal norms, and destruction of old party loyalties. There’s a sense of permanent flux, of implosion. We are in a void between the old regime of globalized economic and social liberalism, which began crashing down in 2008, and whatever system eventually emerges to take its place. 

But for now, nobody is in control. Growth remains elusive to Western governments of all political stripes. State capacity is shot, which means that governments are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver on projects or promises. As a result, economic stagnation has been corrosive to the authority of both the Tories and Labour.

And so Nigel Farage has the opportunity to end the interregnum by leading a new type of government in 2029. For now, he sits at the head of a top-down, personalized party. If Reform wins, it would be the first government in over a century not headed by a Labour or Tory politician, and it would enter office on the basis that it would reconstitute the British state: rewired for harsher, harder times. Liberal Britain, watching Farage’s ascent in horror, has not yet processed the full implications of a Reform government. The commentators read the polls, and know the numbers, but on some level still think of a Farage majority as an outlandish nightmare scenario. Yet it is a Farage majority that is the likely outcome of the next general election, even though the contours of Farageism are still being formed. We still do not know whether the British New Right would govern in the vein of a Giorgia Meloni or a Victor Orbán. 

These two respective leaders of Italy and Hungary represent two poles of possibility for Reform. Orbán’s self-described “illiberal democracy” in Budapest has combined big-state interventionism, and pro-natalist, pro-welfare policies, with economic nationalism and authoritarian creep. Meloni, meanwhile, has eschewed her roots on the fringes as part of Italy’s neo-fascist movement, and has instead governed as a traditional center-right politician — reserving additional rhetorical venom for migration and the culture wars. Farage has praised both leaders at different moments: Orbán, he once said, is “the future of Europe”, while he has also praised Meloni’s uncompromising stance on migration. His policy prescriptions veer unpredictably between Meloni’s relative moderation and Orban’s more robust, statist, abrasive populism. 

But Farage, like the best continental populists, has managed to successfully crystallize into a single issue all the fears, anxieties, and collective fantasies of a desperate public. Crime, dilapidated high streets, shoddy public services, falling real incomes, ballooning state spending — all have been distilled into the symbolic subject of the Migrant. Progressives still object, but within every creation myth is a kernel of rationality. In recent years, inward migration has hit an unprecedented scale. The electorate has made repeated injunctions to keep migration within sustainable limits, but the Left-liberal cultural and political establishment has refused to listen. The supposedly competent moderates, the sensible “adults in the room”, have themselves created the warm petri dish in which Farageist populism flourishes.

Reform’s task, therefore, has been to articulate a broad message that explains the country’s malaise. The party’s offering — big tent, low-migration patriotism — is enough for them to pose as a “none-of-the-above” option for the growing proportion of the electorate that is now prepared to reject technocracy. But beyond Farage’s intuitive communicative flair, and his instinctive penchant for projecting good-humored but no-nonsense defiance towards Labour and the Conservatives, Reform still does not quite know what the party is for. This week, the party attempted to add a veneer of economic credibility to its fiscal plans, abandoning the last manifesto’s promise to replay Trussomomics with a splurge of deficit-financed tax cuts. Instead, Reform promises that spending reductions will now precede any changes to the tax code. Deregulation will summon the animal spirits of British entrepreneurialism, Reform claims, and the state’s ever-expanding welfare commitments will be scaled back. This is a strategy of Meloni-ism writ large.

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And yet it is a model of political economy that is wildly unsuited to our age of chaos. New political forms are emerging from the interregnum. For decades, Chinese state planners have been administering breakneck growth and dirigiste development via industrial subsidy, currency and capital controls, state-owned enterprises and hard protectionism. In the US, Donald Trump has upended 50 years of globalization and open markets, embracing a dog-eat-dog American nationalism that brings the age of liberalized trade and economic integration to a close. On the continent, the formerly austerity-happy EU and Germany have belatedly adopted public investment in strategic industries. In a geopolitically febrile climate, they are “derisking” and “reshoring” domestic production of critical commodities.

Set against this global context, a dogmatic return to free-market fetishism appears inadequate. The Austrian School, and the disciples of Hayek and Friedman, no longer have the answers. Farage, a consummately protean politician, appears to have understood this. In his more Orbánite moments, he has parked his tanks on the fallow lawns of the Left. The steel sector could be nationalized, he has mused, along with water and utilities. Domestic industry would be supported by public procurement, and an industrial strategy would aim to boost manufacturing. The two-child benefit cap would be lifted for working British couples: a policy reportedly adopted after Reform’s meetings with Orbán officials. And, perhaps most radically, the Bank of England would be subject to political interference not seen since high Blairism’s granting of its independence in 1997. (The Old Lady would be instructed to end the loss-making rounds of quantitative tightening, and cancel the high interest rates paid to commercial banks.) 

Earlier this year, Farage even saw fit to talk approvingly of a fellow rebel from the other side of the political divide, Arthur Scargill. There’s a case to be made that during the miners’ strike it was, in fact, the “dry” cabinet monetarists who were the iconoclasts and radicals. In this view, it was the miners’ leader, fighting to protect provincial Britain’s traditional communities, families, and dignity of labor, who was the unlikely “small-C” conservative. And yet all this tentative Left-coded positioning, as well as the reheated Thatcherism, is belied by this week’s more anodyne, conventional pronouncements. In a speech on Monday, Farage tried to calm the nerves of onlooking deficit-hawk think-tanks and quangos. With Reform consistently ahead in the polls, the party is trying to demonstrate its commitment to fiscal and monetary orthodoxy, lest the markets begin their dangerous jitters.

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As the Farageists attempt to build their own grand coalition from the army of the dissatisfied, glaring questions are coming to the fore. How will commitments to a small state and lower tax be reconciled with improved public services? How will a commitment to lower the welfare bill go down in Reform’s own constituencies, in which an increased share of the populist vote correlates strongly with the share of adults who are dependent on benefits? How will the angling towards free-markets and low-regulation sit with public ownership, or robust industrial policy? And who will win in the inevitable clash between Reform’s pro-development, anti-planning law Yimby free marketeers, and the homeowning voters and local councillors in peri-urban England who oppose new building at every turn? 

If Michael Gove’s favourite Marxist, Gramsci, were alive today, in analyzing the chaos of our interregnum he may have identified Nigel Farage as an embodiment of “Caesarism” — a “great ‘heroic’ personality” that appears, in either a reactionary or progressive form, to either break an impasse or resolve a “historico-political situation characterized by an equilibrium of forces, heading towards catastrophe”. Our interregnum may be reaching such a Caesarist conclusion, or else reaching catastrophe. There is a space for a hard-edged, syncretic brand of politics that combines elements of an unleashed free-market with a statist reflation of national production, critical industries and infrastructure: just imagine a mixture of Chinese, Singaporean and East Asian developmentalism. But this is yet to be articulated; Reform is still without a governing ideology. And if the party absorbs all the trappings of respectability that launched us into the age of perma-crisis in the first place, they will merely be placeholders, the next in the queue to manage decline. And in that case, our long interregnum will stretch out further.

To be considered national treasures, and indeed to truly capture the national imagination, children’s authors paradoxically need a loyal adult readership to supplement their youthful one. But Deary has never enjoyed the crossover audience of a Pullman or a Rowling. Nor has he advertised his politics the way his antipode, Roald Dahl, once did (“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [the Jews] for no reason”). Scarcely a jot is known about the anchoritic Deary. Only kids read — more accurately, worship — him. The adults they grow up to be might hazily remember the guts and gore, piss and shit — but not his worldview, internalised at an undiscerningly early age.

The Marxism of Horrible Histories, then, has flown under the radar. Deary himself is aware of this. Likening himself to a “sneaky propagandist”, lacing his tales with subversive ideas, he takes pleasure in his camouflaged transgressions: “I’m poisoning the minds of children.” His invitation is always the same: come for the ribaldry, stay for the radicalism. Beneath the comical carnage (“history with the nasty bits left in”) and Mailesque addiction to alliteration (Rotten Romans, Vile Victorians, Groovy Greeks, Vicious Vikings) are hymns to the pluckiness of the common man.

When asked by The Times to name his favourite historical figure, Deary replied “Mr and Mrs Peasant” — better than some “bloke stuck on a column in Trafalgar Square”. Accordingly, he’s rather sympathetic to the peasants who beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury in 1381: the clergy had it coming, extracting free labour and tithes from serfs. “Just to rub in the fact the Church was making a fortune, the bishops stored their ill-gotten goodies in huge tithe barns,” he writes in The Peasants’ Revolting Lives (2020). “Imagine if you were a hungry peasant walking on your way to your frozen field and having to walk past that barn stuffed with the bishop’s food,” he asks his reader. “These tithes and their monstrous barns may explain why peasants targeted the clergy when they rose.”

Deary, of course, is a republican. “Slimy Charlie thought he could rule without” Parliament, he says in The Slimy Stuarts (1996), explaining why Charles I “got the chop” in 1649. When the late “Lizzie the Last” (“because the monarchy will never survive Charles”) visited Durham, Deary turned down a meeting: “Sod the Queen.” Years later, he had this to say to the Guardian: “My top character is Margaret Wilson, a Covenanter from Scotland, who preferred to drown rather than say God save the King.” The honours system elicits a similar reaction: “Knighting people who’ve done bugger all, while carers [and] nurses get no recognition at all. It breaks my heart.” Class conflict, for Deary, was key.

Imperialism, it seems, is just as awful as the monarchy. “Brutal Britannia” was, along with Belgium, “one of the most evil empires in the world”. Barmy Britain (2008), his most impassioned book, chronicles the “dreadful deeds down under”, the decimation of the entire population of Tasmania — some 20,000 aborigines — by British guns and germs in the nineteenth century. This at a time when more Brits than not were “proud” of empire. In Deary’s account, empire was not about saving souls or preaching progress but rather “money, money, money”. The Royal Navy’s victory in the Opium Wars made “Brit drug dealers very rich … and the Chinese very dead”.

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Crucially, Deary’s history isn’t just a dreary tale of oppression. He emphasises native agency. We get a life story of, for instance, the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, whose gut-wrenching memoir — liberally quoted in Barmy Britain — went a long way in securing abolition. Kids, by contrast, are taught an altogether different story in school, one that the economic historian Eric Williams encapsulated when he wryly remarked that it is “almost as if Britain introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”. Deary takes a dig at “batty Boswell”, who defended slavery on the ground that slaves were a “cheerful” lot that liked their station: “Of course, Mr Boswell wasn’t a slave, was he?”

Deary’s distaste for the establishment derives from his own personal history. Born in post-war Sunderland — father a butcher in a slum, mother a shop manager — Deary is from “a terribly poor background”. He recalls an unhappy childhood, being “beaten, bullied, and abused at school by the teachers, not the pupils”. His hostility to authority and formal schooling was carried into adulthood. Indeed, it can be felt throughout Horrible Histories. The series’ conceit — always — is: here’s the “real history” your teachers have kept away from you.

Deary has elaborated on the theme in interviews, describing schooling as “an ancient Greek idea that the Victorians borrowed to get kids off the street. It’s fundamentally wrong.” These days, “a bunch of clueless muppets in Whitehall are determining what children learn”. To what end? To “pass your exams so you can get a job and make money and be happy. What a lot of codswallop.” He would rather not be read than wind up on a reading list: “I shudder when I hear my books are used in those pits of misery and ignorance.”

Deary’s ideal reader, then, is a child rather like him: a sceptic tired of being hoodwinked, and talked down to, by the establishment. Both the style and substance of Horrible Histories reflect his penchant to stick it to condescending elites. “I’m not a historian…I want to change the world,” he says, echoing Marx. “Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you’ll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.”

This, needless to say, is particularly refreshing in a land whose popular historians are overwhelmingly of aristocratic stock, excepting the odd Home County and North London subaltern — public schoolboys to a man. Think Hugh Thomas, David Gilmour, and John Julius Norwich. Deary, meanwhile, was apprenticing as a butcher from the age of three, and spent his mid-twenties touring rural Wales with a theatre troupe. Acting, however, was not his calling. He settled in Suffolk, teaching drama and moonlighting as a writer. Fifty titles appeared in half as many years. Success came late.

It was only in his late-forties, in 1993, that the first Horrible Histories were published: Terrible Tudors and Awesome Egyptians. Fame and fortune followed two years later, with Blitzed Brits, timed for the 50th anniversary of VE Day. The story of blunders from on high with devastating consequences for ordinary people, children agreed, was bracing when contrasted with the blimpish jingoism of conventional histories. Its pendant, The Woeful Second World War (1999), tackled the Holocaust, substituting instruction for humour — never a key ingredient in Deary, for whom politics comes first. Indeed, quips and gags are secondary in Horrible Histories.

Beyond the pale in Thatcher’s time — a time of riots in Brixton, Section 28, and imperial adventurism in the Malvinas — Deary’s politics are not unusual, and in fact fairly palatable, nowadays. For the last 30 years have witnessed an astonishing liberalisation of social attitudes. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious belief, support for the monarchy — all are on the decline. The years bookended by the publication of the first and most recent Horrible Histories have been marked by nothing less than the collapse of social conservatism. There’s a correlation here; of course, a causation mustn’t be assumed. It is, all the same, fair to suggest that, on account of his impressively robust sales and impressionably young audience, Deary has played a greater part in shaping public opinion than most public intellectuals have. Indeed, he belongs in the company of Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Giddens.

For some hundred years now, Marxist historians have preoccupied themselves with, in E.P. Thompson’s celebrated phrase, rescuing the lower orders from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. A few of them have done so with remarkable success. Eric Hobsbawm’s histories of brigands and peasants, for instance, are read in garrets and grandes maisons from São Paulo to Shanghai. Yet a truly mass following has been wanting: not a million readers scattered across capitals but tens of millions in a single country. It is the latter that counts for impact.

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Ruled for all but 31 of the last 100 years by the Tories, Britain is unquestionably a conservative country. This is reflected in historical tastes: the lower sort of biography turning on the lives and wives of great men; sporting and starlet hagiographies; an instinctive suspicion of social history. For the Left and its historians, breaking into bestseller lists has always been a Sisyphean task.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used to carp about the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling elite, which gave it an edge in class conflict, shepherding mass aspirations through the tamer channels of politically disengaged entertainment. In his homeland, this became dispiritingly true in the age of Berlusconi, by which time the Left was vanquished and a television audience hooked on watching seemingly demure housewives take their clothes off on his networks.

Britain has been somewhat luckier. No, the Left has never enjoyed cultural hegemony in this sceptred isle, but it has one rather formidable champion of mad, bad, and dangerous Brits in Terry Deary, a Marxist culture warrior avant la lettre. Who knows, perhaps someday the English Civil Wars will more widely be known as the English Revolution.

But what do they have to show for it? Not as much as they might have expected. Rather than a Bolshevik-style assumption of power, there’s every chance this institutional triumph will not produce an enduring political victory, let alone substantially change public opinion.

Even before Biden’s botched Build Back Better initiative, American progressives faced opposition to their wildly impractical claims about achieving “zero Covid” and “zero emissions”, confronting “systemic racism” by defunding the police, regulating speech, and redefining two biological sexes into a multiplicity.

Increasingly, the “march” has started to falter. Like the French generals in 1940 who thought they could defeat the Germans by perfecting World War One tactics, the progressive establishment has built its own impressive Maginot Line which may be difficult to breach, but can still be flanked.

That is not to deny the progressives’ limited successes. It has certainly developed a remarkable ability to besmirch even the most respected institutions, including the US military. But that is where its achievements stop.

While the Pentagon’s top brass focused on “domestic terrorists” and a progressive social agenda, it calamitously bungled its withdrawal from Afghanistan and appears utterly unprepared for Chinese or Russian competitors. And the effect of this progressive march is plain to see: the percentage of Americans who feel “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” has dropped in just three years to 45% from 70%.

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This decline in trust in major institutions, so evident in America, is also rife across Europe and Australia. In Europe, for example, young people express less pride in their cultural and religious heritage, and are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.

The great paradox of progressivism is that nowhere are its shortcomings more evident than in its geographic heartland: the dense urban centre. Conventional wisdom has dictated that America’s high-tech economic future will be shaped in dense urban areas, where superstar companies stand the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.

But while the upper crust of the labour force continue to head to the dense urban cores, on the ground people are moving in the other direction. Across the high-income world, not only in America but Europe as well, the vast preponderance of growth has taken place in suburbs and exurbs. In the last decade over 90% of all US metropolitan population growth and 80% of job growth took place on the periphery. On the ground, then, the progressive dream is withering.

The pandemic has greatly enhanced these trends, with downtown neighbourhoods recovering far less quickly than suburban, exurban, and small towns. But even if these changes are not permanent, at least not entirely, city residents will still have to contend with another pitfall of the progressive agenda: rising crime. Twelve American cities have experienced record homicides this year; all are ruled by Democratic, often progressive, leaders, many of whom explain away crime and excused, even praised, the looting and mayhem caused by protestors in the summer of 2020.

Yet despite this visceral impact on urban neighbourhoods, it is in education that our new hegemony could have its most long-lasting impact. The West’s new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have no use for our liberal inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists.

In Canada, we have seen an instance of “flame purification” for everything from old encyclopaedias and maps to Depression-era cartoons. In America, the disconnect between the professoriate and the people also keeps growing, as conservatives head towards extinction on many campuses: on some well-regarded campuses such as Williams, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans reaches between 70 and 132 to 1.

These trends have long been evident in the fading humanities and social sciences, but now even the sciences are becoming politicised. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that universities are losing credibility even among some traditional Leftists, who marvel at how they burnish their progressive credentials while making huge profits off their endowments and seriously underpaying most of their employees.

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And just as with the growing disaffection for the military, teachers, students and parents are starting to push back. A number of teachers who have been “cancelled” or otherwise threatened for dissenting are now fighting back in the courts. There’s also considerable criticism from parents and alumni, some of whom are now pledging not to contribute to their schools, and instead support well-publicised and well-funded efforts to start new initiatives, such as the recently announced University of Austin. Even more importantly, would-be students are also voting with their feet: after decades of rapid expansion, the number of college students enrolments fell by 5% last decade, and dropped an additional 6.5% since 2019.

Likewise, only one in three Americans have confidence in their public schools, where the education establishment’s goal seems to be to obliterate merit. In my adopted home state of California, this “post-colonial” approach includes deemphasising the importance of tests, excusing bad behaviour, and imposing ideology on often ill-educated students. The San Diego Unified School District, meanwhile, is busily getting rid of mandates for such things as knowing course material, taking tests, handing in work on time, or even showing up; all these, the district insists, are inherently “racist”. This in a state that ranked 49th in the performance of poor, largely minority students. (Still, the situation could be worse: neighbouring Oregon no longer requires any demonstrable proof of competence to graduate.)

In the past year, this blindness has incited considerable public outrage. Criticism of Critical Race Theory buoyed the Republican win in Virginia in November, and has become a rallying principle for parents around the country, including a recall drive against San Francisco school board members.

Other parents are trying to opt out of the public system altogether. The pandemic saw the departure of more one million American students from public schools, while 1.2 million families switched to home-schooling last academic year, bringing the total number of home-schooled students to 3.1 million, roughly 11% of the total. According to the Census Bureau, Black and Hispanic families now have the highest estimated rates of home-schooling, at 16% and 12%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the mass media, particularly its legacy outlets, constitute another progressive bastion losing credibility. One recent survey found that barely one in three Americans trusts the media, including a majority of Democrats, while only 15% of Americans have confidence in newspapers. Part of this surely stems from their bias: although there remain some powerful conservative voices, notably on talk radio and Newscorp properties, the vast majority of journalistic power lies with the Left. It’s the same story with social media, which increasingly dominates news access and is also widely distrusted.

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But the media’s Maginot Line may prove more vulnerable than expected, and this breach is certainly a far better prospect than those that came with the German flanking. There is a definite challenge not just from the traditional Right but a plethora of new publications which offer intelligent analysis outside the establishmentarian party line, as well as from Substack. Unless the media oligarchs find ways to repress these elements, a resurgence of free thinking may rescue journalism from progressive editors and journalism schools.

The shift in the media parallels that in mass culture. As late as the Fifties, mass culture was seen as largely neutral. But in recent decades, it shifted towards a more monochromatic look — one which a significant portion of the public are fed up with. Gender flipping may excite progressive creatives, but politically correct remakes of household favourites have proved box offices disasters. Indeed, it’s striking that openly conservative presenters, such as Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, now do better in ratings than their more established network rivals like Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.

Yet perhaps nothing is more ironic, and potentially dangerous, than the takeover of the corporate suite by progressive ideology. Traditionally, the dispersion of ownership and the conflicting views of entrepreneurs and inheritors fuelled the dynamism of democracy: you had far-Left businessmen like George Soros and doctrinaire Right-wingers like the Kochs in competition. They fought it out, and sometimes even aligned. But they came from diverse viewpoints.

Today this diversity of viewpoints is being obliterated by design, with corporate behaviour now married closely to the notion of the “great reset” and “de-growth”: an economy where improving conditions for the masses is replaced with lowering carbon emissions and diversity tokenism. Such standards, of course, do not apply to snotty private schools attended by their offspring, or areas that are home to their mansions.

The oligarchs may feel they deserve dispensation from the masses by their “good deeds”, but people are not as stupid or malleable as the ruling elites believe. Trust in major corporations, never too robust, is below 20%, less than one third that for small businesses. It is slowly becoming apparent that ‘woke capitalism’ will never solve divisions which are essentially economic. The key, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with racial quotas or hiring transgender workers but the economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”.

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The question now is whether there will be sufficient pushback to turn the tide. Unlike local school boards, online magazines, and even alternative colleges, it’s difficult to replace or challenge an Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Morgan Stanley. Yet fortunately these institutions do not yet control all wealth. Big companies may have shamed themselves out of oil and gas, but investors are ramping up due to the soaring price of these assets.

So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left. Our society may never regain the feistiness of previous eras, and our new elites might continue marching through our institutions. But as they become increasingly discredited, they would be unwise to forget that all long marches one day come to an end.