And yet the problem is so much deeper than bad candidates. It’s the problem of a decrepit regime — a collection of functionaries and placeholders, who’ve reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation and are now incapable of running the world which they have made. Like all elites, they developed the habit of backscratching and logrolling. And, like all elites, they soon lost touch with the people beneath them.

That explains the striking number of destructive liberal policies, which have wreaked havoc across the West. San Francisco, a bastion of social liberalism, is so addled with homeless encampments on the streets and drug addicts snorting fentanyl in public, that even progressives have had enough. Sweden, once a by-word for social harmony, now suffers from the highest rate of death-by-shooting in Europe, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The British northern cities that powered the Industrial Revolution are plagued, in their ethnic enclaves, by cousin-marriage, honor punishments and grooming gangs. The response of all too many liberal intellectuals to these tragedies is to demand more of the policies that led to them in the first place. The triumphalism of the Nineties has been the common man’s loss.

This has provoked a growing number of intellectuals on both the Right and the Left to proclaim the death of liberalism. The most familiar argument is the Marxist one that liberalism is a ruling-class trick, and that the harsh realities of exploitation and imperialism underlie their treacly words about “freedom” and “democracy”. A more interesting, and more influential, argument is being made by the New Right — many of whom call themselves “postliberals”. They argue that liberalism proved a disaster, not because good ideas were badly applied, but because liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

In his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, the political theorist Patrick Deneen wrote: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.” Liberal regimes succeeded when they were disciplined by traditional ideas about virtue and civility. But their core belief — that we are all rights-bearing individuals, answerable primarily to ourselves — inexorably destroyed the civilizational constraints that gave it strength. Liberal individualism generates self-indulgence and anomie. Equality of opportunity produces a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with little of its noblesse oblige.

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The bulk of these postliberals are headquartered in the United States. A group of followers of Leo Strauss, based in the Claremont Institute in Southern California, relentlessly expose the faults of the “liberal regime”. Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a leading exponent of the idea of the “unitary executive”, argues that the job of the state is to promote good government rather than to protect liberty as an end in itself. The US vice-president declares himself to be a postliberal. There are so many products of the Claremont Institute in the White House, the administration, and Congress that they are fondly known as “Claremonsters”.

Postliberalism has plenty of supporters in Britain, like James Orr, a Reform advisor and Cambridge philosopher of religion, and the Reform MP, Danny Kruger, who propose a faith and flag-based conservatism as a solution to the disillusionment of modern life. Both are devotees of Roger Scruton, the late conservative intellectual, who fulfills a similar role to Leo Strauss in British postliberal circles. Far more belong to the Blue Labour tradition, like Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, John Milbank and Philip Bond. (John Gray, the most intellectually significant of this group, has retreated from postliberalism of late.)

Their critique predominates at a time when the current liberal establishment is the most decadent it’s been — when, in the words of the American historian John Patrick Diggins, “few live for liberalism, but many live off it”. This all comes at a time when the forces of illiberalism are stronger than they have been at any time since the Thirties. The world’s second-biggest economy, China, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; its biggest democracy, India, by an illiberal strongman; its most battle-tested war machine, Russia, by a man who wants to bury the liberal order; and its most important liberal power, the United States, is, at best, an uncertain friend of the liberal order that it created after the Second World War. Donald Trump is an instinctive rather than a cerebral politician, but almost all his instincts are illiberal, sometimes astonishingly so. Trump has declared, like an absolute monarchy, that the only constraint on his actions lies in his own conscience. He has not even bothered to pay lip-service to international law in his wars of choice in Venezuela and now Iran and the wider Middle East.

Yet the postliberal influence owes much more to luck than substance. They fail to address the material problems that plague the post-industrial wastelands that they excoriate: Deneen’s follow up to Why Liberalism Failed, called Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future, is notably short on workable policies. They have no answer to the question: what happens to populism when it’s undisciplined by liberal constraints? The experience of the Thirties suggests nothing good. It is time to mount a defense of liberalism before it is too late.

***

It’s impossible to defend liberalism without starting with a definition of what we are defending. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been associated with the shrinking of the role of the state when it comes to both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair produced a widely admired bourgeois-bohemian (BoBo) synthesis by combining the Thatcherite deregulation of the economy with the Sixties deregulation of morality. The strength of the postliberal argument is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.

But the BoBo synthesis is only one possible manifestation of liberalism. You can have big government liberalism as well as small government liberalism, moralizing liberalism as well as permissive liberalism. (John Maynard Keynes was no less of a liberal than Friedrich Hayek.) All are linked by three core beliefs: that society starts with the individual rather than the collective; that truth is only reached through open debate; that power is so dangerous that it must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing, and power from being constrained, is illiberal.

During its long history, liberalism has suffered from several near-death experiences, but it has always revived. It has done this by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its fundamental principles. One example is particularly germane to our current predicament — namely, New Liberalism, which emerged at a time in the late 19th century, when the laissez-faire liberalism of the Victorians risked being swept aside by the emergence of a new world of organized trade unions, mass political parties and authoritarian nation states. A group of intellectuals, such as T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas, dreamed of a liberal state — more interventionist while not sacrificing the principles of individualism and divided power. A remarkable group of New Liberal politicians followed — such as David Lloyd George, R.B. Haldane, and Winston Churchill, who revived the moribund Liberal Party and built the foundations of the welfare state. The First World War and the rise of Labour eventually led to the Liberal Party’s “strange death”, but liberal ideas were absorbed by both ascendant parties under the influence of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.

In the Twenties and Thirties, liberalism risked being stamped to death by jack-booted fascism or communism. “The liberal state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal,” proclaimed the socialist-turned-fascist Benito Mussolini. But the Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War, constructing the Iron Curtain, and remaking the world according to a new collection of liberal principles. In the Seventies, the postwar regime gave way to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis only to revive under the influence of the neoliberal revolution.

It’s understandable that people are angry with the liberal establishment and disillusioned with centrist promises. But the alternatives from both the Right and the Left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to his billionaire friends, entrenching crony capitalism and passing big tax cuts, while providing his populist base with rhetorical puff balls. He didn’t even make significant progress with his “beautiful wall”. During his second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and both postliberal and illiberal thinkers in the ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East, sending stock markets into a tailspin. Meanwhile, in Britain, Reform’s economic policies are an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and Left-wing statism.

The radical Left is even more impractical. The Green Party’s policies, so entreatingly presented by Laura Spencer, the victorious candidate in Gorton and Denton, are a JCR laundry list of wishes: spending funded by taxing billionaires, the legalization of drugs and pornography and, almost as an afterthought, nice things for the environment. Not only that, but the radical Left is also blind to the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration, and the development of parallel societies. Spencer not only brushed aside worries about immigration as “racism” but also distributed pamphlets in Urdu and extracted political capital by posturing over the war in Gaza. The noisy fight between the far Left and far Right is often a distraction from collective problems like fixing governments that require concerted effort and careful thought.

The only way forward is to reinvent liberalism just as thoroughly as previous generations of liberal reformers did to address new problems, while discarding established shibboleths if they happen to get in the way. If we fail, we will be swept aside by the radicals of the Left and Right; if we go off half-cocked, we may end up making the problem worse. The last attempt to revive the radical center was made by Emmanuel Macron, who only entrenched and deepened France’s divisions. His failure is not only the result of his divisive, vain and self-glorifying character, but — more importantly — because, as a creature of the neoliberal revolution, he focused on yesterday’s solutions, economic deregulation, rather than addressing today’s problems: the tensions between the center and the periphery, and the failure to assimilate immigrants. Liberals must be bolder and more self-critical than the Man in the Élysée. We must also be more consistent. Such a reinvention must start with three strategies: rethink, reposition, and re-articulate.

First: rethink. Today’s liberals need to break with their four-decade fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The Epstein affair should provide both a reason for such a break and a spur to self-reflection. The Epstein Files have not only exposed how many neoliberal heroes, from tech-billionaires to illustrious economists, have feet of clay, but also the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence and self-gratification that lies at the heart of the BoBo culture.

Today’s liberals must also reapply the core principles of liberalism as they encounter old sins in new forms. The tech giants are not only amassing market dominance of a sort that we haven’t seen since the robber barons, but are also using that dominance to misinform and manipulate individual citizens. Left-wing identitarians are offending the basic principles of individualism by treating people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals, even applying different selection standards to different groups, or by canceling people with what they deem to be heterodox opinions.

The biggest weakness of today’s liberals is that they have become the establishment — the heads of Oxbridge colleges, Quangos, the BBC — and they have all the attendant weakness of an establishment. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the same vigor with which the Greens and Reform challenge it, but in the name of liberal principles rather than identitarian ones. Why have the heads of universities betrayed the sacred principle of free speech? Why has the grooming-gang inquiry been bogged down in procedure and vacillation? Why is groupthink spreading in NGO circles?

Every successful reformulation of the liberal creed, from the New Liberals, through the managerial capitalism of the Forties, to the neoliberal revolution of the Eighties, has involved the sweeping away of a decadent elite and the creation of a new cadre of reformers. Today’s radical liberals must muscle aside the existing liberal establishment — that is, the Davos establishment — before the populists do it for them. Radical liberals also need to be willing to forge alliances with groups that their elders have made a career demonizing. Conservatives such as Roger Scruton turned out to be right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about the dangers of the over-concentration of economic power. Liberalism has a wonderful history of reviving itself through unexpected alliances.

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Third: re-articulate. One reason why liberals were so successful in the past is that they were so good at communicating. John Stuart Mill was a master of clarity. Lincoln wrote like an angel. Gladstone held his audiences enthralled for hours. Today’s liberals have entirely lost the art. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats, with wooden phrases about diversity being our strength taking the place of “the laws of dialectical materialism”. Eurocrats have invented their own language of “attestation” and “decommitting”. Academics write for constipated referees who hold their fates in their hands. Corporations produce bureaucratic blather. The current leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is better known for his theatrical stunts than any particular argument or opinion.

There are two reasons for this failure: being the establishment, liberals largely talk to each other rather than to the public, academics to academics and Eurocrats to Eurocrats. Being a decadent establishment, they don’t really believe what they are saying. They are repeating formulaic phrases in much the same way as Soviet bureaucrats repeated such phrases — to protect themselves from criticism and curry favor with the even more powerful. The simple fact of breaking with the establishment should be enough to take care of the dead-prose problem: once people start believing what they say, and once they start speaking to the public rather than experts, they discover the language that they need.

Once they’ve recovered their spirit, our reformed liberals need to take to the public square. Diplomats need to be willing to advance the case for open societies and religious toleration in the UN and other such forums. Politicians need to speak out more loudly against illiberal practices such as shouting down speakers in universities, persecuting people who “blaspheme” against Islam in schools, or practices such as arranged or cousin marriage.

What often passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self. But liberalism has revived from near-death experiences in the past— and it has revived precisely because liberals have rediscovered their ability to reapply their philosophy to fresh problems and put their arguments into new world. Liberalism properly conceived is the only reasonable solution to the great problems of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talents. Ignore the siren voices talking about postliberalism. Resist the superficial glamour of the twin populisms of the Left and Right. It is time to begin the patient but exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age. Centrists of the world, unite!

As a dyed-in-the-wool Leftie, I think I have the right to say this: if Trump is in the White House, it is our fault. If too many Britons blame migrants for a secular stagnation that has nothing to do with them, it is the Left’s fault. If Europe is fragmenting and warmongering, yes, you guessed it, that too is on us. If green investments are despised on an overheating planet, it is because the Left failed to wrestle the green transition from the clutches of Wall Street types who profit from phony pollution markets.

Am I being too harsh on us Leftists? Not really. Big Finance and Big Business did not, of course, need us on their boards to devastate people’s lives in 2008. They did it all by themselves. But we on the Left had the tools to see the crash coming and to push sensible policies afterwards to tend to the wounded majority. Instead, we fell in love with our own voices as we delivered fiery speeches at otherwise splendid gatherings: Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi. While we wasted our energy debating irrelevant issues, the likes of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Europe’s social democrats were concocting — often in our name — schemes to transfer the bankers’ losses onto the shoulders of society’s weakest. In short, we had the opportunity to shield the many from the greed of the few. And we failed, resulting in the surge of nativist proto-fascism that masquerades as unbowed patriotism and realist geopolitics.

But here is the greatest paradox of our era. Though never before has the Left been so weakened and discredited, never before has it been so necessary. The reason is that only the Marxist Left is even interested in rethinking the one thing that can re-align our technological capacities with our need for freedom and prosperity: property rights over machines, algorithms and scarce natural resources.

Where are we at today? Capitalism was defeated in 2008 almost as decisively as Soviet communism was in 1991. Since then, austerity for the masses and state “socialism” for Big Business and Finance inadvertently funded the explosion of Big Tech’s cloud capital: machines that produce no commodities but generate enormous power directly to modify our behavior.

The resulting permanent stagnation reflects the post-2008 Twin Peaks problem: a massive pile of monies (the first peak) that won’t flow into productive investment, and an equally vast pile of public and private debt (the second peak) that such investment could have canceled. Rising discontent and the return of the ultra-Right were inevitable — it’s what happened the last time Wall Street collapsed, in 1929.

A new technofeudal ruling class, using its cloud capital and power to shape our behavior, seized control of markets and siphoned off profits as rents, deepening systemic stagnation. Competitive markets are now infeasible, except in communist China. Across the Western world, capitalist markets are shrinking while cloud capital threatens the very idea of the liberal individual and the neoliberal fantasy that growth could come from shrinking the state. Social democracy is also dead in the water, a sad reflection of how welfare states can never be funded by taxing mercurial tech lords and unhinged private equity outfits who own both our states and the means directly to modify our state of mind.

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As cloud capital develops its AI powers further, it is overriding what remains of our property rights over our thoughts, intellectual output, even our audio-visual image. By privatizing the dollar through stablecoins and the military-industrial complex through the combination of drones and AI, our tech lords have begun to develop a new transhuman ideology — techlordism — which will replace neoliberalism.

Regulation, anti-trust laws, and wealth laws cannot rein in these exorbitant, feudal-like powers. In a world where technofeudalism advances by masquerading as dynamic capitalism, all other ideologies — liberalism, neoliberalism and social democracy — are now as extinct as the feudal ideals of chivalry or the divine right of kings.

The old ideological clash between free-market ideologues and social democrats no longer describes our reality. True political power comes from control over property rights — the only way to make our brilliant new technologies serve humanity is to democratize control over them, particularly in the workplaces where they are deployed. Who else but a revitalized Left can make that case?

But first the Left must regain the trust of a deeply skeptical society. It can only do so by distancing itself from five cardinal sins.

The Left fell into the trap of welfarism once it abandoned its ambition to drive social progress by intervening in the workplace. Having forgotten what makes production tick, social democratic parties ended up as the parties of pensioners. Redistribution is essential in any civilized society, but a society stuck in a welfarist mindset won’t stay civilized for long.

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Then there’s laborism. As William Morris so eloquently warned, the celebration of mind-numbing work as virtuous is stultifying and misguided. Industrial robots and cloud capital, once wrested from the tech lords, must be the Left’s tools for liberating labor from laborism and for steering the masses toward creative, artisanal work that not only satisfies the soul but also produces high-quality stuff.

Green Keynesianism is theoretically splendid but severely circumscribed in practice. As Michal Kalecki predicted decades ago, even if the ruling classes permit the state to boost their aggregate profits through public investments in socially necessary projects like green energy, their dominant strategy is to take advantage of public monies but end Keynesian policies well before the majority benefit from them.

Accelerationism can also be useful in the right context but is a disaster when applied unthinkingly. The idea that, if things get much worse, the majority will come to their senses and rise up to protect their interests, is as deluded as the tech lords’ conviction that we shall all become happy and glorious if their AI-driven cloud capital takes over the planet tomorrow. Preventing the deterioration of society’s circumstances through redistribution and Keynesian policies in the short run is essential as long as the Left does not fall into the trap of seeing welfarism and Keynesianism as permanent solutions.

But perhaps our worst sin has been that which we rose up to defeat but ended up embracing with grim gusto: authoritarianism. Those of us who spent our youth in Leftist circles can recount the horror stories. But the rot began earlier when our precursors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels among others, failed to foresee that our powerful prescriptive texts attract disciples and believers. Before long, Leftists abused comrades, built their personal power base, deplatformed rather than out-argued opponents, sought positions of influence within the system they were supposedly fighting against, bedded impressionable students, took control of the Politburo and threw anyone who resisted into some gulag, actual or metaphorical.

Assuming that we are capable of putting these sins behind us, the task ahead is clear: to demonstrate that the radical democratization of workplaces and core economic infrastructures is not merely a radical ideal, but a practical requirement for authentically freer, richer, and happier lives.

Any theory of change must begin with a vision of a future worth fighting for. But it can’t end there. To be useful, the Left must outline the tangible steps it would take to get there — not just tomorrow, or in six months’ time, but in one year or five years from now.

Beginning with the long-term vision, the Left needs to inspire confidence that technology can become a liberator, rather than the handmaiden of exploitation and oppression: that it will forever be as long as machines are owned by the 0.001%. It must, then, illustrate what this means for how corporations function, how money is created and how land and other natural resources are used. To explain fully how these three realms — production, money and land — are to be managed by an empowered demos, would take many pages. Indeed, I had to author a political science fiction novel to outline them.

Nevertheless, the foundations of any long-term Left vision can be summarized in a single word: democratization. First, that means democratizing corporations by means of new corporate laws that incorporate the principle of one-employee-one-share, and one-person-one-vote, alongside citizens’ juries (as opposed to bureaucratic overlords) that would oversee newly democratized corporations. Second, that means democratizing money, by deploying digital payments systems to establish a monetary commons which harnesses our collective capacity to create money. This would be a decisive step toward providing a non-inflationary trust fund for all. Finally, any serious Left must democratize land, and other scarce natural resources, via a new system of land use that divides socialized land into commercial and social zones, using proceeds from the former to invest in the latter.

With production, money and land democratized (but not nationalized), there is no limit to imagining a realignment between humanity’s technological capacities, our collective interest and our personal freedom. Indeed, the only limit is the hard question: OK, even if we agree that this is where we want to go, how do we get there? The answer must include tangible, verifiable goals every step of the way, from tomorrow morning to the next decade or two.

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These steps must include practical solutions to the aforementioned Twin Peaks problem (the transformation of idle cash into productive, non-damaging investments); the termination of fake electricity markets; the revival of our depleted (health, educational, environmental) commons; the task of restraining Big Finance and the technofeudal ruling class; the liberation of swathes of people from the shackles that hold them back; and the misunderstandings that cloud their thinking.

At the level of ideology and prose, meanwhile, the Left must correct the great mistake that, in the first two decades of the 20th century, caused it to veer off into a mire of authoritarianism and, inevitably, failure. Though the Left has its roots in the emancipatory movements of the 19th century — from women’s liberation to the trades unions — sometime around the Great War both the communist and the social democratic traditions ditched liberty in favor of something nebulous and ill-defined that Karl Marx rightly rejected: equality. In this way, the Left gifted freedom to the liberals (who only cared about their freedom, not that of the majority) and itself drifted into authoritarianism and, eventually, ill-repute.

The Left must now ditch airy-fairy notions that it cannot define, like fairness and equality, and instead proclaim as its highest calling the universal freedom from others’ extractive powers — powers that, in modern society, stem from highly skewed property rights. Put slightly differently, property rights must be the main plank of the Left’s program, along with the defense of freedom from concentrated (corporate or state) power and intolerance (including the intolerance of the intolerant).

In this technofeudal world, where capital has triumphed by mutating into a variant that controls our minds directly, we do not even own ourselves. As the 21st century’s dystopia unfolds, a libertarian Marxist mindset is the Left’s last chance to be relevant and useful to a species struggling not merely to reform a problematic system — but, ultimately, to survive as a species capable of both freedom and prosperity.

The prisoner sprawled on the floor was no ordinary inmate. In 2003, during a counter-terrorism raid in Manchester, Bourgass stabbed four police officers; Detective Constable Stephen Oake later died of his wounds. Convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, he was later handed another 17-year sentence for his part in the so-called “ricin plot”. He was, in every sense, a defining figure of that early wave of al-Qaeda-linked offenders.

Two decades later, Bourgass is reported to be on the cusp of his first full parole review. The precise timings are unclear, but the decision may already have been made; Bourgass might walk out of prison as early as this month. The Parole Board’s role is not to punish retrospective horror, but to weigh current risk: it must assess the man before them, not the man he was. And yet, as Bourgass’s minimum tariff is now expiring, the country is left with a more uncomfortable question: what does “rehabilitation” really mean when the beliefs behind the violence are so hard to change?

I pose that question not as a distant commentator, but as someone who spent 17 years inching through every category of the prison system, after being convicted of murder in 2005. Along the way, I lived alongside some of the most dangerous men in the country and, eventually, sat before a stern-faced parole panel myself.

The Parole Board is one of the few parts of the justice system that still works with forensic calm. It takes nobody’s word for “change”. Before any file reaches a panel, the Public Protection Casework Section (PPCS), inside His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), manages the referral and compiles the core dossier, coordinating the required reports from prison and probation. The Board then conducts a first-stage review of that dossier, and decides whether the case can be settled on the papers alone or needs an oral hearing, with witnesses called and challenged.

But terrorism cases expose the profound limitations of this process. Everything is documented, but not everything is meaningful. The ERG22+ risk tool, for instance, measures behavioral and psychological indicators linked to extremism — factors such as grievance, identity needs, susceptibility to influence and capability for violence. It can, therefore, help flag patterns, but can never reveal what someone truly believes. The Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), meanwhile, is designed to challenge extremist thinking and help offenders build up a non-violent identity. Yet its success depends entirely on honesty, while ideologically committed prisoners can learn the jargon without ever changing their core beliefs. And that is the central difficulty: the system is designed to reward behavioral compliance, not to test ideology’s durability. The file may glow; the risk may remain.

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I saw early signs of that tension when Bourgass first entered Frankland. Days after he was felled in that dinner line, he went looking to settle scores and picked the wrong target — a 21-year-old who had once been kept in a cage used for Charlie Bronson. As he made his move, the younger man clamped his hands around Bourgass’s head and bit his face. Bourgass was quickly moved to the wing next door, but the atmosphere remained tense.

Months later, Bourgass’s cell was set ablaze after claims that he and a handful of fellow Islamists had boasted they would “run the wing” once enough of “the brothers” arrived. What followed was sharp and ugly: a white prisoner was slashed across the face, followed by a small riot that left several prisoners and staff injured, one officer with a broken arm.

Those early years should have been a moment of clarity. Instead, the danger was consistently downplayed, and a new dynamic took root. With similar flare-ups happening across Category A prisons, there soon emerged what prisoners called “the brotherhood”: less an organization than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups.

In practice, these Islamist groups came to operate with a subtle but unmistakable authority, their days revolving around small acts of domination. They often isolated themselves from non-Muslim inmates, for instance, deciding who cooks in a jail’s communal kitchen. Pressure often arrived as a “friendly chat”, an offer of protection, a meal placed on a new arrival’s bed or even a copy of the Quran — gestures that looked charitable but carried an unspoken price. Refusal meant isolation, threats, or the quiet sense of eyes following you around the wing, sometimes ending in violence.

For some men it was easier to blend into the group — to “convert” for safety — than stand outside it. Their routines blended the swagger of a jailhouse thug with the absolutism of jihadist doctrine: instilling the most literal interpretations of scripture, holding cell sermons, debating conflicts in the Middle East, always framed as proof that the West was at war with Islam. The impressionable gravitated toward this intensity; the harder cases used it to justify enforcing discipline. Ideology gave the violence meaning; violence gave the ideology weight. In the dark corners of a prison cell, simple grievances hardened into hate.

And that ideology didn’t stay contained on a single wing. The brotherhood’s strength lay in its reach — often vengeful. A slight against a brotherhood-aligned prisoner in one jail might be “answered” months later in another, by different hands of the same network. I witnessed the results of that cold logic when the man who had floored Bourgass arrived at HMP Long Lartin. A decoy question at his door — “Where you from, mate?” — before a brutal rush from behind. He woke with stab wounds dotted across his face. “I was lucky not to lose an eye,” he told me later.

To anyone who hasn’t lived it, this sounds like exaggeration. It isn’t. In 2016, former prison governor Ian Acheson, in his report on prisons, told ministers to separate the most dangerous ideological influencers — men who radicalized others or used violence to enforce Islamist discipline — into dedicated units. Jonathan Hall KC’s 2022 review went further. He found that the service had long under-appreciated Islamist gang-type activity and the “perverse esteem” enjoyed by terrorist prisoners, noting how “brotherhood” groupings dominated wings and exerted coercive control. Both Acheson and Hall urged governors to take clear ownership of terrorist risk.

The uncomfortable reality is this: poorly managed prisons can entrench ideology more readily than they can challenge it. When a group holds authority and the cultural high ground on a particular wing — through numbers, status, and a ready-made sense of belonging — the incentive to change almost inevitably vanishes. Hall’s point, and Acheson’s before him, is that treating this as mere “prison culture” is how control is lost — and how the rest of us inherit the risk.

Bourgass himself later spent months in segregation at HMP Whitemoor amid concerns about his influence over others. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that parts of his extended segregation had been unlawful on procedural grounds: decisions to keep him isolated beyond the initial 72-hour limit had been repeatedly renewed by prison managers rather than the Secretary of State, as the law requires, while he had also not been given enough information to meaningfully challenge these decisions. They might sound arcane, but these details matter: it shows how long the service has wrestled with the question of what to do with ideological leaders who make already-violent places more dangerous. That tension now sits at the center of Bourgass’s parole bid.

A case like this rarely reaches a parole hearing without formal evidence of risk reduction. As always, PPCS coordinates the referral and dossier; on life sentences, the Parole Board review begins as the minimum tariff nears, and considers whether the case should go to an oral hearing. Yet terrorism cases unsurprisingly don’t sit in a silo: counter-terrorism police and MI5 both contribute, and any release plan runs through what’s known as a “Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement”. Parole management, for its part, falls to the Probation Service’s National Security Division — a specialist unit created to handle the most complex, high-risk cases — if the Board agrees to release a convicted terrorist.

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Paperwork, though, is not certainty. I learned that on my first day out of prison, when I helped restrain Usman Khan on London Bridge, an act for which I received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy and later a Queen’s Gallantry Medal. Khan, too, had “done his rehabilitation work”, had sat on a de-radicalization program in custody, and was under tight license conditions. But none of this was enough to prevent the murders of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones. As the coroner’s subsequent report lays out, a man can look “compliant” yet remain ideologically primed.

That is the paradox the Parole Board now faces with Bourgass, if it hasn’t faced it already. Ideology disrupts the usual calculus. A stable workplace, supportive housing, a curfew, an electronic tag, a conscientious probation officer — these are all important. But they do not neutralize an extremist belief system. HII may genuinely shift thinking for some, but for the most committed, it becomes a vocabulary lesson, a guide on what to say, not a mechanism for change. The Board knows that and will probe it.

When Bourgass is ultimately released, the next question becomes whether the state can safely manage him outside. Probation will model scenarios; police will develop contingencies; MI5 will again contribute its view. But someone must ultimately sign a license and believe it will hold. Risk can be managed or mismanaged; it cannot be eliminated. And even if release were judged manageable, the question of deportation introduces a different kind of difficulty. Terrorist offenders like Bourgass, who entered the UK unlawfully, cannot simply be removed at the end of their sentence. Deportation requires the receiving state’s agreement, and a court must be satisfied there is no real risk of torture or degrading treatment on their return. Algeria has repeatedly resisted forced returns, and British courts scrutinize diplomatic assurances with caution, often finding them insufficient.

My hunch? Bourgass is unlikely to be freed on his first attempt. The Parole Board tends to be more conservative in cases where ideology intersects with violence, and where deportation complications muddy the supervision picture. But whether now or the next time, his return to public life is no longer a distant abstraction. It is approaching.

And that is where the deeper national problem lies. For years, parts of the high-security prison estate have served as incubators, raising up the most committed ideologues and silencing more moderate Muslim voices. The brotherhood, for its part, understood this dynamic long before the institution recognized what was happening. Until we confront that internal culture — not with euphemism, but with honesty about who commands influence on prison landings — we will keep returning to cases like Bourgass: underplaying the risks, and hoping they don’t spill back onto the streets.

In 2005, the author of this piece was convicted of murder, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. In 2019, he was was involved in stopping the London Bridge terror attack, and is now a writer and speaker. 

It is a doctrine that has become highly influential. The American Medical Association in 2023 laid down “best practices for sex and gender diversity in medical education.” Medical students are to be taught that both sex and gender are “[socially] constructed.” And “it is appropriate to affirm each individual’s self-determination regarding both sex and gender labels.” But are “male” and “female” really social constructs like money or like our 12-month calendar? Is that really the considered view of the American Medical Association? Are we seriously training a generation of young doctors to think that the sex of a patient is a matter of individual choice, not objective anatomical and physiological reality?

There are welcome auguries that the fashion is finally on the wane, at least in Britain. It is to be hoped that, in America, it will soon go the way of McCarthyism. The otherwise loathsome President Trump made the upholding of biological maleness and femaleness the subject of an Executive Order, as one of his first actions after taking office (perhaps the only good thing he has ever done). I could imagine future lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent for no better reason than a subsequently regretted claim to have been “assigned” the wrong sex. What, after all, does “below the age of consent” mean if not too young to make permanent, life-changing decisions?

Two and only two sexes

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes? Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, is of the opinion that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants, not our masters, and he might claim that it’s open to him to say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman; therefore, a woman can have a penis.” That is logically unassailable in the same way as “I define ‘flat’ to mean what you call ‘round’; therefore, the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand.

The question is whether a particular redefinition is helpful for any constructive purpose. The flat Earth example clearly is not. It’s simply perverse. How about the redefinition of woman (or man)? I shall make the case that the redefinition of a woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is worse than unhelpful. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the universal biological definition (UBD) based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD because it’s the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes, the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, and that is how biologists define female and male. A human egg contains at least ten thousand times as much matter as a human sperm. In ostriches, the discrepancy is obviously even greater, by a very large amount. The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants.

The UBD has the virtue that, in addition to being universally applicable, it explains a diverse load of facts. And it’s grounded in a body of powerful and widely illuminating theory. Here’s how. It’s an argument that should appeal to economists. In the words of R.A. Fisher (1930), “In organisms of all kinds, the young are launched upon their careers endowed with a certain amount of biological capital derived from their parents.” When two gametes unite to make a zygote, they must, between them, provide this requisite quantity of expensive nourishment. In a fair and equitable world, you might expect the two parents to contribute equally, each bearing half the necessary costs. Such a system is known as isogamy. It doesn’t exist in animals and plants but can be found in some microorganisms and algae. Clever mathematical modeling by various scientists, including Geoffrey Parker of the University of Liverpool, indicates that, under plausible conditions, isogamy is unstable. It tends to be replaced, in evolutionary time, by its opposite, anisogamy: two different kinds of gamete, radically different from one another.

Imagine you are an individual in an isogamous system. If you produce slightly larger than average isogametes, each zygote will be better endowed and therefore more likely to survive. On the other hand, since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, you can only afford to make fewer zygotes. Conversely, by stinting on gamete size, you could contribute to making a larger number of zygotes, but they’d be poorly endowed and less likely to survive. Unless, that is, your smaller-than-average isogametes could somehow seek out larger-than-average isogametes to partner with.

Parker and others developed plausible models whereby, over evolutionary time, half the individuals produce gametes in ever-decreasing numbers but ever-increasing size. These gametes eventually evolve into eggs. The other half goes in the other direction. They evolve smaller and smaller gametes in larger and larger numbers, which eventually become sperms. You could, if you wish, say that the sperm producers exploit the egg producers. Or you could say that, being more valuable, eggs don’t have to go out of their way to seek sperms. They can just sit and wait to be approached. Sperms, therefore, evolved miniature outboard motors (waving tails) with which to actively seek out eggs. Both types, the macrogamete producers and the microgamete producers, flourish in the presence of the other.

The fundamental economic inequality of anisogamy illuminates a large number of biological phenomena, thereby justifying my claim that the UBD does lots of explanatory work. If you define females as macrogamete producers and males as microgamete producers, you can immediately account for the following facts:

1. In mammals, it’s the females that gestate the young and secrete milk.
2. In those bird species where only one sex incubates the eggs, or only one sex feeds the young, it is nearly always the females.
3. In those fish that bear live young, it is nearly always the females that bear them.
4. In those animals where one sex advertises to the other with bright colors, it is nearly always the males.
5. In those bird species where one sex sings elaborate or beautiful songs, it is always the male who does so.
6. In those animals where one sex fights over possession of the other, it is nearly always the males who fight.
7. In those animals where one sex has more promiscuous tendencies than the other, it is nearly always the males.
8. In those animals where one sex is fussier about avoiding miscegenation, it is usually the females.
9. In those animals where one sex tries to force the other into copulation, it is nearly always the males who do the forcing.
10. When one sex guards the other against copulation with others, it is nearly always the males that guard females.
11. In those animals where one sex is gathered into a harem, it is nearly always the females.
12. Polygyny is far more common than polyandry.
13. When one sex tends to die younger than the other, it is usually the males.
14. Where one sex is larger than the other, it is usually the males.

In all cases, the key is economics: large gametes cost more than small ones. In various ways, this inequality plays out. Large gametes are more precious, more worth guarding, more worth fighting for, more worth protecting against wastage through mating with the wrong species or wrong individual.

It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, and social systems for probably two billion years.

Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

Here are some apparently anomalous examples that test (the true meaning of “prove” in the proverb) the rule. Unlike most mammals, spotted hyena females are larger than males and socially dominant over them. They have a hugely enlarged clitoris, scarcely distinguishable from a penis. They can get erections. They have false testes made of fatty tissue. The sight of apparently male hyenas giving birth has given rise to numerous myths of hermaphroditism. Given that so many roles and signals are reversed or ambiguous, how can we even know what we’re talking about when we use the words “male” and “female” in describing the anomalies of hyenas? By the UBD, of course.

Many species of fish are livebearers. As listed above, it is usually the female who gets pregnant. But in seahorses, it’s the male, in the sense that he has a pouch for holding the fertilized eggs, and he gives birth from his pouch. How do we know it’s the male? Couldn’t we define the female as the one that gets pregnant? We could, but then, “In seahorses, it’s the female who gets pregnant” becomes a tautology that leads nowhere.

Some worms and snails, and many plants, are simultaneous hermaphrodites. They are capable of producing both micro- and macro-gametes. Not a problem: the UBD is easily applied, and sex remains binary. The earthworm has organs appropriate to both sexes defined by gamete size. Enthusiasts for fluidity of “gender” love anemone fishes, also known as clown fishes. They, along with many other creatures, are sequential hermaphrodites. The largest, most dominant fish in a group of clownfish is female. If she dies, the dominant male becomes female. But what does that even mean? By what definition of male and female? On the UBD, it’s very simple. When the dominant egg-producer dies, the largest sperm producer starts to produce eggs instead.

Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male/female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedeviled by numerous exceptions. Especially with respect to the sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we, in practice, recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

Gender

A watered-down version of the ideology concedes that sex may be binary, but “gender” is not. The word gender enters the discourse trailing clouds of confusion. To grammarians, gender is clear. It is a classification of nouns by how adjectives and pronouns agree with them. French nouns fall into two genders, English and German nouns into three. Kivunjo, according to Steven Pinker, has fifteen genders. French genders could have been named A and B (la table, le tapis), English and German genders A, B, and C. As it happens, all males belong in gender B, all females in gender A, and that same neat separation occurs in most languages. It is, therefore, convenient to use “feminine” and “masculine” as names for two of the genders, rather than A and B. This perfect correlation permits the use of “gender” as a coy euphemism for sex. Alex Byrne, in Trouble with Gender, and Kathleen Stock, in Material Girls, both make valiant attempts to sort out the confusion. In the mind of this reader, accustomed to scientific standards of rigor, the confusion remains. Stock herself sensibly tries to avoid the term, replacing it with “concrete, clearer terms that do whatever jobs I want them to at the time.” For the same reason, gender is not a word I normally use except in the grammarian’s sense. If you want to speak French properly, you really do need to respect every noun’s preferred pronoun.

The current fashion for transsexualism belongs in a cluster of inter-related vogues, sometimes called “woke,” partly stemming from a sincere concern for social justice, largely well-meaning but misguided and scientifically ill-informed. The cluster includes “identitarianism” and the view that alternative “ways of knowing” (women’s ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, personal lived experience) are just as valid as objective science in understanding nature.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of genderism?

By Kathleen Stock

Transsexualism has strictly no necessary connection to whether sex is “binary” or a continuously varying spectrum, although, in practice, the same people are often partisan with respect to both. Those of us who argue that there is no spectrum of intermediates between male and female — that sex is “binary” — should not be seen as threatening to transsexualism. Whether or not there are “intersexes” with ambiguous genitalia, or abnormal sex chromosomes, is irrelevant to transsexualism because no trans person claims to be intersex. A trans woman insists that she actually is a woman; a trans man, that he actually is a man. Neither claims to be hermaphrodite. Rather, the claim is a psychological one. There’s a disjunct, or so it is claimed, between a person’s biological sex and the gender that they feel themselves to be.

There are many dimensions along which human personality can be measured. They might include assertiveness, ambition, empathy, aggressiveness, selfishness, methodicalness, volatility, perseverance, affection, bossiness. A mathematician might see each person as situated in a multidimensional space defined by these dimensions. We are all amateur psychologists who gossip about each other. Without being mathematicians, we implicitly classify each other along dimensions such as those I have listed. Perhaps there is a psychological dimension of masculinity/femininity, which is more or less correlated with some of the other dimensions listed. In defiance of much hard-won feminist progress, you might invoke sexual stereotypes in an implicit invocation of such a dimension. “Cecil is effeminate. Ros is butch. Lizzy is a tomboy; she doesn’t like dolls, loves climbing trees, and plays with wheeled toys.”

We can situate ourselves along such personality dimensions, including the perceived dimension of masculinity/femininity. We may even go so far as to wish we had been born the opposite sex. We might phrase it as being trapped inside the wrong body. It’s a version of dualism, a belief in a kind of disembodied soul, the real you, who is of a different sex or gender from the body in which the “real” you lurks. If that is how you are inclined, it might take little encouragement from the surrounding culture to push you over the edge into full-fledged belief. And today’s surrounding culture — doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, political leaders, lawyers, and perhaps above all school friends — gives more than a little push. Sex “assigned at birth” is arbitrary, we are told, and you only discover whether the real you is male or female by introspection.

An early account of what it is like to feel you are trapped in the wrong body is Jan Morris’s Conundrum. As what she called a “true transsexual,” she had little time for “the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves.”

A feeling of being in a body of the wrong sex seems to be a real psychological condition. Such “dysphorics” can feel genuine distress. When anorexics look in the mirror, they see an emaciated body that they think is too fat. “Gender” dysphorics look in the mirror and see the wrong genitals. Both deserve sympathy and understanding. Nobody is phobic about anorexics. Why should anyone be phobic about gender dysphorics? “Trans- phobia” is a pernicious fiction.

Partly influenced by Jan Morris and partly out of normal politeness, it is my custom to refer to people by their preferred pronouns. But I draw the line at the belligerent slogan, “Trans women are women,” because it is scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women. It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons, and so on. So powerful has this “postmodern” counterfactualism become that newspapers refer to “her penis” as a matter of unremarked routine. Even the Times, Britain’s traditional newspaper of record, could begin an article (Jan. 18, 2023) with these words: “A transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis as she went on trial at the High Court in Glasgow.”

If the journalist had said “with his penis,” the Times could have been in trouble with the police for “misgendering.” In 2020, Humberside police descended on the workplace of Harry Miller to warn him that one of his tweets “was being recorded as a hate incident.” What did the offending tweet say? “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” A neat joke, in my opinion, and pretty gentle when compared with the satire of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Lehrer, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Monty Python, W.S. Gilbert, or Jonathan Swift. Evincing an almost superhuman inability to take a joke, the police recorded it as a “hate incident” and threatened the satirist. Have the British police become George Orwell’s Thought Police? Will it come to that? The resemblance occurred to Mr. Justice Knowles, before whom the Harry Miller case came up. “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Well said, M’Lud! I hope the Humberside police officers have learned their lesson. Perhaps somebody might take them aside and patiently explain about this thing called satire.

I am sorry to say it looks horribly as though otherwise sensible and certainly well-meaning political leaders are pandering to an intimidating lobby, militant activists ever ready to pounce on what they see as heresy. Such activism is especially dominant among young people. Several senior publishers have confided to me that they are under strong pressure from young employees to censor, or even suppress, books that they perceive as “transphobic.” I hereby place on record my regretful suspicion that some otherwise respected scientists, too, are betraying science in a desperate attempt to curry favor with “the kids,” perhaps especially their own.

If your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a “Transphobic bigot,” a “TERF,” or a “full-on MAGA alt-right Trump-supporter,” you’ve already lost the argument. Sometimes the name-calling goes further and becomes overtly threatening. At a London Pride demonstration in 2023, “Sarah Jane” Baker (previously Alan Baker) told a cheering crowd, “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face.” I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say that such language is more typical of the sex that “Sarah Jane” claims to have left than the one she aspires to join.

Sky News (January 23, 2023) had a picture of two Scottish Nationalist Party politicians, members of the British Parliament and the Scottish Parliament, respectively, at a transgender demonstration in Glasgow, grinning inanely in front of a large, colorful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “Decapitate TERFS.”

Threats of violence have no place in decent society. “Decapitate TERFS” is not only horrible. It’s pathetic. So is an exhortation to punch a TERF “in the fucking face.” A position should be supported, or refuted, by rational discussion informed by evidence. People who terminate an argument by resorting to threats or name-calling are ignominiously signalling that they’ve lost the argument.

The human conceit that personal feelings can change reality signals an extraordinary elevation of humanity in a kind of species-level solipsism; a vain hubris in the face of the eternal and universal verities of science. And yet science is the jewel in humanity’s crown. We have every right to take pride in it. But pride as we uncover nature’s truths should be tempered by humility. Let us hope we don’t take too long to come to our senses.

This essay is extracted from ‘The War on Science’, edited by Lawrence M. Krauss (Post Hill Press).

It is as if, somehow, conservatives imagined that the cultural worldview best expressed by T.S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” could long thrive in a capitalist culture. As if Eliot’s view, that the true significance of an artist’s work lies in the relationship between the artist and those who had come before, could be compatible with capitalism, an ideology that is by definition “presentist” and utterly disdainful of the past. Or, to put it another way, as if what Daniel Bell described as capitalism’s “radical individualism in economics, and [its] willingness to tear up all traditional social relations in the process” could somehow still leave room for traditionalism in culture.

For tradition is, at least in the long run, the cultural, and perhaps even the moral, opposite of innovation which is what the free market perpetually aspires to. To use the business school boilerplate, new technologies give rise to new industries, which in turn produce new goods and services. In the process, social relations are transformed. Even if it is correct to believe that capitalism, through what Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”, is the best economic system in history for creating prosperity, the price for that prosperity was always going to be high culture.

In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell rejected Marx’s idea that culture was a reflection of the economy — that it was “integrally allied to it through the exchange process”. Instead, Bell argued that culture had become ever more autonomous. And yet the connection he made between the growth of discretionary income, and the advent of a cultural order that proudly proclaimed itself the adversary of the established social order, actually fits in better with Marx’s view than his own. Towards the end of his essay, Bell conceded that the breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system was, in fact, brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.

But Bell doesn’t seem to have understood something quite crucial about the role of the arts. It is unquestionably the case that from the middle of the 19th century, despite a few dissenting voices such as Eliot’s, artists in the West saw their mission as the dissolution of the social status quo. With hindsight, however, it is clear that their more important role, in world historical terms, was to serve as a kind of inadvertent avant-garde of the free market: by systematically destroying the Protestant Ethic with all its moral and economic commitments to what Bell called “Malthusian prudence”. Bell’s language is elegiac. American capitalism, he wrote, “has lost its legitimacy, which was based on a moral system of reward, and the Protestant sanctification of work”. And, writing as he was in 1970, it is understandable that he thought that the replacement of Protestant moralism with hedonism, with a new “voluptuary system” of “social permissiveness and libertinism”, would be unsustainable.

And had it stopped there, perhaps Bell would have been right. Every social system needs some kind of moral warrant, and in 1970 it was anything but clear what that new moral warrant would be. Half a century later, though, we now know what it has been: wokeness, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, LGTBQ+, and the rest. These doctrines have moralised the voluptuary system, disciplined the libertinism, and politicised the permissiveness. As for the cultural contradiction Bell warned of, that, too, has been settled — and in Carthaginian fashion, by condemning and repudiating the past as racist, which in practical terms means calling for the erasure of the high culture of the past. It could hardly be otherwise, since high culture in every society has always been the product of the rich and powerful, of kings, empires, princes, or plutocrats.

High culture became the only thing standing in the way of the free market, and now that too has been taken care of. Art can co-exist with Schlock, but it cannot indefinitely survive the onslaught of Kitsch — the only kind of culture the free market can really tolerate. And there we have the unimaginable combination of Schumpeter and Fanon. Yet, once imagined, obvious; perhaps, even, inevitable. Because, at least in the long run, it is impossible to have an economic system based on obsolescence and destruction (“creative” or otherwise) and a cultural system based on pious continuity. We have moved from the Grand Inquisitor to the Grand Therapist.

Suggested reading

The squashed birds of progress

By Slavoj Žižek

And so now only 8% of university students in the UK are enrolled in humanities subjects. The madness of wokeness and the barbarous inanities of “anti-racism” are well on their way to destroying high culture in the Anglosphere and, probably, in parts of Latin America and Western Europe as well. And this despite the Rightward turn, because most of the Right in the US, Canada, and Australia are no more committed to high culture than to the preservation of the environment. In Western Europe and Latin America, high culture has at least for a century not been a monopoly of the Left — from Borges to Houellebecq, a conservative tradition remains alive. By contrast, in the Anglosphere, once one gets past Chesterton, Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy, the cultural pickings are slim indeed.

Let us for once be honest: what is on offer in terms of contemporary culture on both sides of the woke/anti-woke battle line today is a penumbral shadow of the culture of the past. This is not to say that there aren’t any people of talent in both camps. But, if we are being rigorous, it is simply a fact to say that the greatest days of Western culture are behind it. There is nothing unusual in this. Cultures and civilisations are as mortal as human beings. The great Renaissance historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini said that a citizen must not mourn the decline of their city. All cities decline, he wrote. If there is anything to mourn it is that it has been one’s unhappy fate to be born when one’s city is in decline.

If there is a new culture waiting to be born, it will certainly not be born of wokeness, of neo-tribalist nostalgia, of notions of race that would have pleased the worst 20th-century race scientist. But nor will Western high culture ever ascend to the place it reached so gloriously in the period between the Renaissance and the middle of the 20th century. That race has run its course. And somewhere, deep down, everyone knows this. Given that, why in God’s name would one want to study a subject in the humanities? There are, of course, material reasons for the death of the humanities as well. One can be materialist here, but not too materialist; allegro ma non troppo, as it were. The old culture is dying, and what purports to be its successor has come into the world stillborn.

***

A version of this essay appears in David Rieff’s new book, Desire and Fate, published by Eris and out now.

The florid, high-pitched, hand-on-heart tone of American political discourse is religious at root. In fact, one can’t understand much about the USA without grasping how very godly the place is. The US and the UK are not only separated by the same language, as George Bernard Shaw commented, but by the question of metaphysics. Americans are more at ease with bulky abstractions such as freedom and divinely ordained rights than the more empirically-minded British. Some wit once remarked that it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up, which captures the British sense of these matters exactly. Religion in Britain rarely takes to the streets, but it does so all the time in the States. People talk about God over there as they talk about Gary Lineker over here. Anglican vicars, however, don’t rant on about the demonic forces controlling the Boy Scout Association as they’re too busy organising the village fete.

More from this author

America is tortured by demons

By Terry Eagleton

There is, of course, a vital historical difference at stake here. The United States is a profoundly Puritan society, and Puritans believe that everyday life should be subordinate to religious faith. Not long ago, it might have seemed that not much remained of this noble doctrine in the land of Las Vegas and Stormy Daniels beyond the high-minded tone that its political rhetoric borrows from the preachers. With the rise of the Maga Right, however, an ugly form of theocracy now threatens to engulf the country.

The Puritans are back in business with a vengeance, not least because they can boast of actually having founded the country. The US is still young enough to feel the vibrations of its revolutionary past, in which the God of Puritanism was on the side of subversion. Like all nations born in anti-colonial struggle, America’s origins are insurrectionary. Violence, dissent, anarchic individualism and a suspicion of state authority are thus built into its very fabric, unlike those parts of the world for which there is conservative order on the one hand and rebellion on the other. Anarchic individualism can always be channelled into the free market; but once that market gives way to the transnational corporation, which smacks of the same kind of absolute sovereignty as Church and monarch once did, it isn’t surprising that symptoms of insurrection should break out afresh.

We manage things rather differently over here. Britain was awash with religious ideology in the 17th century, as Puritan and revolutionary forces clashed with the established order and beheaded the king; but that order had had a long time to entrench itself, and so was able to come to terms with these unruly powers. Hence the legendary English talent for compromise and the middle way. Middle-class entrepreneurs began to marry into the nobility, while the sons of dukes were educated side by side with the sons of merchants in the public schools.

In America, by contrast, there was no such traditional order to temper revolutionary energies. This is one reason why ideology loomed so large, another being that you have to think big in order to make a revolution. This is why the French have far too many ideas, at least in the eyes of some of those in Dorking or East Grinstead. They have concepts while we have common sense. But it’s also because aristocrats find ideology vulgar and unnecessary. Gentlemen don’t need to argue about rights and property and political interests. They just feel these things in their bones.

Hence the great quarrel between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke at the turn of the 18th century. Paine was deeply involved in both the French and American revolutions, and in his astonishingly popular The Rights of Man is much taken with abstract concepts of freedom and equality. For his part, Burke counters this seditious stuff with custom, habit, piety, tradition, affection and sentiment. If you have to argue about these things, you’ve already betrayed the fact that you don’t understand them. Ideas break skulls, whereas sentiments bind citizens together. An Irishman from a neglected, half-famished colony had to leap to the defence of aristocratic Britain against revolutionary France, just as the Irish had to write much of the nation’s great literature for it.

You might claim, however, that the British could afford to look askance on the abstractions of Robespierre. After all, they themselves had been through this turmoil of revolutionary ideas themselves over a century earlier, and having come through it and settled down to the more sober business of making money had no great wish to be reminded of it. Besides, if you throw up the barricades yourself, you might teach those below you to do much the same. The era of revolution in America and France is also the time when a new actor — the industrial working class — is about to emerge on the political stage, and throughout the 19th century the middle classes lived in fear of this threat to their very existence.

The contrast between Burke and Paine, tradition and ideology, isn’t as clear-cut as either man seems to think. People nowadays use the word “ideology” to mean a system of abstract ideas, as opposed to a more pragmatic approach to political affairs. I see things as they are, you have ideology and he is a fanatic. But ideology isn’t just about ideas. It’s the invisible colour of everyday life, too close to the eyeball to be objectified. It, too, is a question of habit, instinct, custom and sentiment. In the language of Donald Rumsfeld, it’s a question of unknown knowns — things we know but don’t know we do, because they are built into the very framework of our knowledge. Keir Starmer is quite as ideological as Jeremy Corbyn; it’s just that a lot of his ideas are currently accepted as common sense, whereas a lot of Corbyn’s still have to be argued over. Why is the command economy ideological but the right to private property isn’t? Why is it ideological to be nationalistic but not to be patriotic?

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By Slavoj Žižek

On the whole, advanced capitalism is averse to ideology, which is one of the many aspects of Trump which make him so exceptional. The ideal is for the system to work automatically, without relying on anything as chancy as beliefs. As long as you turn up to work, smash a bare minimum of shop widows and don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe whatever you like. Nobody cares whether you’re a Jain or a Seventh Day Adventist. In fact, nobody even knows what they are. Material interests will always pull rank over visions and principles. Since convictions are a source of conflict, they are generally discouraged. In postmodern culture, convictions are almost equivalent to dogmatism. This is why people say things like “It isn’t necessarily that inequality is being reduced”. They mean that it isn’t being reduced at all, but since that sounds too doctrinaire it’s prudent to add “necessarily”. “It’s like getting worse” is a lot less table-thumping than “It’s getting worse”. Some people in this agnostic climate even have a problem with saying “It’s nine o’clock”.

If you banish ideology, however, the danger is that it will reappear in pathological form, as it is currently doing in the States. We may all be moving back to the 17th century. Men and women don’t just want prosperity and security; they also want recognition. They want to be assured that they are loved and needed, cared about and included. These are not activities at which bureaucratic states and transnational corporations are particularly adept, which is one reason why populism and fascism are on the increase. US Steel can give you wages or supply you with commodities, but they can’t give you meaning. For that you have to turn elsewhere, to sex and sport, snake oil salesmen and aspiring autocrats, crooked preachers and neo-Nazi louts, Hollywood mystics and bent bishops, each of them seeking to out-loony his neighbour. Rampant irrationalism begins to breed at the very heart of technological rationalism. The more reason is reduced to a set of scientific calculations, the more school children are massacred and little green men peer inquisitively in at your bedroom window.

Not long ago, when History was declared to be at an end, the West had rationality while the East had ideology. The question was whether a rather anaemic Western pragmatism and liberalism were tough and resourceful enough to withstand the absolutism of radical Islam, or were they altogether too effete, over-civilised an affair to deal with the likes of Bin Laden. Now, however, the fanatics and barbarians are well and truly within the citadel. As I write, the news comes through that Trump has given the go-ahead for a Jeffrey Epstein Center for Family Values. That’s not true. But in a nation where the line between fact and fantasy becomes ever fainter, it might just happen.

I couldn’t believe it. It’s one thing to talk with disdain about your political opponents, but how striking that she genuinely couldn’t fathom that Trump supporters are real, or at least that any would find themselves in distant relation with her. This political species making up about a half of the American electorate (not to mention his international admirers), it is at best irrational to impute such an unlikelihood to this kind of discovery. But given our desperate need (in the service of everybody calming down a bit) for proactive efforts at understanding each other a little better, the development of this sentiment may well be a kind of vice.

Forget for a moment any moralising about charity in politics and think strategically. Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.

Political hatred is nothing new, of course, and there will always be more and less antagonistic periods in the US’s continual development (remember that the vice president used to be whoever came second in the election, an entertaining policy to imagine active in the last few presidential cycles), but something does seem decidedly more openly nasty about modern US politics; gone are the days of clandestine bitterness — now even the pretence of propriety has been dropped in favour of common name-calling.

There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that Trump is a genuine anomaly. He swears. He insults. He asks Theo Von what cocaine is like. He attempts to prevent democratic elections. He is a convicted felon. Worse still, he appears to bring out the worst in otherwise generally professional politicians. (The recent dick joke made by the spotlessly charismatic 44th president at the DNC can hardly be blamed on Trump, but it is difficult to imagine him doing the same at the expense of John McCain or Mitt Romney.)

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Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.

We often hear that social media is something of a “new public square” where ideas are efficiently trialled and debated, while providing a decidedly meritocratic possibility for basically anybody’s response to appear right underneath a tweet by the President himself. But I see it as a sort of no-man’s land. Step into it, and your life immediately gets worse. You may blow something up. You may blow yourself up. You may find another country’s government is suddenly attacking you.

Really, though, social media is best described as a utopian paradise. I mean in the etymological sense: utopia from ou topos, “no place”. Paradise from paradeisos, “enclosed park”. A place that is not real, and at the same time a walled garden. Less a public square, whose contents are contingent and out of your control, and more a private estate designed from the ground up to keep out anything which may disillusion you of the space.

Ingeniously, the conviction is encouraged that we are its architects, furnishing the plot with autonomous follows and subscriptions, and with an array of painless mechanisms for muting or blocking the vexatious topics and people. But anyone paying attention knows that we are instead helpless addicts to an algorithmic generation beyond our comprehension. It is not your stated preferences but the unconscious microseconds of difference between how long you spend here or there which determine what kind of material you are fed (remember it is called a feed).

In 2012, a story began circulating about an enraged father storming into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to see the manager. His daughter, still in high school, had received coupons from the company advertising cribs and maternity clothes, which he believed was inappropriate. Days later, that same father apologised to that same manager, having found out that his daughter was due in August.

Statistician Andrew Pole, reported the New York Times, had created a “pregnancy-prediction model” which analysed the purchasing habits of Target’s female customers, assigning a probability based on correlative spending decisions. The daughter’s behaviours were picked up by the system, and thus is explained how Target figured out that a girl was pregnant before her own father did.

This story is perhaps dubious, but the fact that it is so believable proves that we already know how recommended content is really produced. We have all heard stories of people who swear that they only needed to mention dog food in audial range of their (sometimes inactive) computer for it to begin advertising pet food to them. True or not, the paranoia it invokes proves at least one thing: many of us are fearful that we do not even know when and how we are being monitored.

And not monitored by some despotic government (though why not that too!), but by advertisers, who want not to quell political dissent but to simply curate content, figuring out what you will buy, and watch, and read, and selling it to you for the low cost of your zombified attention.

Not you and me, though. Because we know all of this, and we are enterprising in our efforts to defy it. We follow people intentionally whom we disagree with. We engage in conversations and debates online. Our feeds are an impressive and virtuous balance of Left and Right.

Do not fall for this trap: it is smarter than you think. It is smarter than you. Remember that disagreements can be enjoyable, and entertaining or winnable disputes are allowed in your garden. After all, what is more rewarding than “interacting” with the “other side” by publicly exposing their ignorance and stupidity?

When was the last time you had your mind significantly changed as a result of such an interaction? The unfortunate reality is that the extent to which you enjoy disagreeing with someone (including revelling in righteous anger, and being congratulated for it) on social media is inversely proportional to the seriousness of the threat they pose to your worldview. This is why online arguments gravitate around either smarminess in flawless victory, or dull rage at how unthinkable a position is, and tragically evade the productive space in-between.

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By Frederick Kaufman

The thing about a town square is that you don’t get to choose who’s there. You don’t get to amplify voices based on your interests. You certainly don’t get the murky town council doing this for you without you even realising based on a painstaking surveillance project.

Whatever it is, we spend a lot of time there. And in comprehensively regulating what kind of people we politically interact with, social media at the same time dictates our very understanding of the terms of the debate.

I believe a significant number of political arguments are at base about language. Disputed definitions are often the foundation of political disagreement. But our vocabulary can only ever be a result of how those we are surrounded by use and understand terms, and if people spend enough time separated by selective algorithms during the evolution of our political semantics, linguistic speciation will inevitably ensue. Our words begin drifting from their original referents, and we end up developing a different vocabulary from our opponents without realising it.

Thus the time wasted feuding over labels that simply represent different concepts depending on who speaks them: “democratic”, “woke”, “racist”, “woman”. Bafflement arises as a result of encountering contradictory concepts, so when our definitions begin to vary, confronting a person who negates our view of the world is not just upsetting, but confusing. It is as though we have been met with a contradiction. The empathetic friend who is not a feminist. The rational neighbour who is not a capitalist. The cousin I love who is a Trump supporter.

Yes, social media is a utopian paradise. It should be avoided at all costs.

One of the founders of Extinction Rebellion boasts that he wouldn’t let an ambulance through if he was blocking the road, even at the cost of a patient’s life.

A biological male with criminal convictions for kidnap and attempted murder says at a Trans Pride rally: “If you see a Terf, punch them in the fucking face.” The crowd, holding placards about love, kindness and human rights, cheer and applaud.

Students at California State University glorify a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel to slaughter the innocent, while Harvard students write an open letter blaming Jews for their own execution. They grieve the “slow and sudden” deaths of Palestinians.

Acts of kindness bear witness to our shared suffering. But when kindness becomes pathological, it is cruel and divisive — as with these examples. And it is on the rise. In the West today, there are people whose suffering is deemed to be non-existent or of little value, and so judgement takes the place of understanding, punishment that of mercy. The result is a purity spiral whereby extreme kindness towards an in-group gives unlimited licence to act with cruelty towards an out-group. It’s this licence that gives progressive activists permission to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism.

Following the Hamas massacre, a lecturer at Stanford University used “identity-based targeting” to force three Jewish students to stand in a corner so they could feel “what Israel does to Palestinians”. He asked them how many Jews died in the Holocaust. One of the students said “six million” and the lecturer replied that “colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer”. In New York, activists tore down posters pleading for the safe release of Jewish hostages, many of them women and children, while London saw a 1,353% increase in antisemitic attacks.

In the intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, kindness for the “oppressed” legitimises unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. For normal people, whose instincts are not numbed by ideology, the dissonance of cruelty clothed in kindness is disorientating. In 2021, Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, challenged use of the phrase “birthing person” to describe a pregnant woman. Fellow birthing professionals denounced her — in the name of kindness. As the attacks intensified and the language became increasingly violent, Milli lost her sense of reality, telling an interviewer: “Am I the person I think I am? Do I have this dark side that’s violent and hateful and toxic and all the things they say I am?”

Polish psychiatrist Andrew Lobaczewski, who spent his early life under Nazi occupation, analysed the political and psychological processes that generate this loss of reality. He called it ponerology, or the “the study of the origin of evil”. Collaborating, in secret, with a number of dissidents in post-war communist Poland, he sought to explain the “pathological inversion of a normal social hierarchy” in which “psychological deviants” take power and create a “pathocracy…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people”.

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This minority is the “pathological underbelly” present in every society, about 6% of the population, of which a tenth are psychopathic — characterised by grandiosity, narcissism, personal charisma, impaired moral and psychological reasoning, a systemic incapacity for self-criticism and the sadistic pursuit of pleasure. Under communist rule, Lobaczewski witnessed such people, riven with mediocrity and oblivious to their incompetence, become leading members of the party. As their grip on power tightened, one malignancy bred another, until academics, scientists and psychologists succumbed to communist ideology. They acted as if in possession “of some secret knowledge; in their eyes we became their former colleagues, still believing what the ‘professors of old’ had taught us”.

From Mao’s attack on the Four Olds — old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture — to the assault by critical race theorists on the universalism of the civil rights movement and the sublimation of antisemitism into support for Hamas atrocities, a defining factor of pathocracies is historical amnesia and psychological naievety. This allows for the separation of the “Old” from the “New”, and the metastatic transformation of what Lobaczewski called the “pathological underbelly” of society into the ruling elite.

In the West, progressive activists are denying their cultural dominance, despite using this dominance to shame, de-bank and destroy their enemies. They compete for status by aligning themselves with intersectional destitution to manufacture a world in which discrimination, inequality and climate deaths are increasing, when the evidence shows the opposite is true. Ultimately, elite pathocrats become totally isolated from the world of normal people. Their language becomes esoteric and they speak only to each other. The Polish philosopher Angnieszka Kolakowska described this descent into unintelligibility among Communist Party members as a defence mechanism: when they “feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon”, she wrote. “Their words simply fail to refer and the result is gibberish.”

Gibberish, in the mouths of elite pathocrats, becomes wisdom, creating a utopia of nonsense, detectable in sentences like this, from the activist Rosa Lee: “By remembering the metaphorical character of any scientific model, we can draw out the insights of the theory of performativity while putting it into conversation with our other Marxist metaphors.” The end point is “communisation, the transition to new communist selves”. The mystique of this language cements the separation of ideology from reality and pathological elites from the “normal man”. Faced with struggle sessions, shaming, bullying and violence — and fearing for their sanity — normal people lapse into silence, unable to comprehend the pathocratic trauma unleashed upon them. When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration.

When an individual is compelled to violate what she knows to be true, to substitute an ideological fantasy for reality, the result is psychological disintegration. Such a spectacle is a source of pleasure to the dominant elites for whom “forcing others…to feel and think like themselves becomes an internal necessity, a ruling concept”. This “necessity” can never be satiated. No level of deindustrialisation can cleanse the West of its “abuse” of Mother Earth, no ritualistic recitation of pronouns can redeem the “sins of the cis” and no atonement can ever be sufficient to repay the debt owed by the Jews for their “crimes”.

This impossibility of salvation makes sadism eternal.

This process is viscerally described in Juliette, a novel written by the Marquis de Sade. In it, the eponymous heroine meets Pope Pius VI and demands that he offer up a dissertation on murder. The Pope obliges, arguing that to commit murder is in accordance with Nature:

“from time immemorial, man has taken pleasure in shedding the blood of his fellow man and to content himself he has sometimes disguised this passion under a cloak of justice, sometimes under one of religion. But, and of this let there be no doubt, his purpose, his aim has always been the astonishing pleasure killing procures him.”

Ideology, in other words, is used to conceal the sadistic desires of the libertines, to legitimise the raw exercise of power. Normal, virtuous people are imprisoned, tortured, brutalised and killed by aristocrats, priests and popes — purely for the pleasure of it.

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Pathocrats who seek the collapse of open societies do everything they can to conceal the “astonishing pleasure” they get from having the power to punish. They do so by redefining concepts like “justice”, “safety” and “kindness” in a language accessible only to the elite. Like contemporary identitarian progressives, Sade’s libertines speak only to each other. This enables them to hide the sadistic psychology that drives them.

And because it is impossible to prove that people are thinking “correctly”, the elite’s desire can never be satisfied. Pathocrats and libertines cannot be appeased. In a futile attempt to appease her attackers, Milli Hill offered her online platform to a Bame birthing expert. For this, her accusers amplified her guilt by adding racism to the accusation of transphobia. They shamed her for not paying the Bame woman for her work, and accused her of being a “white saviour”. The simple fact of Hill’s continued existence was an irresistible invitation to degrade her further. But still, they cloaked their cruelty in the language of kindness. Lacking the courage of the Sadean libertine, her tormentors clung to their progressive ideology, for fear, as Lobaczewski observed, that without it “nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive”.

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Ideology has poisoned the West

By Jacob Howland

It’s that nakedness we see when a mob is implored to “punch a fucking Terf” or a Hamas terrorist decapitates a dying Jew with a garden hoe. Yet those who raise their fists in support are, without doubt, on “the right side of history” — that is, the winning side. Pathocrats almost always win, the few silencing the many, because it’s easier to be kind than to love.

If we are to survive this cruelty in the name of kindness, we need to separate what’s benign and beautiful in progressive ideologies from the pathological underbelly that’s overwhelmed them. We need to salvage tolerance and inclusion for all trans people from the attack on science and single-sex spaces undertaken in their name. We need to rescue the universalism of the civil rights movement from an anti-racism that reverses the terms of a malevolent racial hierarchy in the name of justice. We need to protect present and future generations from the consequences of environmental degradation without sacrificing the poor to gratify an apocalyptic vanity. And we need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.

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The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Lobaczewski concluded that normal people protest against pathocrats “from the depths of their own souls and their human nature”. They protest against the evisceration of their language, the denigration of their values and the unjustified status of the elites who govern them. If we allow pathocrats to control our institutions and corporations, the future will #BeKind.

We must remember that it’s their weakness, not their strength, that compels the pathocrats to silence dissent. As the anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer wrote: “No social system in which a tiny minority must govern without consent over a vast majority can afford to submit any part of control of communication.” To break their power means isolating the minority within the minority from the decent people who have become cruel out of fear, contagion and opportunism. In this struggle, we’ll find unexpected allies.

Having been one of the last prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed in July 1789, the Marquis de Sade later found himself in the improbable position of a revolutionary judge. When the family of his estranged wife, responsible for his long years of incarceration, were brought before him for judgement, he chose mercy and spared them from the guillotine, saying: “Such is the revenge I take upon them.”

Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.

To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.

It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.

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Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.

This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.

Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.

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It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.

In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.

All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.

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There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

Planned for the Serpukhov district south of Moscow, it is to be a home for Western expatriates who are tired of the “radical values” of their supposed democracies. “Today, they have 70 genders — and who knows what will come next,” Beslangurov reportedly told a conference in St Petersburg. He claims they have identified around 200 “normal people” to move there, mainly Christians fearing the end of their faith in the West.

There is already a small community of Westerners in Russia: some, such as Australian John Helmer, have been there since the Cold War, while others have emigrated more recently, including ex-cop and fugitive Floridian John Mark Dougan, who skipped town just as the FBI was about to arrest him on hacking charges. Even more have arrived in the past year, firmly picking a side in the war against Ukraine, as ex-US soldier John McIntyre did. This rump of foreigners is more critical to upholding President Vladimir Putin’s legitimacy than it is given credit for.

The Russian-based Canadian Eva Bartlett, for example, uses her social media channels to advance the idea that the fighting in Ukraine is a “US proxy war against Russia”, and that Western media and US intelligence agencies are covering up “the fact that Ukraine is committing genocide”. She vents to her 150,000 followers on Twitter, and another 32,000 on her Telegram channel, and is still promoted by far-Left groups in Canada. Meanwhile, Thomas Röper, the German-Russian editor of a pro-Russian blog, whose YouTube channel has 120,000 subscribers, has travelled throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine at the invitation of Moscow, even serving as an “international observer” for sham referendums held in the Donbas region.

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McIntyre, for his part, was initially fighting alongside the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, the unit defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Then, earlier this year, he deserted, only to pop up in Moscow not long after. He claims to have been spying for Russia from the very beginning.

Russia has been only too happy to give these figures a home and a platform. Bartlett and Röper are both frequent contributors to the RT propaganda network, and were also invited, alongside Dougan and several other Westerners, to testify before the International Public Tribunal on Ukraine: a series of hearings, run by a Russian government body in Moscow, that have accused Ukraine of war crimes and developing biological weapons.

In some cases, these influencers reinforce Russian foreign policy. Bartlett, for example, has toured Syria at the invitation of Bashar al-Assad, and helped peddle the idea that rebels and internationally respected medics launched chemical weapons attacks inside Syria, rather than the Syrian military. It’s a thoroughly debunked allegation that aligns closely with the obfuscation pushed by the Russian government and its client, al-Assad.

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The Prigozhin roadshow isn't over

By Aris Roussinos

In other cases, they reinforce the idea of Putin as a benevolent actor. Over the past year, the President’s personal future and the longevity of his kleptocratic regime have been shaken to the core: beset by a stalled invasion; destabilised by an aborted coup; and frustrated by the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens fleeing his partial mobilisation. Throughout it all, Moscow has tried to project not just strength and stability, but the idea that Russia is a guiding beacon for the rest of the world, a symbol of traditional values.

This certainly works in Africa and the Middle East, where Moscow’s social values, particularly around religion and sexuality, better reflect the cultural norms than does Western decadence. It also aligns well with the American and European Right. Tucker Carlson has frequently held up Putin as an antidote to America’s wokeness. In France, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have both, at various times, hailed Russian values. And Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has styled himself after the Russian dictator, lamenting that his nation is under assault by Western liberalism.

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All of this is to Putin’s benefit. The idea that Westerners themselves are validating Putin’s warnings about the moral decay and irreligious apostasy of Nato countries is useful to the Kremlin. The idea that some of those Westerners would come to Russia to fight, even die, for Putin’s political project is even more compelling.

Take Dougan. He told me last year that he planned to help train the Russian-backed separatists. “The Donetsk People’s Republic have captured a bunch of the Javelin missiles sent to them by the American government,” he told me on a video call from Moscow. “When I was in the United States Marine Corps, I happened to be an anti-tank assault man. And my goal is to teach them how to use these missiles to defend themselves… I’m going to give them a way to fight back.” While he declined to confirm if he ever actually went to train them, he did say that, more recently, he had trained with Chechen fighters. (“Those guys are awesome shooters,” he told me this week.)

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The West has, for now, opted to ignore this small cohort of Putin propagandists, probably just a few hundred strong. But even that small cohort wields outsize influence. And if it wanted to, could the West act against them? Western states do carry a legal prohibition of sorts on joining a foreign conflict, absent a declaration of war — these laws, however, are selectively and rarely enforced.

In March 2022, American law professor Dakota Rudesill called on the US government to offer some clarity as to who may, or not may not, run afoul of the Neutrality Act in Ukraine. That clarity never came. Rudesill tells me that it is still unclear whether it is legal to travel to Russia to join the fight. Given how much evidence has been posted on social media about these foreign volunteers, he says: “I am confident that a fair number of Americans who have joined the fight on both sides could be charged if the Justice Department as a matter of prosecutorial discretion decided to do so.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is unlikely to target anyone fighting alongside Ukraine. But, Rudesill says, a future administration could break with Biden’s pro-Ukraine stance. Without clarity on the law, he says, the Department of Justice could “start prosecuting Americans who have been resisting the invasion”.

Congress could modernise the law — both by updating the Neutrality Act to reflect modern realities, and by expressly forbidding Americans from joining foreign wars, while also specifically exempting those fighting for Ukraine. (Such a bill, to provide legal cover for the Ukrainian volunteers, has already been introduced in the House of Representatives.) The UK’s Foreign Enlistment Act, and similar legislation in its former colonies, is equally antiquated and selectively enforced, but still in effect.

There are other legal mechanisms to draw on. Western sanction laws are probably the most practical: many of those living and working in Russia are, almost certainly, in violation of them. The European Union has classified the Russian government as a state sponsor of terrorism, and there is a movement afoot to have the US follow suit. Such a designation would come with a spate of legal prohibitions. The United Kingdom is getting ready to classify Wagner Group as a terrorist entity, and other countries are considering following suit. That could mean anyone fighting alongside them could be prosecuted much like those who joined the Islamic State.

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Ukraine may also insist on trying some of the fighters for war crimes, even if they are American, Canadian or European. There is also some precedent in the country for prosecuting propagandists if they are found guilty of inciting genocide.

When the West was called upon to repatriate its citizens who had joined Islamic State and wreaked havoc in Syria and Iraq, it — by and large — shirked its responsibility. As a result, tens of thousands of foreigners have been left to rot in the Middle East. Some are former combatants, whom, even years later, Western governments are still disinterested in prosecuting. Others are women and children who had no hand in the fighting or brutal violence, and yet many states still refuse to take them back.

With this in mind, Western countries ought to clarify the situations in which their citizens could face prosecution for their participation in Putin’s war. This may, in some cases, be purely academic: they may simply never leave Russia again. But as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow showed, the Russian state may be less stable than we thought. And if the President were to fall, what would become of his useful idiots. Suddenly, that brand new Potemkin village might not look quite so appealing.

Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine. Any piece of it, such as racial justice, can make perfect sense, but the whole dissolves into incoherence when it becomes clear that the highest ideal, equity, is a weasel word used to mask an inability to reconcile opposites.

Definitions of equity, whether provided by the White House or by elite universities, are baffling, I suspect intentionally so. Terms such as “fairness” and “anti-racist” are thrown around — but somehow this adds up to “investment” and “allocating resources” favouring designated grievance groups. Equity, in practice, means absolute equality of outcomes in all transactions, measured not in the liberal tradition, between individuals, but harking back to a more primitive outlook: between castes to which we have been assigned by birth and fate.

How does this work? The first step is simple enough. Government must intervene in every transaction to assure equal outcomes. If white males have an average “privilege value” of 100 and black males have an average of, say, 50, the government must take from one and give to the other until both share the identical value of 75. But what of black women — shouldn’t they receive a higher multiple than black men? And what of many Asian-American groups that have achieved a higher average than white males — should they be downranked and de-grievanced? And what of more intangible factors such as education, a good marriage and family life, raw ability at work and play, a sense of humour, happiness? Can government make the “historically underserved” laugh and the overserved cry?

The purpose of ideology is to lay down rules of the road that lead to a specific vision of the just society. Identity is the opposite of that. Equity is just a three-syllable sound. It explains nothing and resolves nothing. Put aside obvious questions about regressing to a system of lineage-based justice that throws overboard the legacy of individual rights, or about the overwhelming display of state power required to impose that system on an unwilling public. I’m talking about pure functionality.

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Whatever identity is, it doesn’t do the work of an ideology. Stitched together from the bits and pieces of moribund ideas received by the educated class, identity exemplifies the contemporary preference for bowing to the applause of an imaginary audience over the hard work needed to connect two consecutive thoughts. The causes of this intellectual flabbiness are frankly puzzling. The more credentials we heap on ourselves, and the more information we gather, the less connected we seem to reality.

Unnoticed, a vast chunk of the context that once measured our well-being has crumbled away, leaving us sick at heart and disoriented. Suicide and drug overdose deaths are rising. Many who are ostensibly healthy have been sucked into the moral vacuum of digital politics, substituting vehemence for meaning, posturing for productive action. Now and then, some shallow misfit detonates into a massacre of innocent strangers. Nihilism, the will to destroy whatever stands, is the guiding instinct of the day. Ideology, let us not forget, is also a creed, a set of beliefs dependent on faith, as much as it is a system of ideas — and the sterility of our moment, of which identity is a pathological example, may be derived less from intellectual failure than from a chronic and agonising spiritual condition.

***

Every ideology worthy of the name envisions a perfect end-state: a utopia. The kingdom of God may be near at hand or far in time and distance, real or fantastic, but in every case it performs an important function: it engenders hope and faith. If only we play by the accepted rules, human relations — that cauldron of selfishness and misery — will at last be reconciled. After resurrection, Jesus preached, we will be “as the angels are in heaven”. Under pure communism, the brutal strength of the state will wither away and we will each be given according to our needs. American democracy, in its high modernist phase, aimed for the Great Society; under more conservative hands, it looked to be a shining city on a hill.

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In this sense, the cult of identity is exceedingly utopian: believers judge established institutions against perfection, then reject the lot. But this is a journey without a destination — utopianism without an actual utopia. Identity is an engine that runs on rage and repudiation. Deprived of a satanic enemy to rail against, it stalls. If Donald Trump retired tomorrow to a Trappist monastery, the zealots of identity would drag him back out. If all white males and other oppressors vanished in a great culling at the end of days, the whole point of “identity” would explode in a puff of smoke. If grievance groups existed only to express their own separateness, social life would fall apart in a rush.

In the dark heart of its repudiation, identity repudiates itself, denying, by a parasitical necessity, the possibility of progress. It can thrive only so long as injustice advances. The impulse, then, is to remain implacable, irreconcilable, striking blows against anything that stands, in an ecstatic frenzy of nihilism that, when properly understood, is a form of suicide.

Reality, of course, is a tad more prosaic. I recently encountered a young man at the supermarket. He was a mass of Zoomer hair and tattoos, and when he turned, in bold white letters on the back of his black hoodie, I read a defiant message: “RISE UP. RESIST. REVOLT. REBEL.” Below that, in more modest script, a warning: “To not speak up is death.”

I considered the meaning of this apparition. Rise up, resist, revolt, rebel — against what? Everyone and everything, I suppose. Speak up — on behalf of what? That was the wrong question. You speak up to resist, revolt, strike blows. You stand forever against. Yet there he was, this would-be destroyer of worlds, at the fruit counter, contemplating the cantaloupes. Apparently, even nihilists have appetites.

***

In The Will to Believe, William James observed that certain explanations about the nature of things are “live options” while others are “dead options”. James was a psychologist. He understood that history and culture condition the mind, driving many theoretically possible propositions out of consideration. Does the universe rest on the back of a turtle? That was once a live option, but no longer. Is there no God, only atoms? That statement will get you shot in Kabul but elicit yawns in Harvard Square.

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There has been, in the 21st century, a great slaughter of live options. Truth and knowledge are largely mediated: we receive them from some trusted authority. But trust in the mediators has utterly collapsed and a fatal crisis of authority has spread to every subject. We now dwell in the Tower of Babel. Hope and faith, under such conditions, must dissolve into a shrieking, incomprehensible noise. The mindless contradictions of the cult of identity, and the dismal poverty of our ideological imagination, follow directly from these disasters. Religion, patriotism, love of place and family — these are dead or dying options. Conservatism and liberalism, Right and Left, are tribal stickers detached from any serious content.

The path to Communist revolution, wrote Marx in the Manifesto, “involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas”. I was born into a world alive with hope and faith, fertilised by a running quarrel between ideas old and new. Utopia was not only possible; for many, it was inevitable. Revolution, these people thought, would purify the human race. Radical ideology was wholly oriented to that transcendent moment. In democracies, socialists and liberals believed we could get to the same place by peaceable stages. Artists and poets everywhere longed for the “bliss in that dawn” Wordsworth had experienced in Paris.

Then came the night. In December 1991, the Soviet Union went out of business. Rather abruptly, revolution became a dead option. The cry for it fell terminally quiet because faith was lost in its magical powers of transformation. Insofar as ideology had usurped the place of religion, the death of revolution was like the death of God. For radical thinkers, bereft and bewildered, deprived of direction, it felt like murder. A seething anger replaced coherent projects of political change. Pierre Rosanvallon describes the consequences of the end of “the idea of revolution”: “To be radical is to point a finger of blame every day; it is to twist a knife in each of society’s wounds. It is not to aim a cannon at the citadel of power in the preparation for a final assault.” Blaming and knife-twisting, I note, accurately describe the central rituals of the cult of identity, a post-utopian conduit for rage rather than change.

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A dead zone like the present moment might be conceived of as a great silence, a darkness, an emptiness that sucks the life out of new ideas. We emerge from nowhere and have no idea which way to turn — no idea whether the world is round or flat, whether it’s run by God or atoms, what words like “justice”, “integrity”, or “happiness” mean in practice. Every option at hand is either dead or in the process of dying. To attempt a coherent explanation of such a graveyard of dreams would be an exercise in despair. Anger at least has a pulse, and if intense enough feels like a facsimile of the spiritual life.

But all this, I think, amounts to a half-truth. The graveyard isn’t quite still. Dead options and failed ideologies twitch, moan and clutch at us zombie-like, stopping us in our tracks. We haven’t broken free from the past: just the opposite, we are overwhelmed by memory, so that our best thoughts have been thought before, and thought more brilliantly, and tested and exposed in their inadequacies. We seem to lie at the bottom of a century-deep well crushed by the weight and inertia of dead time, where we can accuse one another of being Nazis or fascists or communists, revolution lingers with its impossible promises, Ronald Reagan smiles over America, Jim Crow persecutes forever, and the Beatles perpetually top the charts. We aren’t empty but overfull. The Tower of Babel isn’t a silence but an unbearable noise.

The reflex to smash blindly at society, to obliterate the present and abolish the past, must be understood on these terms. Barbarism, with its true silence and true darkness, has acquired the aspect of utopia.

***

The last surge of ideological vitality in this country took place in the Sixties. That decade witnessed the rise of modern conservatism, destined to swell into a dominant political force in the Reagan years, and of the New Left that announced its arrival in the Port Huron Statement and, after many strange mutations, has become a sort of totemic ancestor to identity. The two movements were each other’s nightmare monster, yet in hindsight it’s remarkable how many goals and assumptions they shared. Both embraced history as an ally, not an enemy, for example. Both partook of that sense of infinite possibilities associated with the American frontier. In politics, both exhibited a Jeffersonian antipathy to state power and glorified a robust, almost anarchistic, individualism.

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Hippies and Goldwaterites had more in common than they knew, starting with the conviction that they were making the world over. A newborn ideology is a redrawing of the map — a radical shift in perspective. Doors suddenly swing open that have stood locked for an age. Everything is alive again, even the past, which isn’t repudiated so much as recruited and synchronised to the concerns of the present and future. No part of this need be destructive or nihilistic. It’s just a moving forward and a leaving behind.

Energy from these movements propelled American politics for many years, but inevitably the environment changed and momentum ran out. We are now stuck in the muck. We require explanations and aspirations that address the peculiar character of the digital age, and our inability to produce these is telling. Whatever their intrinsic worth, the ideologies of the Sixties were healthy attempts to change the world: they truly aimed at justice. Our sickness is that we speak of justice but we really crave meaning. We desperately wish to fill the spiritual void left by the decline of religion, community, and family, and when we engage in pseudo-ideological dabbling we are pleading on our own behalf, not that of society or the oppressed — we are praying to a silent heaven that our sickness might be healed. But that is not the province of ideology or politics.

Failure triggers blind rage and the barbaric urge to smash at the tokens of civilisation. This is our predicament, our closed loop. We begin the search for justice by gazing into the mirror of Narcissus but end it as the monster at the centre of the labyrinth.

We might ask how such a deformed and unsatisfying creed as the cult of identity has come to achieve the status of an established church. The answer isn’t hard to tease out. Identity justifies control by those who have lost authority. The institutional elites are held in contempt by the public. Their advice is rejected and their commandments ignored.

By wielding that fuzzy and mutable ideal, equity, the elites aim to regain control of policy and prosecutorial decisions — but also of the education of children, the research of scientists and scholars, the persons and opinions that will be tolerated online, the treatment of the poor and homeless, and ultimately, the words in the mouths and thoughts inside the heads of the common herd. As a bonus, they get to surf a wave of puritanical smugness. They can call dissenters “deplorables” and treat their dissent as a form of racism or homophobia. What could be better?

It may appear far-fetched to portray elite embrace of identity as a 2020s take on Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and in a way, it is. The digital realm is virtually infinite; that’s a lot of territory to conquer and hold down. My point, however, is that the ragged engine of identity has an open road ahead and will continue its suicidal rampage through American life until opposed by a coherent set of ideas.

On this issue, the Democratic Party assumes the mantle of righteousness. Who could oppose “life-saving” “gender-affirming care”? Who supports “conversion therapy”, which the Biden administration described as “a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people”?

The reality diverges sharply from the loaded language the Biden Administration deploys, lifting terms directly from the most radical trans activists occupying positions at the outermost extreme of an ongoing debate between different factions of gender clinicians.

The dispute over how best to treat gender-questioning children that the Biden Administration seeks to resolve by enshrining “gender-affirming care” and stigmatising “conversion therapy” boils down to whether or not clinicians regard the children in their care as exceptions to everything we know about child development, human biology, sexual orientation, and more. Attending closely to the language of the activists with whom the Biden Administration has sided provides a masterclass in how to manipulate language to normalise risky and invasive medical intervention on a class of people — children — who are widely understood to be unable to provide consent in other contexts.

For exploratory providers, a child’s transgender identification is the beginning of a clinical inquiry that will travel through the individual patient’s biography, their social context, and the templates the culture at large offers that young patients use to make sense of suffering. Nothing magical or transformative happens when a patient experiences gender dysphoria or expresses a transgender identity. Children and adolescents remain children and adolescents. Clinical practice does not overthrow itself when a young patient changes her pronouns.

For affirmative clinicians, on the other hand, the declaration of a transgender identity and the desire for a particular gender presentation suffice. That’s what affirmation means: no further inquiry required. A transfer of loyalty takes place when affirmative clinicians are confronted with “trans” children and adolescents: clinicians’ sense of responsibility shifts from the patient in front of them to the patient’s transgender “alter”. Doctor and patient then collude to slice and drug the patient’s body into compliance with the new identity regime.

Across the Atlantic, countries such as Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom are stepping back and shifting away from hormones and surgeries and toward exploratory psychotherapy as evidence of harm mounts. It’s remarkable that the United States government has chosen this moment to double down, without reference to serious inquiries underway at home and abroad.

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Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.

To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.

Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?

Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.

That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.

What about sex and sexual orientation? As recently as the mid-2000s, medical providers understood cross-sex identification in childhood and adolescence to be a normal stage of homosexual development, resolving in the majority of cases as the child moved through adolescence and became comfortable with his or her sexual development and sexual orientation. Long before the concept of gender identity took root, the idea of being “born in the wrong body” resonated with many young gays and lesbians — not to mention medical providers, who viewed homosexuals as “inverts” in need of psychological or surgical “correction”.

Affirmative providers overlook, downplay, or outright deny the overrepresentation of same-sex attracted youth among youth seeking transition. But clinicians who rate the “gender presentation” of “transgender” preschoolers on a scale from stereotypical girl (fitted, sparkly, frilly) to stereotypical boy (baggy, sporty) inevitably sweep up children whose rejection of gender stereotypes is rooted in their same-sex orientation. Affirmative providers such as Diane Ehrensaft argue that “prototransgender youth use [same-sex] sexual identity as a stepping-stone toward their transgender true gender self”, a rhetorical move that overwrites the connection between homosexual development and gender dysphoria, and equates accepting your same-sex sexual orientation with pursuing irreversible medical interventions.

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Much like their views on same-sex attraction as a “stepping stone” toward a young person’s “transgender true gender self”, affirmative providers treat just about any mental health comorbidities as secondary to gender dysphoria. Suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, anorexia nervosa, depression, anxiety, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, experiences of sexual abuse and trauma, and substance abuse aren’t taken as reasons to question or delay transition but instead are treated as evidence for the need to accelerate transition.

In order to grease the skids, affirmative providers have invented or adapted a wide range of new medical concepts, all of which operate to obscure what they do from the public and from providers themselves,  scrambling the complex clinical presentations they need to parse — and manipulating patients, parents, and policymakers. These concepts include “wrong puberty”, “sex assigned at birth”, “reconstructive surgeries”,  and “internalised transphobia”.

Reconceptualising patients as “wrongly sexed” (thus in need of reconstructive relief) and giving allegiance over to the patient’s transgender “alter” over the physical patient and her social and medical history skew clinical assessments and lower clinicians’ barriers to providing experimental medical interventions. Girls become “boys”, not in reality, but in the way gender clinicians talk about reality. Elective double mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys”. Exploratory therapy to understand where distress over sex and gender originates becomes “conversion therapy,” something no ethical clinician would practice. Drastic, life-altering medical interventions — such as “pausing” puberty and all the cognitive, physical, and emotional development that goes along with it — become conceptualised as non-interventions on the one hand, “life-saving” on the other. In any case, language becomes detached from reality, skewing risk analysis.

This language of determined identities and autonomous “people” speak to the way affirmative clinicians see their role: deferring to patient self-identification and facilitating hormonal and surgical interventions to bring patients’ bodies in line with how they want to “wear their gender”, Meanwhile, activists inside the medical profession push for policy changes to lower the age at which minors can consent to transition — a priority of the forthcoming guidelines from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — and remove requirements for parental assent. California legislators are on the verge of passing a bill that would equate denial of “gender-affirming care” with child abuse, a move advocates say would turn California into a “sanctuary state” for trans-identifying children.

Ask for stronger evidence or stricter safeguarding measures and you’ll get an earful about suicide and self harm: affirmation is a “matter of life and death.” (Never mind that researchers had to cook bad survey data at extremely high temperatures in order to make such dire claims.)

Affirmative clinicians frequently compare gender dysphoria to endocrine conditions such as diabetes. Take Johanna Olson-Kennedy, dismissing the need to explore the causes of a young person’s distress over gender: “I don’t send someone to a therapist when I’m going to start them on insulin”. Never mind that medical providers can test for diabetes (and monitor whether the treatment is working), while relying on patient testimony to initiate medical transition. Never mind that untreated diabetes kills. Analogies to cancer also abound, especially when clinicians need to justify serious risks like permanent loss of fertility and the very real possibility that patients will lead shorter, sicker lives after medical transition. Ask clinicians and they’ll tell you that gender dysphoria, like cancer, is a life-threatening condition. In the absence of supporting evidence, this is emotional extortion, nothing more.

Affirmative clinicians evade the possibility of regret and detransition. They prefer to talk about “gender fluidity” or “gender journeys”— “journeys” that may include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and elective double mastectomies. Journeys that could not and should not have been avoided, in other words.

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Affirmative providers also cleave to a narrow set of explanations about why patients experience regret and detransition, pinning regret and detransition on lack of social support for the patient’s transgender identification. By placing the blame on factors outside the medical system, providers avoid the suggestion that regret and detransition may be the result of inadequate evaluation or inappropriate medical interventions. This interpretation also keeps patients firmly within the ideological framework that underlies affirmative care. Under this framework, a patient remains “really transgender”, even if external factors conspire to keep the patient from living out that identity. Even if the patient disavows their transgender identity entirely.

***

If affirmative providers’ belief in the exceptional “transgender” child bears out, we can make a strong case for affirmation. But if this belief is merely an article of faith, nothing more, clinicians risk doing serious harm to their patients under the banner of affirmation. In other words, if gender-dysphoric children and adolescents are truly exceptions to everything we know about identity formation, child and adolescent development, how humans make sense of distress and their susceptibility to social influence, the role of sexual orientation in gender dysphoria, and more, then affirmation may be the right approach.

But what if supporters of gender-affirming care are wrong?

What if children who identify as transgender are just that: children? What if they hurt, like other children? What if they’re trying to figure themselves out and learn how to navigate the strange world they live in, like other children?

What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.

These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairy tales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies’. Adults who should know better — adults who do know better — have made these children impossible promises.

Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?

There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional — the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure — because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.

The word “ideology” is often used as a synonym for political ideas, a corruption of language that conceals its fundamentally anti-political character. In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech. While voice registers private feelings — think of animal purrs and yelps — speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.

But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as “the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for”. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.

It follows that the ideological synthesis remains incomplete until the programme of action is implemented. Marx famously claimed that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. But Marx, whose broad classical education informed his great critique of capitalism, remained at the level of philosophy. His interpretation of history achieved its stated end only when it was put into practice, however crudely, by Communist revolutionaries, starting with Lenin. By his own standards, Marx’s philosophy cannot be cleanly separated from the historical depredations of Marxism.

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By Jacob Howland

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideology’s focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.

Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of God’s creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.

Descartes prophesied a future in which “the common good of all men” would be secured by “an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth”, and by the elimination of “an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind”. Should biological science ever eliminate death due to “the infirmities of old age”, as he dared to hope, what would likely be a fresh earthly hell would render the question of the afterlife largely moot. Here, too, an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation.

But there is a deeper and more important connection between ideology and technology. Ideology is in fact a social technology. The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartes’s infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives. (Marx imagined a leisurely existence spent fishing, hunting, and philosophising, although philosophising would presumably be pointless when the world no longer needs changing.) This unscientific hypothesis is then tested on actual human subjects.

In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. What happens when violent protestors are encouraged to riot in our cities, crimes go unprosecuted, and bails are waived? Or biological males are permitted to use women’s restrooms and live in their cellblocks? Or schoolchildren are indoctrinated with identity politics, while professors are required to pledge support for diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas as a condition of employment? Or borders are thrown open to illegal immigrants who enjoy privileges and benefits not extended to citizens? No sensible person would want to find out. But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.

History is littered with examples of malicious ideological experiments, which in good Baconian form observe nature — in this case, human nature — not “free and large”, but “under constraint and vexed… forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded”. What is to my knowledge the first such experiment occurred after the Athenians were starved into submission at the end the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, when the Spartans installed an oligarchy known as the Thirty. The regime was led by Plato’s aristocratic cousin Critias, who flattered himself with the thought that he was a greater philosopher, statesman, and poet than his illustrious ancestor Solon. In Plato’s dialogue Charmides, Critias advances a vacuous conception of rule by a “science of sciences” — an ancient prototype of idéologie, which Tracy considered to be a “theory of theories”. According to Lysias, an eyewitness, the Thirty proposed “to purge the city of unjust men, and to turn the rest of the citizens toward virtue and justice” by restoring what they claimed was the ancestral Athenian constitution. The oligarchs proceeded to disenfranchise, disarm, and expel large segments of the population and finally to rob and murder their political opponents, putting to death roughly 1,500 Athenians — perhaps 3% of the citizen body.

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The ideological tyranny of the Thirty left no lasting mark outside of Athens. This was not the case with Communism and Nazism, which also disenfranchised, robbed, deported, and murdered large numbers of people, but did so with modern managerial and industrial efficiency. As Alain Besançon observes in his short but indispensable book A Century of Horrors, these ideologies had much in common. They both aimed to achieve a perfect society by eliminating the evil that hindered its creation. They claimed to seek the good, either of the German people or of all mankind. They used pseudo-sciences like dialectical materialism and race-based eugenics to justify and wield their power. Most important, they claimed the right to kill, and did so on an unprecedented scale.

The Nazis murdered roughly 17 million unarmed civilians, not including those who died in aerial bombings and other ordinary acts of war. After almost 80 years, historians are still compiling a list of ghettoes and camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. As of March 2013, the total number identified by researchers stood at 42,500. But here as elsewhere, the National Socialists were students of the Marxist ones. It was the Soviets who invented and systematised the use of combination slave-labour and death camps, and the concentrationary universe of the Gulag covered an even greater geographical area than the Nazi Lagers. Lenin and Stalin also anticipated Hitler in the use of poison gas (including mobile gas vans), mass deportation, and, in the great famines of 1921-22 and 1930-33, targeted starvation to liquidate what Lenin called “harmful insects”.

The Black Book of Communism estimates that Communist regimes murdered between 85 and 100 million of their own people during the 20^th century, fulfilling the eerie prophecy in Dostoevsky’s Demons that socialism’s cure for the world’s ills would involve “lopping off a hundred million heads”. And while Besançon regards the Holocaust as the “absolute zero” of murderous intensity, he rightly observes that “communism brought about a more widespread and deeper moral destruction” than Nazism. Thoroughly discredited by the Holocaust, Nazism exited the world stage in 1945, but Communism officially endures today in China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Marxism furthermore remains a respectable alternative to capitalism in the eyes of many Westerners, even including some who acknowledge the aforementioned facts. This is itself due, in large measure, to the ideological distortion and suppression of history.

Ideology’s most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the “Totalitarianism Lite” of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.

Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called “mute coercion”. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of “victims” and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of “oppressors”. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme — denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists — must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.

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This war can save liberalism

By Francis Fukuyama

In modern times, the template for the use of violence in the name of the highest political and moral ideals was established in the French Revolution. Marching under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Revolution took less than five years to move from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Terror of Robespierre and the genocidal destruction of the Vendée, a French Department where the Revolutionaries responded to a peasant rebellion by slaughtering roughly 15% of the population. The trajectory from utopian fervour to nihilistic bloodshed, traversed over the past century in countries scattered across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is unsurprising. One could hardly expect a programme of radical social transformation that demonises its opponents to be free of bloodshed.

Anyone who thinks that the United States could not descend into similarly horrifying violence is deluded. Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that infects people who are morally immunocompromised, and today it poses a far greater threat to human beings than any merely biological virus. It always attracts thugs, sadists, and those who lust for power, groups that, once revolutionary fervour gives way to dictatorship, always outnumber true believers. But it also exploits the universal human longing for social validation and fear of being cast out. These risk factors are exponentially amplified by the tribalising social and news-media feedback loops that now fill the vacuum left by a permanent moral order, inherent in nature or revealed by God —notions that, owing to the seductions of technology, were arguably doomed at modernity’s inception.

The inevitable consequence of ideological infection is brain rot. Besançon justly remarks that “it is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology”. Intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy. Nor can it take root in the sterile soil of widespread cultural repudiation. This is why all ideological regimes are without exception plagued by sheer ineptitude.

Just consider: the anti-Jewish decrees of April 1933 stripped a quarter of Germany’s physicists of their livelihood, including 11 who had earned or would earn Nobel prizes, and left German research in atomic physics in shambles—  a lucky break for the Allies. Trofim Lysenko, a barely literate agronomist who won Stalin’s ear, vilified the work of the geneticist Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, as “fascist, bourgeois-capitalistic, and inspired by clerics”. Thousands of biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed for opposing Lysenko’s crackpot theories, which exacerbated famines that killed many millions of people in the U.S.S.R. and China (where Mao adopted his methods in the Fifties). Up to 70% of the U.S.S.R.’s active engineers were arrested and sentenced without trial in 1930, while Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan to build heavy industry was in full swing. Not to be outdone, China has now painted itself into a corner with its brutally tyrannical zero-Covid lockdowns, which immiserated its population and destroyed the economy but cannot be fully lifted without destroying the credibility of the Communist Party.

And then there is the gross incompetence of the Biden administration. While ideologically-induced stupidity may not fully explain this phenomenon, it’s a huge contributing factor. The administration’s ineptitude is already provoking what looks to be a strong political backlash, and if we are very, very lucky, we may be able to avoid major disasters before the 2024 elections. But a new government will make little difference. The rot has penetrated every essential institution in the United States, and the long-term picture is bleak. Nor is there solace in the fact that we Americans are by no means alone. Whoever said misery loves company wasn’t thinking about the ideological endgame of liberal democracy.

This may sound like the words of a liberal internationalist. But they come from Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the anti-immigration, Right-wing populist party, the Sweden Democrats. In the past he has equivocated when asked whether he preferred Putin to Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden. But four days after the onset of Russia’s invasion, speaking to Sweden’s parliament, his tone was unflinching.

Many Right-wing leaders have shifted their rhetoric since the start of the war. Marine Le Pen first downplayed Russia’s threat to Europe and described Putin as a force for good, only to then call Russia’s invasion “condemnable”. In Italy, Lega Party leader, Matteo Salvini, supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea, opposed retaliatory EU sanctions, and praised Russia’s government for “working for its people’s interests”. But he eventually condemned Putin and “Russian aggression”.

The shifts in rhetoric offer insight into their values, as well as the challenges facing their loudest opponents. Indeed, as the far-Right distances itself from Putin in varying degrees of about-face, centrist commentators are pouncing. The Times of Israel claimed Russia’s invasion “plunged far-Right movements across Europe into an identity crisis, as they struggle to square their loyalty to Vladimir Putin with the public’s overwhelming solidarity with Kyiv”, leaving the far-Right in a “pickle”. The Japan Times and the Times of India ran the same report calling it a “quagmire”, while the New York Times said Europe’s nationalists were “squirming”.

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Commentators such as prominent Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe were more prescriptive than descriptive in their characterisations. As she wrote for an American audience: “To the people who think… that trans people are made up, that ‘cancel culture’ has gone too far, that ‘men should be men and women should women’ — congratulations, you agree with Putin. You are his ideological ally.” CNN columnist Frida Ghitis went further in theorising coherence and consistency between Russia’s invasion and the agendas of Western rightists, linking Putin with Marine Le Pen’s reach for the French presidency and even Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase and transform Twitter. “We’re all witnessing the great challenge of our times play out around us,” she concludes.

Two agendas seem to drive much of this commentary. The first, revealed in comments such as Ioffe’s, is strategic opportunism: to use public opinion about foreign policy to advance a domestic political effort. Link local cultural conservatives to the unpopular Putin via alleged ideological commonalities, and you make conservatism less appealing.

The second is more psychological. It has to do with convincing yourself that the people you oppose in one context are also your enemies in all others: to declare the universality of your ideological map, and to extinguish all suspicion that You and They might look at a single consequential political development and feel the same way about it. It may be an outgrowth of the Left’s enduring insistence that its visions and campaigns (minority rights, environmentalism, anti-Imperialism, etc.) will all smoothly integrate in a political universe suited to mass management, where ideological consistency and coherence reign.

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Ukraine has split the far-Right

By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson

Ideological consistency is elusive among the far-Right — a fact the Left likes to point out, without understanding its implications. But it’s worth understanding the nuances of the far-Right’s worldviews and values, which vary and are at times mutually irreconcilable. If we were to divide Europe’s ultra-nationalists into two camps, we would see, on the one side, more moderate reformers who tend to endorse cultural nationalism, philosemitism, and pro-democratic liberal chauvinism opposite hardline idealists lurching toward ethnonationalism, anti-Semitism, cultural conservatism, explicit anti-liberalism, and authoritarianism.

However, perhaps counterintuitively, “liberal” nationalists have produced some of the more tepid criticisms of Russia’s invasion. One example is that blond bombast Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom, who has long claimed that liberalism, rather than conservatism, motivates his opposition to immigration on the grounds that Muslims threaten feminism, gay rights, and democracy. And yet that ostensible commitment to core liberal values has seldom inspired opposition toward anti-liberal Putin. Even in the weeks following the invasion, Wilders’s previously qualified endorsement of the Russian leader has mostly gone quiet as he opposes sanctions and spreads talking points of the Russian state in his media channels.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of far-Right parties in Eastern Europe who embrace ultraconservatism while opposing Putin. The Alliance for the Union of Romanians and Latvia’s National Alliance, which have both always been hyper-conservative and anti-Russian — this has accelerated since February 24, with the National Alliance, for instance, proposing to deny residency to Russian citizens in Latvia. Meanwhile, the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia — once mildly supportive of Putin — not only switched its tone but has been supporting proposed energy embargoes. And the European country with one of the most robust records of action in support for Ukraine, its neighbour Poland, is led by Andrzej Duda, an ultraconservative sprung from the Law and Justice party, who pursued dramatic curtailing of abortions, gay rights, and immigration.

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Political sympathy toward Russia, in other words, is not tracking with far-Right parties’ attitudes toward liberalism. Their reactions, instead, appear plainly related to whether they feel directly threatened by Russian military expansion. When facing an existential crisis (Poland), or seeing historic antagonisms revived (Sweden, Finland), they care little for talk of ideology.

So while centrists see strategic and idealistic reasons to criticise the far-Right now, their attacks may be short-sighted. With Western economic and military coalitions being tested — and with calls from some on the Left for Ukraine to surrender, uttered with an aloofness resembling liturgy more than political analysis — far-Right parties may provide vital reinforcement. This is true even beyond Baltic states and Poland. In Sweden, for instance, the Sweden Democrats not only voted in favour of sending arms to Ukraine, but also altered their stance on Nato membership early in response to Russia’s invasion, bolstering the cause and with it the likelihood that Russia ends this conflict geopolitically weakened. Matteo Salvini, meanwhile, pledged early support for Ukrainian refugees — a move that observers speculated might have been a tactic to outflank a political threat from the Right ahead of elections next year, from the ascendent Brothers of Italy party, who are vocally pro-Ukraine.

But a deeper challenge beckons, that of resigning ourselves to the possibility that certain circumstances might align us with our political opposites. Grievances often levied against the far-Right in the West — about its anti-democratic sentiment; disinformation; a coarsened political discourse; fetishes for state violence — take a different shape today. Confrontation with Russia calls us to question whether the internal fights we have in Western politics really do span the ideological spectrum as we like to think, or whether we curse each other while huddled in the corner of a vaster terrain. When presented with actual violence instead of symbolic violence, and war crimes instead of word crimes, we may find we have less time for things like ideology.

Thrasymachus is directly acquainted with Athenian justice. He was a citizen of Chalcedon, one of over 100 subject-cities of Athens in the late 5th century. The imperial yoke so chafed the Chalcedonians that they revolted in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. The results were predictably bad.

Besieged by Athenian forces, the Chalcedonians were saved in 408 by the satrap Pharnabazus, who paid off the aggressors with Persian coin. In the Republic, which unfolds against the backdrop of these historical events, Thrasymachus is brought to a hard boil of indignation by the ridiculous spectacle of two Athenians, of all people, agreeing that it is never just to harm anyone. He interrupts the philosopher Socrates — for he is one of the Athenians — with astonishing belligerence.

Thrasymachos (Bold in Battle) knows that politics is nothing but domination and servitude, and that everything is political. He also thinks Socrates and his interlocutor are either fools or hypocrites, and Socrates in any case deserves scorn as he is a lowly craftsman, a stonecutter and intellectual amateur, whereas Thrasymachus’s professional knowledge and political office — he represented Chalcedon in diplomatic negotiations with the Athenians — place him in the ranks of the elite.

Thrasymachus polices Socrates’ language, forbidding him to offer certain answers to the question “What is justice?” An expert in the field of politics and an early practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion, he is certain that Socrates aims only to obscure the truth with specious arguments. He is therefore perfectly entitled to restrict his means of doing so.

Thrasymachus is quite the familiar character. Our highest-ranked universities have been training and credentialing his descendants for decades. He is more aggressive than inquisitive. His ideas are more precise than accurate, more critical than enlarging. His embrace of intellectual fashion springs in no small part from ambition. His combination of indignation, cynicism, social and intellectual elitism, and proclivity to abstract and totalising constructions is today unavoidable. He is the ancient ancestor of the contemporary ideological technocrat; types like him have recently flooded the political mainstream, altering the character of virtually every part of American life. They are the bitter fruit of an illiberal education.

By ideology, I’m referring to a reductive political theory that, when implemented, is incapable of securing the free and informed assent of the governed and so must rely on extensive fraud and compulsion. By technocrat, I mean someone belonging to a regime in which claims of scientific or technical expertise override traditional kinds of political authority and substitute for political debate.

Technocracy and ideology are intimately connected. Technocracy is necessarily ideological, for while the management of abject slaves may perhaps be reducible to a science, the governance of a political community — one in which free citizens share in the determination of public affairs — is not. Politics, a continual process of public deliberation and negotiation in the light of the available facts, engages and exercises the capacities of practical reason. It is a school of virtue, capable, at its best, of dignifying and ennobling human existence. Technocrats, though, regard human existence as a problem to be solved or a sickness to be cured; knowledge and agency belong almost exclusively to them, who approach the ignorant like surgeons preparing to operate on a patient.

Equally, ideology is very often technocratic. It is almost invariably so in late modernity, an era infatuated with what is unreflectively called Progress — the advancement and practical application of science. But the mixture of ideology and scientific expertise generates pseudo-sciences, such as Leninist dialectical materialism, which are used to consolidate and justify despotism. In this, as in other respects, modern ideological tyrannies trace their ancestry, as Karl Popper showed 80 years ago in The Open Society and its Enemies, to Callipolis, the Republic’s infamous city of philosopher-kings.

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The prototype of all scientific tyrannies, Callipolis deceives, manipulates, and constantly surveils its citizens; its very name, Noble and Beautiful City, is a lie. The regime claims to achieve perfect justice for all, offering what Karl Marx, in another context, called a “solution to the riddle of history”. Although radical technocratic and ideological responses to that riddle seem to lead only to final solutions, the nightmare of total scientific control in the name of justice and human liberation continues to stalk the West like a zombie horde.

The United States remains a constitutional republic, but technocratic progressivism threatens its future as a representative democracy. It is telling that, in the mouths of the governing elites, the word “democracy” no longer refers to government of, by, and for the people, but to progressive policies that are endorsed by credentialed experts yet have little popular support. And now we must contend with a monstrous union of science and politics that lames and deforms both.

Consider government responses to Covid. At the outset of the pandemic, a handful of unelected public health officials immediately began to advise and direct policy decisions of enormous consequence. Our elected officials in the US, trembling before these scientific experts, have followed their recommendations with little consideration of the cost that lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and the like exact on the economic and political well-being of the country and the mental and physical health of its citizens. Similar measures were adopted across the globe.

Americans have from the beginning been told to follow the science, but the science has mostly followed politics. In June 2020, for example, over 1,200 medical and health professionals signed a letter arguing that, despite the high risk of viral transmission, prohibitions then in force on small gatherings like church services should not apply to large (and frequently destructive and violent) demonstrations protesting what the authors called “the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. And when the science pointed toward the likely origin of Covid in a Wuhan lab, top health officials conspired — for political reasons — to smother that news.

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More ominously, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the corporate media have acted, and continue to act, as willing handmaids of our public health officials. They have eagerly embraced the role of Covid censors, monitoring and restricting debate, dissent, and the flow of information — the lifeblood of all knowledge, and, in Tocqueville’s view, the last bulwark against complete servitude to the new form of oppression he called “administrative despotism”. Public speech is now substantially mediated by digital technology, whose constantly expanding and probably irreversible influence on our lives is a unique feature of contemporary technocracy.

Digital technology has amplified and accelerated the politicisation of almost everything, including scientific inquiry. Researchers who publish findings or explore questions that run afoul of progressivist ideology are regularly attacked by social-media mobs and can expect little support from the leaders of their universities and academic organizations, some of which, like Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, have formally institutionalised censorship. The situation has drawn thoughtful and informed comparisons with the Soviet Union, where engineers, physicists, geneticists, linguists, and others were purged from the academy for practicing “bourgeois science.”

This is not all. For technocracy and technology exacerbate the worst characteristics of late-stage democracy, a transitional period that Plato illuminates with prophetic clarity. His description of the growth of tyranny in the midst of democracy cuts close to the bone today.

In the Republic’s grand arc of political decline, democracy emerges from oligarchy, a regime ruled by stingy and avaricious money-makers. Oligarchy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The children of the wealthy are “used to luxury and unaccustomed to labors in body and soul, weak in resisting pleasures and pains, and idle”. The old misers are furthermore happy to make loans to this spoiled cohort. This produces a class of indebted and dishonored young men “hating and plotting against those who acquired their property, and all the rest, and longing for political change”.

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The revolutionary longing of these frustrated and dispossessed elites finds fulfillment in democracy, which is characterised by freedom and free speech, personal license, the indulgence of criminals, the neglect of education, and the equality of equals and unequals alike. License and leveling go hand in hand, because the acknowledgment of fundamental differences between what is noble and base, good and bad, hinders the unrestricted satisfaction of individual desire. The democratic man turns a deaf ear to the admonishments of older relatives and banishes shame and moderation, calling them foolishness and cowardliness.

The desire for limitless freedom eventually becomes insatiable, especially among the young, who attack customary restraints with sacred fervour. Rulers who resist are accused of being religiously polluted, while obedient citizens are vituperated as willing slaves and nonentities. Anarchy pervades the polity and enters the household. Fearing vilification, fathers capitulate to their sons, while sons have no fear or shame before their parents. Rulers imitate the ruled and the old come down to the level of the young, flattering them “so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic”. The condemned carry on like free men, foreigners are treated like citizens, and the souls of the people become soft and tender and unable to bear anything that smacks of servitude.

In the end, ancestral customs and written laws lose all authority, and the city is governed by the most ferocious among the idle sons of the oligarchs — the ones who had longed for political change under the regime of their fathers. These rulers seize the wealth of the money-makers, the class that is most invested in civic order, keeping the lion’s share for themselves and distributing the rest to the poor.

In the Republic, we see the present in an ancient mirror. The radicalisation of the children of the elites; the repudiation of ancestral customs, political traditions, parental and educational authority, and the very idea of sacred order; the normalisation of previously illicit pleasures; and the weakening of civil rights are all features of contemporary American life. So are the vehement shaming and scapegoating of political opponents; clemency toward criminals amid a surge of lawlessness; the enrichment of the ruling class, destruction of the middle class, and increased dependency of the poor; the fragility and unwonted aggressiveness of the young; and the fatuousness and cowardliness of the old. Is this not astonishing?

But these ills are now supercharged by technocracy, which is perfectly compatible with democratic passions even if it is incompatible with representative democracy. There is currently no shortage of “scientific” support for the liberation of human beings from the constraints of nature and custom alike.

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Wesley Yang recently used his Year Zero substack to draw attention to a 2019 USA Today article that cites policies adopted by the American Medical Association in 2018 to substantiate its claim that feminists who resist the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces, including restrooms and athletic competitions, “deny transgender people their full humanity and go against what the medical community today has accepted as scientific fact around gender and sex”. The arguments of these “transphobic” feminists get no mention; the exclusionary position is summarily dismissed on the ground that it violates an implicit and newly minted right to “full humanity”— a term that can mean whatever those who claim that right want it to mean.

This example illustrates the invidious political dynamic of our time. Having begun to condemn great masses of Americans as scientifically illiterate bigots, our self-appointed guardians find themselves on a road from which there is no exit. Turning political disagreements into occasions for public shame and vilification has failed to produce the desired alignment of public opinion. It has only emboldened the opposition, whose refusal to be silenced has been met with increasingly heavy-handed controls. Extreme democratic passions have paradoxically fuelled the anti-democratic takeover of the public square.

Read in the twilight of the present, the great books of the past disclose new meanings. The Republic’s Cave Image offers a chilling prophecy of the human terminus, the total triumph of ideological technocracy in the age of advanced technology.

Chained prisoners facing the bottom of a cave watch a play of shadows on the cold wet wall beneath them. The shadows are cast by puppets manipulated in front of a flickering fire by men above and behind them, players in a rigged game of whose existence the prisoners know nothing. Living in social quarantine, they cannot move their heads and have never seen a human face, never directly encountered another existing individual. All they know of themselves and one another is mediated by the shadows of artificial things: dark, flat, uniform, fundamentally negative shapes, abstract forms not of light but of its absence.

These shadows — today limned by an electronic glow — tell only the official story, the thin and impoverished “narrative”, that the puppet masters, competing for money, power, and honour, wish to project.

This whole human tragedy will be complete, the dying embers will sputter and smoke, when not a single person in this dank and gloomy underground — not one prisoner or puppeteer — has any remaining inkling that, on the sunlit uplands above and beyond their poor constructions, there is a warm, vibrant, colourful, three-dimensional, naturally ordered organic world. The one that was once called reality.

The single quote on the front cover was stark, “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.”

Our new issue is here! On the cover—'Periods on display' and the cultural movement against menstrual shame and #PeriodPoverty.

Plus, @WHO air quality guidelines, low #BackPain management, community-acquired bacterial #meningitis, and more. Read: https://t.co/eP1Lx7D116 pic.twitter.com/DchfiHnYEs

— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 24, 2021

Not even, “people with vaginas”, though that would have been bad enough. The Lancet has now gone beyond the appalling language — “people who menstruate” — that so upset JK Rowling last year.

The excerpt came from a review of an exhibition on the history of menstruation by Sophia Davis, but my complaint is not with her — she used the words woman and women five times in her piece. My concern is that this specific quote was chosen to be used so provocatively on the cover.

The Lancet — one of the world’s oldest and best-known medical journals — is on a mission. The publication might claim that “improving lives is the only end goal,” but editor Richard Horton has grand plans. His vision, which he laid out in 2016 is political revolution.

“The idea of the Lancet was born at an extraordinary moment in the history of the world in the early 19^th century which was a moment of political revolution and social revolt. We have to capture that idea every single day in what we do… What I think we’re trying to achieve now is to capture that original idea – the essence of who we are, our identity, in these campaigns that we are developing.”

This journal is of course no stranger to controversy. In 1998, it published Andrew Wakefield’s now notorious article that linked the MMR vaccine with chronic enterocolitis and autism. By the time that paper was retracted — 12 years later — children had been harmed. According to Public Health England, “It had an important impact on MMR coverage which dropped to about 80% nationally in the late nineties and early 2000s and took many years to recover. … Measles cases continued to rise and in 2006 endemic transmission became re-established in the UK.”

Horton has strayed over the line from medicine into politics repeatedly, covering for example the invasion of Iraq and the conflict in Gaza. While he has been quick to challenge the UK government over the response to Covid-19, he has been rather more forgiving of the Chinese authorities.

It is perhaps no wonder that he has waded into one of the most charged political debates of our time: the material reality of flesh and blood. Yes, some people struggle with their bodies — for any number of reasons, but we can never be divorced from them.

The egregious quote might lead us to think that Horton believes otherwise. Does he really think that “bodies with vaginas” are as peripheral to humanity as, say, cars with a hatchback: mere perambulating devices that transport our metaphysical essence from place to place?

If so, he would be replacing modern science with Gnosticism, a heresy that stretches back much further than the founding of The Lancet in 1823. So ancient in fact, that it was first refuted by Ignatius of Antioch who died around 110 CE.

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By Mary Harrington

In the early second century, Gnostics separated the spiritual from the material. They held that matter was evil and the spirit good. Their focus was on the person of Jesus Christ — claims were made that he did not have a real body but only an apparent or phantom one — and a hope of salvation that came through esoteric knowledge, or gnosis.

There are strong parallels today in the debate over sex and gender. Adherents of what has become known as “gender ideology” might replace spirit with mind, but the schism between mind and body is much the same. Their entire belief system is constructed on esoteric knowledge.  Even small children are understood to be able to discern their gender identity, a mysterious quality that supposedly trumps mere biology when demarcating men from women.

As Mary Harrington suggested in her recent essay about latter-day “luxury Gnosticism”, when we can spend so much time in cyberspace in whatever form we please, it is seductive to believe that choosing our sex in the real world is as easy as toggling a switch and changing our name.

Gender ideology might not be a religion in the traditional sense but it is certainly a belief system. Gender identity — its principal dogma — is unprovable and unfalsifiable, yet we are expected to believe in it or keep quiet. It has its catechisms — Transwomen are women, transmen are men and non-binary people are valid — and its priestly class. They would be transgender people like me, supposedly with esoteric knowledge about what it means to be trans.

The reality — and I chose that word deliberately — is rather different, of course. Nobody, not even transgender people, can discern what it feels like to be someone else. All we have is our own experience. Are transwomen women, or are we men? Not only that, but men with a psychological disorder that drives us to want to become women? In a battle of ideas divorced from objective reality it is one person’s word against another.

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That benefits nobody, not least transgender people who have been plunged into possibly the most toxic and divisive debate in politics. Campaigns that were once important — for example the resourcing of NHS gender services and the protection against less favourable treatment at work — have been overshadowed by pointless squabbles over pronouns.

Words matter, because if we change the words we use we change the way we think. In many contexts, sex has been replaced with gender and — equally troubling to me — transsexual has been replaced with transgender. In both cases, people are separated from their reproductive biology. That doesn’t help anyone live their life in the real world where sex does matter.

Horton’s chosen quote — bodies with vaginas — both extends and focusses the denial of humans as material beings. Not only does he separate people from their entire biology, he directs the attention at just one sex: women. The Lancet used very different language in a Tweet about men’s health last week, “About 10 million men are currently living with a diagnosis of prostate cancer.”

The complaints appear to be piling up at The Lancet, including objections from the medical profession itself. Professor Dave Curtus, a contributor to The Lancet, tweeted: “Just wrote the Lancet to tell them to take me off their list of statistical reviewers and cancel my subscription and never contact me about anything ever again. Absolutely inexcusable language to refer to women and girls.”

The concerns are far more than mere intellectual or academic protests. This type of language makes women yet more vulnerable. The ideologues might convince themselves that womanhood is somehow separate to femaleness but as Professor Selina Todd explained in The Post last week, “Ignoring sex doesn’t make sex-based discrimination and harassment go away, it just prevents you from dealing with it.”

Bev Jackson, founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 and more recently a co-founder of the LGB Alliance, went further in her analysis, “Dehumanization is the prelude to violence.”

Moreover, as in the MMR debacle over 20 years ago it is children who are being put at risk of harm. They have no special knowledge about their gender identity — nobody does — but promises are being made to them that can never be delivered: that they can somehow choose to be a boy or a girl. The flip side of course is the implied threat that if they choose incorrectly, they may go through the “wrong” puberty and never find satisfaction in life.

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Now this quasi-religious belief system is being given legitimacy on the front cover of The Lancet. It took the journal 12 years to retract the misinformation over the MMR vaccine. For the sake of the current generation of young people, Horton needs to rectify this current outrage somewhat more quickly.

Gnosticism may be alluring but it is ultimately futile. We are our bodies. It is high time that politicians, policy makers, and even the editor of The Lancet accepts the truth that Ignatius knew by the turn of the second century.

Some parts of the tax system, like business rates, were looking fragile even before the crisis. The effects of loading the tax burden on shops and restaurants, while allowing the online retailers to get off lightly, can be seen in towns and cities across the country. Lockdown means that the issue can no longer be dodged. We either go for wholesale reform or say goodbye to the high street.

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It’s been reported that the Treasury is working on plans for an online sales tax — something I argued for back in 2017. Even better, it looks like serious consideration is being given to a “capital values tax.” This would replace business rates and would be a tax on the value of land (plus the buildings built upon it). Furthermore, it would be payable by the owner not the tenant.

You may be thinking that sounds rather like a Land Value Tax (something else I’m rather keen on) and you’d be right. So if Rishi Sunak introduces it, we’d be facing a truly remarkable moment in British politics: the first step toward a seemingly impossible political philosophy — Tory Georgism.

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Georgism is an economic theory named after Henry George (1839-1897) — an American economist and journalist. He lived through a time of unprecedented economic change — the transformation of the United States from agricultural backwater (and, in the southern states, slave society) into an industrial giant. He will have seen small settlements grow into mighty cities, walked in the shadow of the first skyscrapers and travelled on trans-continental railroads.

What he  also  witnessed, however, is landlords getting rich from the value created by all that development. Not that they had to lift a finger to make it happen — they just had to own property in the right places and rake in the rents. Putting that injustice right was his life’s work.

George was not a socialist. He supported free trade and free enterprise. People should keep the value they created, he believed. But by merely owning land, landlords don’t create value — they simply exploit their monopolies on the physical space that people need to live and work.

He saw all of this as a sickness at the heart of the capitalism, but one that had a cure: a tax system based on land values. The more a piece of land is worth, the more tax the owner would pay on it.

That way, value that would otherwise be extracted by private landlords would benefit the whole community — both by providing the state with revenue and by replacing taxes on income and consumption — i.e. useful activities that create supply and demand in the economy.

Taxing the value of land has further advantages. For a start, it disincentivises speculation and the use of land as a mere piggy bank. It also prompts land owners to make the most productive use of their land or sell it on to someone else who can. That’s why land value taxation has supporters on the Right as well as on the Left. Indeed the free market economist Milton Friedman called it the “least bad tax”. While a tax on income discourages work and a tax on dividends discourages investment, a tax on land does not discourage land. All of it will still be there no matter how hard you tax it. It’s one asset that can’t be moved to a tax haven.

But if land value taxation is such a good idea then why aren’t land value taxes more common? And to the extent that we have property-based taxes at all, why are they in the form of policies like the UK’s Council Tax and Uniform Business Rates — which are payable by the occupier not the owner and which are imperfectly linked to the actual land value?

Well, there are technical challenges to overcome — not least the accurate, ongoing valuation of land — but for Georgists the real answer is the ever-present influence of the “landed interest”. Landlords are just about the oldest and most influential of all lobby groups. Politicians who may not have the time for active business interests, often have ‘passive’ investments in property and are thus easily swayed against land value taxes. 

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Moreover, British Georgists sometimes identify the landed interests specifically with Toryism. Over the centuries, it can be argued that the Tories — as the party of farming, the countryside and the “gentry” — have acted to protect these interests over those of the urban population and commerce. It’s not nearly so simple as that, of course — but nor is it completely untrue. Successive Tory — and, later, Conservative — governments have given landlords an easy ride.

However, this aspect of Toryism isn’t entirely about grubby self-interest. There’s a moral case for the dignity of ownership, especially home ownership. Why shouldn’t Britons be able to call a piece of this Blessed Plot their very own? Why shouldn’t their homes, and their possessions contained within, be theirs to keep — paid for out of taxed income, but then free from the depredations of the tax man?

Ownership rights are the foundation of liberty — and one only has to look at countries where people have no secure title to their land to see how important these rights are. While socialists would like to make us all tenants of the state, conservatives (and many liberals too) believe that what separates us from totalitarianism (self-reliance, family life, basic privacy) begins at home.

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Unfortunately, though, the Tories have a record of over-extending this moral case to provide cover for the exploitative ownership of other people’s homes (and workplaces) and of land that has little to do with home life, but which is important to the common good. It is, for instance, truly astonishing that 20 years into the 21st century, we still don’t have a complete register of exactly who owns exactly what land.

Digital mapping technology means this is entirely feasible. We have the Land Registry of course, but the information that it provides is incomplete and expensive to access — and, as recently as 2016, the Tories under David Cameron and George Osborne were planning on privatising it! This may have been an Osbornite policy, but a less Georgist measure could hardly be imagined.

Thankfully, we’ve moved on from that low point. Indeed, if Rishi Sunak really is about to introduce land value taxation then that would be a jaw-dropping turnaround.

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But given eveything I’ve said, isn’t Tory Georgism the ultimate contradiction in terms? One might as well announce a policy of violent pacifism or isolationist expansionism or universalist exceptionalism. It makes about as much sense as a square circle. 

But, then again, the world is full of oxymoronic ideologies. We’ve already got capitalist communism (China), authoritarian liberalism (the woke Left) and plutocratic populism (Trump). I realise those examples aren’t exactly encouraging, but Tory Georgism is the oxymoron we need right now.

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Indeed, the Tories need Georgism and the Georgists need Toryism. 

The Government is in the tightest of financial spots. It has to rebuild the tax base, without raining down further blows on a traumatised economy. Hikes to income and consumption taxes would hurt the recovery — as would a further round of austerity. But a Georgist taxation policy would only hit non-productive activities that funnel wealth away from ordinary consumers into the pockets of the rich (who spend a lower proportion of their money than the rest of us). Both economically and politically, there is no better way to raise money right now.

Of course, that would require the Government to put in place a proper system for valuing land and identifying its owners — but then that’s what it needs to do anyway if it’s serious about solving the housing crisis — another vital part of any credible recovery plan. 

The reason why the Georgists need the Tories is simple: they haven’t had much success selling Georgism on their own. There are no mainstream Georgist political parties. After all, Britain’s landlord-friendly policies can’t be blamed on the Conservatives alone. We’ve had Labour governments too, but they didn’t bring transparency to land ownership or stop lucky farmers from winning the planning system lottery. 

If anyone can sell Georgism to a wary public, then it’s the Tories. The majority of the population are home owners and a lot of the rest hope to become home owners. They will resist land value taxation if they suspect it will be used to effectively confiscate their houses, slice-by-slice. A Land Value Tax will only be politically viable if tax-free thresholds are hardwired into the system to respect the right of home ownership — and also to protect small businesses that own their own premises. And, needless to say, the assets of charities and community organisation should also be sacrosanct. 

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Above all, Georgists need protecting from the utopian tendencies of the Left. In the long-term, a thoroughly Georgist taxation policy may deliver a fairer, greener and more prosperous society. But getting from here to there won’t be easy. Implementation needs to happen step-by-step, taking care to obtain popular consent at every stage — as well as dealing with all the practical complexities.

So forget the fantasy politics. If we get Georgism at all it won’t be in a sudden burst of ideological purity. It will be through piecemeal, painful progress — one least bad option at a time.