It is for this reason that the current political crisis playing out in the United States might end up being one for the history books. As far back as the 2020 election, there had been whispers about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Since then, supporting evidence continued to mount — until 27 June, when the President’s house of cards came crashing down.

A fortnight after that wretched debate, the Democratic Party has passed through a stage of shock, then grief, only to now arrive at a determination to push Biden out. Polling is now showing that an increasing number of Americans believe Biden is too old to stand; party donors are in revolt; and senior Democrat lawmakers are publicly urging the President to resign. As the trickle of leaks from the White House increasingly turns into a deluge, the picture that emerges is one of a collapsing administration.

Yet the real crisis at the heart of the American political system is not the punctured pretence of Biden being able to run things. Rather, the problem is almost the opposite: it’s now become clear that nobody is doing the job for him. Protected in the White House by his disgraced son-turned-gatekeeper Hunter, and powered by the conviction that the presidency is his God-given right, Biden, somehow, is still the one calling the shots.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise: in America, the President is the head of the executive branch of the government, the only person with the authority to give orders to — and coordinate with — every branch of the executive apparatus. If he does not do this job, nobody else has the formal authority to step in: the Treasury Secretary, for example, cannot simply decide to give orders to the Pentagon.

Nor is this a situation lacking in historical precedent. In 1848, the Austrian Empire faced an incredibly serious set of crises, after a string of revolutions in Italy, Hungary and even Vienna threatened to tear apart the entire empire. The Emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, was severely disabled since birth, and couldn’t be expected to navigate this crisis. Beyond his mental infirmity, simple day-to-day activities would trigger extremely serious epileptic seizures. In 1831, after Ferdinand was wed to Princess Maria Anna of Savoy, he suffered five seizures as he tried — and ultimately failed — to consummate the marriage.

But because the Emperor was the head of the Austrian state, his inability to do his job led to the various people underneath him picking contradictory policies and fighting factional battles against each other. As Prince Klemens von Metternich and Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky — the two most notable members of the government at the time — attempted to increase their dominions, Austria see-sawed dangerously back and forth between one set of incompatible policies and another, even as the crises continued to fester. Armed struggle was breaking out in Italy, the Czechs were talking about independence, the Hungarians were clearly moving towards breaking free from Habsburg rule, and the streets of Vienna were filled with demonstrators and barricades. An impotent Ferdinand could do nothing about any of this, and the people who were supposedly running Austria on his behalf were too busy feuding to notice.

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So how was this resolved? Finally, in December 1848, as Austria’s situation finally became too desperate to ignore, Ferdinand I was pressured to abdicate. Everyone agreed that the factional power struggles inside the state apparatus had to be alleviated; and everyone knew that required a fully capable Emperor. Thus, after a few dynastic tussles within the Habsburg family, all potential claimants were eventually convinced to abandon their claims and clear the way for the 18-year-old Franz Joseph I, who actually turned out to be a very good choice. He would become one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of Europe.

When compared with today, what gives this story a suitable twist was the pivotal role played by the ambitions of a single woman. In 1848, that woman was Princess Sophie of Bavaria, mother to Franz Joseph I. Her plans to finally place her son on the Austrian throne had been well known long before his accession, and it was through her hard work that Franz Joseph’s coronation became possible. Indeed, occasionally described as “the only man at court” in Vienna, it was through her work of cajoling, coercion, and persuasion that the rest of the imperial family finally got on board.

Today, the woman in question is Dr Jill Biden, who is clearly the most forceful voice urging her husband to continue with the presidential race, no matter the cost to the country. But she is far from acting alone. For many in Biden’s inner circle, their own fortunes are completely tied up with the man himself: if he falls, so will they. In this way, the entire American political system has essentially become hostage to one political family, whose interests are increasingly not in line with anyone else’s. One common reaction to the presidential debate was to call it a form of “elder abuse”: many viewers recoiled at the spectacle of an old man forced to perform a role for which he was clearly no longer capable of, when he should be spending his last years relaxing. But what is the health of an individual man, compared to dynastic ambition? We shouldn’t be surprised when such calls fall on deaf ears.

And yet, at this point, the pressure from donors, party operatives, and down-ballot candidates has probably passed the point at which it could be stopped: not removing Biden now will probably cause greater damage to the party’s credibility than forcing him out will. And that’s before we face up to the damage to the credibility of America at large.

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By Edward Luttwak

Just as Austria was unable to deal with crises abroad in 1848 due to its domestic dysfunction, so is America trying to keep a lid on the Middle East, prevent Ukraine from losing, and keep Beijing at bay in the South China Sea. It is arguably failing in each of those theatres, and this current crisis is unlikely to change that.

More important, however, is revealing to the Americans themselves that the people who rule them no longer have a plan. At this point, nobody in America believes their senile leader can do the job of president for four more years, and most have stopped trying to argue that he can. But even so, even with disaster so clearly visible ahead — whether it comes six months or a year from now — Biden is pressing on, openly taunting the Gods themselves to intervene to stop him.

And perhaps this is where the 1848 analogy should give way to another. America might not be particularly interested in classical Greek tragedy, by and large. But as this disaster slowly unfolds at the heart of the US political system, it appears Greek tragedy has become interested in America.

Perhaps the least interesting thing about this talented young couple is that they are unvaccinated against Covid-19. When I meet them at their house in a wooded suburb outside Vienna, I am almost embarrassed to ask about it. But they carefully explain how, for reasons of mistrust, caution and, as they see it, integrity, they have decided not to take the Covid vaccine — and how this fact is suddenly defining their whole lives.

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. It was introduced in response to rapidly rising cases and a lack of excess capacity in Austrian hospitals. “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line.

The Brazilian-born Mia has already had Covid and, in the Austrian “2G” system, proof of recovery affords you the same status as if you had been vaccinated — albeit for a period of six months. So, for now at least, she is allowed out and about. Chris is stuck at home. He describes it as a “brainfuck”. Attempting to remain philosophical about it, he explains how he tries to tune out the relentless fear coming out of the TV and keep control of his own mental state. “I don’t want to be dependent on these kind of things to be happy.” But the sense of alienation and unease is palpable. What will the future look like? He is supposed to be performing in Paris before Christmas; who knows if he will get there.

Back in the old town, alongside the fancy boutiques of the Kärntner Straße, it’s a very different world. Affluent shoppers are out and about in the crisp November air, and they are more than happy to share their views with us.

“I think it comes much too late,” says one woman. “They’re crazy. All the trouble we have is due to those people that believe in, I don’t know, that the earth is flat… If the majority of society depends on idiots, then they can’t be helped and it’s the end of society!”

Her view is typical — there is very little sympathy here, and a good deal of frustration. Only a few voices take the opposing view, and they tend to be passers-through more than the wealthy locals; the doormen and deliverymen we try to talk to just shake their heads. One man simply describes the latest lockdown as “bullshit”.

What is striking is that very few think the policy will actually work. Covid levels per capita have shot up in recent weeks, and Austria now has one of the highest case rates in Europe. The rationale behind the lockdown is that it will increase the level of vaccination (low for a Western European country at 65%); but even supporters of the move predict that it will be followed up by more universal measures soon enough. The Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg openly explains that the policy is a heavy-handed “nudge”: “My aim is very clear: to get the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, not to lock up the unvaccinated,” he told ORF radio station.

On a practical level, though, the logic of the new rules does not withstand much scrutiny: unvaccinated workers are permitted to travel to and from work, and they work disproportionately within the hospitality sector. This means that they are currently allowed into restaurants and bars to serve, but not to consume. In any case, if there were only vaccinated people in a venue, that wouldn’t necessarily make it Covid-free. Many places require daily testing for non-vaccinated staff, yet not for the vaccinated, leading to the odd situation where the unvaccinated are “safer” than the patrons.

It feels like a bit of a stand-off. The vaccine issue has become a show of strength, a test of principles. As Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, tells me: “When some of the anti-vaccine people said, ‘we are ready to defend our freedoms’, the basic message of the Government was, ‘Okay, let’s see what price you are ready to pay for them.’ The idea of this measure is to make people uncomfortable.”

One peculiar feature of this dramatic new measure is the silence of the liberals. Why are the bien-pensant Viennese, usually so concerned with the rights of minorities, so relaxed about a measure that in other contexts would seem outrageously draconian?

Somersaults of logic have been performed to assert that the policy is more liberal than the alternatives. For one thing, they say, it stops short of an actual vaccine mandate, which just about keeps alive the notion of personal choice; for the majority, it offers the hope of avoiding another lockdown, so seems to them to be a lesser intervention. And, unlike in neighbouring Italy, the unvaccinated can still work, with tests being provided at public expense. In Austria, across the West, there is no one left to assert the rights, or even try to understand the motivations of this despised minority, the anti-vaxxers. They are the new deplorables.

To interrogate this seeming contradiction, I visit Professor Manfred Nowak, one of Europe’s pre-eminent human rights lawyers, at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has dedicated his whole life to the upholding of human rights and the defence of oppressed minorities against arbitrary detention and mistreatment. Former Special Rapporteur to the UN on Torture, current Secretary-General of the European Campus of Human Rights, activist against Guantanamo Bay, UN Independent Expert on Children Deprived of Liberty — the list continues. I expect him to be a little concerned about the potential direction of travel in his home country of Austria.

He wasn’t. He thinks the policy doesn’t go far enough. “From a human rights perspective, you always have to balance the obligation to protect the right to life, the right to health, with interfering with other rights such as personal liberty,” he tells me.

He wants to make vaccination mandatory, with refusal equivalent to a traffic offence, resulting in a fine rather than a criminal record. He is also worried about how this partial lockdown might affect an already divided society — but he is unconcerned about the human rights or civil liberties implications. Do you not even have a twinge of anxiety about the shift in democratic norms, or whether such discriminatory policy might be applied in different settings, I ask? “No, not really,” he says, with admirable candour.

The final component in this lockdown mix is, of course, politics. In most European countries there are no mainstream political parties that could be described as “anti-vaccine”, but Austria has the populist, right-wing Freedom Party, which was part of the coalition government until 2019; it has made vaccination choice a central issue. The FPÖ organises regular rallies in cities around Austria, and its new leader Herbert Kickl is gaining popularity by condemning Covid policies as “corona fascism”.

Having thus turned vaccine hesitancy into a “right-wing” political campaign, Kickl has managed to put a face to the dissenting minority — and it’s not one that many people like. As a result, instead of thinking of the unvaccinated as a vulnerable, if misguided, group and one worthy of protection and respect, they have become viewed as an extreme political enemy who must be defeated.

It would be hard to think of anyone less threatening or extreme than Mia and Chris. Alternative, certainly; anti-establishment, yes. But good people who in any healthy, confident culture would be cherished and celebrated. Allowing them, and millions like them, to drift into a caste of untouchables, separated from the mainstream, all for the sake of a marginal gain against a virus that is rapidly becoming endemic, may prove to be a grave miscalculation with effects that will be felt for years to come.

This piece was originally published in November.

As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.

In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.

In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be. At the same time, the Left’s position distanced it from any kind of working-class base, since low-income workers were the most severely affected by the socio-economic impacts of continued lockdown policies, and were also those most likely to be out working while the laptop class benefitted from Zoom. These same political fault lines emerged during the vaccine roll-out, and now during the Covid passports phase. Resistance associates with the Right, while those on the mainstream Left are generally supportive of both measures. Opposition is demonised as a confused mixture of anti-science irrationalism and individualistic libertarianism.

But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies? How, in relation to the development and roll-out of vaccines, did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that, given the money at stake, and when BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer currently make between them over US$1,000 per second from the Covid vaccines, there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play? And how is it possible that the Left, often on the receiving end of state repression, today seems oblivious to the worrying ethical and political implications of Covid passports?

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By Freddie Sayers

While the Cold War coincided with the era of decolonisation and the rise of a global anti-racist politics, the end of the Cold War – alongside the symbolic triumph of decolonisation politics with the end of apartheid – ushered in an existential crisis for Left-wing politics. The rise of neoliberal economic hegemony, globalisation, and corporate trans-nationalism, have all undermined the Left’s historic view of the state as an engine of redistribution. Combined with this is the realisation that, as the Brazilian theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, the Left has always prospered most at times of great crisis — the Russian Revolution benefited from the World War One, and welfare capitalism from the aftermath of the World War Two. This history may partly explain the Left’s positioning today: amplifying the crisis and prolonging it through never-ending restrictions may be seen by some as a way to rebuild Left politics after decades of existential crisis.

The Left’s flawed understanding of the nature of neoliberalism may also have affected its response to the crisis. Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. The problem with this argument, even accepting its dubious logic, is that neoliberalism hasn’t entailed a withering away of the state. On the contrary, the size of the state as a percentage of GDP has continued to rise throughout the neoliberal era.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neoliberalism relies on extensive state intervention just as much as “Keynesianism” did, except that the state now intervenes almost exclusively to further the interests of big capital – to police the working classes, bail out large banks and firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, etc. Indeed, in many ways, capital today is more dependent on the state than ever. As Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan note: “[A]s capitalism develops, governments and large corporations become increasingly intertwined. … The capitalist mode of power and the dominant-capital coalitions that rule it do not require small governments. In fact, in many respects, they need larger ones”. Neoliberalism today is more akin to a form of state-monopoly capitalism – or corporatocracy – than the kind of small-state free-market capitalism that it often claims to be. This helps explain why it has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist, and even authoritarian state apparatuses.

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This in itself makes the Left’s cheering at a non-existent “return of the state” embarrassingly naïve. And the worst part is that it has made this mistake before. Even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many on the Left hailed large government deficits as “the return of Keynes” – when, in fact, those measures had very little to do with Keynes, who counselled the use of government spending to reach full employment, and instead were aimed at bolstering the culprits of the crisis, the big banks. They were also followed by an unprecedented attack on welfare systems and workers’ rights across Europe.

Something similar is happening today, as state contracts for Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies are parcelled out to transnational corporations (often through shady deals that reek of cronyism). Meanwhile, citizens are having their lives and livelihoods upended by “the new normal”. That the Left seems completely oblivious to this is particularly puzzling. After all, the idea that governments tend to exploit crises to further entrench the neoliberal agenda has been a staple of much recent Left-wing literature. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, for example, have argued that under neoliberalism, crisis has become a “method of government”. More famously, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism”. Her central thesis is that in moments of public fear and disorientation it is easier to re-engineer societies: dramatic changes to the existing economic order, which would normally be politically impossible, are imposed in rapid-fire succession before the public has had time to understand what is happening.

There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”. This confirms, too, the ideas on the “state of exception” posited by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has nonetheless been vilified by the mainstream Left for his anti-lockdown position.

Ultimately, any form of government action should be judged for what it actually stands for. We support government intervention if it serves to further the rights of workers and minorities, to create full employment, to provide crucial public services, to rein in corporate power, to correct the dysfunctionalities of markets, to take control of crucial industries in the public interest. But in the past 18 months we have witnessed the exact opposite: an unparalleled strengthening of transnational corporate behemoths and their oligarchs at the expense of workers and local businesses. A report last month based on Forbes data showed that America’s billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by US$2 trillion during the pandemic.

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Another Left-wing fantasy that has been shuttered by reality is the notion that the pandemic would usher in a new sense of collective spirit, capable of overcoming decades of neoliberal individualism. On the contrary, the pandemic has fractured societies even more – between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, between those who can reap the benefits of smart working and those who can’t. Moreover, a demos made up of traumatised individuals, torn apart from their loved ones, made to fear one another as a potential vectors of disease, terrified of physical contact – is hardly a good breeding ground for collective solidarity.

But perhaps the Left’s response can be better understood in individual rather than collective terms. Classic psychoanalytic theory has posited a clear connection between pleasure and authority: the experience of great pleasure (satiating the pleasure principle) can often be followed by a desire for renewed authority and control manifested by the ego or “reality principle”. This can indeed produce a subverted form of pleasure. The last two decades of globalisation have seen a huge expansion of the “pleasure of experience”, as shared by the increasingly transnational global liberal class – many of whom, somewhat curiously in historical terms, identified themselves as on the Left (and indeed increasingly usurped this position from the traditional working-class constituencies of the Left). This mass increase in pleasure and experience among the liberal class went with a growing secularism and lack of any recognised moral constraint or authority. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the support from this class for “Covid measures” is quite readily explained in these terms: as the desired appearance of a coterie of restrictive and authoritarian measures which can be imposed to curtail pleasure, within the strictures of a moral code which steps in where one had previously been lacking.

Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.

This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.

This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.

Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.

But where the Left’s response has been found most wanting is on the world stage, in terms of the relationship of Covid restrictions to deepening poverty in the Global South. Has it really nothing to say about the enormous increase in child marriage, the collapse in schooling, and the destruction of formal employment in Nigeria, where the State Statistics agency suggests 20% of people lost their jobs during the lockdowns? What about the reality that the country with the highest Covid mortality figures and excess death rate for 2020 was Peru – which had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns? On all this, it has been virtually silent. This position must be considered in relation to the pre-eminence of nationalist politics on the world stage: the electoral failure of Left internationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn meant that broader global issues had little traction when considering a broader Western Left response to Covid-19.

It is worth mentioning that there have been outliers on the Left – radical-left and socialist movements that have come out against the prevailing management of the pandemic. These include Black Lives Matter in New York, Left Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, the Chilean urban left, Wu Ming in Italy and not least the Social Democrat-Green alliance which currently governs Sweden. But the full spectrum of Left opinion was ignored, partly due to the small number of Left-wing media outlets, but also due to the marginalisation of dissenting opinions first and foremost by the mainstream Left.

Mainly, though, this has been a historic failure from the Left, which will have disastrous consequences. Any form of popular dissent is likely to be hegemonized once again by the (extreme) Right, poleaxing any chance the Left has of winning round the voters it needs to overturn Right-wing hegemony. Meanwhile, the Left holds on to a technocracy of experts severely undermined by what is proving to be a catastrophic handling of the pandemic in terms of social progressivism. As any kind of viable electable Left fades into the past, the discussion and dissent at the heart of any true democratic process is likely to fade with it.

Perhaps the least interesting thing about this talented young couple is that they are unvaccinated against Covid-19. When I meet them at their house in a wooded suburb outside Vienna, I am almost embarrassed to ask about it. But they carefully explain how, for reasons of mistrust, caution and, as they see it, integrity, they have decided not to take the Covid vaccine — and how this fact is suddenly defining their whole lives.

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. It was introduced in response to rapidly rising cases and a lack of excess capacity in Austrian hospitals. “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line.

The Brazilian-born Mia has already had Covid and, in the Austrian “2G” system, proof of recovery affords you the same status as if you had been vaccinated — albeit for a period of six months. So, for now at least, she is allowed out and about. Chris is stuck at home. He describes it as a “brainfuck”. Attempting to remain philosophical about it, he explains how he tries to tune out the relentless fear coming out of the TV and keep control of his own mental state. “I don’t want to be dependent on these kind of things to be happy.” But the sense of alienation and unease is palpable. What will the future look like? He is supposed to be performing in Paris before Christmas; who knows if he will get there.

Back in the old town, alongside the fancy boutiques of the Kärntner Straße, it’s a very different world. Affluent shoppers are out and about in the crisp November air, and they are more than happy to share their views with us.

“I think it comes much too late,” says one woman. “They’re crazy. All the trouble we have is due to those people that believe in, I don’t know, that the earth is flat… If the majority of society depends on idiots, then they can’t be helped and it’s the end of society!”

Her view is typical — there is very little sympathy here, and a good deal of frustration. Only a few voices take the opposing view, and they tend to be passers-through more than the wealthy locals; the doormen and deliverymen we try to talk to just shake their heads. One man simply describes the latest lockdown as “bullshit”.

What is striking is that very few think the policy will actually work. Covid levels per capita have shot up in recent weeks, and Austria now has one of the highest case rates in Europe. The rationale behind the lockdown is that it will increase the level of vaccination (low for a Western European country at 65%); but even supporters of the move predict that it will be followed up by more universal measures soon enough. The Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg openly explains that the policy is a heavy-handed “nudge”: “My aim is very clear: to get the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, not to lock up the unvaccinated,” he told ORF radio station.

On a practical level, though, the logic of the new rules does not withstand much scrutiny: unvaccinated workers are permitted to travel to and from work, and they work disproportionately within the hospitality sector. This means that they are currently allowed into restaurants and bars to serve, but not to consume. In any case, if there were only vaccinated people in a venue, that wouldn’t necessarily make it Covid-free. Many places require daily testing for non-vaccinated staff, yet not for the vaccinated, leading to the odd situation where the unvaccinated are “safer” than the patrons.

It feels like a bit of a stand-off. The vaccine issue has become a show of strength, a test of principles. As Ivan Krastev, a political scientist at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, tells me: “When some of the anti-vaccine people said, ‘we are ready to defend our freedoms’, the basic message of the Government was, ‘Okay, let’s see what price you are ready to pay for them.’ The idea of this measure is to make people uncomfortable.”

One peculiar feature of this dramatic new measure is the silence of the liberals. Why are the bien-pensant Viennese, usually so concerned with the rights of minorities, so relaxed about a measure that in other contexts would seem outrageously draconian?

Somersaults of logic have been performed to assert that the policy is more liberal than the alternatives. For one thing, they say, it stops short of an actual vaccine mandate, which just about keeps alive the notion of personal choice; for the majority, it offers the hope of avoiding another lockdown, so seems to them to be a lesser intervention. And, unlike in neighbouring Italy, the unvaccinated can still work, with tests being provided at public expense. In Austria, across the West, there is no one left to assert the rights, or even try to understand the motivations of this despised minority, the anti-vaxxers. They are the new deplorables.

To interrogate this seeming contradiction, I visit Professor Manfred Nowak, one of Europe’s pre-eminent human rights lawyers, at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He has dedicated his whole life to the upholding of human rights and the defence of oppressed minorities against arbitrary detention and mistreatment. Former Special Rapporteur to the UN on Torture, current Secretary-General of the European Campus of Human Rights, activist against Guantanamo Bay, UN Independent Expert on Children Deprived of Liberty — the list continues. I expect him to be a little concerned about the potential direction of travel in his home country of Austria.

He wasn’t. He thinks the policy doesn’t go far enough. “From a human rights perspective, you always have to balance the obligation to protect the right to life, the right to health, with interfering with other rights such as personal liberty,” he tells me.

He wants to make vaccination mandatory, with refusal equivalent to a traffic offence, resulting in a fine rather than a criminal record. He is also worried about how this partial lockdown might affect an already divided society — but he is unconcerned about the human rights or civil liberties implications. Do you not even have a twinge of anxiety about the shift in democratic norms, or whether such discriminatory policy might be applied in different settings, I ask? “No, not really,” he says, with admirable candour.

The final component in this lockdown mix is, of course, politics. In most European countries there are no mainstream political parties that could be described as “anti-vaccine”, but Austria has the populist, right-wing Freedom Party, which was part of the coalition government until 2019; it has made vaccination choice a central issue. The FPÖ organises regular rallies in cities around Austria, and its new leader Herbert Kickl is gaining popularity by condemning Covid policies as “corona fascism”.

Having thus turned vaccine hesitancy into a “right-wing” political campaign, Kickl has managed to put a face to the dissenting minority — and it’s not one that many people like. As a result, instead of thinking of the unvaccinated as a vulnerable, if misguided, group and one worthy of protection and respect, they have become viewed as an extreme political enemy who must be defeated.

It would be hard to think of anyone less threatening or extreme than Mia and Chris. Alternative, certainly; anti-establishment, yes. But good people who in any healthy, confident culture would be cherished and celebrated. Allowing them, and millions like them, to drift into a caste of untouchables, separated from the mainstream, all for the sake of a marginal gain against a virus that is rapidly becoming endemic, may prove to be a grave miscalculation with effects that will be felt for years to come.

Guys, it’s a big ask, I know. Some people who teach 20th-century literature for a living have never dared tackle The Man Without Qualities. It’s huge. Well over 1,000 pages long. You can’t vanquish it in a couple of afternoons by the pool. You might even have to put it on the nanny’s luggage allowance.

But don’t let that put you off. Even its author didn’t finish it. In April 1942, Robert Musil suffered a cerebral haemorrhage after his morning gymnastics. He was 62 and had been working on the novel for around two decades. His wife, who found him dead in the bathroom, reported that his corpse bore an expression of “mockery and mild astonishment”.

What happens in The Man Without Qualities? Nothing much. Characters have long and seductive conversations about the soul, bisexuality, the blossom in the garden. There are weather reports. A bit of incest looms in the last few hundred pages, but Musil’s final workout prevented its consummation. It lacks a few other things, too. It doesn’t take place across a great span of time and space — Musil gives you a year in Vienna, starting in the summer of 1913. There’s no big cast of characters of the sort you find in Proust or Dickens. Ulrich, the title character, isn’t a tragic hero, but a privileged and directionless dilettante with a background in mathematics, a married mistress and a slightly misguided philanthropic interest in a sex murderer called Moosbrugger.

More from this series

Can our leaders cope with freedom?

By Timandra Harkness

But it’s Ulrich’s job that will repay the attention of anyone in power. He is honorary secretary of the Parallel Campaign, a grand project established to celebrate the 70-year jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. It is complex, demanding, a salient matter of state, and completely futile.

Ulrich and his fellow appointees have their work cut out for them. They must decide questions such as “What is true patriotism, true progress, the true Austria?” They must plan a series of spectacular events that will form “a glorious demonstration of vitality”, a “mighty stride forward into the outside world, which would at the same time have a salutary influence on conditions at home”. Most of the committee are content to congratulate themselves simply for saying such things aloud. Ulrich is more insightful. He knows the process will produce nothing. But he doesn’t know what we know: even if these nationalist assertions meant anything, or were possible to realise, the state being celebrated will shortly be dissolved by violent forces beyond its control.

If you’d read this book five years ago, you might have found it comforting. It’s a portrait of a vast, overcomplicated and doomed European entity, fond of long discursive meetings. Plenty to engage a Brexiteer of the sanguine or faint-hearted variety. But this is a modernist masterpiece. If it makes you feel good about yourself, then you’re not reading it properly.

So what are you supposed to draw from it? Don’t take the title as an insult to the PM — Polly Toynbee may have described Boris Johnson as “a man without qualities, devoid of public spirit or regard for anyone but himself … a man to shame the country as its figurehead.” But this is unMusilian: to be without qualities is not a state of moral and intellectual poverty. That’s too easy. Musil is a funny writer, but he’s not an easy one. His protagonist is no self-serving charlatan. Ulrich is possessed of great philosophical and spiritual capital. He knows about history, meteorology, criminology, Buddhism, Leibniz. This wealth, however, remains inconvertible: Ulrich’s command of detail, his passion for ideas, his sensitivity to subtlety and scruple, have brought him to an impasse with himself. And yet, Musil does not ask us to condemn his position, nor even to regard it as an error of judgement.

Told you it was difficult.

More from this author

Enough with the crazy talk, Eamonn Holmes

By Matthew Sweet

That difficulty, though, is why I’d urge the book upon you. The Man Without Qualities is a novel about negotiating a relationship with your historical moment. Ulrich’s moment is one of the classics. Pre-war imperial Vienna, where everyone seems fit for some couch-time at Berggasse 19, and not for the mud and the bullets to come. And yours? Well, 2020 might also turn out to be one of those years. Your country is estranged from her neighbours, uneasy with a US president as capricious as a syphilitic Hapsburg, and authorities unaddicted to two-thumbed boosterism have judged its official response to the coronavirus pandemic to be world-beatingly poor.

Here, though, is a kind of consolation. Musil shows us that the world is too complex to be completely understood or mastered, and that it is foolish to pretend otherwise. If a phrase such as  “take back control”, “super-forecasting” or “oven-ready” was inserted into The Man Without Qualities, you could imagine it shrivelling to death on the page. It’s a book that encourages you to express self-doubt and to have some cognisance of your limits. Because even if you can’t see them, others will. This is why Ulrich, despite his paralysis, is hard to despise. He can’t see the catastrophes to come, but when they do arrive to shake his little knot of nations to pieces, they will not find him in a dreamworld built of empty phrases.

So start it. Get halfway through the first volume, maybe. Skip a few pages, leave it behind in the holiday home, possibly not by accident. That’s completely fine. Failure is an option here. It might be the only option.

Things started to go wrong quite early on in the process, with an almighty backlash against the draft constitution. But it wasn’t the practical provisions of the draft – such as the expansion of qualified majority voting – that caused the biggest outcry, but the preamble.

Suggested reading

Welcome to the populist decade

By Henry Olsen

Preambles matter. The US constitution wouldn’t be the same without “We the people…” or the Declaration of Independence without “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The most resonant phrase in the Treaty of Rome (and subsequent EU treaties) is “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” – which echoes the US constitution’s reference to “a more perfect Union”.

And so a great deal of thought was put into the preamble to the EU constitution. What was required was so much more than a few warm words before the legally-enforceable stuff; rather, here was an opportunity to encapsulate the shared identity of Europe itself – and, by extension, the democratic legitimacy of the whole constitution. Unfortunately, what they came up with was a travesty:[1. Draft preamble to the Treaty establishing the Constitution, The European Convention, 28 May 2003]

“Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which, nourished first by the civilisations of Greece and Rome, characterised by spiritual impulse always present in its heritage and later by the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law.”

Do you notice the gaping hole in this account of Europe’s origins? The narrative leaps in one bound from ancient Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment with no acknowledgement of what happened in between – i.e. more than a thousand years in which Christianity didn’t just come to define Europe, but, more than anything else, brought the very concept of Europe into being.

Nevertheless, the authors of the draft preamble thought it best to airbrush Christian Europe out of history. It was a blatant act of falsification – and the chorus of protest against it forced a redraft. But rather than mention Christianity, the ‘compromise’ was to drop everything else instead. So no mention of Greece, Rome, the Enlightenment or anything else specific:[2. Preamble to the Lisbon Treaty, Official Journal of the European Union, C 115, Volume 51, on 9 May 2008]

“DRAWING INSPIRATION from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law…”

In the end, the constitutional treaty was abandoned (its place taken by the Lisbon Treaty]. Ironically, it was the secular French and the liberal Dutch who killed it off – in national referendums held on the 29 May and the 1 June 2005.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the populist revolt against the political elites not only predates Brexit and the Eurozone crisis, but also the Global Financial Crisis. Though 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump, is seared in the political imagination, it is actually 2005 and the defeat of the EU constitution that marks the turning point against the globalising policies of the liberal establishment.

Suggested reading

U OK Hun(gary)?

By Peter Franklin

Now let’s fast-forward thirteen years: The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is giving a speech in eastern Transylvania. He sinks his teeth into those who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge Europe’s Christian roots. The whole speech is significant, but here’s the core of his argument:[3. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the 29th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp, 28 July 2018, Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad), Website of the Hungarian Government, 29 June 2018]

“….we must demonstrate that there is an alternative to liberal democracy: it is called Christian democracy. And we must show that the liberal elite can be replaced with a Christian democratic elite… Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith – in this case Christian religious articles of faith. Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation. Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected. Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.”

For the record, I think he’s wrong. He’s especially wrong when he states that “liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal.” Sorry, Viktor, but I don’t like. There’s a reason why liberal democracy sprang from the soil of Christian Europe – and that’s because liberalism, in all the best senses of the word, is derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and is not something fundamentally different.

Suggested reading

The radicalism of Reformation: How Luther shaped modern Europe

By Melanie McDonagh

Of course, liberalism has, in many ways, turned against its parent. It has also had rebellious offspring of its own: murderous ideologies violently opposed to both liberalism and Christianity. And yet the Christian principle of human dignity is multifaceted – and it required the Enlightenment, and the good things that followed from it, for many of those facets to get the recognition and respect owed to them. To draw an absolute divide between Christian democracy and liberal democracy is, like the preamble to the EU constitution, a falsification of history.

However, just because Orbán and his enemies are both wrong (and for much the same reason), it doesn’t mean that the conflict between them isn’t real. It is undeniably real – a divergence in worldview that is in many ways much deeper than the split between the Brussels establishment and Brexit Britain. The only question is how consequential it is.

Liberal democracy has always contained a tension within it between traditionalists and progressives. And the nature of that conflict has been one of managed retreat on the part of the former – with only the thinnest of concessions offered by the latter. The negotiations over the preamble were a case in point – all that the progressives had to offer was a form of words that made their airbrushing of history less obvious.

But a lot has changed since then. In place of managed retreat on the part of cultural conservatives, there is a vigorous counter-attack by rampaging populists. And as Orbán makes clear, their intention is not just to challenge the liberal establishment, but to replace it. In a growing list of countries they are succeeding.

More from the series

Europe 2025: the beginning of the end

By James Bloodworth

Orbán was in the vanguard, but he is no longer alone. In Poland, the populist right is nearly as dominant as it is in Hungary. West of the old Iron Curtain, a conservative-populist coalition governs Austria. And, this year, the biggest shock so far: a populist-populist coalition in charge of Italy.

It is not just that populists are gaining power that is significant, but that they are doing so across a geographically coherent chunk of Europe. If one includes the ‘broadtent populist’ government of Czechia and the leftwing nationalist government of Slovakia, then most of what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Trieste to Krakow is now in populist hands. It’s a point not lost on Viktor Orbán. His speech makes numerous references to “Central Europe”. He specifically identifies his conception of “Christian democracy” with “Central European tenets”.

The geographical branding of Orbánism suggests an equidistance between Western Europe and Putin’s Russia to the East. To say this raises geopolitical concerns is putting it mildly.

During the Cold War, Finland was ostensibly part of the ‘free world ‘ – though, like Sweden, officially neutral. However, the country had an unusually close relationship with the Soviet Union – so close, in fact, that western strategists coined the word ‘Finlandization‘ to describe the process by which a smaller country acquiesces to the heavy influence of a larger neighbour without formally entering into an alliance with it. There are those who see Russian influence on populist movements in Europe as a new process of Finlandization – with Hungary a particular cause for concern.

The debate over how far this influence goes has generated more heat than light. Clearly, Putin will take any opportunity to mess with the West, but to view the rise of populism through this lens alone is shortsighted. Not every country in the populist bloc takes a soft line on Russia – just ask the Poles. Furthermore, it’s not as if western Europe is above cutting deals with the bear: Germany has helped Putin build gas pipelines that strategically bypass Russia’s neighbours and London is awash with Russian money.

The assertion of a central European identity isn’t just about telling western Europeans what they can do with their hypocritical political correctness, it’s also a reminder that eastern Europe does not start where western Europe stops: there is somewhere in between the two that’s quite distinct from both.

Central Europe is also defined by its southern borders. For centuries, the Austrians and Hungarians held the front line against the Ottoman Empire. The gates of Vienna were never breached, but Hungary suffered devastating defeat and occupation.

Europe is not a distinct landmass like Africa or Australia. It’s borders have always been debatable – and there are points in its history where European civilisation might have been extinguished (indeed there are places where it was). Western Europeans, secure on their Atlantic islands and peninsulas, easily forget that the struggle to remain European went on for centuries longer in other parts of the continent than in their own.

It’s important not to portray this struggle as a simplistic clash between Christian and Islamic civilisations – because it never was. Europe has never been exclusively Christian and Christianity has never been exclusively European. And yet the histories of Europe and Christianity are intimately entwined – and especially where those identities have come under the greatest pressure.

The liberal disregard for historical and geographical sensitivities has already had dire consequences for the unity of Europe. This can be seen most dramatically in regard to immigration policy. While the nations of central Europe – together with their Italian and Balkan neighbours – find themselves on the front line of mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa, western Europeans have attempted dictate their response to this challenge from Brussels. One might have thought that the populist takeover of central Europe would give the EU establishment pause for thought, but there is little sign of it so far.

More from the series

Europe 2025: how populism saved democracy

By John O'Sullivan

So what if the ideological clash continues? I don’t believe we’ll see the EU break apart by 2025 – not unless there’s another, even more serious Eurozone crisis. However, I do think we’ll see the central European bloc – including Italy and Austria – solidify. The EU establishment will find it much harder to browbeat a whole region of Europe (including countries considered to be ‘western European’) than individual nations.

This will provide the context for a new dynamic of ‘populist statesmanship’. Though they’ll cover one another’s backs, we can expect see the likes of Viktor Orbán, Sebastian Kurz and Matteo Salvini competing among themselves to see who can go furthest in defying the European establishment. Previously, the only way to gain status as an EU leader was as a reinforcer of the establishment and its orthodoxies. Ambitious EU politicians now have an alternative career path.

I think this will transform populism in western Europe too – where populist parties, though growing in strength, are currently locked out of power. The outsider style of populist politics, as exemplified by Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, will give way to a new generation whose purpose is power not protest.

There are cases where a mainstream party inadvertently leaves itself open to a reverse takeover by a populist movement – the Labour Party in Britain and the Republicans in America being obvious examples. A different, and more likely, path to power is that pioneered by Sebastian Kurz in Austria: win the leadership of a mainstream political party, pull a hard right on an issue like immigration, and then, having stolen the populists’ thunder, bring them into government with you.

There are a number of countries vulnerable to a such a manoeuvre. The most obvious is France, where the cordon sanitaire that has kept the National Front out of power could be breached by an ambitious centre-right politician – especially if the Front’s leadership passes to a more presentable figure (keep an eye on Marion Maréchal, who has recently dropped the ‘Le Pen’ from her name). Another possible scenario: Boris Johnson ousts Theresa May and consolidates the Conservative-UKIP vote. And how long before the Swedish centre-right welcomes the once far-right Sweden Democrats into the fold?

It wouldn’t be the first time that populist parties have made it into government. But on previous occasions, they’ve found themselves either repulsed by the political establishment or absorbed into it. What the rise of the populist bloc in central Europe shows – and Trump’s America too – is that populists are now capable of taking power and using it to effect real and lasting change.

This is something new. Lacking genuine precedents, some anti-populists draw parallels with the rise of fascism and Nazism between the wars. I don’t think it will be anything that cataclysmic. Today’s populists – especially the ready-for-government version – aren’t trying to overthrow western democracy; they are  seeking to redefine it.

Unlike the establishment liberals, they don’t regard the western ideal of liberty as universal. It isn’t something that’s already ‘there’: ready-and-waiting to be discovered by all of humankind – as soon as the ancient clutter of nationhood, religion and tradition is swept away. Rather, populists see democracy as something nurtured within, and still attached to, specific traditions. Not all such politicians would describe those traditions in the same way as Viktor Orbán does – with his emphasis on cultural Christianity. For instance, Marine Le Pen places her preferred narrative in the French history of republicanism and laïcité. The pro-Trump intellectuals otherwise known as ‘west coast Straussians‘ base their worldview on the foundation, and nation-building project, of the United States of America. In the UK, some Brexiteers take an explicitly Whiggish view of history – a sort of flag-waving, red-white-and-blue liberalism.

Suggested reading

Pro-Trump intellectuals – yes, they do exist

By Peter Franklin

These aren’t so much competing narratives as parallel ones – because they’re deliberately specific to particular histories, nations and regions. There is, of course, an ever-present danger that some of these narratives could lend themselves to exclusionary politics based on cultural, ethnic or even racial identity. However, liberal universalism has its dangers too – its assumptions were instrumental in conflicts, like that in Iraq, that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Less bloodily, there has been the widespread failure to control mass immigration and adequately integrate migrants into their new homes. Meanwhile, the globalisation of trade has opened-up deep class-based divisions within western societies.

That these and other failures have resulted in the rise of populism is obvious. However, establishment liberals are still catching up with the fact that their populist opponents are intent on power not just protest. And almost completely unrecognised is that the universalisation of liberalism – the attempt to cut it loose of its roots – has opened the way for the equal and opposite errors of populist ideology.

I don’t know which side will ultimately prevail. Perhaps new leaders will emerge with the wisdom and courage to defeat the false dichotomy and reintegrate the western tradition. For the foreseeable future, however, we are divided.

Read part one of this essay

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it has always had its limitations. Most obviously, it is one dimensional, making no allowance for the fact that the positions that people and parties hold on different policies don’t always align in a uniform way. For instance, one member of a political party may be middle-of-the-road on economic policy, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative on social issues and a resolute anti-interventionist in foreign affairs; meanwhile, another member of the same party could be a gung-ho free marketeer, a dripping-wet liberal in the social sphere and an enthusiast for military intervention on the world stage.

Clearly, the left-right spectrum can’t represent these multi-dimensional permutations. Then again, it doesn’t have to. Given that elections are about basic choices, mostly economic, a single dimension gets the job done.

However, what works for clarifying electoral politics doesn’t always work for classifying political ideology. For instance, where do we put the various kinds of populism currently disrupting conventional politics – especially those described as rightwing populism? Do we place them to the right of the mainstream conservative parties, as is physically the case in the European Parliament? The problem with that is that populist economic policies are usually to the left of what conservatives advocate and sometimes far to the left.

And where does libertarianism go? Should we tack that onto the right end of the spectrum too? Not if it means lumping it in with authoritarian ideologies to which it is diametrically opposed.

To try to resolve these contradictions, various attempts have been made to change the way that we classify politics.

Sorry libertarians, but it’s not all about you

One approach is to add a second axis to the conventional left-right spectrum – the two axes intersecting at right angles to create a two-dimensional continuum. Examples include the Nolan Chart and the Political Compass.

Typically, one axis is about how much or how little government should intervene in economic matters, while the other is about how much or how little regulation there should be of non-economic matters. Essentially, both axes are about (personal) liberty versus (collective) authority and therefore, unlike the conventional political spectrum, they do a good job of clearly separating libertarians from conservatives, the liberal left and various kinds of authoritarian.

Further reading

The idea that liberals aren't represented by the party system is the opposite of the truth

By Peter Franklin

However, this way of thinking about political differences does rather revolve around libertarian assumptions. The value of freedom is elevated above all others – and, furthermore, defined in direct opposition to the role of the state. The idea that government, or other sources of authority, might be an enabler of freedom is designed out from the start.

But perhaps the strongest argument against concepts such as the Nolan Chart is that real-life politics refuses to organise itself in any such fashion. Though libertarian parties exist in many western countries, very few have had a significant impact on mainstream politics. Indeed most are on the fringes, not even qualifying for minor party status. 

The populist surge currently disrupting conventional left-right politics is not a libertarian revolt. Admittedly, it is not a demand for less freedom either; but that only underlines the fact that the current realignment of politics is about something else completely.

Sorry centrists, but it’s not all about you either (whoever you are)

A different solution to the limitations of left-right spectrum is to stick to a single dimension, but to stop visualising it as a straight line. A straight line maximises the distance between extreme left and extreme right, but if you bend it into a horseshoe shape, then the extremes curve back round towards one another. Shaped in this way the greatest distance between any two points on the line is between the centre and either extreme.

The horseshoe model of politics has a lot going for it – not least in reflecting the commonalities between extreme left and extreme right. It seems especially applicable to French politics where a centrist candidate (Emmanuel Macron) defeated opponents on the hard left (Jean-Luc Melenchon) and the hard right (Marine Le Pen) to win the Presidency. It also help us visualise how a great deal of the National Front’s voter base defected directly from the left,[1. Andrew Knapp, Parties and the Party System in France: A Disconnected Democracy?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, page 118] without going on a political ‘journey’ via the centre.

However, like a real horseshoe, this model of politics is full of holes. It strongly implies the existence of a second and more important political axis running between centrism and extremism, but doesn’t say what it is. Who are the centrists, anyway? Metropolitan liberals? Localist communitarians? Technocratic pragmatists?

Further reading

A new party could save politics from the extremes

By Ian Birrell

The only firm definition of political centrism is that it lies between the extremes – and yet the whole purpose of the horseshoe is to bring those extremes closer together. As a model of political opinion it is incoherent and paradoxical.

We can’t even identify centrism with the strongest support for democracy. The weakening of such is a worrying long-term trend identified by Yascha Mounk and others.[2. Amanda Taub, ‘How Stable Are Democracies? Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’, New York Times, 29 November 2016] One might logically associate it with the growing polarisation of politics. And yet recent research suggests that the loss of faith in our democratic institutions has gone further among self-identified centrists than among those on the Left or the Right. The same research found that “support for a strong leader who ignores his legislature” is also strongest among self-declared centrists.[3. David Adler, ‘Centrists are the most hostile to democracy, not extremists’, New York Times, 23 May 2018]

The most plausible explanation for these perplexing results is that it isn’t just political moderates who claim the centre as their home, but also their temperamental opposites – people who are fed-up with the political establishment and everything about it – including conventional categories of Left and Right.

Leaving aside the special example of France, it seems clear that centrism is no more useful a reference point for the new politics than libertarianism is.

There is, however, a much much stronger candidate for a new political spectrum.

How open-and-closed got its start

Ruth Davidson is the young and charismatic leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. She is a confidante of the Prime Minister Theresa May and widely tipped as a future, if not immediate, successor. Interviewed in Vogue earlier this year, she was asked whether she worried about the “Tory brand becoming re-toxified.” Her answer was full of significance:[4. Decca Aitkenhead/Ruth Davidson, Vogue, 31 January 2018]

“My worry is actually much greater than that… My worry is that we’re about to head into a culture war around the world where it’s not a question of left versus right any more – it’s a question of open versus closed. We’ve spent a long time believing there was a consensus about the idea of freedom and interaction and breaking down borders, and then suddenly they’re all being built back up again. That’s what I think the fight is going to be about, and I’m damn sure going to take part in it.”

Further reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

Where does the concept of open-versus-closed come from and what exactly does it mean?

One of the earliest and best references comes from the opinion pollster Stephan Shakespeare. This is what he said in the Guardian at the time of the 2005 UK general election:[5. Stephan Shakespeare, ‘They seem to be campaigning for the sake of it’, Guardian, 17 April 2005]

“…there is a new line which separates one side of the electorate from another: recent YouGov research suggests that we no longer range along a left-right axis, but are divided by ‘drawbridge issues’.

“We are either ‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down’. Are you someone who feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other? Depending on which side we take, we regard ‘drawbridge up’ people as unpleasant, or ‘drawbridge down’ people as foolish.”

He didn’t actually use the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ – but they’re clearly equivalent to “drawbridge down” and “drawbridge up.”

A year later, Tony Blair, then British Prime minister, gave a speech to the TUC annual conference, in which open versus closed made its political debut:[6. Tony Blair, ‘Prime Minister’s address to Congress 2006’, TUC, 12 September 2006]

“There is a debate going on which, confusingly for the politicians, often crosses traditional left/right lines and the debate is: open v closed.

“Do we embrace the challenge of more open societies or build defences against it?”

The year after that, following his resignation as Prime Minister, Blair devoted a whole speech to this concept:[7. Tony Blair, ‘Tony Blair speech at Blenheim Palace’, Office of Tony Blair, 1 October 2007 accessed via Wayback Machine]

“the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left [and] more to do today with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed.”

Though thoroughly biased towards the open point-of-view, the speech had its prescient moments:

“….you’ll find the open and the closed on either of the traditional political categories of right and left. And it has got some fascinating implications, actually, for electoral calculations.”

Of course, by the time the speech, Blair was out-of-office and out-of-favour with fashionable opinion. His thoughts on open-versus-closed were largely ignored over most of the following decade.

Further reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

In that time, there were many indications that populism was growing in strength.  For instance, the arrival of Five Star as a major party in the 2013 Italian general election and the results of the 2014 European Parliamentary elections. However, these could be dismissed a protest vote against the financial crisis and its aftermath.

One of the few commentators to realise that something more important was going on on was an UnHerd contributor, James Kirkup. Writing for the Daily Telegraph in 2014, he argued that left-and-right were of diminishing relevance – especially in describing the distinctions between the parties of the political establishment and their populist challengers:[8. James Kirkup, ‘From immigration to trade and the NHS, politics is about open vs closed’, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2014]

“…the terms ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ are becoming meaningless.

“After all, if those labels were useful, they’d tell us how people who carry them would think about particular subjects. Left-wingers, for instance, would be hostile to free markets and big business, while Right-wingers would embrace them. It’s a nice, clean theory, but the reality is much messier.”

Referring to a proposed free trade agreement between The US and EU, he said that open-versus-closed would be a better to guide to the politics of the future:

“So keep watching TTIP. Dry and dusty it may be, but the way our politicians deal with it will tell you much more about them than any label putting them on some meaningless left-right spectrum.

“Forget Left and Right. The real political division of the 21st Century is the same as it was in the 19th. Should we be open or closed?”

Further reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

From concept to reality

He didn’t have to wait long to be vindicated. 2016 was the year that the vote for Brexit redefined British politics and the election of Donald Trump redefined American politics. In 2017, Marine le Pen reached the final round of the French Presidential election, gaining a third of the vote.

Anti-populists took heart from the fact that her centrist opponent got twice as many votes. They were also encouraged by a disappointing result for Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Dutch general election (his party having lost a clear opinion poll lead to come in a poor second).

However, hopes that the surging populist tide of 2016 had been turned back in 2017 were soon to be dashed. In last year’s German general election, the AfD doubled its vote to become the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag – forcing a weakened CDU and SPD into yet another reluctant coalition. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, won the legislative election by taking his party to the right on immigration. He then turned right again – selecting the Freedom Party as his coalition partner. Over the border, Victor Orban won a crushing victory (the third in a row) in this year’s Hungarian general election.

Further reading

U OK Hun(gary)?

By Peter Franklin

In any case, the fact that ‘open’ sometimes wins doesn’t alter the reality that open-versus-closed is displacing left-versus-right as the most important political divide.

This year’s Italian general election was an especially symbolic moment. Italy has a large number of parties, but traditionally they organise themselves into two main blocs – one on the centre-right and one on the centre-left. The names of the two blocs and their precise membership changes from election to election, but each time it amounts to much the same thing. Or, at least, it did.

The first blow to the old order came from the emergence of the populist Five Star Movement as powerful force unaligned to either bloc. The second blow has come from the rise of the League – a populist party of the hard right. The League fought the 2018 election as part of the centre-right and was expected to follow the lead of what had been the biggest party in the bloc: Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Except that, as UnHerd’s Henry Olsen predicted,[9. Henry Olsen, ‘Il nuovo, dolce vita per Italia?’, UnHerd, 6 March 2018] things turned out differently. Five Star won the election, but the League came second – and well ahead of Forza Italia. In the subsequent negotiations to form a government, the League dumped its centre-right partners to form a coalition with the other big populist party – Five Star.

Not for the first time, the organising logic of open-versus-closed is proving to be more powerful than that of left-versus-right.

After Brexit, after Trump, after Italy, there is no more ignoring the new reality. Left-and-right is not dead yet, but open-and-closed is nevertheless redefining politics. Therefore there’s a lot riding on what is actually meant by open and closed. 

The battle to define that is what we turn to next.

Further reading

Test article

By Henry Olsen