Chance would give you a correct result 50% of the time. Humans, when they’re asked to say whether a face is conservative or liberal, do slightly better and get it right 55% of the time. The software Kosinski used was able to accurately guess the political orientation of the people represented 73% of the time. In statistical parlance, that represents a “large” effect size. Nor were the results country-specific: when the algorithm was trained on US faces, it could still distinguish between liberal and conservative faces in Canada with 68% accuracy, and in the UK with 67% accuracy. Some demographic markers are pretty obvious — in the US, white people, older people and males all lean slightly more conservative. But even when Kosinski excluded that data, the accuracy only dropped a fraction. Working off tiny visual cues like head pose (the roll, pitch and yaw of the head) or facial expressions such as surprise or happiness, the algorithm could still tell a person’s politics from their profile picture with 71% accuracy.

Our minds influence our faces. There are obvious ways in which our make-up choices, or our hairstyles, or our particular style of facial hair or jewelry also reflect our values. The assumptions we make about the politics or aesthetic preferences of someone in goth or emo make-up, or the clean-shaven young man with a perfect Fifties side-parting, are probably fairly accurate. But our faces also affect our minds.

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When I was in my early twenties, an old friend invited me to a political meet-up for young Eurosceptics organized by some friends of his in the Conservative Party. I had already been to lots of similar gatherings, but for the much poorer and smaller, centrist Liberal Democrats: fundraisers, policy events, even a couple of party conferences at second-rate hotels in down-at-heel seaside towns. My expectations of a political meet-up were bad lighting, the kind of snacks you’d find at a gas station, and cheap white wine in a box.

Not this political meet-up. The young Conservatives had commandeered a 15th-century cloister in Westminster Abbey. Beneath the medieval fluted arches and ornate coats of arms, they entertained each other with tales of European corruption and technocratic overreach. There were canapés on trays served by waiters in uniform, and wine that came in bottles. And the women were beautiful — lucid complexions, advert-ready hair, a sense of poise, and elegance, each cloaked in a halo of perfume. A pretty strong incentive to switch political allegiances.

I reasoned with myself. These young people were just polished. They were just rich. They could afford good clothes and decent hairdressers. They could afford healthy food and expensive skincare and smart cologne. But the thing is, they were beautiful — at least by my standards. Their faces did seem more symmetrical, their bodies looked like they adhered to some golden rule of aesthetics. They were just more handsome than the political types I was used to over on the other side of the political spectrum.

I filed that slightly galling experience under “Conservative Honeytrap” and didn’t think about it again until I read an article in the Guardian in 2018 that triggered the memory. Rather bravely, it informed its Left-leaning readership that a large scientific study proved that attractive people tend be Right-wing.

The researchers Rolfe Peterson and Carl Palmer analyzed two large surveys from the Fifties and Seventies in the US which, apart from testing for personality and political and social attitudes, had also rated each of the 15,000 participants on a five-point scale for attractiveness: from 0 — which they euphemistically described as “homely” — to the “strikingly handsome or beautiful” at 5. They found that the dreamboats and the heartthrobs were more likely to identify as conservatives and Republicans than their less attractive counterparts. It wasn’t a one-off: lots of other studies have shown that people with traditionally desirable physical traits — tall men and women, men with high natural upper-body strength and women with symmetrical faces — tend more conservative. Conventionally attractive people tend to gravitate towards conservatism, and there’s a very simple explanation why.

Beautiful people live in a slightly different world from the rest of us. It’s a kinder world; people assume better of them and strive to make things easier for them. Beautiful people are less concerned with inequality — perhaps the central issue of Left-leaning politics — because they have experienced less of it, have felt it working against them less. On the contrary, it tends to work in their favor.

Strangers are kinder to people who are good-looking. At birth, babies with symmetrical features receive more direct eye contact and warmer treatment from their parents than their plainer siblings. It’s even at work amongst people we know aren’t models of probity — attractive criminals get lower sentences. Being good-looking also means people attribute other nice qualities to you. From their earliest years, attractive people are seen, without evidence, as more intelligent, more honest and more competent. Teachers pay more attention and give better grades to attractive students. Employers pay attractive people more and promote them faster: there is a “plainness penalty” on salaries of between 10 and 15%.

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Teenagers call this “pretty privilege”. Winners of the physiological lottery spend their lives surrounded by people who treat them nicely, assume the best of them, and have confidence in their ability to achieve great things. Their looks help them do better at school and at work, as well as on the social and dating scene. All of which can lead attractive people to see the world as a wonderful place that provides opportunity and rewards those who work to deserve it. Just like them.

Some beautiful people are riddled with anxiety and self-doubt regardless of their beauty, and some are doubtless riddled with anxiety and self-doubt because of it. There are lots of extremely attractive Left-wingers and liberals all over the world, not least many of the stars of Hollywood, who are predominantly Democrats. But, on average, beautiful people tend to the Right because they are the winners of a certain type of inequality — they start the game of life with a superpower they don’t even recognize themselves having.

All body types are beautiful

Because they live in a world that has offered them opportunity and success, attractive people can easily assume that the experiences of others have been the same. It makes them stronger believers in meritocracy (even if a big part of their “merit” is just being good-looking), more individualistic, less understanding of the underprivileged, and less likely to support government redistribution to address inequality. We can see from Parlia’s data (above) that their relative attractiveness also, perhaps unsurprisingly, correlates with being more interested in beauty standards.

We are, of course, talking averages and generalities, but the principle remains. Beautiful people vote differently in part because their politics are responding to a lived experience of the world that is simply different. They inhabit different realities from the rest of us, all because of the particular arrangement of their facial features.

Extracted from Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins Of Our Deepest Beliefs by Turi Munthe (Hutchinson Heinemann; £22).

“Inside the intelligence services,” Cummings writes, “special forces, […] bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently.” As Cummings notes, the Government’s panicked response to last year’s ethnic riots, and its fear of their recurrence, derives from “incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs… The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence.” And yet instead, Cummings claims, “As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicization of white English nationalism.”

Much of this analysis I agree with. Certainly, the events that followed the parade crash in Liverpool this week provided a glimpse of a country, and government, on edge, waiting for an explosion it is either unwilling or unable to escape. Unlike after Southport, the perpetrator was swiftly revealed by the state to belong to Britain’s ethnic majority (or rather, Liverpool’s Irish one). This information was revealed so rapidly precisely to ward off another wave of riots, the prospect of which hangs over the Government like a deferred death sentence. Yet even still, simply revealing the facts of the case was not enough for many, who saw it as another instance of two-tier policing: we have, unfortunately, entered a situation where for many the police, and state, can do no right.

Fears of a second round of riots may have been overblown in this instance — the incident was, fortunately, not fatal, and the current inclement weather, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland well know, is an inhibitor to mass street violence — but the initial tension of the moment provided a vivid portrait of a country on edge. The Government is held hostage to factors outside of its control: the possibility of a mass casualty attack that can be linked to mass migration, as now commonly occurs throughout Europe, and a simultaneous extended spell of good weather in Britain, which is less common. One may, as I do, believe that sustained bouts of civil conflict are not the most probable outcome of Britain’s current unhappy circumstances, but the revealed actions of the British state suggest that they are highly possible.

The state’s official report on the policing of the summer riots observed that police forces were nearly overstretched by the scale and geographic dispersal of the events, characterized as “exceptional levels of violence” in which “offenders attacked police officers with missiles, including petrol bombs”, and which saw 54 police officers hospitalized. The report briefly considers the use of baton rounds in any repeat of the disorder, and suggests that “it may be timely to explore whether current and foreseeable circumstances might render the use of water cannon conceivable”. For the authorities, then, the retention of coercive power sufficient to suppress probable future disorder is a process still being refined. The question now is how to arrest the tailspin of the British state to render these refinements no more than a latent, unneeded capability.

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Starmer’s late-stage pivot on mass migration, using language that would have Hope Not Hate chasing him if he were an anonymous blogger rather than a center-left prime minister, is one such attempt to steer away from disaster. But Cummings too has evolved in this regard. Two years ago, that he was ultimately a reformer, aiming to save Westminster from itself, rather than a revolutionary. Yet now, for Cummings, the Westminster state is “the regime”, and a failing, pre-revolutionary one at that. As he observes in the Sky News interview, the attitude of British voters towards their political system is one of “hate, contempt and disgust”, adding that “it’s now very common to have discussions outside London with normal people where they talk about the coming civil war, about how their area is going to crack up, what they see around them, and how frightened they are for the future. That’s not an abnormal conversation to have now.”

Cummings’ newest musings on civil war are an elaboration of his February observation, glossed over by lobby journalists in favor of SW1 gossip, that the next election presents the last opportunity to install a reformist Right-wing government before 2032, “by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid”. For Cummings, as he says to Sky News, Britain’s current political system is already dead: “the old system can keep struggling and fighting, but it’s not going to win that battle in the end, it’s only a question of how destructive that transition is.”

In his follow-up this week to his now-viral essay and interview (referenced by Cummings) assessing the likelihood of civil war in Western nations, including Britain, David Betz, the King’s College London Professor of War in the Modern World, claimed that “At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France”, as “governments under increasing structural civilizational distress and having squandered their legitimacy are losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies that are terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics”. Cummings now claims that Betz “reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF [Special Forces] etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence”. Betz’s suggestion is that “Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.”

But is this actually true? It is certainly true that a sense of foreboding has settled over the country, that these conversations are now being had, from previously unexpected quarters. But there also remains the opposing feeling that much of this derives from the circular reasoning of the Right, a handful of people referencing each other, talking themselves into an unnecessary disaster. Would the Army leadership seeking a political directive to plan for civil war, as Betz suggests, ameliorate a looming disaster, or would it summon an avoidable one into being as the plans are leaked and the nation’s already fraying social fabric tatters even further?

Accepting their framing, how can disaster be averted? Cummings cites the existence of unnamed “Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change”, claiming that “There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.” Who are these “political entrepreneurs”? He surely does not mean Farage, who appears more like the last vestige of the old regime than its replacement. What are the “embryonic networks” and “very powerful forces”?

When Cummings claims that “deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence… have seeped through to few MPs or hacks”, is this the same “deep state” that fears seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organization?” Is it the same “deep state” as in his claim that “the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes”? Exactly what or who this “deep state” is is never revealed, but it sounds strikingly close to his own view.

Whitehall, Cummings implies, is divided between those that are preparing “to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system” and those, “particularly in security and intelligence”, who will respond to this disintegration. How do the repeated references to the SAS, which is, he claims, “under attack from its political bosses today” and “watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defense” fit in? Does this relate to his assertion in the Sky News interview that during Covid “we put the former commanding officer of 22 SAS in there… and then things actually worked, we sent his mates from the SAS around the country and they actually built stuff […] while all the other useless wankers in Westminster were just sharing powerpoints”? How does all this relate to his claim that dissatisfaction within the Army “is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place… bubbling out of control for Whitehall”? Does this fit into his previously expressed suggestion to place “Army heroes” into his reformist Right-wing government? If so, aside from anything else, this idea assumes a higher degree of competence in the Army’s leadership than its ongoing procurement woes (which Cummings unfairly places squarely on the MOD’s shoulders) would suggest.

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The suggestions Cummings makes here are far more interesting than gossip about the dying days of the Johnson government — and consequently, have been ignored by the Westminster lobby. The cumulative effect is like reading political fiction about the alleged plot against Harold Wilson, or, as noted above, a Right-wing conspirator in a David Peace novel: it reads, at times, like a Left-wing fever dream of Right-wing politics. Without Cummings’ access to the inner workings of the British state, it is impossible to form an opinion on the veracity, or otherwise, of these doom-laden “deep state” conversations. Betz, for his part, puts the likelihood of civil war in Britain at around 18% over the next five years, certainly much higher than one would like, but far from likely — and even Betz would agree that his stance is a minority opinion. Either way, both Betz and Cummings address themselves directly to security elites within the heart of the British state in an attempt to either avoid or ameliorate the effects of serious civil disorder they place on a sliding scale from possible to near-inevitable.

That these claims can be made seriously, by credible people, is testament to the failure of Britain’s political system over recent decades. Certainly, urgent reform is needed before the country descends further down a dark and slippery path. But we are not there yet, and disaster is very far from inevitable. Even should civil conflict occur, it would, I suggest, look more like the Northern Ireland of 2025 than that of the Seventies: Britain’s politics gummed up with the petty narcissism of unresolvable ethnic factionalism, with only sporadic and brief outbursts of violent disorder. This would be a mark of historic political failure, but is a far more palatable scenario than the refugee flows and Army-protected “secure zones” Betz envisages. The more likely scenario is the three main parties competitively outbidding each other on immigration, in a Rightward shift with no functional Left-wing opposition, the focus of which will eventually turn towards mass deportations, as now underway in the United States.

Cummings is probably correct that a Reform government, representing a last-ditch protest vote by Britain’s voters, would be the final gasp of Britain’s political system in its current ailing form. The stakes of British political reform are now uncomfortably high: if the system cannot reform itself, it will break. Cummings concludes his Sky News interview by saying that “the forces now in play will express themselves one way or another. The old system’s going to get much worse before it gets better, chaos is coming in all sorts of ways… But how that all works itself out, it could work itself out in different ways.” The lesson is either banal or profound: something will happen, unless something else better does. But in averting disaster, reformists on the Right should be careful not to talk themselves into one.

Instead, attempting to match the mood of optimism across the Atlantic, the British government points to a call for a judicial review perhaps one day permitting a new reservoir near Abingdon. While British post-liberals have triumphantly claimed the Trump victory one of their own, it must be honestly admitted this is not the case. Instead, vowing “the future is ours and our golden age has just begun”, Trump’s address represents the political ascent of what has been termed Right-wing Progressivism in the world’s most powerful nation.

Were a British leader to make a similar speech, it could be described as Anglofuturism — a hybrid subcategory among the younger, policy-driven Right, which fuses national tradition with a futuristic drive for rapid technological progress. More broadly, Right-wing Progressivism is a strand of thought driven by effective, modernising outcomes rather than outdated dogma, rethinking systems of governance from first principles. As a recent ASI paper observes, this is a movement whose “adherents look to the Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew for inspiration, eschewing traditional political idols”. It is a moment crystallised by Syria’s new foreign minister As’aad al-Shaybani’s onstage declaration at Davos that his “Syria First” vision is inspired by Singapore and Saudi Arabia’s Vision2030. This is a glimpse of the ambitious, tech-developmentalist future of governance from which our own ailing dispensation remains firmly isolated.

Just as Trump’s speech declares America’s liberation from a radical and corrupt establishment, Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. What unites both these visions of the near future and British Right-wing Progressivism is a shared sense of loss, a tragic recognition that something has gone deeply wrong with the society in which we live. As N.S. Lyons observes: “the sheer devotion some display in their zeal for this science-fiction future is itself a sign of the depths of their despair in the actual here and now”. In Britain, it is purely tragic that the most inspiring visions of the future, like Concorde, lie in our past. It is tragic that it requires tinkering with AI prompts to give us visions of Britain as a functioning country, just as it is tragic that 2020s Britain is so unremittingly depressing that our brightest and most creative minds fantasise about whimsical tea parties on Mars, like galactic refugees.

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Right-wing Progressivism begins, then, with the recognition that Britain’s dominant vision of progress has failed. It has brought only stagnation, even cultural and technological degeneration: so what does the new dispensation offer in response? When Anglofuturists make the case for building on Dogger Bank to evade planning regulations, is it a serious proposal or an absurdist satire on the British state? The reality is that it is both, because it is the British state that has become absurd. What, then, is this current’s relationship to the existing Westminster state? Is it an SW1 reformist movement, a project of national rejuvenation like that of 20th-century China or Meiji Japan? Or is it a nascent replacement for Westminster governance in its current form?

If Singapore is Right-wing Progressivism’s guiding example of a meritocratic, post-imperial state that achieved progress through rejecting Whitehall’s dysfunction, then another useful analogue, perhaps counterintuitively, is early 20th-century Ireland. There are striking parallels between the ferment of ideas on the younger British Right and the classical nationalism of the 19th and early 20th century. Ireland is, after all, the only example of a nationalist movement breaking away from a sclerotic Westminster and reformulating itself according to a vision of modernity drawn from an idealised national past.

The influential Nairn-Anderson thesis that the British state’s dysfunction derives from Westminster’s political development being arrested at the time of the Glorious Revolution is undergoing a revival (including on the younger British Progressive Right). Yet as Nairn underlined in After Britain (2000), Ireland’s historical path diverged from Westminster because “Irish 19th-century and early 20th-century development was so much closer to European and global norms”. Counterintuitively, Ireland was simply “more ‘modern’ than main-island politics”. Uneven development, even the industrial under-development brought by union with Westminster (and here one can see parallels with today’s northern England), fused with the growing popular perception that Westminster’s rule was both illegitimate and disastrous, creating the cultural and ideological ferment that would soon lead to Irish rebellion and independence.

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This restive mood was not so different from the mounting perception on the British Right that the Westminster state in its current form is undergoing an existential, and perhaps terminal crisis of legitimacy. Repeatedly failing, through its own ideological obsessions, at the basic function of any state — that is, ensuring the security of the people — Westminster is eroding its popular legitimacy at a frenetic pace. Indeed, given the ongoing and apparently limitless revelations of the British state’s seeming collusion with rape gangs in northern England, and demographic vandalism against the British people through its commitment to mass migration, the Irish nationalist John Mitchel’s 1845 assertion that “The people are beginning to fear that the Irish Government is merely a machinery for their destruction”, would strike a chord in provincial England today. So would Mitchel’s Trumpian observation that the British administration was “altogether powerless; that it is unable, or unwilling to take a single step…for the encouragement of manufactures, or providing fields of industry, and is only active in promoting, by high premiums and bounties, the horrible manufacture of crimes!” The relationship with Irish nationalism is typological, as through its late-stage dysfunction the Westminster state is birthing a classical nationalism of its own against its own rule, dragging the country towards political modernity. In Nairn-Anderson terms, we can say Britain is finally approaching its second bourgeois revolution.

In a similar way, over just a few decades, as the historical sociologist John Hutchinson shows, Ireland’s rising Catholic intelligentsia abandoned the British imperial identity they had been educated to serve in favour of a cultural nationalism which saw Ireland as a nation with a “distinctive evolutionary path, and its special creative contribution to make to human progress”. Blocked from social mobility by dysfunctional Westminster governance, like Britain’s contemporary Right-wing Progressives, Ireland’s cultural nationalists suddenly adopted resentment against the inefficient, traditionalist, “actively malign” state. They saw their project, like today’s middle-class reformers, as one of “catapulting the Irish nation from present decline to a higher stage of social evolution that would embody a higher synthesis of both the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’”.

Just as this characterises Trump’s declaration of American “liberation” from the ruins of an ossified and sclerotic political order, so does it encapsulate the sociological basis of both Anglofuturism and Britain’s Right-wing Progressive strand more generally. Ireland’s cultural nationalists were drawn from “the educated young who had to break with established authority and regenerate the nation from within”, using a mythicised past not as a comfort blanket against modernity but instead to modernise those traditions. This is now the governing ideology of Britain’s imperial patron, and just as every American political trend is soon adopted in our own backwards province, so will its overwhelmingly popular new dispensation come to dominate the thinking of our own political Right.

There is no failure of the collapsed Biden order that Westminster has not in recent years tried to replicate, spreading it like manure on our own intellectually barren polity. The increasingly overt hostility of the Trump administration and its Big Tech oligarchs to Britain’s faltering government presents an opening that both our Right-wing challenger partners will compete to weaponise: this looming dynamic is certain to dominate the politics of our near future. Just as the object of the Online Safety Bill is preserving the safety of the Westminster class from the British people, in trying to turn the Southport atrocity into a narrative about American Big Tech, we see the Starmer government preparing to pull up the drawbridges of our hermit kingdom, insulating a historically unpopular new government from historical forces beyond its control. Yet there are ideological gaps on the Right too.

The conversion of Westminster’s neoliberal think tanks to immigration restrictionist, free-market developmentalism — a kind of institutional Powellism — is one marker of this ideological shift, yet it also highlights a lacuna in the thinking of the British Right and of the Westminster state generally: the post-industrial Northern aspect of British discontent. Just as it was the Red Wall which carried the Brexit vote, defining the nation’s current political course, so were the summer riots — as striking a marker of volatile popular discontent as can be imagined — overwhelmingly a Northern English phenomenon. The anti-riot rallies in the regime heartland of Walthamstow were notably absent in northern England, just as the grooming gang scandal is itself a product of Westminster’s willed neglect of what was once the country’s engine of modernity, now sinking into a level of peripheral torpor and anomie as grim and politically destabilising as early 20th-century Ireland.

Rather than resolving Britain’s national dysfunction, a programme of regeneration that does not place as much emphasis as Trump’s does on rebuilding Rust Belt industrial capacity and prosperity as on tax and planning reforms risks widening regional equalities, dragging the fissiparous pressures already threatening the state within the Celtic periphery into England itself. The North’s decline bears out Nairn’s 1981 prediction that “the metropolitan heartland complex will become ever more of a service-zone to international capital”, while “the industries and populations of the Northern river valleys will eventually be shut down or sold off”: the result, in Anderson’s reckoning, is that “the nexus” — the British state — “is bound to dissolve, in one way or another”.

Rather than conquering Mars, then, the first goal of Right-wing Progressivism is simply dragging Britain to the developmental level of a functioning northwest European country, building and nation-building as if for the first time. Like its etymological derivations from Afrofuturism and Archeofuturism, Anglofuturism’s focus on Lee Kuan Yew is inherently post-imperial, a kind of Third World developmentalism for the only part of the British empire to never win its self-realisation from the ruins of Whitehall misgovernance. In the quest for national progress, Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore broke off the shackles of a sclerotic post-imperial state, and prospered. Surely this is the Anglo-ness of Anglofuturism: not a nostalgic imperial Britishness but an inward-looking programme of national regeneration.

It is Anglo not in the sense of a bombastic, Westminster-led imperial identity but as an explicit rejection of that identity and its consequences, in recognition that Britain’s future progress rests entirely on the British nation’s frustrated human and cultural capital. If by its nature it is postcolonial, it can then be seen as a liberation movement to unshackle the British nation from a governing class which still seeks to be world-beating even as it sinks in global esteem, remoulding the nation into a vast budget airport terminal of global transients, without the attendant security such a transformation requires. The logic of Right-wing Progressivism rests on centring the security and prosperity of the British people over any other global aspiration, or any self-imposed moral obligation, the polar opposite worldview to that of our current governing class. It is the quest to remain world-leading that has left Britain in decline; paradoxically it is only in turning inward that Britain can become a great power once again.

If anything, Jünger’s writings, along with those of other thinkers of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, seem to foreshadow the political ferment and geopolitical fault lines of today. As Dugin observes in his rambling and only partly comprehensible essay, published last Friday, “if we turn to Jünger’s idea of total mobilisation in a Heideggerian manner, then we get an existential theory of mobilisation”, as “when death is before us and we don’t run away from it and we don’t turn our backs on it, that’s when we exist authentically. In a sense, this can be described both as a total mobilisation on an existential level and as what I would call an awakening.”

Just as, in The Worker, Junger foresaw the fusion of man and technology in the trenches of the First World War heralding the death of bourgeois liberal values and the birth of a new “age of Titans”, Dugin asserts that Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine is “awakening” Russian society, shifting it from a period of “inauthenticity” to one of “authenticity”. In Dugin’s assessment, Russia’s overt enemy, the Ukrainian people, barely count, now being something less than human. Instead, in a wild perversion of Schmitt’s thought, the war has revealed “the very real, absolute Enemy of the human race, to which only theological categories are supposed to be applied” — because “we thought we were fighting enemies in Ukraine, but we ended up in hell”.

That enemy, that hell, is us: “the current postmodern globalist West”, a society “degenerating as humans” where “transgender parades already hardly allow us to understand what kind of species we are dealing with”. Ultimately, “posthumanist formations, i.e., cyborgs, are to follow” because “Western globalist circles are the last transitional state from human being to algae”.

While Dugin’s work is often carried by Russia’s state propaganda channel RT, his influence within Putin’s regime has been vastly overstated. If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right. Back in 2014, as noted by the Ukrainian scholar of Radical Right intellectual thought Anton Shekhovtsov, now an influential Twitter personality in the war’s online front, Dugin created a narrative which consisted of four major ideas: “first, that Atlanticists brought Nazis to power in Ukraine thus declaring a war on Russia; secondly, that the interim government was a Nazi junta and had no legitimacy; thirdly, that Ukraine did not exist anymore; and finally, that Russia must act decisively to prevent the Atlanticists from establishing control over the entire territory of former Ukraine”.

These arguments are now as wearily familiar to anyone who follows the war on English-language social media as they are to Russians themselves. When Tucker Carlson can describe, as he did last week, Zelenskyy not as the democratically elected leader of a nation fighting invasion, but instead as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”, he has adopted, consciously or not, a Dugin-like framing of Russia’s aggression against some existential evil. If Dugin remains an outsider of sorts in Russia, then, he has nevertheless helped to shape both the contours of the war in Ukraine itself and international perceptions of it. For a marginal outsider, Dugin certainly seems influential.

In any case, as the editor of CodaStory Natalia Anteleva correctly observes, “the argument about whether or not Putin personally reads Dugin is somewhat irrelevant because Dugin is plenty relevant to the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist movements, who consider him a teacher”. As Shekhovtsov notes, Dugin’s previously state-funded Eurasian Youth Union (or ESM) was prominently involved in the initial 2014 stages of the Ukraine war, and “strengthened the pro-Russian separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine, fuelled ethnic and social tensions, launched disinformation actions and declared alternative political centres”. Dugin’s ESM acolytes took up prominent positions in the new separatist republics: Aleksandr Proselkov, leader of the ESM’s cell in Russia’s Southern Federal District, became Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), before his mysterious death in 2014, while ESM activist Andriy Purhin became the DNR’s first Vice Prime Minister.

Other fringe political figures on the edges of Dugin’s circle achieved prominence in both stages of the Ukraine war: the Russian adventurer Igor Girkin or “Strelkov” is a familiar name to Ukraine-watchers, first as the DNR’s Minister of Defence, and latterly as a military analyst and harsh critic of Putin’s shambolic prosecution of the current invasion. But for Dugin, Girkin is something else entirely, the mystical embodiment of “the Russian myth”, a “fearless Russian Orthodox Warrior heading to a Sacred War on his own accord” who by seizing Slovyansk “like D’Annunzio in Fiume” appeared on history’s stage as “the ghost of a true Russia” to guide Russia into its glorious Eurasian future.

With his opaque political philosophy merging both the esoteric Traditionalism of René Guénon (whose acolytes include both our own King Charles and, seemingly, Ukraine’s chief of intelligence Kyrylo Budanov) and an interpretation of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution which tips more sharply into fascism than the original, Dugin embodies the strange ferment of ideas which attended the fall of the Soviet Union. As the scholar of Traditionalism Mark Sedgwick observes of the philosophy, “in the West, it has generally appealed to intellectuals whose understanding of modernity has led them to disenchantment with it and alienation from it”. This makes them marginal figures in a broader political scene, but “for those with experience of Soviet modernity, however, Traditionalism could very easily seem to present an entirely accurate analysis”. After all, “nowhere was the loss of the sacred more dramatic than in the officially atheist Soviet Union, and nowhere else were the two substitute cults of science and progress more assiduously advanced, and nowhere else was the cult of progress more obviously illusory.”

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Sedgwick’s insight is the key to understanding the influence of radical Right-wing, anti-modernist and Conservative Revolutionary thought on both sides in the Ukraine war, lost in the tiresome and intellectually sterile debate over which side contains the greater number of “fascists”. Kept isolated by Communism from the development of the post-war liberalism which still maintains a faltering hold on Western political discourse, as Communism discredited itself, radical intellectuals in the post-Soviet sphere turned their attention to the last great intellectual attempt to transcend liberal modernity, the Conservative Revolution, until recently discredited in the West by Germany’s subsequent, disastrous Nazi interlude.

In this story, Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking second city of Kharkiv, birthplace of both Ukraine’s nationalist Azov movement and hometown of Dugin’s early patron, the Russian National Bolshevik provocateur Edvard Limonov, plays a significant role. Even now, Kharkiv functions as the organising base for the Azov-linked exiled Russian ultranationalists and neo-Nazis fighting Putin’s invasion through their incursions into Russia’s Belgorod. As the Kharkiv writer Anatoly Voronin observes, the city’s status as an ethnic and cultural borderland between Russia and Ukraine forged an unusual hybrid identity, and a form of nationalism quite distinct from that of western Ukraine, where both Russian and Ukrainian radical Right intellectuals interacted with each other in shaping their worldviews. As Voronin asks: “how do we explain the generally good relations between Dugin and various Ukrainian Right-wingers in the 2000s? No one in ‘Azov’ ever denied the profound influence Dugin had on young [Azov leader] Andriy Biletsky.”

Dugin’s influence, funded by Putin’s government, within the Ukrainian dissident political scene of the 2000s included cooperation with the poet and Right-wing activist Dmytro Korchynsky of the Orthodox fundamentalist Bratsvo party (whose militia is now fighting Russia in the east; as an aside, a young American volunteer with them I met in Kharkiv complained his fellow fighters dragged him to Orthodox mass early every morning). Dugin even found favour with the fascinating, complex Oleksey Arestovych, until recently Zelenskyy’s strategic advisor, but back then a Eurasianist opponent of Ukraine’s relationship with Nato and the West. Dugin’s original ambivalent stance on Ukrainian nationalism allowed for a degree of influence perhaps surprising now, broken only by his sudden, dramatic turn towards denial of Ukraine’s very existence. Nevertheless, though counterintuitive today, fringe Right-wing political ideas then possessed both unusual reach and strange, overlapping ambiguities.

The influence of both Dugin and of the German Conservative Revolution is perhaps best embodied in the fascinating political career of the Azov movement’s intellectual star, the Kharkiv native and “first lady of Ukrainian nationalism” Olena Semenyaka. Described by her professors at Kyiv-Mohyla University as “a brilliant student, reserved, and introverted but committed to her work”, Semenyaka’s PhD thesis — “The Transformation of the Conservative Revolutionary Subject in Ernst Jünger’s Work, from the Worker to Anarch in Ernst Jünger’s Creativity” — revolved around Jünger’s relevance to the new world she saw dawning in the 21st century. As the analyst Adrien Nonjon observes, “Semenyaka rose to popularity in the Duginian Traditionalist movement thanks to her article, ‘Conservative Revolution as Mythological Modernism’, published in volume 4 of Aleksandr Dugin’s anthology, In Search of the Dark Logos. She was invited to speak at the international conference Against the Post-Modern World, which was organised at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) in 2011 by the Tradition Center chaired by Dugin”.

While Semenyaka now dismisses her relationship with Dugin as merely a one-off meeting, her early work, such as 2011’s “Transformation of Ernst Junger’s alternative to the bourgeois individual”, approvingly cites Dugin’s definitions of Conservativism, just as her geopolitical worldview, like Dugin’s, derives from the British political theorist Halford Mackinder’s concept of the World Island, far more influential in Russian Eurasianist thought than it ever was in its homeland. Dugin’s shadow looms over Semenyaka’s writing and speeches, which can often be read as a conscious rejection of her former mentor following the two widely divergent paths each took as a result of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Just as Ukrainian and Russian commentators battle to convince international observers that the other side are the real fascists, Dugin and Semenyaka compete to convince the European and American radical Right that the other side are the real liberals. Yet each, despite their two respective nationalist projects being locked in an existential war against each other, share many of the same reference points in the Conservative Revolution, particularly their use of Jünger’s The Worker as a lodestone.

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Often dismissed as a Nazi, Semenyaka more accurately occupies a far more interesting intellectual space as a Conservative Revolutionary whose concept of a pan-European political sphere distinct from an Asiatic Russia and a liberal American-led West derives directly from Jünger’s political thought. As Semenyaka writes, “the point of Ernst Jünger, who offered one of the earliest and most insightful descriptions of the coming totalitarian orders in his interwar classic treatise The Worker… is that the difference between the two regimes which rivalled for the planetary domination in the 20th century and the post-war neo-liberal order, in fact, is not so striking.” For Semenyaka, the value of Jünger in understanding the present is unparalleled: “it is his creativity that is considered the brightest example of the alternative of the Enlightenment project of modernisation and is widely known for its futuristic and even forecasting value”.

As she wrote in her intellectual autobiography published on the American White Nationalist website Countercurrents, the Azov movement offers a means to translate her academic interests into real-world politics: “I could say that what I studied in theory, I developed in practice. This is the Third Way, the Conservative Revolution, but revived for today. All of these theorists were also advocates of pan-Europeanism, and that is what our projects are all about.” As she remarks in an explicit rejection of Dugin’s work, “our goal is clear: it is the creation of the sovereign military and political Paneuropean bloc (confederation) which continues the classic tradition of the European third geopolitical way. That’s why Prof. Dugin is wrong by pretending by means of his Fourth Political Theory that the third geopolitical way is no longer possible and that all attempts to restore the European superpower, geopolitical subjectivity and the leading positions in the ‘unipolar’ world are ‘anti-Russian’ encroachments in the service of American imperialism.” For Semenyaka as for Dugin, as she observes in her essay on Black Metal, the goal of the Conservative Revolution is “to cancel not only the era of Enlightenment, but also that of Renaissance and Reformation. In other words, it aims at building the New Middle Ages”.

Mocking Girkin’s marginality, Semenyaka instead posits Azov’s National Corps as the engine of history, the “vanguard of the Ukrainian nationalism of the new generation which offers the alternative both to the West and Putin’s Russian Federation.” In Semenyaka’s assessment, “According to Jünger’s forecast, the titans will reign throughout the entire 21st century, but then the gods will return, casting the titans in the Tartarus again, but also completing the eventual decline of the anthropocentric history which began with WW1.” It is in this process that the Azov movement can play its historical role, she believes: “That’s why, on a global scale, as pompous and surreal as it may sound, we will feel a relief only when we hasten the coming of a new metahistorical aeon.”

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When I interviewed Semenyaka back in 2019, she had just published her own translated selection of Jünger’s writing to be distributed among soldiers at the front. At the time, I thought her prediction of a coming great war against Russia, in which the West would be embroiled and in which Ukraine would forge a deeper cultural and defence relationship with Poland and the Baltic states as part of her Intermarium project, was a wild and unlikely fantasy. But the Azov movement, though still politically marginal, has been significantly boosted by Russia’s invasion, in numbers, military power and in its reputation as dogged defenders of the Ukrainian homeland, as during the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal. Azov offshoots, such as Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade and Kharkiv’s Kraken Regiment, play prominent roles in the war, and can reasonably hope to trade it for political capital — however the war ends.

Whatever the strange ambiguities of their earlier relationship, Dugin and Ukraine’s nationalist intellectuals like Semenyaka are now bitter opponents, locked in an existential conflict against each other, in a sort of esoteric Rightist shadow war distinct from but embedded within the far greater Ukraine tragedy. When the Russian state accused Azov of assassinating Dugin’s daughter Dariya Dugina — a still unproven claim — it only highlighted the strange intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian radical Right-wing politics. On the one hand, these are wildly obscure intellectual currents on the fringes of Right-wing thought; on the other, Western liberals cheering on the Russian Volunteer Corps’s raids on Belgorod, like American Republicans regurgitating Dugin’s portrayal of Zelenskyy as an incarnation of evil, have each found their own political personas influenced by them, demonstrating the strange ability of fringe politics to shape the wider world.

While Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole, Semenyaka’s, while fascinating, remains marginal in Ukraine. Yet each embodies the unexpected resurgence of esoteric Rightist ideas from the early 20th century in a hypermodern war that looks set to define the contours of modern Europe. Far from obscure 20th century marginalia, Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution looks more relevant than ever: sometimes, history is written on the fringes.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

Obviously this is a fantasy, like most British political commentary. It is Britain’s political comment class alone who are so destructively enamoured of the political theatre of a distant foreign country that American news crowds out our own in the battle for attention. Yet this colonised mindset is only true of a specific shade of American politics: an identitarian left-liberal strand tailor-made for our mid-Atlantic Twitter class.

Londoners rioted in protest against policing in Minnesota, and our increasingly deranged discourse is directly cut-and-pasted from US models. But the twists and tangles of American conservative politics are more or less unknown territory in our own semi-digested imperial province.

A clear example of this dynamic can be found in the rise of what some term America’s New Right, well-documented in a critical but fair and accurate portrayal by the Left-wing New Republic’s Sam Adler-Bell. An uneasy alliance of state-capitalist National Conservatives, post-liberals and Catholic Integralists, the New Right “wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps”.

Like younger conservatives in Britain, a young New Right writer quoted by Adler-Bell observes that “we have to think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries or restorationists who are overthrowing the regime”, as the conservatism of their elders has simply failed in its essential task: “there’s not a lot left to conserve in the contemporary state of things. There are things that need to be destroyed and rebuilt.”

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The parallels with Britain are clear. In America, the conservative establishment has “ossified into a decadent, self-dealing oligarchy” that has adopted “the moral heresies of so-called wokeness and [clings] to the rotted corpse of the Reaganite consensus”. The conservative old guard “‘just want to run the greatest hits of 1984 over and over again”.

Surveying our own Conservative scene, we see the same dismal picture: the potential challengers to Boris’s rapidly waning authority include Rishi Sunak, a free marketeer crippled under the weight of his Treasury Brain, and Liz Truss, gleefully capering around in one of the Army’s remaining tanks in homage to Thatcher, keeping alive a Tory cargo cult that should have died decades ago. The Tories possess the single electoral benefit of not being the Labour Party: but they have no coherent vision of the good, and offer little to any forward-thinking conservative.

Why is this the case, given the total Americanisation of British politics? Why do the intellectual currents revolutionising the American Right here remain a mere object of curiosity to an idiosyncratic minority of conservative thinkers?

It is hard not to think that Thatcherism has played a major role in the intellectual debilitation of the British Right: the ideas that most animate the party faithful are the same ones put into practice, overwhelmingly disastrously, forty years ago. The free-market think tanks which cluster around CCHQ are still trying to realise the fever-dreams of fin-de-siècle Vienna intellectuals. The Tory party remains trapped in the long 20th century, weighed down by corporate boomers and their lobbyist hirelings. Indeed, the paucity of Conservative Party thought today is such that there is more value in adapting Marxist analysis to Tory ends than in reading anything excreted from the party ecosystem.

As a result, Conservative MPs whine about ‘wokeness’ on Twitter instead of using their parliamentary majority to repeal the raft of New Labour legislation that foisted a Blairite shadow government on the country; the dense web of state-funded quangos, NGOs and bureaucrats that sets the tone of British political discourse and frustrates Tory policy at every turn. No wonder Tories win elections and yet are amazed they can’t change Britain’s political culture: they waste their energy fighting the symptoms while subsidising the causes.

In Britain, the obvious target of an equivalent conservative counter-revolution would be against the destructive innovations of New Labour, whose zombie ideology, rejected by voters a decade ago, still commands the cultural heights. This is what the purported “culture war” means, at heart, which explains the horror expressed by every ageing broadsheet commentator who claims that revoking legislation brought in ten years ago is an assault on the venerable British Constitution comparable only to fascism.

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A swift path to victory is possible, not least by halting the overproduction of downwardly mobile elites New Labour embedded into British society like a retreating army laying delayed-action bombs. Even Blair himself, rising flowing of mane and leathery of skin from his political tomb once again, recognises the problem of his own deranged political children, without accepting any of the blame.

But the Tories ultimately don’t want to win the culture war. Instead, they’ll keep it grinding on until the last boomer dies in the last nursing home, as long as it keeps the shires blue for another decade. A ruthlessly efficient machine for winning and holding power, the Conservative Party simply has no idea what to do with power once it has it, and thrusts it at its enemies like a hot brick.

The fundamental problem facing the Conservatives is this: largely as a result of its own policies it will soon run out of voters. Younger voters, millennials and zoomers, are not aliens with strange and inexplicable desires: they want their own homes, secure jobs, good pay and the ability to form families.

The Labour Party, at its best, offers much of this. But it also offers much else that is terrible, including an unhinged identity politics repellent to ordinary voters even in the America of its birth, let alone in the very different cultural and demographic context of an Early Modern kingdom in northwestern Europe. Given the choice between boring, effective socialism and American-imported identity politics, it will always choose the latter. There is simply no way forward with the Labour Party that currently exists; its front bench is effectively a mindless golem swayed by the Twitter fads of the moment.

Much of the energy of the young New Right, like that of the millennial socialist Left, derives from online debate on social media, which has radicalised politics away from an ailing and effectively dead centre. For both factions, it is an intra-elite competition, aiming to seize control of sclerotic party structures to win the support of the masses for their respective revolutionary projects. Like millennial socialism, the New Right represents the political battlegrounds of the near future: both share revolutionary dissatisfaction with the status quo, and both share the desire to win the coming ideological battle. The Nineties Third Way is dead, and whatever replaces it will shape the coming decades.

Whatever the angst about it from ageing commentators, in Britain, as in America, all younger conservatives are shaped and influenced by the discourse of the online Right, just as younger Leftists are shaped by the internecine squabbles and identity fundamentalism of the online Left. In Britain, however, our ruling Conservatives seek to quash the only intellectually interesting expression of youthful conservative thought through their campaign against online anonymity: they may be incapable of preventing Islamists stabbing MPs to death, but they’ll pull out all the stops to stop you complaining about it online.

As in Britain, in America the proponents of the new conservatism of the common good are largely Catholic, though they less often display the convert’s zeal that characterises their more pugnacious American equivalents. In Britain, this tendency largely adheres to Blue Labour rather than the Conservative party — a situation I have previously argued is not tenable. Theoretically, the division between the American New Right’s China-inflected state capitalism and Blue Labour’s socialist heritage is a point in favour of the British variant: we have, after all, a viable and only-recently destroyed tradition of nationalised industry and utilities, still popular with voters, that Americans do not. But alas, our post-liberals lack the killer instinct, meekly submitting their tweed-encircled necks to the culture war knife, merrily quoting Chesterton all the way to the scaffold block.

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But the ultimate downfall of any Tory counter-revolution is the absence of any infrastructure for nurturing a new wave of conservative thought. In the US, as Adler-Bell notes, a lavishly-funded constellation of goodies are offered to young conservatives, from think tanks that ‘“identify, educate, and credential” a new generation of staffers and bureaucrats to the fellowships that “have long played a role in shaping the next generation of right-wing elites.” In effect, as he jokes, “all this conservative foundation money slushing around functions as a ‘welfare state’ for lacklustre writers and scholars”.

In Britain, this conservative infrastructure to bring in new blood and new ideas simply does not exist; they’d send our equivalents to Prevent. Indeed, the only money sloshed around by the Conservative apparatus is for huckster resellers of PCR tests and for a cultural and NGO blob which hates conservatism in all its forms.

The Tories profess to believe in the magic wisdom of the free market while subsidising their political enemies, and affecting perplexity at the results: their vision of the glorious past extends no further than the early 1980s. The British political Right still views the state with fear and loathing, with Tory MPs happier snuffling around for crumbs from boardroom tables than exerting the executive power granted to them by the public. The American New Right, by contrast, aims to use the power of the state, the most powerful tool available to any politician, to effect a conservative counter-revolution.

Ultimately, the Conservative party shrinks from the vast power the British constitution affords the executive, which can radically reshape Britain for the better and cement Tory rule for another generation. For all its many faults, the Labour Party does not. And when it eventually returns to government it will surely use the state’s power to bury Toryism for good, just as Blair and Brown managed to allow Tories to keep winning elections yet to keep failing at delivering the basic governance demanded by their voters.

The American New Right may well warrant some scepticism: whatever its populist leanings, its electoral manifestations are largely a project of Silicon Valley donors, after all, and the disbelief of the American Left that the country’s Right can ever be swayed from corporate capitalism may well be accurate. Yet it is surely correct about one thing: the party that learns to use the state effectively will be able to reshape the nation in its image. Perhaps we should be paying attention to America after all.

People might not understand why Israelis and Palestinians are firing rockets at each other, but that doesn’t stop them choosing a team. “Mark likes Israel, I’m Palestine” — as Jeremy in Peep Show pointed out, it’s much more interesting if you pick sides, and the western world is not short of People With Opinions About The Middle East.

The modern stereotype of western partisanship is, on the one hand, someone with a US flag and/or a crucifix in their Twitter avatar protesting that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where gay pride is allowed. And on the other, you’d have someone like gender studies professor Judith Butler, who once described Hamas and Hezbollah as being “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left”.

Yet it wasn’t always like this. As Jeet Heer wrote a while back, American conservatives were once sympathetic to the Palestinians. Right-wing publisher Regnery, for instance, “published a steady stream of books championing Arab culture and sympathetically describing the plight of the Palestinians”. In 1956 the National Review called Israel “the first racist state in modern history” while “James Burnham, the most important and influential foreign policy analyst at National Review, was very critical of Israel, constantly berating the state for inflaming Arab passions by mistreating Palestinian refugees and its internal Arab population.” The conservative science fiction writer Poul Anderson mocked the Left for ignoring the Palestinians — something you couldn’t accuse them of now.

Among certain English conservatives was a strong affinity and natural sympathy with the aristocratic Arab world, while most of the Zionists were radicals, socialists and feminists of various kinds.

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So why did Left and Right swap places? After 1967, the two sides did become more aligned along Cold War lines and so to be pro-Israeli was to be pro-American, and vice versa. But Heer argued that conservatives like power, and that their perception of a weak Jewish state changed following their heroic, spectacular victory in 1967: “After that, conservatives, like nerds attracted to a strongman, decided to sidle up to Israel.” That generalisation of conservatives is not entirely untrue, of course; Right-wing views in men tend to correlate with higher upper-body-mass and after the Six Day War Israel became a gym-bro’s dreams. Its military victories, as well as its famous special forces and intelligence agencies, are genuinely impressive in a Boy’s Own sort of way. That Israel operates as a sort of modern-day Sparta while also being ultra-libertarian does push all the right buttons for conservatives.

Then there is religion. In the Seventies, Israeli politicians built relationships with Evangelical leaders, who increasingly referred to “Judeo-Christian” values and gave Israel a solid support base in the US far larger than its Jewish minority; the one tiny downside was that Israel’s victory would ultimately bring about the end of the world, but this was a mere detail.

Israel, most recently, has also become much more religious, and therefore conservative, due to its Orthodox population having higher birth rates; indeed, it has become more religious at a time when religion is in freefall not just in the United States, but in the Arab world too.

The western Left, in contrast, carries with it an overriding interest in the power of victimhood, a legacy of some obscure sect that flourished in that part of the world 2,000 years ago. They also strongly identify with what Jonathan Haidt called the Care/Harm Foundation — the desire to protect the weak — but this is often only really triggered when they can in some way identify with the person doing the harming; that is why Syrian atrocities against Palestinians get as much attention as police shootings in Jamaica or Brazil.

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But another, better suggestion for the Right’s identification with Israel might simply be anti-liberalism, so that when the Left adopted the Palestinian cause after 1967, conservatives supported Israel just to oppose them. Much of the modern Right is really only defined in opposition to the Left; if progressives went back to supporting Israel tomorrow, the Right would probably all add little Palestinian flags to their Twitter profiles. As the Balfour Declaration famously put it: “a home for the Jewish people, to own the libs”.

That won’t happen, but there are lots of instances where partisan groups switch sides en masse for purely tribal reasons. Before 2016, Republicans tended to be much more free trade than Democrats, and more hostile to Russia. Post-2016 that has reversed, to such an extent you might assume it was just the natural state of things.

The Left’s fondness for the underdog has often led intellectuals to side with “social movements that are progressive” who were also bloodthirsty maniacs. During the Cold War, many went off to support Leftist guerrillas in Cuba, Vietnam and various parts of Africa, but as Communism faded they found other underdog-murderers to support, and stumbled on Islamic radicals and revolutionaries. Michel Foucault famously had a weird infatuation with the Ayatollah Khomeini, calling him an “old saint” and referring to the Iranian revolution as “the most modern and the most insane” event. He meant “insane” in a good sense because Khomeinism transgressed western notions of rationality, which indeed hanging gay people from cranes certainly does.

Islamic fundamentalists, unlike communists, have little in common with western progressives, but that didn’t necessarily matter. While there are lots of different factors that determine a person’s political stance — personality type, moral flavour, our view of gender roles — the real primary motive is: who hates whom. Who is on your side?

Butler’s argument was that, since the likes of Hamas define themselves as anti-imperialist, and are opposed to US dominance, then they are on the Left. Of course, many on the Left get furious at this argument, since if Hamas were white, they would be defined as so right-wing as to be off the spectrum. Indeed the Right-Wing Authoritarian test has been done on Palestinian subjects and, unsurprisingly, Hamas supporters turned out to be pretty Right-wing and authoritarian.

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And yet if they were white reactionaries, they would not be anti-western, nor therefore “anti-imperialistic”, so it is not an illogical rationale. If the Left defines itself as being against the United States’ global hegemony, then Hamas are indeed on the Left.

This is also the logic of the Right on Israel — that not only is it a liberal democracy, but it is somehow on their side in a civilisational sense. In some ways that’s true; visiting Israel, it does feel western in many respects. But neither is that wholly true, and it is certainly not helpful for a country which needs the acceptance of its neighbours for long-term survival. Indeed, it only vouches for the narrative that Israel is a colonial state.

In From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik interviewed some British-born Muslims fuming at the Zionist entity, and observed that none of them could point to Palestine on a map or mention a single fact about it. But the same is true of most culture warriors on the issue, who all see it as a proxy for a debate closer to home.

The Right is just as bad: during the 2016 presidential race, Ted Cruz was addressing a group of Arab Christians when he proceeded to tell them that they have no greater ally than Israel. Perhaps as a great surprise to him, they didn’t agree and he was booed off stage. But then Arab Christians don’t tend to be especially Zionist, funnily enough. And why should they be? It’s not a civilisational battle between West and East.

A century ago, up to a third of Palestinians were Christian, a group whose existence was famously summed up by the story of an Anglican visitor who asked a local which missionary had converted his family: “Paul”. Many of the leading PLO activists in the 1970s were Christians, as were the founders of Ba’athism. Indeed, rather than Israel being part of the West, the majority of Israelis don’t come from a European Ashkenazi background; over three million are Mizrahim and have always lived in the Middle East; to Europeans many if not most Israelis appear indistinguishable from other Middle Easterners.

But then many people who take an interest in the conflict see it as representative of something bigger. For conservatives, Zionism long ago became a way of signalling civilisational patriotism, opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration in the West, as well as a way of isolating the anti-Semites who have often dogged the Right and toxified the brand. On the other side, Palestinianism is part of a broader struggle; today America’s young progressives are as pro-Palestinian as their European equivalents, conflating it with America’s racial dynamic in a way that displays almost world-beating levels of solipsism.

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Yet I wonder how this will last. The region will always have explosive potential, but it might not hold the same symbolic importance it once did. The Religious Right is in serious decline in the US, and the conservatism replacing it is more secular and more nationalist; it is less keen on foreign adventures and less invested in Israel or the Middle East. Americans as a whole have largely given up on the idea that they are in some existential, civilisational clash with radical Islam because they’ve realised that, whatever their issues with the Muslim world, they hate each other more.

Most of all, the whole narrative around the Holy Land was in many ways a proxy for our view on the United States in a brief unipolar moment — and the rise of China will once again flip political alliances in ways we can’t entirely predict. The one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever horrors the Beijing regime inflicts on the world, some western intellectuals will be on hand to justify it as part of the global struggle against western oppression and colonialism. Some things are even more timeless and unending than war in the Middle East.

I normally quite like mindless action films full of explosions but this time I just couldn’t get past the second episode. There was nothing wrong with it; I’m sure it was fine — I just didn’t want the protagonists to win. We were, of course, supposed to see what drove some Middle Easterners to hate Americans, one having lost a brother in an air strike as a child; American entertainment has moved beyond the “reel bad Arab” caricatures of the 1980s.

I actively wanted them to win, though, and found myself muttering “What are you even doing in their country?” at the Yankees as they ran around some forsaken place in the desert. Before last year I never would have felt that way.

My father was a refugee in the United States. His parents had sent him and his older brother to North America in 1940 because they wanted their children to grow up free. They spent Christmas that year in Manhattan staying with family friends in the Upper West Side, where they were doted on by all the neighbours and friends who came to visit and showered the two English boys with kindness.

But then America was a country famous for its incredible generosity, the welcome it gave newcomers; once you crossed that ocean no king, tsar or Führer could bother you again. Many enjoyed similar welcomes; a friend of dad’s remembered arriving around the same time and being picked up by a New York taxi driver who told him in a broad Nu Yoik accent: “Don’t worry, son, Uncle Sam’s gonna look after you now.” He never forgot that.

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To my generation, growing up in the Cold War, that sense of America The Protector still lingered. I remember as a child seeing US troops at Checkpoint Charlie and being aware that it was thanks to them that we didn’t have to keep our eyes down like the poor prisoners of East Berlin. As a British child, when you watched American films or American TV, you identified with the Americans against our common enemies around the world.

Like many people here, I considered 9/11 as an attack on us too, and not just because of the dozens of Britons killed; I was furious when the BBC aired a panel show a couple of days later in which various (mostly Muslim) guests and audience members shouted about how the Americans had it coming, in front of a distraught-looking American diplomat.

And yet a lot has happened since. There is now a feeling, and I suspect it is growing on the British Right, that America is no longer a force for good in the world — quite the opposite. “Civilisations die from suicide,” as Arnold Toynbee famously said, and the United States, or at least its Ivy League-educated elite, is the Rev Jim Jones of the West.

The overwhelmingly Atlanticist wing of the British Right is, I suspect, going to experience a long retreat — one that will slot right into the long history of anti-Americanism on the Right. America, after all, was a revolutionary society founded by Whigs, and the country’s Tories were largely driven out, to Canada or Britain.

Conservatism, as it began in France and England around the time of the French Revolution, was defined by throne and altar, and so some American intellectuals argued that the country didn’t really have an authentically native conservative tradition. Yet paradoxically America, while being a young country, also has the most ancient of constitutions, and the deepest political roots. It really has something worth conserving. For that reason, until now, it always resisted utopian and revolutionary ideas, while Europeans could never resist them.

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The European Right once had a strong anti-American streak, viewing it as a country filled with mediocrity and an absence of high culture. Those on the extreme Right disliked it as a land of racial degeneracy and Jewish influence; Hitler in particular hated everything the United States stood for.

But as America’s empire grew, however, it was the Left who came to see the US as the chief enemy of the wretched of the earth. Perhaps the lone Yankeephobe among senior post-war British Conservatives was Enoch Powell, who was deeply hostile to the United States, which he blamed for the downfall of the British Empire. Powell wasn’t totally alone, although anti-Americanism was largely on the fringe. The Right-wing Monday Club had been in favour of joining the Common Market because it was opposed to American influence. In 1967 it argued that the choice was between being “first-class Europeans” or “second-grade Americans”. Club chairman Sir Victor Raikes even made the case for the withdrawal of American troops from western Europe so that the continent could instead defend itself.

Yet this quaint nostalgia for the world before 1914 could not live up to a reality where western Europeans have been incapable of defending themselves and still rely on American support. And as the Common Market failed to become the alliance of independent states the Conservative Right hoped for, so the Tories became increasingly Europhobic. By the late 1980s pro-Americanism was imbedded in the British Right; the country’s Right-wing tabloids also became zealously pro-American, while continuously writing in derogatory terms about the Germans and French.

It had become a mantra among conservative commentators that everything America did was better. They believed in freedom rather than euro-socialism, they still cared about defending the West against its enemies. America was richer and technologically more advanced. It even had higher fertility, the highest sign of confidence in the future. None of these things are entirely true anymore.

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On the Left, meanwhile, a casual sort of anti-Americanism has long since been the norm, fed by Americans like Michael Moore who use their countrymen as punchlines for European audiences. It is assumed that most of the world’s problems are caused by the Great Satan, whether through the machinations of the CIA, FBI or capitalism in the abstract.

Yet the same liberal middle-class Europeans who despise “inauthentic” mass-produced American food also hold the most basic, globalised political opinions mass-produced in America. The most successful of these beliefs — the Coca-Cola of bad takes — is that America is a unique force for racism and oppression, exported by Americans who can make a living precisely because it isn’t true. But if European liberalism think America hegemony is oppressive, wait till they see what follows.

So while far more British people on the Right see themselves as pro-American, this barely makes any sense anymore. Certainly on issues of social democracy, relating to welfare and redistribution, most Europeans are more Left-wing than Americans, with the British somewhat closer to the US median. Yet on social justice issues — related to race, immigration, gender and sexuality — America is far more radical than the European norm. And in 21^st century politics, those latter issues are more salient to people’s voting habits.

It was once a rather fond cliché to say that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold, but that idea seems less benign now that America’s politics has mutated into something genuinely toxic and destructive. Its elites are aren’t just misguided, they are deranged and malignant. With the country losing its Christian faith, they are driven by a new religious moral fervour towards the utopian goal of “equity”, equality of outcome transferred from the individual to the racial group, a project destined to stoke hatred and conflict.

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And of all the people in the world, the British have the least immunity to these ideas, unprotected by any language barrier or recent cultural memory of utopianism. In France and Germany, American concepts at least have some linguistic hurdles before they come to spread and dominate; in central and eastern Europe, people recognise that purity spirals and cancel culture have obvious, dark comparisons with their own history. In Britain, however, we have an entirely naïve population.

Because our middle class desperately ape everything they read in the New York Times, or watch on Netflix, so America’s history and discourse is transferred onto ours, a form of cultural imperialism that our leaders are too conformist to resist. So we see nice, elderly Liberal Democrats voters in suburban Oxfordshire kneeling outside their homes in absurd imitation of American sportsmen protesting about a police shooting, the circumstances of which they are entirely, and wilfully, ignorant of. Would any of them protest police killings in Brazil, which dwarf the US rate? Would any of them care?

It’s not a thought-out belief with an understanding of the causes of a problem or the consequences of any proposed solution; it’s a meme, a fashion. It’s what anthropologists refer to as “prestige-biased group transmission”, when people imitate the fashions and mores of powerful groups without any understanding of whether these fashions will benefit them. It’s the same reason that my children are now being taught American history at school, the stories of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, as if it was theirs.

It’s tragic, because on a personal level Americans are still as warm and generous as they’ve always been; their earnestness and kindness sometimes shames me, coming from a country so filled with cynicism and nihilism-disguised-as-irony. But their political culture is poisonous, and America’s progressive fundamentalists are a bigger threat to Britain, and to Europe, than probably any other force on earth, bar climate change.

I still cheer for the Americans in the old films. But when it comes to the American religion being forced on us, I empathise more with the desert tribesman than with Jack Ryan: Yankees go home and get out of our lives.

But it was also rather timely; in the past weeks, Classics has endured quite a hammering. At the beginning of the month, Dan-el Padilla Peralta — a Dominican-born, New York-raised professor of Classics at Princeton — gave an explosive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he expressed his desire to do away with “Classics” as a term and “explode the canon”, on the basis of it being appropriated by xenophobes and white-supremacists. For Padilla, it’s an endemic problem: “The production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of Classics.”

What does this mean in practice? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of Classics at Stanford University who was also interviewed for the NYTM piece, we should simply get “get rid of” Classics altogether: “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field”. Which may seem like an odd thing for a Classicist to say, but it’s a view that’s becoming increasingly widespread, and even institutionalised. Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”. (Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)

Tensions over the value and ethics of studying Classics have been simmering for some years. Indeed, it is hard to think of another subject that has required its devotees to defend their field of study with such frequency. We’re told that it’s the study of useless “dead languages”; that it’s the preserve of public schoolboys, such as our Pericles-loving Prime Minister; even worse, that it needs to burn because it’s an inspiration for far-Right extremists in the US.

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The latest battle over Classics is a culmination of all the above. The fact that it remains a relatively marginal and unstudied subject in the educational system has made it an easy target in today’s culture wars. It means, for example, that Classics can be dismissed as simply the “history of Greece and Rome” — even though North Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul, the Russian steppe and many other territories also form part of it.

This cognitive blindness is made all the more peculiar when you consider how broadminded and enquiring Herodotus, Tacitus and many ancient historians could be about their fellow citizens. Although they were mostly interested in questions of national identity, when they did write on matters such as skin colour, they tended to do so with more curiosity than judgement, attempting — albeit mostly without success — to explain difference through factors such as climate and geography.

This meant that for Herodotus, the Ethiopians were dark-skinned on account of their proximity to the sun, while the inhabitants of colder territories were paler as they were further away from it. For Tacitus, the climate of Germany was such as to render its people naturally resistant to cold and hunger. It’s all nonsense, of course. But as Padilla himself has conceded, the Greeks and Romans “would have not really understood our racial categories”. One could be a Roman regardless of where you originated or what you looked like.

More importantly, these sources constitute the classicist’s raw materials; they are what lie at the heart of Classics as a field. Why is it, then, that in the debate that is now raging over the future of the subject and its right to exist, they barely get a look in? One would have thought that the actual texts and archaeological finds used by classicists today would be the first things to be considered in any reappraisal of the subject.

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Those who wish to banish Classics instead emphasise what has been done with these sources. They point to entitled Grand Tourists trundling over the ancient sites and pocketing things at will; to the likes of Winckelmann, the German art historian who idealised the whiteness of ancient statues despite the fact that they were once painted in bright hues; to the tendency of today’s far-Right to draw upon Classical imagery. Meanwhile, under the Third Reich the writings of Plato and others were mined and distorted so that they would appear to endorse Nazi eugenics.

But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective. Indeed, if the main argument against Classics resides, as it appears to, in its development as a discipline and reception in the modern world — more than in the ancient material itself — then the other side of this journey ought to be told, too. For example, it would be easier to refute claims of Classics’s Eurocentrism if attention were paid to things such the transmission of texts; if it wasn’t for the scholars of places such as Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, who painstakingly translated and copied ancient manuscripts, the corpus of literature studied by classicists today would be considerably poorer.

More importantly, for every account of the abuse of classical material, there is another of inspiration. Take the growth in recent decades of “Classical Reception”, a relatively new field through which classicists engage with ancient material through the lens of more contemporary writers and artists. This specialism has helped to broaden the horizon of Classics by revealing some of the positive or at least enriching ways antiquity has permeated the modern world. The works of writers who have drawn legitimately and powerfully on ancient sources — whether it’s William Shakespeare, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka – surely form a more meaningful aspect of the story of Classics than the misquotations extremists upload to online forum. Even Antony Gormley’s engagement with the classical tradition has inspired a number of academic papers in this area.

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If anything, the abuse of Classics ought to be used as an argument for saving it. For the alternative, abandoning it, would be to hand it over to those very groups Padilla and others identify as ransacking it. The field does not deserve to be razed because of the way it has been tended in certain quarters. If a study of Classics teaches us anything, it is how much easier it is to knock down than rebuild. As the so-called Liberators of Rome discovered to their regret, assassinating Julius Caesar, rather than what came after, was the easy part. Demolish Classics — and then what?

No one is denying that aspects of the ancient world and its reception are ugly — this is true of all cultures and periods — but that is no reason to abandon Classics itself. There is no call to study the ancient material through the eyes of Nazis. The arguments of Winckelmann can be read to be disregarded. The so-called Classics of white supremacist organisations such as Identity Evropa can be disregarded — they do not deserve the airtime.

The current climate, in which individuals cherry-pick classical quotations to their own ends, ought to be a summons to the original sources that form the heart of Classics. They ought to provide the impetus to return to Classics’ roots, to read old texts anew with our own eyes, to look at art that crossed the globe knowing no borders, to read legitimate engagements with the classical past, to think for ourselves. As Heraclitus wrote: “our eyes are more accurate witnesses than our ears”. So let’s not be afraid of using them.

Yehuda is too young to vote — the voting age here is 18 — but he was deeply invested in the outcome of this week’s election, which Netanyahu went on to win. Handing out the mock ballot slips was more than a stunt, it was an act of devotion to the prime minister who has been in power for more than half of his life.

“There’s no one like Bibi,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “The Likud is like family and friends.”

Yehuda’s enthusiasm isn’t unusual. It’s part of a significant trend in Israel: young people love Netanyahu. And they most probably played a significant role in his reelection. Though we don’t yet know the breakdown of election results by age, a pre-election poll revealed Netanyahu’s popularity with young and first-time voters.

The survey, by the Israel Democracy Institute, showed that 65% of Israelis between the ages of 18-24 preferred Netanyahu while just 17% wanted his rival Benny Gantz. Among Israelis over 65, Gantz was much more popular — 53% preferred him, while 35% wanted Netanyahu.

Broadly speaking, Jewish Israeli youth like Netanyahu because they tend to be Right wing, the dominant ideology in Israel. Here, as opposed to Europe, the Right-Left divide is not related to social issues and economics but to security, defense, and the peace process.

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More than half of the population, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, would identify itself as being on the Right. Among religious Jews, a growing sector of the population given the high birth rates in the orthodox communities, that tendency is even more prevalent.

“Keeping in mind that first-time voters are greatly influenced by their family and home environment,” said Plesner, “and given the disproportionate demographic growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, the logical conclusion is that the current rightward trends are expected to continue.”

But religious demographics are only part of the explanation. These young voters are a generation of sceptics when it comes to the idea of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They support Netanyahu because they believe his message that Israel must live by the sword. “The hope or yearning for peace is foreign to them,” said Plesner.

They were born in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist who opposed territorial compromise with the Palestinians. They were raised in the shadow of the bloody Second Intifada, and were just starting school when Israel evacuated Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They have lived through three wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — in 2008-2009, in 2012, and in 2014. And now most of them are in the Israeli army, with many enforcing a 52-year-long military occupation.

On Election Day in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, a 20-year-old named Roni was sitting at a table inside a polling station in an elementary school. She is a soldier in the Israeli military’s home front command and had spent the day helping with the ballot. She had already cast her first ever vote. Her pick? Netanyahu.

Roni said she didn’t care that Netanyahu was facing corruption charges in several cases, pending a hearing. She was impressed by his diplomacy, and especially his close relationship with Donald Trump. Like many Israelis, she was also voting on security. “The security we have had in the past decade is the best we have ever had,” she said.

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Roni lives in Maale Adumim, another settlement in the West Bank. A few days before the poll, Netanyahu promised that he would annex these settlements if he were reelected. It was an idea that resonated with her, even though she conceded it would be “problematic” – since most countries reject Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu is “the only one that would be able to do it,” she said.

In her view, peace between Israelis and Palestinians is impossible. “I don’t think there is ever going to be peace,” she said. “We both want the same thing. We want Jerusalem, they want Jerusalem. They want to have a country but they want it on our land. It is like two babies wanting the same candy. One will get it one, one won’t. We got it.” Sharing the land is not an option. “I think that would be a disgrace for the soldiers that died protecting the country,” she said, “the soldiers’ blood that was shed all over Jerusalem, all over the West Bank, all over the country.”

Nor does she believe that the Palestinians will give up their fight even if a compromise is reached.

Israel’s youth weren’t always so Right wing. Roby Nathanson is the director of the Macro Center for Political Economics in Israel, which polls the attitudes of Israeli youth every six years. When the survey began, in 1998, its respondents were the “generation of peace”, he said. But attitudes shifted to the Right over the years as the peace process floundered.

A critical point was the Israeli evacuation of settlements from Gaza in 2005, which was followed by repeated wars between Israel and Hamas. There are many reasons for this turn of events — Israel’s siege, Hamas’s militancy, and other regional developments — but many bought a simple story, believing that Israel gave up land and got rockets in return.

In the 2010 survey, the first one following the Gaza withdrawal, Nathanson said he noticed more extreme attitudes from the youth than ever before.  “We identified racist opinions among the youngsters,” he said. “We were very astonished about these positions.”

Today, these opinions are no longer surprising. In the 2016 survey, the most recent one, 40% of Jewish teenagers (15-18) and 44% of Jewish young people (21-24) said they “think that Arab citizens of Israel should be prohibited from being elected to the Knesset”.

According to Nathanson, Netanyahu is particularly appealing to first-time voters because his party invests in their development. Bibi may be notorious for elbowing out competitors within his own party, but in the lower ranks of Likud, young people feel encouraged to take on leadership positions. The populist party “gives many young leaders opportunities to grow into politics and be leaders of the future”.

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Nathanson contrasts this with Likud’s historic alternative, Labor, which is more calcified when it comes to growing the next generation of leaders. Labor are set for a historically low six seats in this election, compared to Likud’s projected 35. One of Labor’s few young stars, Stav Shaffir, did not come from within the party but was courted by it after leading a social justice protest movement in 2011.

It all marks a radical shift away from the Left’s vision of Israel – one that upholds human rights, the justice system, and works toward a negotiated solution with the Palestinians. “If you look at it statistically, the perspective for the secular, liberal, open-minded democratic society is not very rosy,” Nathanson says.

Instead, the future looks bright for the Right’s ideal: an Israel which prioritises the Jewish identity of the country over its democratic one, to the detriment, according to critics, of religious pluralism, the welfare of Israel’s Arab Palestinian minority, and the two-state solution. With demographics on his side, Netanyahu will be steering the country down this path for some time to come.

Generally, they have succeeded in implementing many aspects of their agenda, pushing the political conversation toward their direction. They also start to become ‘normal’ political parties, subject to the same types of activities and bargaining found in more traditional parties. Their stances are clearly not to everyone’s liking, but their impact and durability can no longer be denied.

Blue-collar populists have had the most success in their signature issue, restricting migration. Norway[2. Norway tightens asylum policy to cut numbers.], Denmark[3. Danish parliament passes contentious ‘ghetto’ plan.], Switzerland[4. Switzerland’s new immigration statute sets high hurdle for citizenship.], and Austria[5. The long honeymoon of Austria’s right-wing alliance.] have all tightened their policies on refugees since populist parties entered into government, and Italy’s government[6. Thousands march for refugee rights in Italy.] is in the process of following suit. America’s populist president, Donald Trump, is yet again embroiled in a dispute with Congress over immigration policy as he attempts to reduce the number of illegal migrants who enter and reside within America. Poland[7. Poland only accepts returning Poles under migration policy.] and Hungary’s[8. Orban digs in against European Commission on migration policy.] populist governments have also rejected pressure from the European Union to accept Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees as part of the EU’s common policy.

Just the threat that blue-collar populist parties could take power has often been enough to push governments to propose migration restrictions. The Dutch Prime Minister fought off a challenge from conservative populist Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in 2017 when he took a more demanding tone towards migrants, telling them in an open letter “act normal or get out”, and he has played a strong role in reducing African migration into the EU[9. Rutte says EU deal to reduce migration is a big step forward.]. Sweden’s major parties both tacked to the right on immigration in this year’s general election to fend off the Sweden Democrats, as did Norway’s Labour and Centre parties in that country’s 2017 election. Angela Merkel’s government followed suit this year in a bid to help her CDU/CSU alliance win two recent state elections. Even French President Emmanuel Macron recently mentioned immigration as a concern to be dealt within his speech addressing the gilets jaunes protestors.

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Denmark’s blue-collar populist Danish People’s Party’s (DF) two-decade growth in strength has even forced the long dominant Social Democrats to abandon allies on the left in the run up to next year’s campaign. Breaking a twenty-five-year agreement with the Social Liberal Party, Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen has led her party to vote with the bourgeois-populist government on a number of immigration restriction measures in the current parliament, including a ban on wearing burkas in public[10. Danish parliament passes ban on burqa and niqab.] and a controversial effort to combat “ghettos” where many Muslim immigrants live.[11. Danish parliament passes contentious ghetto plan] The populists have been so successful that there is now a new party to its right, the New Right, which argues that the DF is not tough enough on migration. Polls currently show it is likely to surpass the 2% threshold to enter the Folketing.

Even Hillary Clinton has got in on the act, recently saying that Europe needs to “get a handle on immigration” to stop the rise of blue-collar populism. Restricting immigration and reducing the number of Muslim refugees may remain very unwelcome policies among Western elites, but virtually everywhere else it’s a winning issue, forcing any leader who seeks to form a government to shift with the prevailing winds and endorse policies that would have been unacceptable five years ago.

Conservative populists have had an impact in other policy areas too. Norway’s Progress Party started as an anti-tax protest movement and to this day the party insists it’s more of a classical liberal party than a populist one. In government, its leader, Siv Jensen, took the Finance Ministry and has worked with Conservative (Hoyre) Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg to cut income taxes and eliminate the inheritance tax. The centre-Right coalition has also implemented a long-time Progress Party proposal to finance these cuts by taking money directly from Norway’s large sovereign wealth fund to pay for current spending.

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In contrast, the Danish People’s Party consciously places itself between the traditional Left and Right on economic matters. In practice, this means the party approves of tax cuts for lower-income workers but not for higher-income earners. Their opposition to this forced a smaller member of the governing centre-Right coalition, the libertarian Liberal Alliance, to abandon its plans to reduce the top income tax rate in the 2018 budget.

Italy’s conservative populists, the Lega Party, has also used its newfound power to push for radical changes in fiscal policy. It had campaigned for a 15% flat tax to replace the current progressive regime that includes rates up to 43%. It had also called for reductions in the retirement age. Its government partners, the more centrist populist Five Star Movement, had campaigned on a 780 Euro a month universal basic income. While a recent budget agreement with the EU forced both parties to scale back their programme, the new Italian budget will include increased spending and dramatically lower taxation, precisely the opposite of what the prior, more establishment-friendly budget had envisioned.

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Populist economics has also found a home in the United States. President Trump signed a massive corporate tax cut in late 2017 while also approving dramatic hikes in both domestic and military discretionary spending. The deficit has ballooned as a result, rising to nearly $800 billion (3.9% of GDP) in fiscal year 2018. The deficit is expected to further widen to nearly $1 trillion, or over 4.5% of GDP, in the coming fiscal year. Populist economic policy is spreading and is likely to have as much impact over the long term as its migration programme already has.

For the most part, fears about populism being inimical to democracy have proved ill-founded. Concerns that President Trump would become an autocratic strongman have faded as he acted in accord with his constitutional powers and accepted policy reversals when checked by other branches of government. No populist party in coalition has even tried to move against the press or attempted to criminalise political opposition. While some of these parties did grow out of movements with roots in authoritarianism or fascism, as the parties have grown, those elements have usually been dismissed or checked.

In Eastern Europe, though, the picture is a little less reassuring. Hungary’s Fidesz government has acted in ways reminiscent of authoritarian governments, especially in its use of state resources to mount openly political campaigns. Opposition political activity is not formally restricted, but the difficulty in attracting private advertisement for newspapers critical of the government has drastically reduced the number of openly critical press sources. Polarised between the Fidesz-supporting rural areas and opposition to him in Budapest and with the opposition split, politics is freer than it is in Putin’s Russia, but not as open and fair as elsewhere in the EU. Moreover, the invoking of ethnic nationalist themes in election campaigns is unlikely to be echoed by mainstream Western politicians.

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Poland is another worrying case. The governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) attracted worldwide opprobrium when it overturned a law that had allowed the outgoing Civic Platform party (PO) to appoint a significant number of judges to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. Since then, PiS has continued to pass laws that give its government greater control over the judiciary and public prosecutors. It has also placed the state media directly under government control, leading to what some opponents say is blatantly biased press coverage. The EU has threatened to suspend Poland’s voting rights as a result of these actions.

We must always be prepared to protect democracy, but we also must avoid the temptation to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of votes that don’t go the way we want, and even to change the rules as a result of them. Those opposed to conservative populism have claimed that both the Brexit referendum victory and the election of Donald Trump might have been fraudulently obtained by Russian state propaganda on social media. Law enforcers will duly reach their own conclusions on those issues. But American opponents of Trump have called for Democrats to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and appoint their favoured judges should they obtain control of Congress, exactly the type of allegedly anti-democratic action PiS has engaged in. Democracy is a fragile flower, and its flourishing ultimately rests on the willingness of the losers to accept results they disagree with.

Western countries have now had some form of democratic elections for over a century. In that time, we have grown used to a Left-Right political landscape, one that developed only over time and only in countries where the primary political dispute was over how to handle the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Communism. If one goes back to the mid-19^thCentury, many European countries were divided between Liberals who sought to expand democracy and free markets and combat the power of crowns and clerical gowns and Conservatives who opposed them. The current landscape emerged only when those battles faded in significance and new alliances were drawn to meet new challenges.

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There were always outliers to this landscape. Irish politics was divided for nearly 80 years along the lines of which side you supported in the Irish Civil War, and Israeli politics was originally divided on the question of how a party related to Zionism. Scandinavian politics has long had room for agrarian parties that did not fit neatly into the Left-Right continuum, as did many Eastern European countries in the interlude between the World Wars. The basic insight is that democratic politics organises around the questions that divide a people at a particular moment in time; parties are not, and should not be, frozen in amber.

Conservative populism represents a growing number of people who want different questions asked and answered. So long as this continues, we should expect these parties and figures to remain strong and active players in their nations’ politics. The evidence so far shows that as unconventional as their policies may seem, they can successfully compete in a free and vibrant democratic playing field and can operate as responsible actors when they obtain government. So long as the problems they address remain unsolved, we should expect to see the issues they champion and many of the solutions they advocate to remain on the Western agenda, and perhaps influence the course of history as decisively as did the rise of social democratic parties in the last century.