It is perhaps instructive in the wake of the Arday affair, in which both progressive commentators and sociology departments have found themselves in want of “common sense” as most of us instinctively perceive it, to further examine common sense as a concept within anthropology, sociology’s academic daughter and rival. For the influential cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, making explicit a long-implicit concern of the discipline, common sense is a “cultural system” which “can vary dramatically from one people to the next”, and “rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity”. For the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, suggesting the idea first as a “mischievous” provocation and then entirely seriously, “Social and cultural anthropology is simply ‘the study of common sense’” which is itself “the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms and social rules”.

As Herzfeld remarks, “common sense — the everyday understanding of how the world works — turns out to be extraordinarily diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind”. It is, indeed, precisely the cultural misunderstandings between the anthropologist conducting his fieldwork and the people who he lives among that reveal “the mutual incommensurability of different notions of common sense — our object of study”. What is anthropologically significant about common sense is not that it is sensible but that it is held in common. It is common sense for the Azande tribesman, stubbing a toe or breaking a pot, to ascribe his misfortunes to witchcraft, where the Western observer would point to what are for us more pertinent causes: the two common senses differ wildly, demarcating two different cultural worldviews.

We may never fully understand what attracts such journalistic and legal luminaries as Carole Cadwalladr and Jolyon Maugham to the cause of the late fabulist and self-promoter Jason Arday. Certainly the many fantastic and self-contradictory claims Arday made over the course of his first stratospheric and then tragic career are an affront to the common sense of the cultural community as a whole. Perhaps, we wonder, trying to make sense of their worldview through our own cultural priors, they have simply gone too far and staked too much of their reputations to accede defeat now, despite the nonsensical nature of the claims they still defend. Could it be pure cynicism, we wonder, defending positions they surely now know not to be true to establish their positions within a political community? But instead, borrowing a way of interpreting the world from anthropology, perhaps it is more fruitful to focus not on the sensibility of their claims but their commonality. For while it is common sense to us that they have settled on an absurd and intellectually indefensible position, it is clearly self-evident common sense to them that they are correct. Beliefs that seem bizarre and outlandish to us provide them with social meaning, reinforcing the boundaries and worldview of their culture and allowing them to make sense of a confusing world.

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The common sense of our own culture would, for example, make even an ambivalent observer of the Arday affair think twice before claiming that the forensic Guardian investigation, by a black journalist, of Arday’s fabulism was an example of racist “lynching” by the “right-wing press”. But to this strange and nascent culture within our midst such truths are self-evident. Perhaps “racism”, or its presumed progenitor “whiteness”, those invisible but omnipresent forces whose malignant presence they discern throughout our society, function for them as witchcraft does for the Azande. As Geertz observes, “It is when ordinary expectations fail to hold, when the Zande man-in-the-field is confronted with anomalies or contradictions, that the cry of witchcraft goes up. It is, in this respect at least, a kind of dummy variable in the system of commonsense thought. Rather than transcending that thought, it reinforces it by adding to it an all-purpose idea which acts to reassure the Zande that their fund of commonplaces is, momentary appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, dependable and adequate.”

Indeed, Geertz continues, “the cry of witchcraft functions for the Azande as the cry of Insha’Allah functions for some Muslims or crossing oneself functions for some Christians, less to lead into more troubling questions– religious, philosophical, scientific, moral– about how the world is put together and what life comes to, than to block such questions from view; to seal up the commonsense view of the world… against the doubts its inevitable insufficiencies inevitably stimulate.” Rather than unsettling their worldview, as our common sense would expect, the effect of the Arday affair upon the progressive tribe has been to reinforce it, allowing them to double down on their beliefs and further elaborating their all-encompassing moral cosmology. Absurd to us, the entire worldview makes sense to them, and clearly serves a social function. One need not agree with their precepts, as Evans-Pritchard did not agree with Zande cosmology, to recognize their importance as social facts, and value as an object of study.

Gently placing the Arday affair to one side, we can apply such methods to the Right as well. It is, after all, a political tribe just as much as the progressives, and one which places greater emphasis on its worldview aligning with the common sense of the wider national community. The recent proposal to ban first-cousin marriage, for instance, aligns with British “common sense” — we know, without needing to be told, that we do not do such things here. Such marriage patterns are anomalous and alien to the cultural community. And yet, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper makes clear in his 2009 work Incest and Influence, first-cousin marriage was the preferential choice of the rising bourgeois class of early 19th-century England, giving rise to such powerful “clans” as the Darwin-Wedgwoods, and the Macaulay-Trevelyans, which would dominate English cultural life, through their descendant spinoffs like the Bloomsbury Group, into the mid-20th century.

Like the Mirpuri clans of Northern England who are the object of the current proposed legislation, such preferential marriage arrangements were undertaken to maximize the economic resources of what became corporate kinship groups, outcompeting rivals and creating mutually reinforcing networks of patronage and influence. This pattern was broken up by economic liberalization, reducing the material necessity for such arrangements, and by the outsized impact of fatalities in the First World War on the upper-middle class, forcing eligible women to widen their pool of marriage partners.

That the first-cousin marriage taboo, like the racism taboo, may be relatively new does not make it less widely held or natural-seeming — even “common sense” — today. Like the progressive appeal to racism as a causative factor operating within our society, the present-day political currency of that anthropological staple of differing “common sense”, the kin marriage taboo serves a social function: to distinguish between “us” and “them”, by demarcating the differing values of two distinct societies. The logical solutions for the Mirpuris addressed by the proposed legislation are thus binary: to jettison first-cousin marriage, and become “like us”, or maintain it and become legally as well as culturally outside the boundaries of the national community.

Britain’s dissident Right is increasingly adopting quasi-anthropological frameworks to make sense of the modern UK. The fact that the values of the liberal, upper-middle-class Victorian “130+ IQ Anglos” they laud did not, historically, differ all too greatly in this instance from the immigrant populations with which they are contrasted does not detract too much from the inner logic of their project, any more than the aberrant relationship between objective fact and their worldview does from the progressive one. Much of the newly-anthropological outlook of the British Right has much to recommend it: what is “the blob” if not a governing caste, a cultural superstructure which uses bureaucratic and legal power, shared social norms, rituals and beliefs to advance its collective interests? These norms are enforced with powerful taboos, and fearsome tests of ritual purity which the Arday fall-out has greatly accelerated, to the discomfort of cautiously skeptical progressives like Novara Media’s commentators, compelled to submit their errant cosmologies to the judgment of the tribe. Rather than gaining new adherents, this caste seems to prioritize thinning its own ranks through ever-stricter enforcement of its social norms. Theirs is a political project, or a culture, which sets itself apart from the interests of the political community or wider culture from which it is sprung, and that sees its purpose as either dismantling or overturning it.

Whether we should view modern progressives as a culture, or as a politically-oriented social structure, reflects older fissures within anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology was historically divided between British Social Anthropology, derived from Durkheimian sociology, and with a politically-minded focus on the notionally empirical social structures of “societies”, and American Cultural Anthropology, derived, via Franz Boas, from contemporary German notions of discrete and holistic “cultures”, which make meaningful sense of the world in their own interpretive ways. What they share, and what sociology now apparently appears to lack, is the emphasis on cultural interpretation through fieldwork, the seeing the world “from the native’s point of view”, as Bronisław Malinowski famously summarized the discipline’s craft, which provides a constant check to the cultural assumptions of the anthropologist himself. An “insider-outsider” in an alien society, the anthropologist is forced, through encounter with its differing notions of common sense, to reflect on the partiality of his own. It is an in-built check to cultural solipsism that sociology, the study of advanced Western societies by members of those same societies, inherently lacks. The practice of autoethnography as practiced by Arday and his Cambridge patron Hilary Cremin shows nominal social scientists conducting a form of anthropological technique briefly fashionable in the first flush of the discipline’s engagement with critical theory, but which was always predicted by serious anthropological theorists, as it has since proved, to become a solipsistic intellectual dead-end.

But this is not merely a matter of abstruse social-scientific debates. When Arday could blame “whiteness” for questions being raised about his credentials and competence by his academic peers as well as his students (as in this paradigmatic work of autoethnographic solipsism), while valorizing, as his posthumous defenders do, his own blackness as a defense of his probity and moral worth, we have moved beyond an anthropological understanding of “culture” into the world of power politics and hierarchy: the meat and drink of social anthropology. Who is subaltern and who is dominant when Arday could set the police on the Times Educational Supplement, summon the legal power of London’s most intimidating law firm on skeptics of his manifold claimed achievements, and weaponize accusations of racism against his academic critics, just as his defenders today invoke this most powerful taboo to muzzle the press in advance of their own political power? These are political matters, relating to the fundamental distribution and exercise of power within our society, and are thus legitimate areas for intellectual inquiry and debate.

As the anthropologist Terence Turner cautioned in 1993, progressive “multiculturalists use the term culture in different ways, and for different purposes, than anthropologists”, as a political tool “of the cultural nationalists and fetishists of difference, for whom culture reduces to a tag for ethnic identity and a license for political and intellectual separatism”. Sniffily disregarding its intellectual output, Turner observes that “to the extent that it has developed a theoretical analysis, it is primarily a conceptual framework for challenging the cultural hegemony of the dominant ethnic group”, so that “Culture, as such, becomes a source of values that can be converted into political assets, both internally as bases of group solidarity and mobilization, and externally as claims on the support of other social groups, governments, and public opinion all over the globe”. For Turner, prefiguring today’s febrile discourse, at its worst all this is merely “an intellectual pseudopolitics that implicitly empowers the theorist while explicitly disempowering real cultural subjects”.

Yet in doing so, he notes, the essentialist claims on identity — on race, gender, religious belief — made by progressive multiculturalists for political ends mirror and thus reify those of the presumed dominant culture. Just as Kuper observes, multiculturalism preserves “insidious assumptions” on the organic wholeness of cultures long jettisoned by anthropology itself, which are put to fundamentally Romantic and reactionary ends, and are “distantly related to certain Counter-Enlightenment discourses about ethnic identity”. As Kuper notes, “how can one know whether a person’s cultural identity is authentic? Only if it is further assumed that identity is fixed by descent.” Arday’s Labour Party defender Dawn Butler, for example, is, by virtue of her apparently self-penned poem on the spiritual, physical and moral superiority afforded to her by her skin color, in common sense terms clearly a racist. Yet her racism is surely an inversion of what she perceives as white racism, similar to the way medieval black magic was merely an oppositional inversion of Christianity rather than a coherent belief system in itself. If whiteness and blackness are parallel constructs of the colonial encounter then why should the modern progressive not deconstruct blackness, and drive it out of the academy?

These are questions, provocations that anthropology can pose but which it is not its role to answer: the mere destabilizing of the culturally-specific assumptions behind them, the grappling with their own partiality and cultural boundedness is enough. Can sociology in its current parlous and solipsistic state pose these questions? One does not imagine that career advancement in today’s Cambridge Department of Education would result. This is where anthropology, with its broader and more quizzical perspective, comes in, for, as Turner claims, “much as St. Paul revealed to the Athenians the identity of the unknown god they had been worshipping, anthropologists might play a useful role in helping multiculturalists realize the revolutionary implications of the course upon which they have embarked”.

For just as academic sociology, taken as a culture, is marked by an aversion to “common sense”, which it broadly views as something to be overturned rather than a spur to deeper analysis (as it is for anthropologists), progressives have seemingly settled on a social system or political project — it is not entirely clear which of the two is preferred — set on the destabilization, dismantling or total destruction of the “common sense” norms of the wider national culture.

As an object of anthropological inquiry, such a development is fascinating and worthy of study. As a political project within democratic conditions, it is obviously disastrous for its adherents, as our last prime minister found. The sheer hatred Keir Starmer inspired among ordinary voters goes beyond rational analysis of his strengths and weaknesses: he ruled according to the common sense of his own social and cultural tribe, and against that of the wider society. Laws, intended to produce positive outcomes, were followed zealously because they were laws, whether their outcomes were positive or not. Such a course of affairs was deemed so unnatural, such an affront to our common sense that Starmer became a folk devil quite out of proportion to his bumbling and incompetent nature.

It is in this literal culture war — a term, as Kulturkampf, incidentally coined by the German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow — that our new prime minister finds himself. Much of Andy Burnham’s recent messaging — on North Sea oil, or the Net Zero push — seems intended to position him as aligned with the common sense of the wider political or cultural community and against that of his progressive caste. The relentless northwestern messaging of the Burnham government is not because he is a provincial bore, though he may be, but because it correlates to widely-held stereotypes within the British cultural zone — commonsensical beliefs — about the no-nonsense pragmatism of Northern English culture. He is invoking, and appealing to, a different type of commonsensical worldview than Farage, who addresses himself primarily to the tradesmen of southeastern England. On some matters, the two groups may hold a shared common sense — and indeed the next election will be decided on this question.

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What Burnham appears to understand is that, however intellectually interesting the cultural worldview British progressives have now settled on may be to observe from without, does not present a viable path towards political success. Insofar as, viewed from outside, their beliefs take a coherent form, it appears to be one of direct opposition to common sense, in which the most outlandish and bizarre claims are made precisely to alienate as many potential adherents as possible, and reinforce the purity of the in-group. When they have lost the Guardian and Private Eye, we can deduce, they have lost even the establishment center-left, still tentative adherents to our society’s common frame of understanding the world. For the progressive part, even the Guardian and Novara are now “polluted”, in the anthropological sense, by their perceived contact with “the Right-wing”, the theodicy against which their moral world is constructed.

When we say that policies or outcomes are wrong or unfair, what we mean is that they violate our understanding of how things ought to be; they simply go against our common sense. The fundamental issue highlighted not so much by Arday’s various fables as by the political furor following his death is that the way in which our society is run in large part goes against the dominant cultural understanding of how our society should be run, to what ends and with what guiding beliefs. The belief systems professed by some within the highest ranks of the British establishment are, to most of us, as self-contained, unfalsifiable, and as alien as if they belong to an entirely different culture, a distant society we can only puzzle at from outside. It is common sense to them, but not to most of us. This creates a cultural disturbance inviting in, though not limited to, extreme political turbulence. The electoral collapse of the Left results not from the fact that progressives do not agree with us, but like du Boulay in her Greek mountain village, that they do not know: they are outside the bounds of the wider society.

But Burnham is not a social scientist: what is of meaningful interest to him is not what hidden patterns the opposing worldviews unlock about their respective cultures, but which sense is more common, and thus commands more votes. His future therefore rests upon whether or not he can re-align the Labour Party with common sense — in both the detached anthropological and our instinctive folk usages of the term.

First to speak up is the Chancellor, who in a voice trembling with excitement outlines his vision of an economy which has abandoned money altogether and reverted to a form of barter. The Minister for Health follows with an update of her imaginative new scheme to ease staffing problems in the NHS: a limited number of patients will be allowed to carry out minor surgical operations on themselves, starting by extracting their own tonsils and progressing to self-appendectomies. Finally, the Climate Minister announces further details of his campaign to control the emission of methane gases by cattle: all cows will be issued with a neat pair of buttock-hugging Lederhosen, some of them manufactured from the hides of their relatives, which should ensure a dramatic upswing in the planet’s chances of survival.

At a nod from the PM, Esther McVey, dressed in cap and bells like an Elizabethan clown, swoops on these wretched visionaries and belabours them about the head with a pig’s bladder rattling with dried peas, while the rest of the Cabinet thump the table in approval. Common sense has been restored.

The problem, however, is that common sense isn’t just opposed to silly ideas. A lot of it is hostile to ideas as such, which is one reason why there is so much of it around in the philistine British middle class. Unlike the high-rationalist French, idealist Germans and mystical Russians, British culture is suspicious of grand abstractions. In the United States, the word “dream” is central to public discourse and used for the most part positively; over here, dreamers are people who forget to turn the taps off and bring the ceiling down.

If one wanted a figure typical of plain British sense, one could do worse than nominate the great 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose bluff, downright, demystified observations raise common sense almost to an art-form. Asked whether the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing, Johnson replied: “Worth seeing, sir; not worth going to see.” The dry, downbeat, practical tone of this is the tone of common sense. There are other examples in the literature of the nation. Asked what book he would choose if marooned on a desert island, George Bernard Shaw proposed Practical Hints on Boat Building.

If grand abstractions are to be avoided, it is partly because they are associated with the revolutionary Left. One wonders therefore why God, nation, law and order, all abstract notions beloved of many conservatives, aren’t to be spurned as well. Instead, we’re told that people who trade in ideas lack feeling, as well as being eccentric, unsociable and in sore need of a haircut. They are rootless, robotic creatures who cut you off from nation, family, lineage and locality, whereas what matters for the conservative is sentiment, piety, faith and intuition. The Left has concepts, while conservatives have customs.

We can’t dispense with thought, to be sure, but it should cling as closely as possible to the texture of actual experience. This is what the British know as empiricism. Ideas which come loose from the senses can be lethal. The word “sense” means “meaning”, but also bodily sensation like touching or hearing; and behind the notion of common sense lurks the wish that meaning should be as palpable and immediate as the feel of a rose leaf or the aroma of coffee. What’s true on this model is what we all recognise instantly as true, without any possibility of dissent.

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Making meaning palpable is what happens in poetry. Poetry is concerned not just with meanings or ideas, but with what they feel like. Its aim is to translate them into the language of the body. There can be problems, however, when you think of everyday language in this way. If the right to private property is as obvious as the feel of a rose leaf, how come there have been whole societies which have no such concept? If my conviction that I am a divine being is as self-evident as the smell of coffee, how can anyone ever break the appalling news to me that I’m merely human? Common sense can be unnervingly close to dogmatism. Sentiments and customs sound more congenial than abstract ideas, but you can argue over ideas, whereas “I just feel it”, “Everyone knows that!” or “This is just what we always do” can be ways of closing argument down.

Most of our convictions aren’t as unquestionable as the smell of coffee. Roman Catholics believe that the Virgin Mary was taken up body and soul into heaven, a doctrine appropriately known as the Assumption — but only a seriously weird minority of them think it is obvious that she was. Catholics tend not to fall around in astonishment when they are asked why they believe this, as though it was as plain as the nose on your face. Likewise, people who are devoted to the idea of monarchy are usually well aware that there are a lot of societies which don’t have a monarch, but which don’t fall apart on that account.

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The idea of common sense first emerged when people began to worry that we had too little in common to maintain political unity. It is, in other words, a concept typical of a fragmented modern age. The more liberal individualism flourishes, the more you must look to some deep communal framework which regulates our otherwise anarchic actions. The problem with appealing to common sense here is that you need something rather more substantial for unity than the universal belief that putting your finger in the fire isn’t the wisest thing to do. But the more substantial beliefs get, the less everyone spontaneously shares them. One way you can think of political unity is temporal: we should think and act as our ancestors did.

The name for this is tradition. What counts in the end isn’t so much what I think and do, as the liberal tends to maintain, as what others have thought and done before me. How could my own tuppence ha’penny-worth of insight possibly outweigh those vast resources of communal wisdom? What a great many people have collectively maintained over the centuries may turn out to be untrue, but it’s unlikely to be pure stupidity either. There is usually a kernel of insight to be extracted from it. If people once thought that the sun moves round the earth, they did so for respectable reasons. Nobody thought that the sun was just a smear on the eyeball caused by chewing too many betel nuts. Jesus presumably thought that the world was flat. Given his historical context, it would be astonishing if he had believed anything else.

The trouble with tradition, however, is that our forefathers did a number of different things, many of them deeply unpleasant. If they produced some splendid epic poetry, they also burnt witches and deported trade unionists. Some of this behaviour they even saw as plain common sense, which suggests that common sense isn’t as common as it thinks it is. What was self-evident to them isn’t self-evident to us. What was common sense in 9th-century Byzantium?

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In his study The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi argues that we know more than we can tell. Much of our knowledge is tacit rather than theoretical. It is know-how rather than know-that, and there are kinds of know-how which can’t be explicitly formulated. The way in which we know our own bodies is nothing like the way physiologists talk about them. You can know how to whistle the National Anthem, but you couldn’t teach someone else how to do so because you can’t articulate it to yourself. You can sense that someone is fearful or mortified but find it impossible to spell out why you can be sure of this. This tacit awareness of each other underlies all of our activity and relationships, and someone who didn’t have it would strike us as an alien who had gleaned his knowledge of human affairs from manuals and textbooks. He would be like someone who spoke English perfectly well, but entirely without tone.

A lot of common sense has this tacit, intuitive dimension. It would be too laborious to keep spelling out the axioms and assumptions which underpin our behaviour, so we have to take a whole number of them for granted. The trouble begins when we take for granted what’s thoroughly questionable — when it becomes common sense to believe that Tom Cruise is exemplary of modern manhood, or that the West needs a foothold in the Middle East known as Israel. This is why we can’t live by common sense alone. We also need ways of speaking which subject it to criticism. Having a Tsar for Common Sense assumes that our politicians are fantasists in the grip of grandiose visions which need to be deflated. Since they’re much more drably prosaic than that, the appointment doesn’t make much sense.

And this rising tide of liberal apostasy, coupled with a growing pushback from grassroots businesses and consumers, represents a far more profound challenge to the established order than the one routinely mounted by conservatives. In the Renaissance, the impetus for change did not come from Jews, Muslims, devil-worshippers or pagans, but devout Christians such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin.

In our era, the most powerful critics of progressive theology once again tilt to the Left: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Ruy Teixeira, to name but three. Their apostasy rises to uphold the basic principles once central to liberalism — equality of opportunity, free speech, and open inquiry. This battle is also reminiscent of the struggle waged by the Renaissance critics of the all-powerful Catholic Church. Today, it’s not bishops or popes who seek control, but the oligarchs and their media platforms which, with the sometimes exception of Twitter, favour a censorship regime that brands dissidents largely as purveyors of “misinformation”.

Like earlier apostates, religious or scientific, ours face an uphill struggle. They must contend with forces within the C-suite and, particularly, academia, where even the sciences are now constrained by ideological edicts. This is where the money flows, often to a host of non-profits, some secretly funded, that spread the gospels of censorship, police reduction, indoctrination in schools and an apocalyptic environmental agenda. One problem the apostates face is therefore an obvious one: despite often impressive media resumes, their research rarely makes it into the mainstream, their voices being carried no further than Twitter, Substack and the more broad-minded corners of the media.

This pushback comes at a propitious time, extending beyond a few dissident intellectuals to the grassroots and business moguls such as Elon Musk, Ken Griffin and Bernie Marcus. The latter, in particular, understand that the new progressive orthodoxy undermines the entire system by embracing anti-capitalist memes and reducing the role of merit in a system built around it. And so a critical front has been the rebellion against ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards. Many US states have moved to take their pension funds out of firms that embrace this ideology; some investment houses, notably Vanguard and upstart Thrive Asset Management, are eschewing corporate policies that stress climate change and other issues over fiduciary obligation to investors.. The fact that returns to ESG firms have been poor, when compared with those tied to fossil fuels and basic industries, could presage a further awakening among financial and business leaders that the balance sheet, rather than ideological back-slapping, constitutes the primary mission of business.

More important still, apostasy is also rising among the general population. The pressure for reparations, for example, is opposed by upwards of two-thirds of Americans. All major ethnic groups, notes Pew, reject race quotas, including African-Americans; overall, almost three in four oppose this, as do a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

In the race debate, the role of black apostates is particularly critical. As John McWhorter has long argued, preferential policies encourage “therapeutic alienation” among black people and other minorities — leading some to adopt a mentality of “anger and scapegoating”, instead of doing “the work needed for success”. In the bizarre world of modern progressivism, any opposition to this agenda is “racist”, even if it comes from people who support equal rights and access to opportunity. Critics of race-based discrimination such as McWhorter and Glenn Loury are far from Klansmen incarnate.

Similarly, assaults on European culture have proven unlikely to win over the masses in these countries, the bulk of whom still express some pride in their heritage. The notion that Western societies are eternally oppressive and racist seems a bit of a stretch given that millions of Africans, Middle Easterners, and south Asians continue to flock to these countries, largely to experience higher levels of economic and cultural freedom. The progressive assault on heritage also is likely to stir up far-Right sentiment, as we can see in France, Denmark, and, perhaps most dangerously, Germany.

The ever-more edgy cultural agenda of the Left, particularly its obsession with transgenderism, provides additional fuel for apostasy. People generally believe in the existence of two genders, and are hostile to efforts to impose either sexual or explicitly political curricula on young people. The idea of parental rights, for example — making sure parents are informed if their child decides to transition — has broad support, including nearly four-fifths of Californians, reflecting what appear to be national trends. In defiance of the transgender advocacy from the White House down, the opposition to sporting categories based on gender, rather than sex, has actually grown over the last two years, with even more Democrats now opposed to the practice than in favour.

Critically — and, no doubt, shocking for some — many opposing the progressive agenda are themselves minorities. In Britain and Europe, for example, Muslims tend to be more religious and socially conservative than whites, and Indians, particularly Hindus, have been drifting Right-wards for a generation. In America, surveys show that foreign-born Americans are also more culturally conservative than the native-born.

Perhaps the most economically significant apostasy relates to climate-change policy. Despite growing moves to censor contrary opinions, here the liberal apostates are not classic deniers or oil company executives, but respected scientists such as former Obama advisor Steve Koonin, and climate scientists Roger Pielke and Judith Curry. Even some environmentalists — including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore — openly denounce “Net Zero” and “de-growth” policies as both impractical and deeply flawed. They recognise that these policies are already leading to the immiseration of poorer people, particularly in California and Germany. They are not calling for an end to climate change mitigation, but for policies that are more realistic and less economically damaging for the working and middle classes.

And then there are grassroots protests at European governments’ attempts to impose emission reductions on farmers and ban chemical fertilisers — regulatory moves at a time when food prices are rising throughout the West. Efforts to reduce agricultural output, now being suggested in the United States and Canada, also could have dire consequences for billions in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there is growing scepticism about climate policies globally; in surveys, it barely registers as a priority for people either in Africa or the US where, according to Gallup, climate is stated as a primary concern for barely 2% of the population.

Other troubles, notably the loss of industry amid soaring energy costs, are already creating a popular backlash, which has been a boon for the far-Right in Germany and Italy, among others. Some centrist regimes have taken fright, with France’s Emmanuel Macron stepping back from climate extremism. Less than a year ago, Germany signed an EU target to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, but quickly backtracked.

Overall, for all the talk of ideological polarisation, public opinion may well be tilting more towards the apostates than those of the progressive zealots. Despite the media profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow “Squad” members, the majority of Democrat members consider themselves moderate or conservative, while barely one in four sees themselves as “very liberal”.

Of course, even with public support, supporters of traditional liberal values face a number of challenges when it comes to enacting meaningful political change. But there is some good news. Many companies are now rethinking their marketing strategies in the face of negative consumer reaction. There are even glimmers of hope for liberal apostasy in some big cities, as demonstrated by the election of New York’s pro-police Eric Adams and San Francisco’s recall of progressive school board members.

As was the case during the Reformation, the apostate’s course is still not an easy one. But their critique remains critical to undermining the current progressive theology — a far more effective weapon than the reactionary antics of DeSantis, which are focused primarily on Right-leaning GOP voters. In contrast, the apostates speak the same language and share many of the values that once constituted progressive ideals. They are, in other words, both the key to restoring rationality — and to keeping liberalism alive for future generations.