For many years, the Singapore model, combining technocratic managerialism and authoritarianism, seemed to be working. The city-state has become synonymous with immaculate streets, reliable public transportation infrastructure, efficiency in civil service administration, and the upholding of exacting standards in public education. But the model is now faltering, and Oh’s tribulations trying to secure housing explain why.

Like most entry-level workers in Singapore, Oh turned to Singapore’s public housing authority — touted as a model system throughout the world — shortly after graduation in search of a starter home. He dutifully applied for a built-to-order, or BTO, apartment. Such apartments range in size from roughly 400 to 1,200 square feet and come with a side of social engineering: they’re reserved for singles who are over 35 or heterosexual couples who are married, providing an incentive to tie the knot young. 

In other ways, they’re less ideal. They cost hundreds of thousands of Singapore dollars (about $0.79 to the US dollar), and they can’t be owned in perpetuity, but instead are leased from the government for 99 years. And they aren’t fitted with faucets, water heaters, or bedroom and bathroom doors unless one opts into an Optional Component Scheme for BTO flats. To avoid this system and renovate one’s home to one’s tastes, tenants must select from a list of contractors pre-approved by the government. And to get one in the first place, they must survive a balloting process.

Oh was relatively lucky, and his application took only two ballot attempts, many reams of paperwork, and about five months. Many others are less so. Young Singaporeans have increasingly begun to voice their frustrations at the state of public housing. Indeed, a TikTok video by a woman who had her ballots rejected 11 times recently went viral. The process was akin to a bureaucratic Groundhog Day. 

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Once the euphoria of rapid success began to wane, Oh was confronted with the sobering reality that he would have to wait approximately four calendar years before he could finally move into his flat — by which time he would be 30. “It is quite absurd that the government expects young Singaporeans to start a family when many of us won’t have a space to call our own before we hit our 30s,” he says.  

Given these predictable fruits of a managed economy, it is curious that the anti-democratic segment of the Right has developed a romantic obsession with Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee served as Singapore’s first prime minister from 1959 to 1990 and is regarded as having been pivotal to Singapore’s remarkable ascent from a third-world backwater to a first-world metropolis. Anti-democratic blogger and software developer Curtis Yarvin, who gained notoriety for advocating that states should be operated as for-profit corporations by CEO-monarchs, has celebrated Yew as a glittering example of a hegemonic figure who has developed an “effectively family-owned” state that delivers “a very high quality of service to … citizens, with no meaningful democracy at all.” Likewise, the far-Right philosopher Nick Land fawned over him for being an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”

For such figures, it’s attractive that LKY, as he was known during his lifetime, was a vocal skeptic of mass democracy. One of his most famous coinages is: “I have never believed that democracy brings progress. I know it to have brought regression.” He openly employed strongman rhetoric — “whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him or give it up!” — and he has been a global icon of single-minded managerialism and a technocratic, top-down governance style. 

He has also embodied the principles of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, a favorite of the autocratic Right, who posited the need for a decisive sovereign, unconstrained from acting above the law in times of crisis. Admirers might point to LKY’s treatment of Catholic social workers in 1987 as an example. The workers were alleged to have been part of a “Marxist conspiracy.” LKY weaponized the Internal Security Act 1960 in order to detain them, and when the Singapore Court of Appeal struck down the order, the strongman reacted swiftly, mobilizing his People’s Action Party-dominated Parliament to amend the constitution in order to exclude executive decisions under the Internal Security Act from judicial scrutiny. The detainees were released from prison but immediately re-arrested under the new laws. Whether the detainees posed a genuine threat remains contested, but for aficionados of strongman governance, Lee’s willingness to repudiate judicial constraint is the Schmittian ideal. 

There is a strong case to be made that this single-minded managerialism has led to contemporary Singapore’s public housing crisis and its impending demographic collapse — global trends, to be sure, but which have unique local causes in Singapore.

After coming into power in the 1959 general election, LKY’s People’s Action Party launched an aggressive and utopian public-housing program designed to eradicate the slums and resettle dwellers in traditional communal “kampong” housing into the kind of modern apartments proper for an urban metropolis. When slum and kampong dwellers wished to stay where they were, LKY’s government enacted the Land Acquisition Act 1966, giving itself indiscriminate power to seize any parcel of land for “any public purpose.” Government seizure itself was “conclusive evidence that the land is needed for the purpose specified therein,” according to a legal scholar at the time. 

Thanks to these reforms, by 1985, the government owned 76% of land (up from 31% in 1959), most of it purchased from private owners at below-market value. Yet this concentration of land in state hands did more than facilitate development. It also obliterated the feedback mechanisms that typically regulate a free market for housing, and all but eliminated the private market. Private developers are forced to purchase land from the government monopoly through expensive tenders. As such, the overwhelming majority of Singaporeans are consigned to living in public housing, with only the ultra-rich able to pay the high premiums it costs to afford private housing.

And public housing isn’t as available as government rhetoric would indicate. In addition to winning the lottery in order to buy a BTO home in a new development, Singaporeans can theoretically take advantage of a “resale” market of existing housing, created by others selling their lease. However, the resale apartments, as they are called, are far more valuable than BTOs, since they are in “mature” estates that offer access to amenities like schools, polyclinics, shopping malls, and public transportation. Prices have become exorbitant, with a five-room flat recently selling for over a million Singapore dollars. 

As a result, prospective homeowners have been priced out of both the private and resale market. And while demand for BTOs has surged, supply hasn’t adjusted organically, and instead Singapore faces a chronic shortage of houses. Though the government has vowed to address this by committing to the construction of 50,000 flats between 2025 and 2027, such measures only address supply-side problems. The government has left unaddressed the more fundamental concern that BTO flats — whose prices are pegged to the prices of resale flats — are becoming increasingly unaffordable for prospective homeowners.

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It is true that many other developed cities are embroiled in housing crises of their own — crises that both private markets and governments might seek to address, if imperfectly. Singapore has virtually no private market, and its government option, far from solving the crisis, perpetuates it. The 99-year leases and resale options are supposed to allow the average Singaporean to accumulate wealth through homeownership for future retirement needs. And they have done so, but only for an elite few — and even then only after a long wait, as Oh’s case demonstrates. The autocratic technocracy, supposedly so efficient, is providing neither the “high quality of life” nor the “freedom” it promises. 

Lee was also a eugenicist, another pet cause of the contemporary Right. 

Prior to 1969, abortion was almost fully illegal in Singapore. In 1969, Yew’s government enacted the Abortion Act because the city-state could not “afford to breed” the handicapped or potential delinquents. The government also sought to curb population growth, and rolled out the Singapore Family Planning and Population Board Act 1966 which established a state-led program to promote smaller families, and the Voluntary Sterilisation Act 1974, which incentivized permanent birth control, particularly among lower-income groups and those with disabilities. Its now-infamous “Stop-at-Two” policy imposed financial and social penalties on larger families, including reduced access to public housing, education priority, and other state benefits. 

When the legislation led to lower-than-expected uptake, LKY’s government further liberalized abortion restrictions, allowing women of any age, including minors, to terminate pregnancies of up to 18 weeks upon request. These innovations successfully created a dramatic spike in abortions and a successful suppression of the birth rate. 

Now, in 2025, Singapore is one of the many Asian countries facing a population collapse. The total fertility rate has fallen to a record-low of 0.87, and current Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong has said that by the 2040s, the state will have to import tens of thousands of immigrants to stem the tide. Again, this is a global trend, but in Singapore’s case, it demonstrates the limitations of the supposedly omniscient technocratic vision. 

The state’s antinatalist policies were highly successful — but the government didn’t predict a population collapse, and nor has it been successful in reversing the trend. A landmark 2005 study on the matter by professor and philanthropist Saw Swee Hock found that while the original policies were hugely influential, measures such as baby bonuses and paid childcare leave have been of “limited effectiveness” — the antinatalist programming has gone too deep, and people prefer the new norm.

New Right types of an anti-humanist bent might note that population decline will eventually cure the housing crisis, and they might also believe that a state that suits only the elite is just fine. These are moral failures, of course, but they’re also a justification in hindsight, not a strength of the autocratic model. Society is unpredictable, and the manager — even the very talented one — who believes himself capable of engineering its happiness has been proved, time and again, to fail. As a Singaporean, I hope my nation’s crises will serve not as an inspiration, but a cautionary tale. 

Things might not be quite so simple. There is a school of thought that Kim Ju Ae is being used to distract from the existence of a male heir, perhaps one who is studying abroad under an alias. And, as observers of North Korean politics can attest, much can rapidly change after long periods of apparent stability. Even if Kim is planning a handover, it might not go as planned.

Yet the prominence of this 12- or 13-year-old girl is itself remarkable, for this is a country where choreography is central to the Kim dynasty’s cult of personality. Kim wants the North Korean public, and the world, to be aware of his daughter, and to see her as part of his demigod lineage. And in the event that she succeeds her father, whose health is suspect, Kim Ju Ae will become the world’s only female autocrat. While there are no parallels to her rule today, there have been female autocrats going back all the way to first-dynasty Egypt 5000 years ago. We can look at them to give us an idea of how Kim Ju Ae, as the newest member of this select group, might choose to rule.

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As she will already know, North Korean society is highly patriarchal. In this it is no different to Korean society across history. The last woman to rule any part of the Korean peninsula, Queen Jinseong of Silla, abdicated in 897 AD, making it more than one thousand years since a woman has held direct power there. In the region as a whole, female rule has never been common. Japan’s last reigning empress lived in the 18th century, with female succession banned at the end of the 19th. China’s ineffectual male emperors were puppeteered by Dowager Empress Cixi in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but the country’s only female head of state, Wu Zetian, died in 705. 

Fear of an established leader, such as Kim Jong Un, can make it appear that a non-standard succession has been agreed, but in a society as male-dominated as North Korea, there are very likely grave concerns about a female ruler. This skepticism, though, will be well-disguised. Kim Ju Ae, like many female rulers,  might not find out about it until the moment her father dies. Matilda, for instance, was the only surviving legitimate child of Henry I of England, and was readily accepted as heir by noblemen who swore fealty at her father’s court. But when Henry died, in 1135, these oath-takers abandoned Matilda in favor of a male cousin. Similarly, the teenaged Tamar was given a well-attended coronation to rule as junior king alongside her father in Georgia in 1178, But when he died, six years later, she Tamar faced rebellion. More recently, the accession of Maria Theresa to the Habsburg Empire in 1740 directly led to the devastating War of the Austrian Succession. North Korea is, of course, a nuclear state, making the stakes all the higher.

One way that Kim Ju Ae can seek to safeguard her position will be already familiar to her. North Korea’s leaders always establish a cult of personality, something that Ju Ae will undoubtedly look to do. With this goal in mind, she must first show reverence towards her predecessors, even as she subtly stresses her likeness to them. Kim Jong-Un will probably join his father and grandfather in the pantheon of “eternal leaders of Korea”. His daughter will therefore become one of many female rulers who have found it expedient to stress their links to famous male members of their dynasties. Margrete I of Denmark and Norway, who was so powerful that she conquered Sweden in 1389, still considered it politic to refer to herself as “King Valdemar’s daughter” long after her father’s death, making an overt link to her kingdoms’ last effective male ruler. It is a technique that has been used many times. The acknowledged heiress to the Aztec empire took the baptismal name Isabel Moctezuma after the Spanish conquest in 1521. She did so in order to tie herself more firmly to her father, the last emperor Moctezuma, in the hope of securing a financial settlement from the Spanish conquerors. We can expect that Kim Ju Ae will make much of her descent, likening her character, and even her appearance, to those of earlier members of her dynasty.

Having underscored her place in this lineage, Kim Ju Ae will then need to establish her own cult of personality. Such cults are marked by very public displays of devotion to the ruling family. Kim Jong-Un’s cult emphasizes his strength as a leader, as well as portraying him as, effectively, the father of his country. State propaganda also stresses his military strength and his prestige on the international stage, something that was bolstered by his meeting with Donald Trump in 2018. These values are distinctly masculine, and are in keeping with traditional views from around the world of what a leader should embody. These values can pose problems for women. It was the view of Matilda’s contemporaries that her arrogance cost her the throne, even though arrogance might not have been considered a problem in a man. 

One successful strategy is to attempt to turn the disadvantage of being female into a blessing. Elizabeth I of England did this remarkably well in the sixteenth century, portraying herself as “Gloriana”, or the unchanging Virgin Queen, and as the wife or mother of her kingdom. We still view Elizabeth, who stares down blank-faced and unageing from portraits, through the prism of this personality cult of hers. The same can be said for Catherine the Great, who, in the 18th century, rebranded herself from minor German princess to contender for the Russian throne. In Catherine’s 34-year-reign, she expanded Russia’s territory, enacting complex reforms, and helped elevate her country to the highest echelon of cultured European life. If Kim Ju Ae succeeds her father, she will attempt to depict herself as being on equal terms with the male leaders of North Korea’s allies. She will also, like Elizabeth I of England, invoke the ideas of marriage to her country, or the symbolic motherhood of her people.

As for her rule, we might wonder whether we can expect different behavior domestically from a female leader. Many reigning queens have shown a natural inclination to be merciful, with Elizabeth I of England highly reluctant to sign death warrants during her reign. Elizabeth of Russia — who was the only surviving child of Peter the Great, and had been initially passed over because of her sex — vowed when she took the throne in 1741 that she would order no executions. Astoundingly, Elizabeth kept her vow throughout her twenty-year reign, though she also beat her servants. As for plotters, they were exiled to Siberia after having their tongues cut out. Women are, on the whole, less aggressive than men, but a certain level of aggressiveness must be maintained by a female ruler if she is to ensure she is respected and obeyed. 

This is a difficult balance for Kim Ju Ae to have to learn. We tend to better remember women’s crimes than men’s. Wu Zetian, of 7th-century China, is remembered for her purges, while her literary achievements tend to be understated. Everyone knows “Bloody Mary”, the first crowned queen of England whose reputation rests on the nearly 300 of her Protestant subjects that she burned. Her father, Henry VIII who, on a conservative estimate killed 30,000 of his subjects, never acquired the nickname “Bloody”. 

A complicating factor for Kim Ju Ae, should she inherit the kingdom, is that its ruler’s safety depends on his or her implied aggression. North Korea lives a precarious existence. To deter interference, it issues frequent and bellicose threats to South Korea and other antagonists. North Korea’s military is therefore central to its self-image and how it is viewed on the world stage. 

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It might be inconvenient for the claim of Kim Ju Ae, then, that most wars in history have been started by men and that many female rulers have shown a reluctance to go to war. Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, for example, having won her throne after the long years of the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s, was always reluctant to commit herself to warfare. An exception was her participation in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, though her aim — to regain the province of Silesia, seized by Prussia more than a decade earlier — was, in Austrian-Hungarian eyes, restorative rather than acquisitive. 

Given North Korea’s circumstances, Kim Ju Ae would need to project the impression that she is no more likely to back down from a conflict than her father. The concept of a warrior queen — such as Zenobia of Palmyra, who conquered Egypt in the third century AD, or Isabel I of Castile, who famously conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, in the 15th century — can be extremely helpful to female rulers in how they are perceived internationally. Female leaders are less likely to be expected to act as generals or to direct military strategy, but they can burnish their reputations with appearances at military parades or in international negotiations. We cannot expect a female autocrat to be a pacifist. If Kim Ju Ae has the remotest sense of self-preservation, the dismal situation on the Korean peninsula will remain deeply entrenched.

If she marries, she will need to consider the threat that her husband might pose: a perennial problem for female autocrats. Elizabeth I never married, and was more secure a ruler for it. But Kim Ju Ae will be expected to produce an heir to continue the Kim line, and will one day have to consider her own succession, just as her father did before her. Behind the carefully-managed choreography, there will be plotting and rivalry. Whether any of this will improve the lives of the benighted North Korean people is impossible to know.

In the centuries that have followed, not a single monarch has been assassinated, and only one Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, has suffered such a grim fate. And he was killed not by political rivals, but by a merchant with a grievance. Before 1688, though, deposed kings and other politically inconvenient royals often faced a darker end than the exiled James II. Royals including two Edwards, Henry VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots, either died mysteriously in captivity or were executed publicly.

This is not especially surprising. In a monarchy proper, as opposed to the constitutional kind, political legitimacy rests not in the system so much as in the person of the monarch: a king only becomes meaningfully a king when enough powerful people perceive him as having that special extra something that elevates him to royalty. And a pretender is someone else competing to be seen in this light — either by the same cadre of the powerful or by a rival cadre. In this situation, the only sure-fire way to eliminate the risk posed by a pretender is to eliminate the pretender.

Whatever name Vladimir Putin gives his system of government, its operations in practice make more sense in monarchical than liberal democratic terms. Take, for example, the death in prison of Alexei Navalny last Friday. While of course reprehensible from a democratic perspective, his death was wholly predictable from a monarchical one. For Navalny was, in effect, a pretender to the Russian throne, with considerable public and international support behind his protests against Putin’s regime. Thus, much as with Henry VI in 1471, the only way to eliminate the threat he posed was to eliminate him.

Writing against the French Revolution, the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre argued, in 1794, that the government of a people is not something that can be composed in the abstract; rather, it emerges from the distinct history, culture, and disposition of the people as a whole. With this in mind, we might suggest that, notwithstanding superficial changes of regime, from the Romanovs through Stalin to Putin, Russia has never really abandoned rule by tsar and aristocracy.

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This is more difficult to grasp from the vantage-point of the anglophone West, though. For here we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the Anglo-Saxon model as the only sane and decent way of doing politics. First formalised in the 1701 Act of Settlement — then, across the Atlantic, stripped of its vestigial monarchy 75 years later by the Declaration of Independence — this model views politics as properly a contest of ideas rather than individuals, conducted in a political space that at least aspires to neutrality. Political rivalries, in this order, are to be contained via a matrix of shared norms — one that, importantly, includes a convention of not imprisoning, persecuting, or bumping off one’s rivals.

But this modus operandi has arguably only come to seem so self-evident and eternal by virtue of the outsize role played first by the British Empire, and subsequently by the American one, in shaping the modern West. Both these regimes share a common intellectual and religious legacy and, initially at least, some considerable common demographics. But today the Old and New Worlds are diverging increasingly sharply — including in political outlook. Notably, in today’s England, even supposedly insurgent Right-wing parties colour dutifully inside the conventional political lines. By contrast, the Anglosphere nation now most openly debating direct autocratic rule is the Land of the Free.

There, after Biden’s victory, Trump was mockingly linked to James II. More recently, though, jibes about an impotent king in exile has morphed into mounting anxiety about a Caesar-in-waiting. Those on the Right have made their contribution, not least via mischievous memes comparing the profile of Trump’s son Barron with surviving images of rulers from classical antiquity. And Trump himself has done little to assuage those who fear he aspires to Caesarism, declaring recently that he would not govern as a dictator on election “except on day one”.

In response, Republican Never Trumper, Liz Cheney, has warned of “a sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States”. Is this really happening, though? In a political attention economy that incentivises hyperbole, it’s hard to say. But if it is, the surest evidence in favour of an American tilt towards autocracy comes not directly from Trump, or even from neoreactionary writers or online shitposters. Rather, it lurks in the political class, in the tiers just below Presidential incumbents or hopefuls — and especially in the weaponisation of American institutions as tools of political persecution.

This is, increasingly, a bipartisan strategy. On the day Navalny died, a court in New York City ordered Donald Trump to pay a $354 million fine in a civil fraud trial, one of a plethora of ongoing efforts to impeach or otherwise hamper Trump via the courts. Trump now claims himself subjected to a Putinesque campaign of persecution, calling the ruling “a form of Navalny” and declaring: “If I weren’t running [for president] none of this stuff would ever happen.”

Two days before the Trump fraud ruling, meanwhile, a parallel Republican mobilisation of the formally neutral institutions of justice produced a special counsel report, which found Biden had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials”. When the special counsel nonetheless declined to prosecute on the basis of these findings, this was interpreted as further evidence of partisan abuse of neutral institutions, and denounced by Republican House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik as a sign of the “unAmerican, two-tier justice system that exists in Joe Biden’s America”. The outrage only grew louder the following day, when a key witness in the Trumpist attempt to impeach Joe Biden was charged by the FBI with fabricating allegations about the President and his son taking bribes.

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To be clear: I am not taking a stance here on the truth or justice of any of these allegations or campaigns. Nor, unlike Trump, am I drawing an equivalence between efforts by Republicans and Democrats to wield American state machinery against their political rivals, and the tendency of Vladimir Putin’s enemies to die in plane accidents or (like several English medieval royals) mysteriously in prison. Nonetheless, it should be clear that a new consensus is solidifying among the American political class: one that departs increasingly dramatically from its British constitutional forebear.

In this emerging order no one expects to persuade their opponents. This is perhaps understandable: polarisation is now so acute in the Land of the Free that almost two-thirds of young Americans would reject a prospective partner based on incompatible politics. There is no point contesting ideas, if people’s loyalties are tribal. But if this is so, how do you win? The answer appears to be: by capturing institutions, then going after the other tribe’s leader. There is no such thing as neutral regulatory, governance or administrative infrastructure in this existential struggle against political opponents.

A similar institutional trench warfare is also being fought today in Poland. Since the deposition of the conservative PiS party, a coalition led by former EU President Donald Tusk has taken over and fired key personnel from the state broadcaster, is legislating to pack the judiciary, and is also reportedly preparing to prosecute key PiS officials. Supporters see these actions as an “iron broom” sweeping out anti-democratic distortions. Opponents, though, view Tusk’s efforts themselves as the assault on democracy.

But perhaps again this makes sense from de Maistre’s perspective. Poland’s tradition of liberal democracy is so short as to be practically non-existent. The country enjoyed four years as a fully independent democratic state, from 1922 to 1926, and then another 13 between the end of the Cold War and before EU accession in 2004. Otherwise, the lands and peoples known as Poland have been ruled with vacillating boundaries by an assortment of monarchs, strongman rulers with largely cosmetic parliaments, and Eastern or Western empires.

Thus the face-off between Tusk and PiS represents, if anything, a reversion to the Polish norm, following a brief outlier effort at doing politics on something like the Anglo-Saxon model. And seen across the globe and through time, this is also more generally true: Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy is the outlier, and assorted forms of autocracy and empire are the historic and cross-cultural norm. So perhaps we should greet the competing claims of institutional capture now emanating from America’s rival factions with a measure of fatalism, even if these suggest that American political-class support for the legacy Anglo system is fading.

And again, perhaps, from de Maistre’s perspective this development makes sense. For while its founding political order drew heavily from England both in sensibility and in core assumptions, it is less obvious why modern America should continue in this vein. A “propositional nation” from inception, over time the Land of the Free has become, by design, ineluctably less Anglo in demographic terms. And seen thus, it is perhaps unsurprising to note how many American culture war issues, from statues to “whiteness”, cash out as disputes over how (or whether) to value the nation’s Anglo cultural legacy.

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Following the same de Maistrean logic, it’s to be expected that as the demographic composition of a nation changes, so too will that nation’s emergent — as opposed to written — constitution. It is not unthinkable that one casualty of this change might be the once-unshakeable baseline of public support for a style of procedural politics strongly associated with America’s early Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers.

What will emerge in its place? Will a rapidly-diversifying 21st-century America find itself, by virtue of its changing composition, more inclined towards more autocratic governance? Certainly, albeit in a less violent fashion than Russia, an order seems to be emerging in which victory requires more than just defeating opposition parties: it necessitates the annihilation of rival pretenders. And in turn implies the replacement of a politics of ideas, by one of divinely marked persons. Should this order consolidate itself, it will, whatever the window-dressing, be a monarchical regime.

At present, the keenest supporters of American diversity are generally also those loudest in expressing anxieties about a putative Trumpian Caesar. It will be ironic in the extreme if it does turn out that the real bulwark against autocracy was America’s now rapidly dissolving Anglo heritage.

This faction was dragged into the spotlight earlier this year by the wife of Irish president Michael D. Higgins, Sabina, who wrote a letter to the Irish Times calling for peace. While Ukrainian soldiers were countering an invasion into their internationally recognised territory, with near-total support from Western countries, Higgins seemed reluctant to come down on one side: “Until the world persuades President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, the long haul of terrible war will go on. How can there be any winner?”

This is a nation with a national anthem entitled “The Soldier’s Song”. Our war for independence is the most deified part of our history books. Higgins’s decision to publish the letter on the president’s official website drew criticism from many Irish politicians: Fine Gael Senator John McGahon described it as “inappropriate, unhelpful and distasteful”. Higgins was supported, though, by Yuriy Filatov, Russia’s ambassador to Ireland who commented that her views “make sense”. “She’s against war. We’re all against war,” he told the Irish Times.

Higgins was lambasted, but her views aren’t unusual: she represents a significant far-Left camp in Ireland’s politics — one that uses the vague term “anti-war” to justify defanging the Irish military and, at its extremes, acts as an incubator for authoritarian sympathisers. These far-Leftists are known as the Tankies — a term initially used to describe those who supported the use of tanks to crush opposition in occupied areas of the Soviet Union, but is now commonly used to describe those sympathetic to Left-wing authoritarian regimes. In Ireland, it’s not uncommon for the Tankies to justify the actions of dictatorships by employing a toxic mix of whataboutery and generalised condemnation of western powers.

The Tankies aren’t fringe. While the far-Left in other EU countries remain on the outskirts of politics, in Ireland it has significant political sway. Encompassing members of the European Parliament, grassroots political organisers, national politicians and even the deputy speaker of the Irish Parliament, Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s far-Left are a loud minority with senior political positions.

They therefore have the power to shape international policy. In 2017, far-Left Irish politicians and activists travelled to Syria, having obtained visas from a man working with the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad. The group comprised of several TDs (MPs) and future MEPs, as well as Connolly, who was yet to become deputy speaker. It arrived in Damascus at the same time as a Russian delegation. At this point, relations between the Syrian regime and most European governments were frosty to say the least, and the delegation was criticised by many in Ireland.

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They were right to worry. Previously, one of the delegation’s members, former TD Maureen O’Sullivan, had advocated in the parliament for the Iranian regime to act as peacekeepers in Syria, a regime that is currently embroiled in the brutal suppression of a popular protest movement. And a month after their return from Syria, the group supported a motion to lift sanctions on the nation. (“It is following a visit to Syria and a tremendous amount of research that we stand here tonight to say we do not support the sanctions,” said Connolly.) The move shocked many in parliament — as well as Syrian activists, who accused the politicians of repeating pro-regime talking points. 

Five years later, in the early days of the Ukraine war, Connolly (now deputy speaker) and several other TDs, along with activists and academics, formed The Irish Neutrality Group. Irish troops were being volunteered to train soldiers in Ukraine in skills like demining: this was part of the Tankies’ panicked response.

It was popular support for Ukraine in Ireland that caused an overdue backlash against this motley, oft-ignored group. They have peddled the narratives of authoritarian regimes in Syria, Iran and Venezuela for years, and gone unnoticed. But they made headlines when they refused to applaud Zelensky’s address in Ireland’s parliament — and after making continuous requests for him to negotiate with Russia. 

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This strange standpoint is also in evidence among the Irish Left across the border. Sinn Féin decries human rights abuses at home, within Ireland’s robust democracy. But it also has an MP who in 2017, after being vetted, was invited by the government of Venezuela to participate in a fake election observation: a practice where carefully chosen politicians, activists and trade unionists are invited to countries whose elections are widely seen as undemocratic. These countries often prohibit traditional election monitoring missions in lieu of these “sympathetic” delegations. Despite widespread criticism of the 2017 elections in Venezuela, MP for Newry and Armagh Mickey Brady described them as “fair and equitable”.

Meanwhile, we have Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, Irish MEPs from the Independents for Change party — a party that does not have an accessible membership portal. Both have been invited (by the government of Nicaragua in 2021 and Venezuela in 2020) to observe elections that have excluded recognised bodies and are widely seen as fraudulent. Both MEPs previously lauded the 2021 Syrian elections. And Wallace is known for often supporting Chinese positions on human rights issues — he has downplayed the repression of Uyghurs, for instance. China being a country that doesn’t even bother to hold fake democratic elections, of course. The very same Wallace has complained about EU military support for Ukraine, arguing in 2021 that Nazis within the nation were attacking its civil society.

While a few politicians with fringe views on dictatorships is normal in most democracies, in Ireland they tend to take up a lot of public space — often presenting an image of the country overseas that does not reflect the views of the majority. We have a long history of strong leftist thought, which emerged from the country’s seemingly David and Goliath battle with the British Empire. But those people who were once so opposed to empire now appear to be cheering for the behemoth. In one strange incident, “anti-imperial”, Belfast-based activist Francis Huges was part of a small, vetted group that travelled to Ukraine in 2018 to “observe” the internationally ignored general elections in Lugansk. Russia, which has been annexing territory in Georgia and Ukraine for years, is somehow seen as a liberator, a champion of human rights.

The Tankies have also been known to disseminate Russian propaganda, playing a crucial part in the Kremlin’s disinformation war. Irish politicians from the Left were often featured on Russia Today (RT) talking about Russophobia before it was effectively banned after Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine. And then there’s Irish MEP Clare Daly, who was a member of the EU’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including disinformation. In her minority report challenging the Committee’s finding she wrote: “The inquiry was used to inflate threats of Russian and Chinese interference”.

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Russia realists are the new lockdown sceptics

By James Billot

It’s a quote that has aged poorly given the recent bragging by Russian businessman and Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that Russia did engage in election interference in the US. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere  carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way as we know how to do it.” 

As many of these politicians call for negotiations with Russia and a scaling back of military support for Ukraine, Russia is, ironically, busy testing Ireland’s defences — which, even more ironically, are comprised largely of Royal Airforce Typhoon fighter jets (a fact ignored by the anti-war Left, of course). All the anti-imperial, anti-war sentiment means that having a sufficient military is seen as a threat to Irish neutrality — and it has left the country unable to defend its citizens in an increasingly unstable Europe. Ireland relies on its former coloniser to defend its seas and skies. 

When the US army used Shannon airport to refuel during the war in Afghanistan, a large strata of Irish society objected, emphasising the nation’s role as a peacekeeper and cementing a firm position on Nato. Ireland is not a member. But this leaves the nation vulnerable. Earlier this year, Russia carried out a series of naval exercises off the coast not far from Shannon, after discovering a legal loophole that allows them to enter Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The move was described as “unwelcome” by the Irish government — which could do very little about it.

Of course, when a real threat looms over Ireland, the far-Left buries its head in the sand. But this time, the Irish population’s response to the conflict du jour is too enthusiastic, and differs too much from that of the Tankies for them to be able to claim to represent it. Throughout the country, Ukrainian flags are painted on buildings. The Irish have opened their homes to refugees. Anti-Russian sentiment prevails. And that sentiment, as the Kremlin has recognised in recent days, is now gaining political momentum. Russia’s former hideaway on the edge of Europe has become, at last, unwelcome. 

Even if Galip’s funds do dry up, there’s good news for Kristina: a million rubles might be coming her way shortly. President Vladimir Putin recently announced that he would reinstate the Soviet-era Mother Heroine award, which bestows a lump sum to any Russian mother upon her tenth child’s first birthday. It’s not clear whether Kristina will be eligible for another million rubles when her 20th child reaches the age of one, nor is it certain that hers is the kind of motherhood Putin wants to encourage. After all, she has left Mother Russia and married a Turk: she is not boosting the Russian birth rate.

Is it any wonder pro-natalism does not have a good reputation in the West right now? Urgently necessary though some of us believe it to be, the need for more children is a subject which polite politicians and pundits in most democracies steer clear of, leaving the field to autocrats such as Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. But unless politicians — whether on the Left or Right — reclaim pro-natalism, they might doom their societies.

This ought to be particularly easy for the Left, which has a rich tradition of pro-natalism. Marx made a nemesis of the Reverend Malthus, who suggested that there was a natural limit to population, and unless humans controlled their fertility, they would live predominantly in penury and misery. This philosophy led many of Malthus’s followers — some of whom became prominent administrators of Empire — to shrug indifferently at both famine in Ireland and India and hunger at home. Marx and Engels launched fearsome attacks; to them, Malthus was a “lackey of the bourgeoisie” and his philosophy “a libel on the human race”. Misery was not the result of the proletariat breeding but of the elite exploiting them. In the socialist nirvana, once the exploitative land-owning class had been removed, there would be population expansion and plenty for all.

True, the communist autocrats of the 20th century went too far in their pursuit of this nirvana. Stalin, too, believed that “the most precious capital, the most decisive capital is human beings”. While this did not prevent him and his regime from snuffing out millions of such beings, they were eager for their creation too, and disseminated posters of large happy families of proletarians. Soviet womanhood was lauded for its procreativity as well as its labour, and the Mother Heroine award — the one revived by Putin — continued in the USSR into the days of Gorbachev. Mao, meanwhile, was consistently pro-natalist, despite efforts from those below him to keep China’s population in check: “It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.”

Today, China has pledged to make fertility treatment more available, while also cracking down on abortion, over concerns about birth rates. Meanwhile, in Cuba, the arrival of Castro was accompanied by a baby boom, in part due to restrictions on abortion. These have long been phased out and Cuba has a very low fertility rate. But the regime in Havana still offers lower tax rates to those with children.

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Sinn Féin won the demographic war

By Paul Morland

In short, it’s understandable that pro-natalist policies have become associated with autocracy. Obviously, today’s progressives are better off disavowing Stalin, Mao and Castro. But disavowing pro-natalist policies in general is short-sighted. When I suggested last month that the British government could restructure the tax system to incentivise families to have children, I was met with howls of horror by the progressive crowd and suggestions that I must be somewhere to the Right of Attila the Hun. But while amending the tax system to encourage childbearing and acknowledge its costs seems out of bounds to the Left, it was a Labour government in 1946 which first introduced such a concept into the benefits system, in the form of family allowance.

Today, childbearing has emphatically ceased to be a Leftist cause. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, the understandably distressing news that Roe vs Wade had been overturned in the US was met with a barrage of anti-natalism. The Guardian, for instance, published testimonies by women who bitterly regretted getting pregnant, including those based in nations where abortion rights are not threatened. “Getting pregnant was the worst thing that could have happened to me,” said one interviewee in Mexico. “I hate my reality, the life I didn’t chose,” said a Spanish mother, while another from Germany said: “If I could start over again, I wouldn’t have had any of my children.” It is not that we should never hear such voices, it is simply that their elevation has somewhat precluded the Left’s potential to make a positive case for the continuation of humanity.

There is solid evidence that people in the UK would like on average to have between two and two and half children — but today are having barely one and a half. This is surely an opportunity for Labour to appeal to an electorate of instinctively pro-natal millennials whose circumstances are frustrating them from having larger families.

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Russia is dying out

By Paul Morland

What of the Right? For all the policy ground covered in the long Tory leadership race, little has been said on the subject. Liz Truss has suggested tax changes to make it easier for one parent to stay at home, which, worthy or not, is not designed to boost the birth rate. In other words, the Right, too, is failing aspiring parents — and the Left would do well to capitalise on this failure.

For inspiration, Keir Starmer might look to Sweden, a socially liberal nation that touts the second-highest birth rate in Europe. Since the start of the century, the average Swedish woman has around half a child more than the average woman in Greece, a socially conservative nation that has the second-lowest birth rate in Europe. A clue as to why this might be lies in the fact that, when it comes to women’s rights, Sweden and Greece are once again at opposite ends of a European spectrum. Well over 60% of Swedish women participate in the workplace, but only 43% of Greek women do.

In some ways, this is counterintuitive. You might think that where women are staying at home, they are staying at home to take care of children, and that when they are pursuing careers, they are doing so at the expense of having babies. But nothing could be further from the truth. The best way to persuade women who have been given equal rights to bear the next generation is to give them opportunities to partake of those rights in the labour market. This requires finding creative ways — whether through the agency of government or employers or both — of combining work and family. In Sweden, childcare is subsidised and parental leave exceptionally generous.

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The West is homeless

By Paul Kingsnorth

This is not just a question of Sweden and Greece; they are merely exemplars of a much wider trend. In countries where female participation in the labour force is low, from Portugal to Japan, so too is the fertility rate. This leaves us in a quandary. Where the progressives set the cultural agenda in places like the UK, any advocacy of motherhood is met with anger and scorn. Where conservative values prevail, in places like Greece and Japan, the limitation of a woman’s right to combine family and career depresses the birth rate.

Despite Putin and Orbán, the time has come to proclaim a new, liberal pro-natalism: one that empowers women and men to have the children the evidence proves they want, allows them to combine parenthood with a career, and which acknowledges that, however the family is defined and redefined in the 21st century, a philosophy which places the individual at the centre cannot exists without individuals.

When Adams chose the word “suicide” to describe the death of democracies, he was making a deliberate and important point. Democracies fail from within. They are not usually overwhelmed by external forces, such as invasion or insurrection, or overthrown by internal coups. They fail because people spontaneously turn to more authoritarian forms of government.

Adams had in mind the democracies of the ancient world, the only precedents available before the foundation of the United States. According to the orthodox narrative, the democracies of the ancient world had died because people succumbed to the appeal of demagogues, who promised them security at home and triumphs abroad in return for their acceptance of autocracy. People simply lost interest in democratic government.

John Adams’s sombre prediction did not come true in his own day. The question I want to address is whether it is becoming true in ours.

The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time. This is especially true of young people living in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom and France. In the most recent survey, the United Kingdom has had one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. It seems that only Bulgaria and Greece think less of democracy than the British.

Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey, the latest available, 54% of respondents agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Only 23% disagreed. Nearly half of those who wanted a strong leader willing to break the rules thought that he “shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament.”

Polling evidence is not infallible, but these polls track attitudes over a considerable period of time, and indicate the direction in which we are travelling. They are consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and the leading lights of Alternative für Deutschland.

The first thing that we need to be clear about is what we mean by democracy. We are so familiar with its use as a general hurrah word that some definition seems necessary. What I mean by democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government. Democracy is a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable.

But the institutional framework is not enough. Plenty of countries have the institutional framework of a democracy without being one. This is because democracy can only work in a legal and social culture where there is freedom of thought, speech and association, uncontrolled access to reliable information, and a large tolerance of political dissent. A culture of this kind is fragile. Where democracies fail, it is not usually because the institutional framework has failed. It is because the necessary cultural foundation has gone.

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Lord Sumption: civil disobedience has begun

By Freddie Sayers

The opposite of democracy is some form of authoritarian government. It is of course possible for democracies to confer considerable coercive power on the state without losing their democratic character. But there is a point beyond which the systematic application of coercion is no longer consistent with any notion of collective self-government. The fact that it is hard to define where that point lies does not mean that there isn’t one. A degree of respect for individual autonomy seems to me to be a necessary feature of anything which deserves to be called a democracy.

The polling evidence which I have cited suggests that democracy is now increasingly vulnerable in the very countries that gave birth to it. Why has this happened?

The chief enemies of democracy are economic insecurity, intolerance, and fear. Let me first address economic insecurity.

Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic optimism. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history, like that of other European countries, has been slightly more chequered. But the trajectory has generally been upward.

Today, the outlook is darker. We face problems of faltering growth, relative economic decline, redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality. In most western democracies, including ours, GDP is still rising, albeit slowly. But people measure their wellbeing against their expectations. 60 years of post-war expansion have raised those expectations to a very high level.

Economic misfortune usually bears hardest on the poorest members of society. It marginalises them, and makes them feel that the current organisation of their country has nothing to offer them. But in a more fundamental sense, the impact of economic hardship is likely to be felt at every level of society. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any community. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to totalitarianism in much of Europe. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right which drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. Russia and Germany were widely regarded as the models which showed the way out, just as China sometimes is today.

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Has China rescued the West?

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The second of democracy’s great enemies is fear. People who are sufficiently frightened will submit to an authoritarian regime which offers them security against some real or imagined threat. Historically, the threat has usually been war. In the two world wars of the twentieth century Britain transformed itself into a temporary despotism with substantial public support. Wars, however, are rare. This country has generally conducted its wars at a distance. It has not faced an existential threat from external enemies since 1940, unless you count the high point of the nuclear threat in the 1960s.

The real threat to democracy’s survival is not major disasters like war. It is comparatively minor perils, which in the nature of things occur more frequently. This may seem paradoxical. But reflect for a moment. The more routine the perils from which we demand protection, the more frequently will those demands arise. If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils, which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time. It is because the perils against which we now demand protection from the state are so much more numerous than they were that they are likely to lead to a more fundamental and durable change in our attitudes to the state. This is a more serious problem for the future of democracy than war.

It arises because of the growing aversion of western societies to risk. We crave protection from many risks which are inherent in life itself: financial loss, economic insecurity, crime, sexual violence and abuse, sickness, accidental injury. Even the late pandemic, serious as it was, was well within the broad range of mortal diseases with which human beings have always had to live. It is certainly within the broad range of diseases with which we must expect to live with in future.

We call upon the state to save us from these things. This is not irrational. It is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of mankind since the middle of the nineteenth century, which has considerably increased the range of things that the state can do. As a result, we have inordinately high expectations of the state. We are less inclined to accept that there are things that it cannot or should not do to protect us. For all perils, there must be a governmental solution. If there is none, that implies a lack of governmental competence.

Attitudes to death provide a striking example. There are few things as routine as death. “In the midst of life, we are in death,” says the Book of Common Prayer. Yet the technical possibilities of modern, publicly-financed medicine have accustomed us to the idea that, except in extreme old age, any death from disease is premature, and that all premature death is avoidable. Starting as a natural event, death has become a symptom of societal failure.

In modern conditions, risk-aversion and the fear that goes with it are a standing invitation to authoritarian government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong. We have had a spectacular demonstration of this during the pandemic, where coercive measures with radical effects on our lives were made by ministers with strong public support but minimal parliamentary input. A minister told me some months ago that he thought liberal democracy an unsuitable instrument for dealing with a pandemic, and that something more “Napoleonic” was needed. He was making a more significant point than he realised. Whatever one thinks about this — and my own views are well known — it unquestionably marks a significant change in our collective mentality.

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We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

The quest for security at the price of coercive state intervention is a feature of democratic politics which was pointed out in the 1830s by the great political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville in his remarkable study of American democracy, a book whose uncanny relevance still takes one by surprise even after nearly two centuries. His description of the process cannot be bettered. The protecting power of the state, he wrote,

“extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered. But it is softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

In many ways, the biggest threat to democracy is not oppression by the state, but the intolerance of our fellow citizens. In the early years of British democracy, the great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would be the conformity imposed by public opinion. Roger Scruton once wrote that “the freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive… [is] the precondition of a political society.” Roger had more personal experience of this than any of us. He was a persistent, and joyful dissentient. In the same article, he identified the problem with unerring accuracy. To guarantee freedom of opinion,” he wrote,

“goes against the grain of social life, and imposes risks that people may be reluctant to take. For in criticising orthodoxy, you are not just questioning a belief — you are threatening the social order that has been built on it.”

The deliberate campaigns of suppression conducted by pressure groups against politically unfashionable or “incorrect” opinions on, for example, race, gender reassignment, or same-sex relationships; the attempts to impose a new vocabulary which implicitly accepts the campaigners’ point of view: these things are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world.

The tests recently imposed on freshers at the University of St. Andrews and the campaign against Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex suggest that intellectual persecution is alive even in our universities, for the first time perhaps since Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake just 200 yards from here. Demonstrations, such as those organised by Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, are based on the notion that the campaigners’ point of view is the only legitimate one. It is therefore perfectly acceptable deliberately to bully people and disrupt their lives until they submit, instead of resorting to ordinary democratic procedures. This is the mentality of terrorists, but without the violence.

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By Julie Bindel

Democracy can only survive if our differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree profoundly with the outcome. This implicit bargain breaks down if a society repeatedly finds itself resorting to coercion to enforce the majority view about controversial moral issues. It breaks down if people feel more strongly about the issues than they do about democratic procedures for settling them. The result is the abandonment of political engagement and a growing resort to direct action of one kind or another.

Direct action is an invitation to authoritarian government, because it implicitly rejects diversity of opinion. It assesses the value of democratic institutions by one criterion only, namely the degree to which the activists’ program has prevailed. Those who engage in direct action instinctively feel that the end is so important that it justifies the means, but they rarely confront the implications of their acts. What holds us together as a society is precisely the means by which we do things. Since we are never likely to agree on controversial issues of principle, what holds us together is not consensus, but a common respect for a method of resolving our differences, whether or not we approve of the resulting decisions.

Conflicts of opinion and interest are natural features of any free society. The task of a political community is to accommodate them so that we can live together in peace without systematic coercion. This is necessarily a political process, which is why the contempt for politics expressed by so many people is potentially a mortal threat to our democracy.

The successive surveys of the Hansard Society paint a picture of a society in which interest in public affairs is strong, but willingness to engage actively in politics has declined. The Conservative Party has been the dominant party of government for the past century. It obtained 43.6% of the vote at the last election. Yet its membership has declined from about 2.8 million in the mid-1950s to about 180,000 according to the latest (three-year-old) figures. Labour party membership is larger, at about 430,000, but still a long way below its earlier peak.

This pattern is fairly typical internationally. The membership rolls of established political parties have declined steeply in most European democracies. By comparison, support for new parties dedicated to the wholesale rejection of normal party politics has increased, jerkily but noticeably: La Republique en Marche in France, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and Podemos in Spain have all presented themselves as representatives of a new electorate, spontaneous expressions of the popular will and not as traditional political parties. Podemos has declared that there is no left or right. There is only “the people”, identified with Podemos itself, versus “the caste”, that is to say the caste of professional politicians. In Italy, the Five Star Movement claims not to be a political party but a movement, and has promoted direct democracy with electronic voting. Remarkably, lack of political experience was a central part of the successful candidates’ pitch in the US presidential election of 2016, the French Presidential election of 2017 and the Italian legislative elections of 2018.

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These facts reflect a fundamental problem about democracy, which was pointed out more than two millennia ago by Aristotle. Democratic representation creates a class of professional politicians. Aristotle regarded professional politics as an evil because he thought that any political elite would end up serving its own interests. This has been the received opinion for centuries, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky. In my experience it is untrue. Professional politicians can never be intellectually pure. They are constrained by the need to compromise in order to build majorities. But the great majority of them are public-spirited individuals with a genuine ambition to serve the interests of their country. Most of them would achieve a great deal more money and status by pursuing other careers. Nevertheless, the old trope that politicians are a bunch of corrupt, self-interested and power-crazed hypocrites is deeply embedded in the public mind and always has been.

Aristotle’s solution was to abolish the political class, and replace it with a system in which public offices would be held for short periods by men chosen by lot or serving in rotation. Everyone can then feel that they were at least potentially engaged in a system of self-government. This is hardly realistic in an electorate of 47 million or so. But Aristotle had put his finger on the reason why many people reject democracy. They feel alienated from the political class which democracies inevitably generate. They do not regard politicians as representative of themselves, even if they voted for them.

There is no cure for this condition. Successful politicians are in the nature of things unlikely to be representative of the electorate. They require an altogether exceptional degree of ambition, application and intellect. Those of them who are in government have to apply themselves to complex issues with an intensity for which most of us have neither time nor inclination. If one object of representative politics is to choose politicians who are best-qualified to perform the exceptionally difficult job of governing, then our representatives will always be unrepresentative.

None of this has stopped enthusiasts for constitutional innovation from exploring a variety of ways of side-lining the political class. Referenda are one possibility, but Britain’s experience with referenda has not been entirely happy. They only work if people are voting about precise proposals (necessarily formulated by politicians) whose acceptance or rejection by the electorate will resolve the whole issue. Otherwise, they are simply the prelude to further rounds of political infighting, as we have seen.

Citizens’ Assemblies are the current favourites. They are the modern equivalent of Aristotle’s selection by lot. They seek to substitute for our semi-permanent political class a succession of focus groups. They are chosen to be socially representative, on the assumption that each individual will be politically representative of the categories to which they belong. That assumption seems likely to be wrong. Groups such as manual workers, members of particular ethnic groups or over-65s are no more uniform or consistent in their political opinions than the electorate at large. It is therefore largely a matter of accident whether our divisions are replicated in a Citizen’s Assembly of, say, 100 people. But the fundamental problem about these assemblies is that they have not been chosen by the electorate and are not answerable to anyone. They have no democratic or other legitimacy.

There are measures which might palliate the current problems of democracy, but without solving them. Foremost among them is proportional representation. Proportional representation would probably create a multiplicity of political parties. That would more fairly reflect the diversity of opinion among the electorate than the current two-party system. It would also, partly for that reason, increase the degree of participation in the political process. It is not going to happen, because it is contrary to the interests of the two major national parties and there is no real demand for it among the electorate. The alternative vote referendum of 2011 suggests that the British prefer the crude simplicity of first-past-the-post to anything more elaborate. The critical point for present purposes is that it would do nothing to address the alienation of the electorate from the political process. Indeed, it might well increase it, since it would lead to less stable governments and more political infighting.

I am not about to suggest my own solution to that problem, because I do not believe that there is one. Whatever we may think of our politicians, it is an inescapable truth that we cannot have democracy without politics or politics without politicians. We have to learn to accept the vices and virtues of professional politics, because they are inherent in the whole nature of government. Getting rid of professional politics would almost certainly lead to the replacement of the current political elite by a different one, which would be more permanent, more authoritarian and less representative. Ultimately all political systems are aristocracies of knowledge. Democracies are no different, except that the aristocracies of the moment are removable — something which profoundly affects their exercise of power.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

A generation ago, the enemies of democracy were small groups of cranks and extremists of Left and Right. But today democracy needs a coherent defence, not just against those who would like to dispense with it in favour of more authoritarian models, but against those who would like to redefine it out of existence. We have to say something to the 54% of our fellow-citizens who would apparently prefer to be ruled by a British Putin. Why are they wrong?

The simplest thing to be said in favour of democracy is that it is an efficient way of getting rid of unsatisfactory governments without violence. But there are at least three other more profound reasons why people living in a country like ours ought to believe in democracy.

In the first place, it is the best protection that we have for liberty. Since a large measure of individual autonomy is a necessary condition for human happiness and creativity, this is a consideration of some importance. I am well aware of the oppressive possibilities of democracy. I do not doubt that democracy has an immense potential to oppress not just ethnic or social minorities, but political or moral minorities — people who believe something which majorities object to. That was pointed out by Madison and Mill at the birth of modern democracy, and indeed by Aristotle more than 20 centuries before that.

In most periods of history, the best guarantee of liberty has been the powerlessness and ignorance of the state. Historically, it was relatively easy to escape its scrutiny, and take shelter in the domain of private life. The immense power of the modern state, and its almost unlimited access to information, makes it harder to hide. Access to the levers of state power by democratic majorities is therefore potentially more dangerous today than it has ever been before. But democracy at least offers the possibility of redemption. Its values can be turned against those currently in power. By comparison, authoritarian states entrench themselves in power. They institutionalise repression and cultural control in a way that is more difficult to reverse.

Secondly, the creation of a political class, which Aristotle regarded as the great vice of democracy, may well be its chief merit. Political parties operate in what I have previously called the political market. They are coalitions of opinion, united by a loose consistency of outlook and the desire to win elections. To command a Parliamentary majority, parties have traditionally had to bid for support from a highly diverse electorate. Their policy offerings mutate in response to changes in the public’s sentiments which seem likely to influence voting patterns. Their whole object is to produce a slate of policies which perhaps only a minority would have chosen as their preferred option, but which the broadest possible range of people can live with. This has traditionally made them powerful engines of national compromise and effective mediators between the state and the electorate. It has also served as a good protection against extremes. Autocracy offers no protection at all against extremes.

Thirdly, democracy is more efficient in implementing policy choices. There is a common delusion, which I suspect is shared by many of the 54%, that strongmen get things done. They do not waste time in argument or debate. Historical experience should warn us that this idea is almost always wrong. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables authoritarian governments to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. The want of criticism encourages self-confidence, and self-confidence banishes moderation and restraint. The opacity of authoritarian governments is a standing invitation to corruption.

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By Adam King

These have always been the obvious advantages of representative democracy, and they are just as obvious today. But will they prevail? I am a natural optimist, but I have to say that I am not optimistic about the future of democracy, in this country or elsewhere in the West. All of the threats to democracy discussed above seem likely to intensify in the coming years.

The essential problem is that the public attitudes that I have been talking about are all too natural to human beings. Democracy has existed for barely two centuries in Europe and the United States, less time in other places. It was the creation of an exceptional combination of political and cultural factors, which would never have been easy to sustain and whose impact is now fading. The craving for security is too deeply embedded in human nature to go away. Three centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes made it the foundation of his case for absolute government and it is certainly stronger in out day than it was in his.

Fear will never lose its capacity to distort our collective judgments. The decline of political tolerance and the rise of moral absolutism are trends which are just as unlikely to be reversed, for tolerance too is not natural to mankind. Again, it was Hobbes who expressed it best. People, he observed, are too fond of their own ideas, for they see them from close quarters but other men’s at a distance.

The major challenge to democracy in the coming years will, I believe, be climate change. Climate change will be the main generator of collective fear in the decades to come and quite possibly the main temptation to direct action. It is of course possible that we will do nothing very much about climate change and simply chug along dealing locally with the consequences as and when they arise. But I do not doubt that measures to deal with climate change are necessary, and on the assumption that some action is taken, it is likely to run into strong democratic headwinds. Most of the measures to deal with climate change involve curtailing economic growth. This will not be popular and may not be accepted by democratic electorates, especially if groups come forward to offer easier and perhaps specious alternatives.

The main problem is that climate change can only be dealt with at an international level. This will require major decisions to be made internationally, in a world where democracy is still national. That will be hard to square with traditional notions of democratic accountability. Democracy depends on a common sense of identity and a large measure of mutual solidarity, a feeling that we are “in it together”. Otherwise people are unlikely to feel a common loyalty to the decision-making process, which is strong enough to transcend their disagreements about the issues. At the moment this sense of solidarity exists, if at all, only at the level of the nation state. We have had a stark reminder of that in the Brexit referendum.

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Perhaps in future, climate change will generate a measure of international solidarity, but I would not count on it. National identities are becoming stronger, and climate change is likely to make them stronger still. This is because although all humanity has a common interest in dealing with climate change, they do not have a common interest in the measures necessary to do it. We have seen this on issues like fossil fuels and deforestation. Countries like India, China, Malaysia and Brazil are not likely to accept measures which will restrict their ability to achieve the same standard of living as the West. Especially when they reflect that historically the West has to some degree achieved that standard of living by polluting the world. Countries like the United States and Britain are not likely to accept a disproportionate reduction of their own standard of living as the price of international agreement. The logical outcome of the threat of climate change is not international harmony in the face of a common danger. It is a world of competitive despotisms.

The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is generally smooth and unnoticed. It is easy to sleepwalk into it. The outward forms, the language of politics, are unchanged. But the substance is gone. These things do not happen with a clap of thunder. Democracy is not formally abolished but quietly redefined. It ceases to be a method of government, and becomes instead a set of political values, like communism or human rights, which are said to represent the people’s true wishes without regard to anything that they may actually have chosen for themselves.

Historically, the default position of human societies has always been some form of autocracy. The world is full of countries which have reverted to type. The democratic label is still on the bottle, but the substance has been poured out of it by governments, usually with substantial public support. Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia. The list gets longer every year. Will Britain will end up on that list? A generation ago, it would have seemed strange even to ask the question. But I think that I have persuaded you that it is a real issue.

This is the fourth and final lecture in the inaugural series of Sir Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre on 27 October 2021.

The glorious picture of Alaa Salah, the 22-year-old captured against the evening skyline in long white robes and gold jewellery, woke the world to seismic events taking place in this huge north African nation. An insurgency, that began with street protests over rising bread prices four months ago in the city of Atbara, has led to the sudden deposing of Sudan’s strongman leader, Omar al-Bashir, after 30 years in power.

The generals stepped in to remove him, the only world leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Even some soldiers joined the protests. A military council will now remain in control for two years before elections supposedly take place.

The extraordinary sight of exuberant Sudanese crowds waving flags and chanting for freedom, peace and justice comes just days after mass demonstrations led to the departure of another long-serving and elderly north African autocrat: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.

Rarely seen in recent years, confined to a wheelchair since a stroke, 82-year-old Bouteflika had nonetheless sought to cling to office by standing in a fifth election. But, in the face of rising unrest, the army that gave him power in 1999, after brutal civil war, finally dumped him. Bouteflika was replaced by an elderly ally as caretaker president and pledges of free elections were made.

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Unsurprisingly, these, too, failed to quell demands for more significant changes to end cronyism and corruption. After tear gas was turned again on crowds bearing placards reading ‘Systeme Dégage’ (System Get Lost), the army chief announced a July election date and promised that judges would investigate ‘the whole gang’ – the term used for Bouteflika’s cabal.

These are tense moments in nations that have been trapped for decades under grim regimes, and which are both still under the grip of generals. They are like belated echoes of the Arab Spring, which swept the region with such immense consequences eight years ago. The impression is intensified by the fact that one general in Libya is trying to grab the capital Tripoli with his tanks and planes, while another – the former spy chief who crushed Egypt’s revolution after a coup – has been visiting Washington.

Each country is different, of course, and each protest has local patterns. Activists are certainly more cautious than was the case eight years ago. In Algeria and Sudan, they say they have learned lessons of the past, when despots were ousted only to be replaced by bloody chaos or harsh counter-revolution.

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One country in the region did turn its revolution into positive change, though: Tunisia. And its former president, Moncef Marzouki has described the peaceful rotation of power in Algeria as “one of the most successful revolutions of the Arab Spring“.

It’s true that these uprisings all have a communality that reaches back to 2011, linking them directly to that revolutionary fervour that shook the world after a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire to protest corruption.

The roots of current discontent can be found in the same foetid swamp that gave birth to the protests of eight years ago, nurtured by the arrogance of self-serving autocracies. These young societies are frustrated by rampant youth unemployment, infuriated by state-captured capitalism, dismayed by corruption, inflamed by social media and angered by rich old men who refuse to share power or wealth.

In Algeria – Africa’s biggest country – more than two-thirds of its fast-growing population of 42 million is under 30 years old. These are the ones most affected by rising unemployment, with almost 30% of them jobless.

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Its well-trained army swiftly stopped riots in 2011 over corruption and economic dislocation, aided by painful memory of the savagery of its war against Islamists during the 1990s after elections were cancelled. The anger, though, over bad governance, economic woes and lack of freedom has remained profound.

The sparks vary from uprising to uprising. It was the tripling of bread prices and flour shortages amid rampant inflation in Sudan – a country where almost half the population lives below the poverty line and the end of an oil boom has devastated the economy. But the chant is the same. “Al-sha’b Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” (The people demand the downfall of the regime) was heard in Tunisia in 2011, and Sudan in 2019. It came from the mouth of one courageous army colonel in Khartoum. And was the potent phrase scrawled by teenage schoolboys on the wall of their school in Daraa one night after a game of football, which proved to be the innocent start of Syria’s conflagration.

In the West, we focused on the Arab Spring’s failures, transfixed by the tragedy of Syria, the terror in Egypt and the meltdown of Libya. Yet we largely ignored that the conditions that lay behind the original uprisings remained firmly in place, fuelling that explosive desire for dignity, freedom and social justice.

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Revolutions take time to brew, says the Egyptian-born, Cambridge-based historian Khaled Fahmy. In an essay he wrote four years ago, he pondered how far back we might trace the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, finally asking if the Tahrir Square protests were really rooted in the foundation of the modern Egyptian state in 1805.

Fahmy concluded that five factors thwarted the transformation of Arab nations. These include the impact of foreign intervention, the scourge of petro-dollars funding despotic Gulf regimes determined to stop democracy, and the surge of political Islam. “Despite these deep problems, I remain confident that the future is ours and our revolution will prevail…it would be naive to expect its victory overnight with one decisive knockout blow.”

He is right. Just as the demands of the French revolution did not dissolve when Napoleon Bonaparte took control in 1799, so the pressures of these troubled societies are still bubbling beneath the surface.

There was naivety aplenty in 2011, not least from journalists such as myself who gave too much credence to middle-class protesters they met on the streets and too little weight to the impoverished masses slaving away in fields and factories. The dreams of democracy founded on protest were soon dashed on the rocks of reality.

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And some sceptics still dismiss hopes of democracy in these benighted societies, making bigoted assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, or sneering at their right to have the same freedoms that we enjoy as they endorse cruel and thieving regimes. We have seen the pendulum swing in the United States – still the global superpower despite mounting challenge from China – from a foolish president who thought he could impose democracy on despotic states, to an even more foolish president who flirts with vile autocrats.

But from Syria to Sudan to Saudi Arabia, the choice and issues remain the same for those of us lucky enough to live in democracies: do we support the people pushing for more open societies and stand up for human rights? Or do we espouse such ideals at home, while ignoring them abroad in a misguided search for stability and perhaps a bit more trade.

The answer is clear, as seen in both Algeria and Sudan: never expect the status quo to last in places where aspiration is stifled by autocracy. This is not historical determinism, simply a reflection of human desires and needs. For that brave female student in a protest in Sudan showed the same demand for basic dignity and fairness that led to the Arab Spring – and the pressures in places filled with frustrated young people cannot be contained for ever.

PutinCon was opened by Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned human-rights activist. After a passionate address about demolition of democracy in his native land, Kasparov joked that despots such as Putin preferred playing poker to his sport of chess since they could win with weak cards if their opponents folded. Certainly the diminutive Russian dictator has deployed his hand with malevolent skill – and there is a growing library of books analysing the man and his tactics.

Several are well worth reading. I would recommend Masha Gessen’s superb The Man Without A Face, Bill Browder’s tale of his personal battle with the Kremlin and the late Karen Dawisha’s incisive Putin’s Kleptocracy, which revealed how barely one hundred well-connected characters control almost one-third of their country’s immense wealth. Yet one stands out for me despite barely mentioning ‘The President’, who lurks as just a shadowy presence in the background: Nothing is True And Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia: by Peter Pomerantsev.

This is a book of immense originality painted in vivid primary colours that makes it perfect for the poolside. It reads often like a strange slice of fiction, fast-paced and filled with extraordinary characters. At times it feels like magical realism. Yet this is sharp reportage by an author who spent almost a decade at start of this century working on documentaries and reality television shows in Russia – and it shines penetrating light on the evolution of today’s Russia as its ruler wreaks havoc on the world.

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On one level Pomerantsev – a British citizen with Russian heritage – has simply written an absorbing work about a place emerging from the shackles of Communism into a world of cowboy capitalism. It is a land of glitz, glamour and gangsters; of ambitious young women going to special schools that teach them how to snare oligarchs; of weird religious sects, tragic supermodels and nationalist motorcycle gangs riding Harley-Davidsons; even of urban architecture changing with dazzling speed.

Yet the author, with his insight on television, is really showing how Putin subsumed the media to his cause, blurring the boundaries between truth and reality and, in so doing, rendered truth absurd with propaganda. Not just fake news but fake justice, fake politics, fake terrorists, fake wars. This is the strategy launched with invented terrorists bombing blocks of Russian flats to whip up sectarian hatred and support for savage war in Chechnya. It led to green men invading the Crimea, troll factories in St Petersburg and the hacking of United States political machinery. 

In this world of distorted reality and all-pervasive corruption, Pomerantsev relates how one gangster, fed up with poor quality crime capers on television, uses his goons to make dramas with real guns and then forces a station to broadcast his shows. Even the cults use television to spread their word. One minute an honest woman trading industrial cleaning products is happily driving her Lexus; the next she is accused of dealing drugs and incarcerated for several months – a hapless pawn of political infighting, freed only when Putin tires of the protagonists.

The most symbolic character in the saga is Vladislav Surkov. This key Kremlin player, a puppet master seen as one of the brains behind the creation of ‘virtual democracy’, is a man who writes essays on contemporary art and lyrics for rock bands while supporting religious extremists who attack modernity. In his office hangs pictures of John Lennon, Che Guvera and Tupac. He is almost certainly the author of a savage satirical novel about a dodgy public relations man, while leaked emails have since indicated he was heavily involved in efforts to destabilise Ukraine. 

Surkov demonstrates the dark genius behind the destructive creed of Putinism just as surely as Pomerantsev documents the development of postmodern dictatorship. Now that this is being exported worldwide and similar tactics adopted by admirers, even in the White House, it is imperative we understand this dangerous concept that plays with citizens and countries like they are characters in a reality television show.

As some of us cling to liberal values and a belief in truth, this highly-readable book exposes how the language of freedom, the fundamentals of democracy and the tools of mass communication were subverted to foster autocracy.