In the same way, war has always been the likeliest exit route from the world’s second, American-led phase of globalization. War would sever the supply chains that span the world, replacing them with government-directed industrial policy that prioritizes security over economic efficiency. If Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from neoliberal globalization strikes the commentariat as perverse, it is because the economic consequences now precede the war itself: the economic arms race has broken out, while the guns, for now, remain silent.

For the political Left in the West, reduced to a helpless spectator by a resurgent Right that has become the engine of history, the present moment is one of analytical confusion. Having long settled, for good reason, on neoliberal globalization as the driving motivation of its political enemies, the seeming demolition of the West’s political and economic order by America’s new revolutionary regime is difficult for them to explain. Two different recent efforts, Hayek’s Bastards by the American historian of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian, and the venerable British Marxist Perry Anderson’s latest expansive essay, “Regime Change in the West?“, approach the populist moment from opposing standpoints. Comparing them tells us less, perhaps, about objective reality than about the Left’s difficulty keeping up with the mercurial Weltgeist in the White House.

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Liberalism won't survive 2025

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Slobodian’s excellent 2018 book Globalists charted the birth of neoliberalism in late-Habsburg Vienna and its progression to intellectual hegemony in the think tanks and chancelleries of the late 20th-century West. In Hayek’s Bastards, published next week, he aims to show that the populist Right-wing revolt against neoliberal globalization is less than it seems. He argues that “important factions of the emerging Right were, in fact, mutant strains of neoliberalism” and that “many supposed disruptors of the status quo are agents less of a backlash against global capitalism than a frontlash within it”. The book is, Slobodian claims, “a warning not to be taken in by false prophets, fooled by appearances or lazy media framing”. If the timing of the book’s release, at the precise moment Trump’s neoliberal acolytes like Milei decry his neo-developmentalist rejection of free trade dogma, appears unfortunate for Slobodian, his argument is that things are not as they seem. “Rather than a rejection of neoliberalism”, Slobodian’s framing sees “the Far Right [in which Slobodian counts the Trump administration and the European populist Right] “as a mutant form of it, shedding certain features — like a commitment to multilateral trade governance or the virtues of outsourcing — while doubling down on Social Darwinist principles of struggle in the market translated through hierarchical categories of race, nationality, and gender”.

To make this counterintuitive case, Slobodian marshals impressive archival research from within the neoliberal think tank world, from the in-house publications of Buchananite Paleoconservatism and the online pamphleteering of Anglo-American White Nationalism, tracing the growing qualms of neoliberal ideologues with the world of unfettered movement of capital and people they had brought into being. Yet if the research itself is dazzling, the overall argument remains unconvincing. Proving that dissent, mounting into open rebellion, against globalization’s demographic and economic consequences existed within the neoliberal intellectual sphere is not the same as tracing the origins of the current Rightist revolt against free trade. Slobodian asserts that “we cannot understand the peculiar hybrids of extreme market ideology, Far Right authoritarianism, and social conservatism without familiarizing ourselves with the often-tangled genealogies traced in this book”. Yet the lines of descent do not appear clear at all. Simply, one does not need to mine Mises or Hayek’s writings to construct an argument that unfettered mass migration is socially, culturally and economically destabilizing to nations engaging in this novel experiment. That the neoliberal Right also began to share this opinion does not prove that the current populist moment derives from their late-flowering qualms.

Perry Anderson, by contrast, is a European Marxist, rather than an American progressive committed, as American progressives have become, to globalization’s unfettered movement of people. As such, Anderson’s survey of the moment appears to align more closely with observable reality. Indeed, speaking to the Politics Theory Other podcast, Slobodian recently flagged the “low-key anti-woke tenor to [Anderson’s] work”, gently rebuking the patrician Leftist’s skepticism that mass migration is a Leftist cause worth defending. Slobodian emphasizes that the AfD derives its intellectual origins from the free-trade Right, eliding the fact that, as a purely neoliberal party, its electoral impact was marginal: it is only the demographic question that has it now pegging Germany’s incoming party of government. For Anderson, with a European disregard for American progressive taboos on such matters, the question is simpler: “it is not pure myth that business imports cheap labor from abroad — that is, workers typically unprotected by citizenship rights — to depress wages and in some cases to take jobs from local workers, whom any Left must seek to defend. Nor is it the case that, in a neoliberal society, voters have usually been consulted about either the arrival or the scale of labor from abroad: this has virtually always happened behind their backs, becoming a political issue not ex ante but ex post facto.”

It is because of this question, roiling Europe’s politics, that, as Anderson observes, “the reason populism of the right has enjoyed an advantage over populism of the left is not hard to see”. America, historically an immigrant society, differs from Europe in this regard, he notes: “there is a tradition of selective welcome and solidarity for newcomers that doesn’t exist at anything like the same emotional pitch in Europe.” Indeed, Slobodian and Anderson’s differing attitudes to the question highlight this Atlantic breach within the intellectual Left. Yet while the Right-populist response to mass migration — that it is a catastrophic error, to be rectified — is simple and intuitive to voters, within the Left “nowhere has a politically coherent, empirically detailed, candid answer yet been spelled out. So long as that persists, populism of the Right is all too likely to retain its edge on populism of the left.” Anderson does not trawl the archives of neoliberal ideologues to find reasons why mass migration is electorally unpopular. The reasons, both economic and cultural, are to him self-evident, in a way that, for Slobodian, requires a tangled intellectual origin story.

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When one compares the two Leftist historians’ analysis of the present, the opposing worldviews multiply. Anderson approvingly cites (to Slobodian’s chagrin) the conservative German Marxist Wolfgang Streeck’s “pathbreaking” 2014 analysis of neoliberal capitalism’s eventual collapse as being built on the shaky foundations of credit, rather than investment: “claims on future resources that have yet to be produced” or as “Marx more bluntly called it ‘fictitious capital’”. Yet even as the economic and political system began to run out of road, there was no coherent economic doctrine with which to replace it, leaving a void to be filled by its “antibody, deplored in every reputable organ of opinion and respectable political quarter as the sickness of the age – namely, populism”. Slobodian is correct in that Anderson’s analysis shares its discursive framework with that of the populists themselves. “What [populists] oppose,” Anderson observes, “is not capitalism as such, but the current socio-economic version of it: neoliberalism. Their common enemy is the political establishment that presides over the neoliberal order, comprising the alternating duo of center-right and center-left parties that have monopolized government under its rule.”

Slobodian’s task in his book is to prove that this framework is a false consciousness, in which critics of neoliberalism have been duped by their professed saviors. “The parties dubbed as Right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalization,” he notes. “They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a Golden Age of job security, or end world trade. By and large, the so-called populists’ calls to privatize, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world’s leaders for the past thirty years.” The current moment is, for Slobodian, a false dawn, as proven by its genealogy: the populist apple cannot fall far from the neoliberal tree. The historian of neoliberal globalization is not yet ready to consign the object of his research to history.

Yet for Anderson, even if “no populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces”, leaving “the contemporary opponents of neoliberalism… for the most part whistling in the dark”, the moment is still pregnant with opportunity. Though the road ahead is obscure, and branches in many opposing directions, for Anderson, the present moment is one of flux, in which genuine change is possible. For Slobodian, the revolution is illusory. For both, the essential problem remains that a Leftist goal — the disestablishment of the global neoliberal order — now appears to be well underway. Yet it is the Right that is undertaking this work, and it is a Right to whom Slobodian and Anderson are mere spectators.

The decades-long dogma that There Is No Alternative is being smashed by the Trump regime, even if undertaken in a chaotic way, whose effects may not be those intended. Trump’s neo-mercantilist revolution, undertaken in an uneasy alliance with America’s tech oligarchs and the post-liberal wing of the American Right represented by JD Vance, represents strands of Rightist thinking beyond pure neoliberalism, which may not survive its own contradictions. The result, for now, is that Trump’s supposed ideological allies abroad have been left scrambling for a response that marries their professions of political fealty with their economic dogma. Just as sanctions on Russia, foreseen as catastrophic by their free-trading architects, have left Moscow’s thrumming war economy riding an economic boom, so may Trump’s retreat into splendid Hemispheric isolation provide the former hegemon with the industrial basis for an economic resurgence to come — or equally, it may accelerate the world economy’s collapse. Like the looming First World War Angell saw as senseless, the driving logic is primarily one of imperial, even civilizational competition rather than mere economic utility.

In dismissing the revolutionary nature of the moment through a narrow emphasis on one strand of the Right’s historical thinking, Slobodian risks losing sight of the grand vistas opening up beyond the accumulating wreckage. His emphasis on the intentions of those driving this upheaval disregard the opportunities offered by the unintended consequences, to which Anderson, alert to historical precedents both “improvised and experimental, without pre-existent theories of any kind”, remains alive. “Everywhere the scene is one of instability, insecurity, unpredictability”, Anderson observes, not without a glimmer of revolutionary relish. “‘All is disorder under the heavens,’ and there is little sign of a return to order, as understood by those accustomed to rule the West.” This project of the American Right may yet work towards Leftist ends, if not narrowly progressive ones. Either way, what was once unthinkable is now the new normality, leaving historians and policymakers alike scrambling to keep up.

A New Zealander, previously secure in his oceanic British identity, Pocock worked through the implications of the moment in his 1973 lecture, “British History: a Plea for a New Subject”, composed, he would later note, immediately “after the great divorce which occurred when you told us that you were now Europeans, which we, as New Zealanders, were not”. It was a conceptual reordering which meant “you cared as little for our past as for our future”.

Yet, Pocock observed, the implications for Britain were just as great as for the home archipelago’s imperial cast-offs. For after all: “if it has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the Commonwealth…it is not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate themselves, in their turn.”

Without a grand overseas project with which to occupy itself, the centre itself, focused on Westminster, may not hold. Future historians may find themselves writing of “a ‘Unionist’ or even a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the 13th, the 17th or the 19th centuries and a date in the 20th or the 21st.”

What evidence for this prediction can we find, a half-century later, in the collapsing British state of 2023? It is self-evident that the act of leaving the EU was an act of self-definition, a great inward turn to force the questions of what Britain is and what it should be back to the heart of national politics. Support for Brexit was closely aligned in the minds of its voters with a return to an economy of domestic industrial production, and to a drastic reduction in the historically unprecedented levels of inward migration to which the British political class had committed itself.

Yet the Brexit we got was another Brexit entirely: a vision of Britain as a global trading power entirely unmoored from the realities of its position, a product of the fact that our politicians, for all that effective governance of the UK remains beyond them, find our islands too small a stage for their talents. Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are each in their own ways exemplars of how the ideology of global Britain has made the British governing class incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago, prisoners of a delusion that Britain must always strive to be world-beating, even as it struggles to maintain parity with its closest neighbours.

For the Welsh political philosopher and former Labour MP David Marquand, writing in 1995 in a collection of essays engaging with Pocock’s grand conceptual reordering of our island story, such global pretensions were baked into Britishness from the start. As he observed, “for most of its history, the identity embodied by the British state was quintessentially global, oceanic, imperial and, by virtue of this, non- or at least extra-European”. The new British state’s justification was the consolidation of the various kingdoms of these islands in a grand imperial project, with the result being a vision of the British state and people which Marquand termed “whig imperialist”. And at its heart, he said, “lay the twin themes of globalism and constitutionalism. The British state was, by definition, a global state; and the British people, by definition, was a global people.”

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As Marquand observed, “the Whig imperialist vision of the British state helped to shape the mentality of the entire political class, left as well as right”. Whig imperialist Britain was Britain. “The British state was the child as well as the parent of empire. Its iconography, its operational codes, the instinctive reflexes of its rulers and managers were stamped through and through with the presuppositions of empire.” Even as the empire fell away, its ghosts still haunt Westminster, in inverted form, as a needy internationalism and an aesthetic distaste for the homely and familiar. Unlike our European neighbours, whose revolutions and wars of national independence helped clarify a secure sense of nationhood, Britain’s relentless focus on the periphery left a hollow void at the centre, at least for its rulers. As Marquand, now a convert to Welsh nationalism, observes, “shorn of empire, ‘Britain’ had no meaning”.

This interpretation does much to explain the strange pathologies of the 21^st-century Westminster class, and elucidates the strange mystery of why Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, possesses a markedly anti-national commenting class (intelligentsia is not quite the right word), whose European pretensions, like the continental affectations of a Hyacinth Bucket, are simply those of the provincial petit bourgeois, repelled by the drab simplicities of home. It explains why Britain, for a European country, is uniquely at risk of self-dissolution by global economic forces, and why its governing class’s sense of national identity, as far as can be judged from its citizenship tests, is such thin gruel, entirely indistinguishable from vague internationalist norms of liberal tolerance. It explains the compulsion towards mass immigration, entirely inconsistent with the demands of British voters: for as the empire folded in on itself, sucking the empire’s global children in along with it like a collapsing star, it became easier to remake Britain in the image of the world than to shape the world in a way congenial to British desires.

Such an interpretation also explains the extraordinary ease with which Britain’s governing class has reduced the country to a powerless factotum of America’s global empire, and the degree to which such total self-abnegation of sovereignty is presented and experienced, not as a humiliation fetish but as the natural order of things, and the bedrock of Britain’s security. To maintain its global pretensions, the Westminster class has been forced into a posture of what Perry Anderson termed “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power”. It explains why our Right-wing populists are enamoured of globalised free markets even as they rail against “globalism”, why our state broadcaster functions as a vector of America’s new ideological fixations, and why our royals as well as our politicians look longingly at the better opportunities to be found in California. It explains, too, why our sole national institution, the NHS, sucks both staff and patients from around the world, finding its merely national mission too paltry for its dignity, and the humanitarian obligations of the British taxpayer too bountiful to be shared only among the British people.

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For the British governing class, and its taste-making hangers on, Britain as a small European country is simply too small a stage to bother with. Yet instead of addressing these tensions, surely the underlying cause of the failures of British governance which drove Brexit in the first place, the result of Brexit has only been to heighten them: more immigration, the Indo-Pacific tilt, the endless attempt to summon a Global Britain into being in a post-imperial world. The contradictions between Britain’s world-leading pretensions and shabby material realities are now becoming too sharp for the state to effectively manage. If Brexit has foregrounded one essential fact of British politics it is that the problems facing the country are rooted in its governing class: a class which swooped together with organic solidarity after Brexit to prevent any democratic attempt to redirect its course, and frittered away the country’s economic sovereignty on dreams of global relevance.

As Pocock observed, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which accelerated the consolidation of the British state in Westminster were the result of England’s governing class attempting to resolve their own political divisions through the incorporation of their neighbours in a greater, shared project. For “the English did not want such a war, but found that they had to fight it with each other; and they hated it so much that they imposed it on Scotland and Ireland in the attempt to resolve it. The imperial sovereignty they imposed on other nations was an effect of the imperial sovereignty they had imposed on themselves.”

Britain’s entry into the EC was itself, likewise, a failed attempt to recapture a greater stage on which Britain could play a global role, and foundered on the same tensions, the inward-looking domesticity of the British electorate rebelling against the outward-facing cosmopolitanism of its governing caste. Always the foil of other nations’ acts of self-definition — a process now continuing, with Scotland, even in the home islands — Britain never saw the need or found the occasion to do so for itself. In the collapse of Britain’s empire, then, the only anti-imperial project that failed was that of liberating Britain from its own rulers.

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But is it possible to liberate Britain from Westminster while maintaining the Union? The Union’s collapse would surely only leave us stuck with the same governing elite on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale, just as the cosmopolitan pretensions of the various Celtic nationalisms are, if anything, even more hysterical and absurd than those of the Union as a whole. Yet any attempt at a British Meiji restoration similarly falters on the unavoidable fact that the British governing class has very little interest in the governance of Britain itself — instead it recoils from it, as a distraction from the glittering possibilities of the wider world.

Such an elite makes a shaky foundation for a project of national renewal, yet without a total overhaul of Britain’s governing class, the remaining time in which to advance such a project is rapidly slipping away, before the nation dissolves itself with an affected smirk of enlightened tolerance. The revolt against Brussels then, was always just the opening salvo, on a continental front, of a far more difficult campaign: to become a prosperous European country, Britain must still liberate itself from the self-defeating foibles and global aspirations of the Westminster class.

To impress the English you must be overly kind to dogs and horses, extremely wealthy, or gushingly enthusiastic about football. Abramovich was at least two of these. Previously unknown outside of Russia, his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003 made him England’s favourite oligarch.

He stood for all the others. Like them, Abramovich bought Francis Bacons, yachts, and football clubs. He was expensively divorced. He purchased a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it. His security detail were told they were not allowed to bring firearms into the West London private schools his shoal of children swam through. His weirdly thin background, like his face, was enigmatic. His trajectory — from penniless orphan, to middling rubber duck salesman, to billionaire tycoon — mirrored the unlikely CVs and fluke-strewn ascents of so many mega-wealthy products of Russia’s insane Nineties. Unlike Abramovich though, many of his old rivals and partners from that time met… abnormal ends.

But so what? Abramovich entered London high society when views of Putin’s Russia were charged with hopeless optimism. Putin, wrote Neal Acheson in 2004, was an “agent of sweeping change”. His reforms might one day make “a relatively law-abiding and governable Russia” a fact, rather than a dream. In the academy, favourable verdicts (grandly blessed by Perry Anderson in 2015) rained down on Russia. It was a vibrant, investor-friendly middle-income country; it was a respectable member of OECD; it was less statist in its control of energy markets than Brazil! Abramovich then, was an envoy from a developing country, not a one-man image-softening operation sent from an anguished, ramshackle, authoritarian state, still held together and animated by the most salient, deathless force in Russian political history — imperial ambition.

These wonky arguments added a watery academic gloss to London’s embrace of Russians like Abramovich. Ever since John Major’s Conservatives introduced ‘Golden Visas’ that fished for millionaire investors in the Nineties, every British government, and London Mayors Johnson and Livingstone, had courted Russian money. A butler class formed to enthusiastically count the cash.

Behind the biscuit tin version of London — Union Jacks on the Mall, Notting Hill selfies, and recumbent deer in Richmond Park — was a bleaker reality. To arrive here from Russia was to find networks of bankers, estate agents, accountants, wealth managers, PR flacks, politicians, and a legal system all eager to take your money, over-educate your children, Harley Street your wife, Isle of Man your taxes, gag journalists, and angelify your reputation.

None of them cared where the money came from. London could bury your secrets for you. “This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry”, spits Logan Roy in Succession, “for turning evil into hard currency.”

That quiet part was rarely said out loud. The English are a discreet and sentimental people after all. In 2005, Ken Livingstone, at a Westminster address to 1,200 Russian political and business leaders, invoked the “warmth and sympathy” the English felt for their old wartime ally against Hitler. Sympathy was a sound basis for deal-making: “Russians,” he said, “are welcome in this city, both as individuals and for the business that they bring.” Since 1998, according to anti-money laundering groups, around a hundred billion pounds of Russian money has washed through London, and into property and commodities. The welcome was accepted.

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If Livingstone represented the grasping yet oddly dewy-eyed side of Londongrad’s rise, his successor articulated the jokey cynicism the English felt towards the oligarchs. Boris Johnson was just as enthusiastic about Russian money as Livingstone, but prepared to laugh — like so many other toff-adjacent Brits — at Russian vulgarity too. In 2012 he urged oligarchs to flood London’s courts with libel actions. “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego,” he told the CBI’s annual conference that year. “I have no shame in saying to the injured spouses of the world’s billionaires: if you want to take him to the cleaners, take him to the cleaners in London…”

It was like a joke. Except the estranged wives and litigious oligarchs were components of Putin’s increasingly despotic regime. The key figures of Russian state capitalism, who were now building nests in London, had begun the 2000s calling the President Mr Putin. Then they called him Boss. Then — another joke, at least to begin with — Tsar. Abramovich found ways to deal with Putin. Against a backdrop where oligarchs were assassinated, exiled and imprisoned, the Chelsea owner did everything he could in order to keep himself safe.

The pair were close. Just how close was revealed by Abramovich’s successful defence of a landmark high court claim brought by his fellow oligarch and mentor Boris Berezovsky in 2012. “Mr Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power at the Kremlin,” the judgement recorded. “It was also clear that Mr Abramovich had privileged access to President Putin, in the sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.”

That somebody who had folded so neatly into the scrim of English life — celebrated on Stamford Bridge’s terraces to the tune of the Only Fools And Horses theme, lunching on his yacht with Sir Paul McCartney — was so close to a despot ought to have caused alarm. The press preferred to write about his fleet of supercars, his record-breaking transfer deals, and a floated West End musical about Abramovich’s life. The Premier League’s attitude was summed up by its then chief executive, Richard Scudamore: “Football is not a business but a sport dependent on… speculation… there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.”

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Abramovich was not on equal terms with Putin, even as he became lauded in London. He was a boyar to Putin’s Tsar. “I don’t think there is a percent of independence in him”, said one analyst who knew Abramovich in the Nineties. He was just like the others. The oligarchs’ power and privilege was theoretical, and utterly dependent on Putin. He could ruin them on a whim, as he did to Boris Berezovsky soon after he came to power. The truth was that the oligarchs were more like hostages than independent actors, more like courtiers than policy-makers, and more driven by venality than belief. Putin made them dependents, and walked them over a plank with a very deep drop.

Perhaps English politicians such as Johnson and Livingstone thought men like Abramovich could be moderated by the West, and could help to remake Russia in its image, as the academics thought was already happening. None chose to see the umbilical cords that ran back to the Kremlin. As the 2000s passed into the 2010s, it looked like the West was becoming as corrupt and irrational and nihilistic as Russia, rather than bringing Russia in line with its rules based system. “It was as if a virus,” wrote Catherine Belton in Putin’s People, “was being injected into it.”

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Now the virus is burning itself out. Two weeks of war have forced British politicians to shift 30 years of oligarch-tickling policy. They would no longer be able to take whatever they wanted. Abramovich has been hit with sanctions ranging from asset freezes to travel bans. Johnson says there will be no “safe havens” for Putin allies, not even in London’s courts. Yesterday’s West End final edition of the Evening Standard: “ROMAN’S EMPIRE IN RUINS.” Discarded copies, with crumpled Abramovich faces staring blankly out from them drifted through Berkeley Square.

Given his wealth and notoriety, Abramovich barely left a paw print on English life. Yes, he increased the bank balance of butler class functionaries; yes he will most probably leave Chelsea, his plaything and ornament, tarnished. But his wallflower shyness and refusal to be interviewed make him a ghost. Just as he reportedly moved through his A-List New Years Eve parties on St Barts barely saying anything, Abramovich’s time in England will be defined by his silences not his actions. He will not be ruined though. So much of his wealth is stored off-shore in secret bank accounts that there will always be a fallback for him.

Londongrad will be rebranded, and its lackeys will find new clients. Money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and above all China will need to be laundered. Their tycoons will need crisis PR. Their powerful urges to litigate against each other will need to be satiated. Other Romans are here already. They keep buying football clubs. Not even war will break London’s filthy habits.

Even the late Sir Roger Scruton’s worldview represented an uneasy marriage between Thatcherite capitalism and the last vestiges of the world that came before it. It didn’t ever quite perceive that the Thatcher revolution was too successful: by kicking away the last props of the pre-capitalist order that underwrote the traditional conservative worldview, it killed off that which it proclaimed to love. 

The ultimate irony was Scruton’s appreciation, late in life, of the post-Communist, quasi-authoritarian conservatism of Hungary and Poland as a model. For all the anti-Communism of their post-Cold War governments, surely it was the statist paternalism of their communist regimes that preserved in aspic societies fundamentally more conservative than those eroded by capitalist liberalism in the free-market West. Without Marx, there could be no Orban or Kaczynski; without communism, Hungary and Poland would look like Britain or France.

With this irony in mind, perhaps Government officials, ideologically adrift at a time of national crisis, would do well to read the Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s 72-page dissection of Britain’s decline in the latest issue of the New Left Review. A first draft of modern history from the groundbreaking author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson’s savage critique of modern Britain is as far from the court gossip and palace intrigue which characterises political journalism in this country as it is possible to be.

A product of Eton and Oxford, and of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 82-year old Anderson demolishes the British establishment from within. Like many European if not American Marxists, Anderson is a stern critic of the hyper-liberalism, derived from French Theory via American Puritanism, which disfigures much of the modern Anglophone Left. He is, indeed, more conservative in his thinly-veiled and patrician distaste for Anglo-Saxon liberalism than our own nominally Conservative government. So what guidance can this elderly communist give our Conservative leadership at a time of national crisis?

Citing the most doom-laden author of Germany’s interwar Konservative Revolution — noteworthy in itself — Anderson warns that “Decline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead,” for Britain, “is more like the term in Spengler’s mistranslated title — Untergang: not decline, but downfall”.

Britain’s problems are structural, the combination of appalling economic planning over decades and inherent constitutional dysfunction: “Without any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of Ukania  [a term for the UK adopted by Anderson from the Marxist and Scottish nationalist historian Tom Nairn] has been disrupted as never before since 1911–14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components — economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy — have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilised. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired.”

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The outcome, for Anderson, is the inevitable collapse of what he terms “the Westminster state”. As he declares, the “nexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyone’s guess.” Anderson’s essay, which follows the  slow-burning fuse of British decline back to the Early Modern period, is not party political: indeed, like many conservatives, he reserves his greatest ire for the various political and economic innovations of New Labour, which, like Thatcher before it, eroded Britain’s old order and replaced it with something worse. 

It is remarkable, for all his Marxism, how much Anderson sounds like a Tory grandee of old when he observes that Thatcher “had staged an intra-party coup, routing Tory paternalism as well as Labour corporatism with a cult of the market and a petty-bourgeois zeal no longer restrained by fear of the proletariat.” It is difficult, at times, in his dissection of the finely-graded class differences of Conservative leaders, or in his digressive lament for the declining standards of public schools, to discern where Anderson the Marxist analyst of power networks ends and where Anderson the harrumphing patrician begins. Either way, the upshot is the same. By the beginning of this century, he observes, “Tory England in the old sense was dead. What had replaced it in the Conservative Party was not better.”

In foreign policy, Anderson channels Powell as much as any left-wing thinker when he excoriates Blair and Brown’s “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power, whose pay-off overseas was a hugely greater sum of killing and torture”. Paraphrasing the conservative writer Peter Oborne approvingly, Anderson savages the “surrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcasters” which New Labour introduced into Britain’s political life, which, “instrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty world” still dominates our politics.

We think here, of the lobby correspondent Matt Chorley, who gloated on the downfall of Dominic Cummings, like a palace eunuch in the court of the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, that “every genius who arrives vowing to shake up the media, undermine, bypass and destroy the lobby, ends up leaving. And for good or bad, we’re still there.” That is, of course, precisely the problem, and it is Anderson’s open contempt for our elites that guides the path to some form of solution.

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Why Fukuyama was right all along

By Aris Roussinos

There is, perhaps, an echo of the Neo-Tories of the 1930s in Anderson’s tracing of the roots of Britain’s current day decline to the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, though of course fantasies of cutting a path back to Merry England do not occur to him. The source, for Anderson, of our relative economic decline is that “unlike any of its major competitors, the country knew no second revolution from above after the settlement of 1689, nor intervening convulsion on the road to modernity,” and thus the “fault-lines now becoming visible followed from the original composite nature of the British state itself.” 

Summarising the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis underpinning the New Left Review’s analysis of modern British history, Anderson, like the Scottish nationalist historian and writer Neal Ascherson, traces our current woes to our inhabiting an unreformed Early Modern union of three crowns, in which “the very success of the Anglo-British parliamentary monarchy in overtaking all rivals to become, as early as the 1690s, the most advanced power of Europe, fixed it fast in a shape whose counterparts elsewhere were later swept away”. 

Our early success is thus the cause of our modern failure: “Developmental priority and imperial success had arrested the British ancien régime—‘the grandfather of the contemporary political world’— half-way between feudal and modern forms, leaving its structures an ‘indefensible and unadaptable survival’ of the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism,” with the result that we remain trapped in “a conceptual landscape of Britain swept clean of all but ‘one significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.’”

If Anderson’s thesis is correct then all our problems, in one way or another, lead back to Westminster and the great gothic fantasia on the Thames, the increasing decrepitude of whose architectural fabric is an almost too obvious metaphor for the British state itself. Can it be restored without bringing the whole structure crashing down? The very antiquity of the British state is argued, by some, as a source of potential strength: if devolution could be rolled back, if the almost dictatorial powers available to a confident executive could be wielded effectively, perhaps some of the rot could be cut away, as long as the essential structure underpinning it remains strong?

But the British state is only as strong as the people entrusted with its care, and it is the deteriorating quality of our elites — a theme running through Anderson’s essay — that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of all. It is not, unfortunately, an exaggeration to observe that both main parties are dangerously incompetent, and that the also-rans are, if anything, even worse. The conservative journalist Henry Hill’s recent call for a British “Meiji Restoration,” a reassertion of the power of the central state in a programme of national renewal, “conducted with an eye to tradition and the power and sovereignty of the nation” surely falls at this hurdle: the idea may be good, we are forced to answer, but have you seen who’d carry it out?

So what comes after Westminster? The European experiment — a Tory attempt at “taking Britain into Europe as a surrogate for Empire”— clearly failed, leading to a fraught denouement whose terminal “Brexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations.”

As befits the editor of the New Left Review, whose deep engagement with European politics is not matched by that of Britain’s FBPE media ecosystem, Anderson is notably more critical of the wounded class consciousness or “status anxieties” of Britain’s bourgeois Remainers than of the Brexiteers, noting dispassionately that Remain was a project of the AB social class, support for which has led Labour to be “penned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-class— professional, managerial, clerical— Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives.” 

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

As Anderson observes witheringly, “the correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century,” yet in time, “some of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade.” Instead, for our post-1688 political class, it is “peripheral nationalism” that will likely be “their potential nemesis,” yet Anderson’s analysis of Scottish nationalism is entirely devoid of the lust for national self-negation, part romanticism-by-proxy and part-schadenfreude, displayed by the London intelligentsia for whom he shows such disdain.

Following Nairn, Anderson undercuts the self-aggrandising mythologies of the SNP, reminding his readers that Scotland was not a colony but a beneficiary of Britain’s industrialisation, and a keen and active participant in the imperial project. Instead, he traces Scotland’s sudden drive towards independence to distaste for New Labour, “the neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots — Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a man” whose economic mismanagement “antagonised more and more sectors of Scottish society”.

The essential dilemma for the SNP is that Brexit has made independence simultaneously more attractive and impossible to achieve, at least as a member of the European Union. Pleading to enter Europe from without, its way barred by another fragile Early Modern kingdom, Spain, “departure from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped it”. We remain, unfortunately, trapped in a loveless marriage for the foreseeable future, with no preferable partners available and an ugly rift of some kind awaiting us. 

Intriguingly, Anderson takes the case for English nationalism more seriously than does our political class, sounding like a Marxist Simon Heffer in his sympathy for “the country that had not spoken yet, the English, whose voice had long been usurped by a British-imperial class speaking for them”. As it stands, New Labour’s constitutional reordering, by granting autonomy to the peripheries while keeping England subject to the Westminster entity, has set the stage for English nationalism to manifest itself in unappealing forms: “in not affording it any institutional expression” Anderson argues, “Blair’s project made it likely that [Enoch] Powell’s intonation of it would be heard once more.” 

There are two Englands struggling to be born, Anderson argues: the angry, resentful England of the streets and a social-democratic European nation “with a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of ‘Little England’ — insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur.” Indeed, here Anderson approaches a call for what we have in these pages called a certain National Hobbitism. Whether this is what we’ll get is, of course, another matter entirely. More likely, in Anderson’s view, is “a very British attempt to ‘muddle through’ with a model which is itself not working,” treading water as “a dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brussels” until the Westminster state’s final collapse.

If there is a coherent thread to Anderson’s broad sweep of British history, it is that the relentless outward focus of the Westminster establishment set in train a slow-burning decline at home. As he writes, “Imperial expansion had formed this state. When that was no longer available, it followed its traditional outward bent, resolving to ‘press towards the internationalisation of the UK economy as the answer doing most good to the flourishing parts of the system and the least damage to the ailing ones.’”

Yet every attempt at reform, by trying to solve Britain’s structural problems at home through leaping headlong into the wider world, whether Europe, a subordinate role in the American empire or globalised finance, has only patched up the surface cracks and allowed the underlying rot to advance further. From 1945 onwards, British politics has been consumed by “futile attempts at retrieving national greatness, in which the very term ‘decline’ was a lure inviting the notion that ‘revival’ was possible”.

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Why we need populism

By Matthew Goodwin

The essential problem we now face is whether or not Britain can survive as a unitary state. For Anderson, the answer is simply No: Britain was a project of empire, and without empire, the glue that held it together has dissolved. Simply, in Anderson’s thesis, “the stability of the old order had rested on the external forcefield of empire; once that was gone, the patriciate lost its grip at home, deference giving way to a ‘molecular, resentful sort of rebelliousness’, disabling the supports of the old regime, and Thatcher’s lower-middle-class crusade could finish off the grandees”.

The work of misguided destruction in the cause of renewal that Thatcher began, Blair finished, emplacing the charges that now threaten to destroy our state. The British state, for Anderson (sounding at his most like Peter Hitchens), was the British establishment of old: once they and the empire were gone, shuffled off the historical stage by the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War and its consequences, decline and collapse were inevitable. 

The current government, entirely devoid of any meaningful political thought, would do well to read Anderson’s essay. He presents a narrative stripped of all illusions, in which, as in Marx’s famous quote, the British reader “is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. There is a strange unreality to British political life, with the relentless outward focus on the wider world so detached from our material conditions that it has become a kind of tragic delusion.

But there is no purpose pursuing dreams of a Global Britain while the Union fractures at home: any serious attempt to save the British state will require a serious, dispassionate appraisal of the structural flaws threatening to break it apart. If the current occupant of 10 Downing Street does not intend to make his mark in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he could do worse than inject a dose of rigorous Marxian thought into Britain’s body politic, and there is surely no more suitable vessel than the detached, patrician analysis of Perry Anderson, that most High Tory of Marxists.

With the death of Sir Roger Scruton on Sunday the Prime Minister paid tribute to “the greatest modern conservative thinker.” This view was shared by many commentators, with Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review calling him “the most important conservative thinker of his generation.”

This is a fine tribute to Scruton, and well-deserved. But there is a mournfulness to the sentiment that transcends even the sadness of the great man’s passing, reflected in Douglas Murray’s justifiable observation that Scruton seemed “bigger than his age”. The question lurking behind these sentiments is: who is the next greatest British conservative thinker?

I am sure some names could be produced: Murray himself, Peter Hitchens, Theodore Dalrymple. All of these are fine men for whom I have great respect. All of them, however, are polemicists. There is no shame in that. I am one as well, and in a lower division. But if “intellectual” means anything then it means something else.

Niall Ferguson? I disagree with his more neoconservative politics but no one can deny his skill as a historian. John Gray? His primers for pessimists – like Enlightenment’s Wake and Black Mass – are required reading for anyone on the Right but I am not sure that he would have time for the label. No, the sad truth is that Scruton was in a class of his own. All of his rivals — Oakeshott, Quinton, Cowling and Butterfield — were dead and his loving peers were in his shadow.

More from this author

How Global English became a source of division

By Ben Sixsmith

The Left has its intellectuals. We like to characterise leftists as emotional if not hysterical — and that is by no means always an injustice — but they also have a deep, if narrow, emphasis on learning that the Right does not share. Read the London Review of Books and you will find a depth of literary and historical erudition that cannot be found in Right-wing publications. You can argue that the likes of Perry Anderson and David Harvey are wrong but they combine scholarship with contemporary analysis on a level that few if any British conservatives could match.

“Good!” might be the response of some, not entirely without justice. The twentieth century was not exactly kind to intellectuals. As Raymond Aron, Pierre Ryckmans and others documented, many of them inhaled what Aron called “the opium of the intellectuals” and backed bloodthirsty revolutionary movements in the name of utopian abstractions. Of course, such intellectuals are still with us today. Understandably, then, conservatives have emphasised the extent to which intellectualism can be a cloud of verbiage floating above the real world. We love nothing better than to listen to the gaseous ramblings of pensive Frenchmen and blow giant raspberries. Paul Johnson got a whole book out of it — called, appropriately enough, Intellectuals.

Yet we still need intellectuals, or, at least, we need historians, philosophers, scientists, economists, critics and political theorists who understand and explain the relevance of their studies to the world. We polemicists stand on the mountain of scholarship that they have built. Without them, our perception of the world is superficial.

Why are British conservative intellectuals so thin on the ground? We have a richer conservative history than the United States and yet we have no cousins of their journals like American Affairs or The New Atlantis. Granted, their influence on the President might be limited to non-exist but at least they are there.

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Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste

By Giles Fraser

This makes some explanations limited. The Thatcherite focus on liberal economics above all else — which Roger Scruton, for one, resisted — led to a dearth of conservative cultural thought in Britain but Reagan-era American conservatism had the same affliction and our American peers have done more to overcome this intellectual decline.

I think we have suffered from our tendency to romanticise instinct over intellect. Michael Oakeshott was a genuine conservative intellectual, whose writings about history, education and political theory were rich in erudition and insight. Oakeshott opposed “rationalism”, or the tendency to abstract political thought from political practice. In an elegant metaphor he observed that reading theory to understand politics is like reading recipes to understand cooking. There is no substitute, in other words, for experience.

Still, recipes have some use. (Try making a soufflé without one.) As the Catholic conservative philosopher Edward Feser has written:

“Human life certainly cannot be reduced to the abstractions of political philosophy, but it doesn’t follow that such abstractions have no place.” 

Besides, intellectuals do not trade solely in abstractions. Historians systematically document and interpret past experiences. Scientists, and social scientists, do their best to explain the factors at play. One cannot become a doctor without practical experience but nor can one master medicine without textbooks.

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Roger Scruton: Conservative lodestar

By Danny Kruger

Oakeshott’s most famous words came when he tried to define conservatism as a “disposition”. In an oft-quoted paragraph, he said that to be a conservative:

“…is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

This is true, but without more solid foundations of epistemic and ethical principles it tends to collapse into a shallow presentism that defines the “familiar” and the “tried” as whatever happens to be the status quo. “Present laughter” is continually upheld, however novel it is in historical terms and however much value it has for the future. We need depth in our historical, scientific, societal, philosophical and aesthetic understanding to know what should be conserved and what may be destructive and degrading in the long term.

What is to be done? Young people on the right should acquaint themselves with their intellectual heritage. By this I do not mean that we should encase ourselves in tweed, suck pipes and make vague references to Reflections on the Revolution in France but that we should acquaint ourselves with Scruton on aesthetics, Oakeshott on rationalism, Butterfield on history, Eliot on tradition and so on.

But one cannot just immerse oneself in the past. Time brings new circumstances, scientifically, culturally, and institutionally, and one cannot burrow into old achievements like a badger seeking warmth. The intellectual combines old wisdom with new knowledge, and either one can be misleading without the other. The magic is in the synthesis.