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What is The Good Society?

In Uncategorized on May 13, 2026 at 1:19 pm

Guest talk delivered to Carlisle Reform Party Members Meeting, at Carlisle United Football Club, Carlisle, United Kingdom, 14th April 2026:

THE SHORT ANSWER to this important question is: A free society, where you and I can be ‘at home’. Two words we skip past very easily, freedom and home. But both are central to the project known as ‘British’. For Britishness must be a shared endeavour to secure the values of a free society. Where you and I can be ‘at home’.

“[Britain] laid the foundations of law, liberty, free speech, and individual rights virtually everywhere the Union Jack has ever flown,” offered Donald Trump, on the 17th September 2025, during his state visit to Britain. A man of discernment after all?

The question then for government is how it discharges its responsibilities to enable a free society.

Roger Scruton writes: “Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda… Class is an attractive idea for left-wing historians because it denotes a thing that divides us…

Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us.”

The post-war consensus of a mixed economy created a confused social model, a hybrid of Marxist and conservative visions. This ended and we started on the road to Thatcher’s, then Blair-Brown’s, governance by unrestrained global markets.

As John Gray says: “Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail…

(I should point out that in America liberal means socialist, and in the UK it means free markets.)

…liberals (socialists) denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history… [whilst insisting] Western values… human rights, personal autonomy… must be projected to the last corners of the Earth.” A religious belief that socialism and free markets have our best interests at heart. The Thatcher/Blair consensus is ending now with pressure to move towards economic nationalism. That is, to withdraw from dependence on cheap imports.

But back to the ideas of freedom and home.  

Home is where life is lived. Home is the place we learn our ‘obligations and duties’. We enter any space to discover we are naturally obliged: Loyalty, hospitality, family, and community. Once we spot our obligations, we feel the weight of our duty to take care of each other.

A teenager in the West has infinite choices, and experiences angst as a result. They become an adult by recognising their obligations and duties. By sacrificing our infinite teenage choices, choosing one partner, for life, committing to work, and serving each other we grow up into maturity.

But what an unrestrained global market says is you can have infinite choices forever, and need to make few commitments, as capital, that is money or any resource capable of making more resource, will set you free from obligations and duties. This is known as extreme liberalism. Or the cult of choice.

And Western institutions have aided and abetted infantilising modern liberal democratic citizens to be childlike consumers in the candy store of choice. The ‘We Generation’ has been replaced by the ‘Me Generation’. It is little wonder other societies struggle to respect the West and its ‘way of life’ as it has turned out under extreme liberalism.

David Goodhart’s writing spots the frailty of the Blair-Brown government’s market vision. To send 50% of our young people to university he says is emotionally illiterate. It is an investment in the head, not the heart. The point of education is to turn out courageous people with a vision for building their settlement. Not to become selfish and isolated, unrooted.

The Western model is rooted in privileging the heart above the head, and our faithfulness to home and family. We have lost our way. The path back is mapped out for us. It starts with a heart to tell the truth. An obligation. And then the duty to accept the brutal losses that telling the truth will bring. To think with our hearts.

Learning to fail through telling the truth is where early maturity turns into powerful leadership. Once we’ve absorbed the losses of truth, where else does it lead? To trust. And trust is the basis of civil society, or what we call free association. The great growth of British business, charity and civil society, the model that transformed the modern world, is rooted in the concept of trust.

As we have found over the centuries freedom is costly and fragile. For nearly fifty years our sovereign freedom was handed over to a bureaucratic monster, the European Union. Now, Keir Starmer wants us to realign to EU regulations. The iron cage of Brussels bureaucracy is being wielded again by a visionless anti-democratic administrative class.

And Britishness is disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested, in what you call yourself, how you dress. Becoming or transitioning is a human necessity. We all do it. Banning the burqa is not British. It is petty legalism. Only a tragic society regulates clothing. The politics of resentment and grievance divides. As America has found.

But Britishness is interested in the unrestrained “capitalism [that] concentrates wealth and power in even smaller sections of society, university professors, media figures, lawyers, charity workers, community activists and officers in non-government organisations…”, as John Gray writes. This power means vulnerable human identity conforms to this narrow elite’s shaky self-serving desire to be ‘society’s guardians’. 

In 1974 Prime Minister Ted Heath, another plodding technocrat, during another energy crisis, famously asked in so many words: ‘Who governs Britain?’. Not you! Came the reply. In a television broadcast to the nation on 7th February, 1974, shortly after announcing that February’s general election, he said something which is real again: “The issue before you is a simple one. As a country, we face grave problems at home and abroad. Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed?”

In other words people do not want government by EU committee or unrestrained markets. The British people want their parliament to govern. Where the words: I am a British citizen, civis Britannicus sum, really does mean something.

If you go back only a hundred years it was possible to live beyond the reach of government. No CCTV, or even passports. The historian A.J.P. Taylor in his Oxford English History said: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… All this was changed by the impact of the Great War… The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time”.

And now the Labour government wishes to track you through digital ID surveillance. Are they mad? I think so.

If we look across the pond we see some large red flags. The US is tearing itself apart, between ‘conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives’. It has an unbending two-party system.  Theirs, like most modern liberal democracies, has coded its constitution as sovereign, where here in the UK, parliament reigns supreme, with its multi-party system.

By not chiseling a codified constitution into vulnerable school children’s brains it allows us to swim out into the sea of our long history. The Magna Carta (1215), the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Acts of Union (1707) all soak into parliamentary debate plus our bones, and pub quizzes.

We retain priests and princes in our landscape, for good and ill, as they filter and divert us before any rush to a supreme court to wield the law as an axe above the heads of parliamentarians. The Blair-Brown government’s efforts to install a continental system of government by technical expert committee and a politicised civil service has strained communities who have felt their franchise weakened. In other words European style managerialism, perfectly illustrated by our current Prime Minister, is one of the many threats to The Good Society.

MP and father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke, describes in his speech to the electors of Bristol in 1774 what has become the classic statement of the relationship between Members of Parliament and their constituents:

“To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men… [but] Parliament is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests… Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest… the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole.”

In other words, and this sounds odd to our ears, an MP is to give his or her best judgement on what is good and right for the whole nation. Opinions are subordinate to ‘the good’.

America this week is feeling the limits of its power. Where the British Empire exported modern liberal democracy by staying and building physical infrastructure, such as railways, banking systems, schools; I can go on, so will, rule of law, trading systems, democratic governance, ports and harbours, telegraph and communication, urban infrastructure, administrative buildings, water management. I will stop. America has shown it cannot install regime change by blowing things up. We the British built from the ground up. Building from the ground up is the only governance mentality that sustains. Rooted. Building that which is meant to last. Home!

And, it turns out Thatcher was no conservative. She had read the free market economist Friedrich Hayek as her guiding light. A common story told is Thatcher thumped down a copy of Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty on the table at a 1975 Cabinet Meeting, claiming to her colleagues: “This is what we believe!”. The fable continues that she was not a great reader, and did not get to the end of this book, as the postscript is entitled  “Why I am Not a Conservative”.

America’s soft power has been much greater than Britain’s hard power. Coca-Colanisation brought down the Berlin Wall. The cult of choice as an output of modern liberal democracy has been irresistible. America exported British modernity after the Second World War, but in the last 19 years we have seen democratic recession, a debt crisis and Western systems as frail. In particular Western legitimacy, that is the power to influence through building trust and the faithful application of a rules-based order, has been eroded by what American writer Normal Mailer would say is: Plastic capitalism, ‘where even the molecules in its plastic furniture are persecuted’.

But as America falters and is no longer a model society, the British system looks increasingly grounded in a deep and enduring parliamentary system that developed after the Protestant Reformation. And a civil war, which was a revolution that took place 150 years before the French got round to theirs.

I put to you that we are an achieved society because of a complex and difficult history. And we might argue that our tolerant, largely peaceable and functioning settlements, like Carlisle, were only possible through centuries of development. On our foreign summer hols, struggling to find somewhere to go to the loo, or narrowly avoiding dropping to our death from a jerrybuilt beachfront path, we often return to functioning towns and cities and note the care that built them. Albeit slowly and at excess cost. So, any impulse to overthrow our settlement by those on the far-left appears reckless.

Where the English Civil War sought to settle a domestic dispute between parliament and the king, the French overturned their entire system, based on ideological zeal for a transformed Europe. They have had 12-15 different forms of regime since then, the British just one. For the eighty years after the French Revolution a different regime appeared approximately every nine years.

The French capitulated in the face of the German advance in 1940, because, in one view, it was a ‘fatally divided and demoralised’ as a nation. Aside from ‘bad intelligence and bad tactics’ on the battlefield ‘France [was] much more divided than Britain in the mid-1930s’.

What creates ‘patriotic solidarity’ has deep roots not in nationalism or ideology, but in the settlement, in our dwelling place. In our home. And, in this odd and anaemic term: Civil society. That is the bonds and behaviour that enable people to say: Here, I am at home. Where ‘Continental Europe is based on an idea of nationhood’ we here are ‘bound together by our residence in a particular place’.

The European Union was an extension of that ideological French zeal. In the Gothic structures of cathedrals across Europe these buildings trace beauty and nature down to the created world, its clusters of columns mimicking a forest, which is particular, located, a place. A carved leaf here, a knowing gargoyle there. Where national governance systems look to utopian idealism, we found our reason in the roots of a natured and created world, where truth sits stubbornly replicating its beauty. British judges search the facts of each individual case, as we believe in common law. Common to all. Not grand constitutional law.

What does our slow change system achieve? Largely the ability to absorb pressures from upheavals such as industrialisation and protest and loss of empire. Where French regimes fell under these pressures, the British introduced reforms. But importantly slow change gives legitimacy to its institutions, achieving trust and cooperation from citizens.

It is this growing, if not sudden, realisation that we have something not just remarkable, but exceptional, and Britain’s political furniture must move to protect it. 

We took the head off Charles I somewhat by accident, but our fervour for parliamentary democracy over despotism maps all the way back to the New Testament. For the only freedom the world has is traceable back to the foundations of the Christian story.  

No amount of BBC communitarianism or narrative that romanticises the Greek and Roman pagan world will eliminate the fact that there was no freedom in the classical world. Nothing. Not a jot. The abomination that was slavery was defeated by a Protestant conscience weighing heavy on British foreign ministers at night, as they contemplated their eternities.

Catholicism was a political movement then just as Islam is today. But the challenge of Islam to us of course is to ask: So, what do we here in the West believe? If it is pale wishy washy multiculturalism then the totalising force that is Islam will find it wanting. The good society is one then, that knows what it believes. And it cannot be an imitation of past achievements. We are a society that gathers around a Protestant governance system.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher puts it: “The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society… By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men…”.

Kant saw our Western inheritance as a freedom, reason and a truth that is found in nature. Antagonistic, competitive and collaborative. Finding a natural ecosystem, the tree grows in balance with the squirrel and the river. Not like socialism, standing shoulder to shoulder in fake solidarity, where, as George Orwell puts it, we are slave to a single party and ideology. That is a return to the tribe.

Our system over the centuries was to stand face to face, as unsocially sociable, as Kant puts it. Cousin marriage is less about biological variation, but where we place our loyalties. To home or tribe.

This means the alien can come to our home, with their family, and we are free to be antagonistic. To insult each other as we stand face to face and act naturally. Like our nature dictates. Armed with the load bearing belief system of the Latin West: Forgiveness and repentance. I will challenge you, and if I am wrong I will seek your forgiveness.

The home is something quite unique to our Western inheritance. The Latin Western church gradually shifted the idea of family from the pagan tribe to the Christian family. The ‘we’ of society came to form around the church. Yes, Christ died for all, but his church was to be rooted in the concept of the family as its base unit of transformation. Up close and personal.

For European social policy, from the 1950s, the family was the site of torment, so should be easily escapable. Of course it is a place of torment, but for the British it is the place we stay in and build. Home. Our place of formation.

Historian Tom Holland writes: “The Church, in its determination to place married couples… at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins… Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family”. Previously your slaves, dependents, and hangers-on counted as family.

Now, your husband’s or wife’s parents were sanctioned by the Church’s new canon law, to be your mother and father ‘in-law’. The power of feudal Europe, with its clans trying to stitch power together via cousin marriage was broken, by the Church.

Margaret Thatcher, in her infamous interview in Woman’s Own magazine in 1987, stated: “There is no such thing as society”. What was she saying? It was interpreted at the time that she was heartless. A cold capitalist. The press mischievously ignored her other words: “There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first”.

She was saying that society as a whole has no agency. You cannot go to ‘society’. Paradoxically, this was a grimmer statement than the first. She was a cold capitalist. The double income household, where government has more people to tax, and property owners, whose properties require two salaries to afford, has not meant families are better off.

I am not so foolish to propose women stay at home. But the option for both parents to go out to work was billed as liberation, but is now a necessity. Burnout, excessive commuting hours, childcare costs, monstrous mortgage payments, have helped generate what some call a Polycrisis. Overworked parents have lost their leisure time. Time that would have been invested in community voluntary work, building community cohesion. Home.

Thatcher turned out to be a neoliberal. A believer in cold capitalism. That people are purely motivated, as Karl Marx believed, by material gain. More attune to Marx’s shaping of a liberal Europeanness than she knew herself. The EU was a project of globalisation. A socialist and internationalist project. As Blair put it to the Chicago Economic Club at the time of the Kosovo War: “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not”.

A curious trio then. Marx, Thatcher, Blair. Marx saw a large state. Thatcher and Blair, an even larger state. Britain has been under pressure from European social policy since the fifties to adopt the European social contract. Better known as meritocracy.

In revolutionary Europe and America, a rights meritocracy has created an unsustainable inheritocracy. Owners of capital can buy their way into the top universities and professional careers.  Property values have rocketed, and with it a new mass class of millionaires. Others who could not secure property are now the new Precariat. Property is out of reach unless you graduate into a graduate career, or have parents who are ‘meritocracy winners’. After five to ten years following graduation some 30% of graduates are still in non-graduate jobs.

Institutions, clubs, guilds, churches, like Carlisle United Football Club, are agents of civil society, so too political parties. And what is civil society? It is free association. The ability to gather, as we are here, untroubled largely by spying neighbours or agents of the state.

So The Good Society is the sum of the intuitions of those who gather as belonging to a particular place. To belong of course is to stay and build.

Again, as David Goodhart writes, this is then the Somewhere people. Heart people. We belong in this place. The heart thinks better than the head.

The good society thinks with its collective hearts. My wife and I have, like many, have welcomed Iranian and Afghan immigrants into our home. Fed them. Listened to their stories. And got to know them. And shared our Christian faith with them. Do we believe, like Marx, that they are purely motivated by material gain? That they cannot be converted through the Good News of the Christian gospel by demonstrating Christian leadership values.

We should of course return efficiently and quickly all those who do not wish to build a safe home. And home here in the good society is built on unchanging values of freedom. Britain has a role in the world again. For its parliament and people to build a good society that is the envy of the world. We have a remarkable opportunity to lead by example. No longer powerful but influential. We should embrace post-Brexit autonomy, strong leadership in communities, applying the law, reject progressive ideologies as a liberal fantasy, and recognise economic reality of new technologies, the environment and financial factors.

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Global leadership opinion: Where will the West turn for its survival?

In Uncategorized on December 23, 2025 at 1:22 pm

WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was everywhere: “Enjoy!”

Now, 19 years of democratic recession, a debt crisis, expose Western systems as frail. In our hubristic flush we assumed democratic capitalism was downloadable. Run by a dull-administrative-class alert to the ruinous. The presumption of continuous growth handed agency from politics to borg-institutions, who bent, then snapped their public-mood antennae.

Under all is our obsession with liberty. A history-busting-run at Western freedom is under threat by liberalism transmogrifying into nihilism. The strongmen and tech disruptors’ wells of ressentiment are accelerating an end to post-war sensibilities. They have mastered narrative speed and promised breakthrough-innovation (Norman Mailer: ‘Technology is erotic’).

The tediously long years of the UK’s conservative government between 2010-‘24, was aversion to agency. Characterising Western paralysis. Unlike 1951-’64 (consolidating post-war consensus), and ‘79-’97 (economic re-balancing). Two periods of consequential power. The UK’s four decades of ‘Brussels make the rules’ has drippified British politics. The ontic wake-up has only just started.

The EU, a constitution-eating bureaucratic monster, nudged the UK’s two main parties to become an undifferentiated liberal uniparty. Britain’s Liberal Party proper last won a general election in 1906 and were a spent force by the 1950s. The Conservative (sort of Republican) and Labour (sort of Democrat) parties absorbed deep-seated liberalising moods, shunting their former constitutional-beliefs to the margins. The unifying elements of the two main parties, imperialism (Conservative) and clubbish-socialism (Labour), gradually faded as people sensed genuine social change beneath their feet. An effective constitution being measured by the glacial inexorability of its Goldilocks economics: Not too hot, not too cold, just right.

The temptation of unities

Now, the idealogues on the reactionary right have gained traction as the uniparty has not restrained liberal excesses. Both market and social liberalism have become enchanted by extreme variation. Extremes tend towards ideological unities, which themselves require modern efficiency. The constant appeal within UK politics to modernise into an efficiency-state has been undermined by an inbuilt British transgressiveness. Germany, Japan and even the United States are regarded with a measure of suspicion for their unifying proclivities.

Britain’s post-war self-loathing was not a result of colonial overreach alone, but having spent too long under imperial sermonising about unity. If you are an empire, constant self-justification wears the soul. Learning to love a post-imperial nation is a work of quiet courage. Post-empire we are surprised by our attractive sensibilities. We scan the room and note, we are not that bad after all. But, tempted towards unities. Many of which are illusions. Such as a state-nation in place of a nation-state.

A monumental challenge is to steer, and not destroy our rules-based system, its built-in insurances, civil society’s cohesion, and nation-state autonomy, within a functioning global economy. One that prefers transparency rather than a world of murky state protectionism and eccentric deal-making.

After the nihilism, what?

It is worth reminding that liberal democracy is civil society. Civil society being that plural liberal space we occupy and sustain through constant compromise. Not screaming across the abyss, but crossing it to negotiate with those we profoundly disagree with. For the engine of Western freedom stems from the private realm, the collaborating trusts and mutual partnerships.

And this is a very modern phenomenon, an outturn of the Protestant Reformation’s separation of spheres (politics, religion, economics, family life). This mindset of self-governance defeated the totalising unities of the Catholic Church’s hierarchical social frames. It spawned the myriad voluntary associations, and supercharged industrial capitalism’s distribution of wealth. But we are newly fragile, suffering the enervating effects of supra-institutionalisation. Western confidence is at an all-time low and we are in search of renewal.

Among other egregious illusions is the assumption economic growth itself builds civil society. That is, as social mobility slows, economic hyper-individualism will perpetuate openness and tolerance that previously came from an open public square. By contracting Western institutions to determine the good on our behalf they have drifted into infantile functionalism, distributing liberal rights and privileges devoid of negotiation and compromise. We cannot switch off this machine’s autopilot, with the stark awareness that, as Daniel Bell puts it, “The national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems”. 

Up to the end of the Cold War, as another writer offers, we were a “centrally organised, rigidly bounded, and hysterically concerned with impenetrable boundaries” which have now given way to a world “in which territorial, ideological, and issue boundaries are attenuated, unclear, and confusing”. The boundary was of course inter-locking international agreements, civil society, with private bodies and individuals as principal arbiters of the good, with their hard yards of moderation.

The collapse of Western institutional legitimacy has meant a lurch from international rules to unrestrained liberalism. Naivete has permitted overspend, supranationalism, an AI gamble, as a means to sustain ‘sacred’ growth above moral authority. This has working communities, those who persist in civil society’s ritual of sustained interaction, as losers in the extreme liberal experiment, craving security.

Motorville and Workington Man throwing spanners in the works

As a result, the working public is on the move, hunting leaders with moral seriousness who can arrest institutional overreach. Motorville, USA, the New Deal Democrat heartland states, has turned red (Republican). Why? Trump is a fighter, they say. In the UK, Workington Man, possessing Motorville’s white post-industrial discontents, is heading towards its version of Trumpism, at speed. Largely with the intent of lobbing a spanner into the machinery. It must be careful for what unities it wishes.

Britain and Europe have allowed sufficient dissolving of negotiated settlements, with their loci of love and politics, and their visible measurable outcomes, to invite authoritarianism. The UK, France and Germany are heading towards populist government at their next elections. America has already responded by gutting the Republican Party of its patrician class. The post-war moderate order, the passive centrists (PCs) trusted a growth model (unending expansion of liberal democracy), not least when its hard power failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, which remain strategic mysteries.

9/11, it turns out, has had lasting strategic impact. An unseen, unlocatable enemy, wake politicians in the night, and has led to salami sliced civil liberties, and security overreach. A patient, slow-burn UK populace, whose fur is often available for stroking, is roused from its post-war stupor.

In the UK, patrician institutions, such as the BBC, an expanded public sector, even the Church of England, are Fur Strokers in Chief, as they represent the hinterland between extreme liberalism and civil society. They are asked to reassure, by offering the language of a shared consciousness that restrains any sense of a fragile social order. They are split between serving and pacifying.

Bounded liberal capitalism worked because it was put to work generating wealth and well-being within the human settlements it served, measured by the quality of service at the point of delivery. Business and civic society knew who its principal client was. But untrammelled optimism thought, in time, China would, on the back of trade, capitulate to Westerners’ commodious living.

The passive centrists as the new extremists

Trumpism and the Trump Era (ten years of influence) has, in the UK and parts of Europe, exposed the radical centre not as just complacent, but rabidly against action, a violent laissez faire’ism. The EU’s performance leave ribs aching. These are aggressive non-aggressives. You will be passive, and let da system hum and whirr. Trumpism is irking the passionate ‘do nothing’ majority here.

Passive centrism, aggressively passive, points to unities that deny any sense of ultimacy. As in: ‘Ultimate concern for what is ultimately important’. Imperialism, solidarity-socialism, and extreme liberalism are unities that avoid notions of what is possible, and begs the question of what overarching objectives does a modern Western polity reach for next. Is there anything in our inheritance that can anchor our ship?

19th century critic John Ruskin saw a modernism (education and arts) where the images of Christ, as Western civilisation’s ultimacy, its square root of culture, being squeezed out of the canon, and with society denying this ommission to itself in the process. Modernity (society and culture) has then done the same, shunted the horizon out of its dialectic. If the Present Age is turning to reacquaint itself with something real it starts with an agreement that we are, in fact, denying what is possible. Or, as W B Yeats puts it:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”

In The Second Coming Yeats offers another image, the beast-cynic, on his way to re-birth. Weary Willie’s poetry gave in to temptation. He starts Vacillation with a flash of honesty: “Between extremities, Man runs his course”. And slides into disillusionment, seeing more in Homer’s and Shakespeare’s complacent centrism than Christ’s ultimacy.

The PCs have reacted similarly against ultimacy. Christ rejects the synagogue’s rabbi fast-track programme, striking out for the top of the horizon, but the centre prefer him as itinerant prophet-wanderer. The centre’s mumbler, denying Christ as reality realist (T S Eliot). Eliot restores Christ into modernism’s imagery. But misses that Christ was the first modern man, and is not leading us back to the grinding authority of Eliot’s rediscovered orthodoxies.

The PCs respond to the expansionist aspirations of China, who wish to roll back, with Russia and others, the influence of the West, and especially the USA’s global dominance, with all the critical response of a noctambulist. The institutionalised are three iterations behind reality, and, probably unwittingly, have made the fatal slip from cynicism into disillusionment.

Cynicism in the Western vision is a category error. Modernity itself is not a cynical reaction. Reactions to modernity oft are, but the modern itself is not a cynical response to tradition. Modernity, as The New, was and is always there. But modernity itself does not have to unify in place of dialogue.

3rd c. biographer Diogenes Laertius offers Plato’s man in a modern category, labelled functionally as a ‘featherless bi-ped’: “Plato defined man thus: “Man is a two-footed, featherless animal,” and was much praised for the definition; so Diogenes [the Cynic] plucked a cock and brought it into his school, and said, “This is Plato’s man.” 

““And I,” said he, “am Diogenes the dog.” And when he was asked to what actions of his it was owing that he was called a dog, he said, “Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.” 

So, cynicism has an ability to explore reality, but collapses like Yeats in its inability to offer a path. Populism is built from a cynical offering of unities. And the centrists have fallen into the same vision of modernity.

What centrist governance does not spot during democratic expansion is the extent of its infantilising and categorising, transferring parliamentary sovereignty into a chop technocracy. That is, centrism entered the ‘broken middle’ between dystopia and utopia, but only to over-unify. The technocrat, at a personal level, cannot stomach the necessary messiness of growth, so grab the sensation of unified order. ‘Practical duty’ without a horizon.

Diogenes the dog fawns over physics as a means to understanding, with its visible frames of connections across space and time, but barks at the moment of truth. Ordinary people on the ground, in their creative absurdity, cannot see that technocracy’s boilerplate is a loss of consciousness.

As we face completeness in the West, it turns out to be an illusion of unities. We should not be surprised how so many are in fierce agreement. In fact, everyone in the room. The West, even in its achievements, is being lowered steadily. To borrow from Simone Weil: “We have to think that [whoever has done us harm] has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level”. A humbled West is its best opportunity to offer a renewed ultimacy of what is possible. Albeit over a coffee, or three, in a steaming coffee house, which we offer to pay for.

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Global leadership opinion: MAGA-ultras’ blue-collar economic nationalism might survive market turmoil, but will it arrest the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of runaway meritocracies in Britain and Europe?

In Uncategorized on May 21, 2025 at 7:38 am

THE TARIFF BLITZKRIEG has done its random act of violence. Like a B-17 dropping iron bombs over an open sight, one hit the runway, another Mr McGregor’s greenhouse, the rest slugged into the quagmire. But the message has been sent. Technical dashboard politics should give way to nation-state leadership. On the sidelines traditional conservatives remain hopeful that Al and Peg Bundy’s blue-collar MAGA-ultras’ raid on their policy-position will be temporary. MAGA being a reaction to the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of Western meritocracies’ vision of the economic life, where Al and Peg attempted to ‘live their best lives’ but found themselves fallible.

Prognosticator of an Anglo-American New Republic, H. G. Wells warned last century that Americans suffer ‘nation-state blindness’. An inability by citizens to see how their local endeavour is part of national enterprise.

According to H. G., it was this failure to connect dots that resulted in America missing the opportunity to rule with its Anglo partner. As fanciful as that is now, there is truth in the notion of America today turning inwards to connect itself to itself. For a self, even a corporeal self, such as the nation-state, is a self that is connected to… itself!

Of course, the Western-world is Anglo-Americanised, having absorbed its main export, modern-liberal-democracy. FDR-Churchill, JFK-Macmillan, a shared constitutional outlook, kept the marriage bed warm, but less so Trump-Johnson/Starmer. Affinity generated by Brexit was fleeting.

Although America has a more complex history with free trade, what has often united is a liberal hawkishness, in the British sense of the word liberal, meaning laissez faire economics, rather than the US version, meaning centre left politics. But now the social conservative pendulum has swung illiberally (in British and US senses) on both sides of The Pond, the affair is over. Like Elyot and Sibyl in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, two big egos have blown hot then cold.

What about Britain, and the political rumble in the Shires?

In truth America does not like Britain. Its leaders love invitations to Buck House, applaud Churchill’s Anglo-Saxonese, plus eating out expensively on Neville Chamberlain’s censure, when justifying foreign adventure. The new country has often been suspicious of being suckered by the trappings and flummery of ‘Great British’ power-plays. Much of American leadership-style e.g. The Oval Office candour of late, is a Protestant-idealist language-battle to defeat doublespeak and flush out insecurities about who is big or small on the world stage.

Spurned, Britain shuffles uneasily, poking its canapés, mumbling about the vigour of the vulgar younger nation. A Greece to America’s Rome, Britain fancied steering its protégé with diplomatic ear-bending. This is the self-delusion of the defeated imperialist. Trump II’s realpolitik has finally closed Britain’s fantasy of being in a special relationship.

Culturally, America and Britain are thinly separated. Both tolerant. Americans quicker-witted, Britons wittier. But since America is now led by blue-collar Republicans, Britain is further in the doghouse. Trumpists’ contempt for Britain’s and Europe’s secular-liberal-progressive political elite is undisguised.

And having exited the EU, Britain is of little strategic value. Its technical-politics, which is fundamentally watch-and-wait market-monitoring incrementalism, observes helplessly the unfolding US psychodrama. Whilst simultaneously unable to counter far-right threats to its social equilibrium. For Britain has remarkably settled communities who doggedly weather decline. But there is a political rumble in the Shires which Trumpism is fuelling.

And what is the emergent US New World vision?

Amidst D-Day-style assaults on every policy beachhead, action being totemic stateside, the uncertain vision might be: re-shape the global trading model, revive the nation-state, arrest runaway debt. Then slow, and ultimately halt, the rise of Chinese power. Emotionally, heartland voters require the US administration to draw firmer physical and spiritual boundaries around a US that has been overextended economically and militarily since the Second World War.

Of course, orthodox economics is turning various shades, largely puce. The source of this exit from globocracy is rooted in red-raw inequalities caused by the US’s out-of-control meritocracy. One that originally admitted outsiders, and appeared equal, but has morphed, and created a new money-club aristocracy. Which is not distributing ‘dignity and status’ to middle-class American families. Those who doggedly punch the hours of study and work.

For in Britain, our working-class and middle-class = America’s middle-class. The American working-class aligns more closely with the UK’s notion of an underclass. Those who are struggling to both escape precarious minimum-wage zero-hour no-contract work and pass exams.

Add to this the nature of modern politics, which has invested governance within institutional systems, a deliberate throttling of charismatic ‘man’, and has become remote. In many minds a flawed and accessible charismatic nation-state leader is morally more accountable, by virtue of visibility, than cold unresponsive iron-cage bureaucracies. American modernity (liquefying the residuum of European social systems) has peaked.

Meritocratic overreach and Trump II re-set

In essence, the US meritocratic journey has transmogrified into greed. The post-war ‘We Generation’ moved rapidly in social terms, and understood a ‘good society’ requires extending opportunities to all. But by the late-Sixties, the new ‘Me Generation’, the meritocracy winners, started pulling up the draw-bridge behind what they perceived as their success.

The civic duty to acknowledge personal good fortune, has become my effort achieved my status. The humble serendipity of having a talent the market needed at the right time, has shifted towards a hard-faced cynicism, oft portrayed as ‘toughness’. The fear of the ‘We Generation’, the very real abyss at its heels, which they staved off with gritty stoicism, has emerged magnified in their children, who say ‘no way are we sailing near to that nightmare’.

As competition became fiercer, erosion of the ‘common good’ accelerated. Capital-rich citizens have fought tooth and nail to win, and purchase access to a hot-housed VIP lane of private school>good SATS>Ivy League university>profession. The talent+hardwork nexus has shifted to money+power that propels progeny through the narrowing door labelled ‘high-paid brain work’. Stagist theory said to societies ‘stay in history’s waiting room’ until you and your community are ready to evolve together, but new capital says buy access now.

Into this ineluctable globalised market biology, the Trump II administration signals a re-set. Even if they do not know they are the vehicle for change, they embody an apotheosis for political modernity. One which was predicated on a meritocracy distributing fairly. Instead, it has fomented an inheritocracy, where capital sloshes without the handrails of shared core values.

So how might strategic value be created from economic nationalism?

The immediate challenge is to maintain the confidence of the bond market, and attempt significant savings, whilst opening new sources of revenue. And to achieve this by rolling over tax cuts and rebalancing trade. The risks are considerable, as the tariff strategy may slow growth, increase inflation, and ultimately weaken the dollar’s supremacy in the decades to come. History may not be kind to the big re-set. But the trickiest section of the report card is execution. The manner of delivering these changes has created uncertainty.

So, for the sake of a more considered strategy, some of the good intent might simply founder on the lack of plan completeness. For example, when costs are slashed, such as regulatory control, this might suggest long-term savings, but in practice, if assumptions are not tested, they might trigger major political headaches down-the-line when out-of-the-blue crises emerge. But for the ha’p’orth of tar (a tested plan) the ship (strategic value) can still be lost.

And another sagely phrase: The seeds of your demise are often sown during periods of success. So, America sits at a critical moment, some of it historic, some introduced unnecessarily in its rush to force re-modelling. America is the land of genuinely excellent strategic management, and there will be seasoned management professionals whose skillset can still settle the ship of state.

Of course, this is the view from the hilltop called classical strategic management. Although on the surface it is a dull, plodding discipline, it can still deliver careful re-engineering for America Inc., and at the same time win approval from the markets.

The spectre of an Old World social order returning to haunt the New

In the run-up to the 2008 crash ‘orthodox economics was humiliated… sophisticated financial minds hopelessly miscalculated the value of assets’. Why should classical economics read the runes this time?

There are wider forces at work, and if disrupting the world order, including orthodox economics, is required for America to bring down its stratospheric and unsustainable deficit, then client-politics of old is unlikely to have the re-engineering force of character.

Many are familiar with fire-from-the-hip business leadership relying entirely on gut-angst to bring change. Readers of John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow will recognise quotidian American realities grate with its sunshine theology. America is searching for resolving its mile-wide social dualities (e.g. failing meritocracy), but the current US administration is like the preacher, who in the sermon notes writes: ‘point weak, shout loud’. We suspect, like the new right in Europe, the rocket fuel that gets it off the launch pad is greater than the load required for the second and third stages of nation-state development.

What we might be seeing is America’s long resistance to the shadow of an Old World. A world that is complex and intractable, with its ranked social strata offering sustainable modes of living, in contrast to America’s dominant and creaking social measures of income and wealth. America holds action as more sacred than reflection. As John Maynard Keynes said at the end of his General Theory (1936) this is a sign you are held to some form of dogma. Trumpism is about action, but concurrent critical reflection will need to emerge sooner than later. Tyranny is in the absence of the ability to nuance new political positions.

Does the end of political modernity mean sailing towards the shore of classical conservatism?

Although on the surface the DeLorean is headed back to 19th century mercantilism, many are asking are we also headed towards the morally manageable boundary of nation-statism. For this is as much about America’s moral agency, its sense of self. This suggests Britain and Europe, in their commitment to sublate their nationalistic agency post-war, are wedded still to political modernity as an unquestioned philosophy. Hence, across Europe, the new right is making Trumpist-style gains, largely to arrest a runaway modernity (bureaucratic governance) that has become deaf to its concerns.

And so, the argument is that America’s New World Order is a flaming out of a dying meritocratic social contract. A traumatic admission it wishes to establish a more workable social system.

Meritocracy was the fruit of post-Cold War globalisation. Globalisation is the spread of modernity. Modernity is the liquefying of all barriers, personal and geographic, and the creation of meritocratic social order. Meritocracy is the replacement of class/tribe distinctions for the promise of personal achievement and liberation.

The flaw in this utopianism is that social groups are naturally self-organising, and left to themselves can shake out quite sustainably. Artisans cheerfully graft, bourgeois entrepreneurs buy and sell, and aristos refine their sensibilities in well-stocked country house libraries, opening the odd school and fete to boot. All too utopian, and dewy-eyed, but this old social conservative order is resurfacing in the minds of the slogging metro-dwellers sinking £2,500 rent per month into their stuffy broom cupboard apartments.

Our wobbly meritocracy is also faltering as it is run by homo technicus, loyal not to vision or even mission, or healthy social order, but policy. Bureaucracies avoid volatile human fancy, and put oversight into the hands of bloodless policy wonks. This society will not excel, but it will be fairer to a greater number. Or so we thought.

So, what’s not to like?  Well, in the West the emergence of deep inequality. The Western ship has tilted so hard towards the top 1% of achievers, that the bottom 50% are dropping behind like the wheezy pupil on the annual school cross-country race. The few winners are winning hard, and the losers are massing in large numbers. Part of the tilt is capital accumulation has increased the power of money itself. Money + a decent brain = access to a fast-lane that no-one anticipated would create a new money aristocracy, one that does not have a country pile across from the village, so is unhitched from all communitarian moods.

On the back of these broken structures is the rise of new right parties. With Trumpism offering to collapse globalisation altogether, his challenge is to steer towards the shore of classical conservatism. And avoid the rocks of nihilistic mega-meritocracy. Economic nationalism and ethno-nationalism are in the mixer and the former should avoid the latter.  The detail however, may not be written yet. This gut angst may of course have a moral taproot.

The emotionally illiterate nature of globalisation

Property values have rocketed, and with it a new mass class of millionaires. Others who could not secure property are now the new precariat. Property is out of reach unless you graduate into a graduate career, or have parents who are ‘meritocracy winners’. After five to ten years following graduation some 30% of graduates are still in non-graduate jobs.

As the Blair-Brown government told us, we had better get on board the globalisation train. And we did. It did not know where the train was ultimately destined, but was sold as heading to the land of sexy new metro-liberal coolness. We now know it was pure undifferentiated rhetoric.

We also now realise the emotionally illiterate nature of this message. What many missed is that unfettered liberalisation was an ideology for the dipsy-brained. To which politics is meant to counter. Where the British parliament enjoyed and suffered long speeches, now, members have to ‘cut to the plot’ in short shrift. Debating time has been cut so parliamentarians can get home to their families. Admirable, but naïve, when complex issues demand the sort of exhaustive dialogue as found in a major Dostoyevsky novel. Where the fog starts to clear on page 372, but you are still asking ‘who are all these people?!’.

Under successive administrations politics was gradually jettisoned as an inconvenience to market measures. Rationalism in the shape of single-metric politics, however, does not do ‘good or evil’ assessments. No-one saw the 2008 crash coming. And if they did, they were thrown out the room for their apostasy.

Meritocracies play what Peter Turchin calls the ‘game of musical chairs’. They foster competition across the whole of society, and the resulting stampede towards the remaining number of hi-status chairs generates an ever-growing mass of losers.

Added to this mud wrestling, we allowed mass immigration from southern Europe to fill our skills gap, and catastrophically failed to invest in education, as short-termism is favoured by unworldly technocrats who lack strategic instincts. This liberal world order is now breaking up violently. In short, Trumpism is displaying a controversial and upsetting symptom: Leadership.

Globalisation finds leadership per se, expensive. Leadership points out to client-politics that ‘the language of economics’ is taking over in the open society. When people talk about ‘living their best life’, asking ‘are you investing enough in your education?’, ‘have you had a productive day?’, you know homo economicus is eclipsing humanity itself. Institutions have started to become bearers of this two-dimensional message. Self-actualisation (a terrifying term in itself, and Maslow’s other writing is far better than his oversold model), started at some point to become an economic calculus primarily.

Even if deeply unpopular, leadership remains a challenge to dashboard politics, which obeys market indicators, often mindlessly. As we found in 2008. Some will call it new right authoritarianism, and even see it as creating an uber-meritocracy, but either way it is based on a measure of righteous angst about those left behind.

Possible fruits of Trumpism’s correction?

We reached peak bureaucracy at the turn of the century. The Kafkaesque nightmare of call-centres, the institutionalised West, as an assemblage of disembodied rule followers, was bodied in an untrammelled globalisation. Commodified lean service delivery (as sages of Just-In-Time supply chains like to call it) meant policy enforced rule compliance. But, the revolt against global massification of experience had begun deep in heartland communities.

From the Blair-Brown-Clinton administrations onwards it was the role of technocrats to manage the poverty slaying capital markets that lifted all ships. £1 growth in UK/US, €10 growth in Poland. Yes, employers had a free lunch as young poorly paid East Europeans flooded the UK, and wondered what was the point of investing in training when this cheap and compliant workforce did the grafting.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-British sociologist, who bravely rowed back on globalisation ahead of many, termed globalised modernity’s retraction, and the era of late-capitalism, as liquid modernity. We want the fruit of solid smokestack modernity e.g. undersea cables, WiFi, and freedom to roam, but not the horror of total annihilation of the dislocated self.

The rise and rise of non-spaces, like Junction 44 of the M6, which is not a great cultural addition, provided freedom from territoriality, but also the loss of heroic potential. London is increasingly a non-space. Its museums and history have been gloriously accessible, educating me as a boy, but the slippage is visible. London’s premier Christian house, in the heart of its financial district, St Paul’s Cathedral, is a snip at £26 entry fee. Winners this way, losers round the back? The vast majority of state churches are permanently open and accessible. Lovingly curated sanctuaries display indomitable welcomes come what may.

So, the future re-set might well be achieved from retaining the fruit of technological massification, but re-locating ourselves within a re-born nation-state, its settlements (both physical and philosophical) bearing the weight of life. We do not know if Trump II’s disruption will, in two or three iterations hence, invite civic virtues, a taste for ‘the good society’, and its supporting architecture. We fear it could still unleash meritocracy Mk II. Albeit a nationalised variant.

In Europe we have suppressed nationalism for obvious reasons, but have weakened settled communities that can support those on the margins. For the nation-state is really a collection of laws. If you have arrived yesterday as an immigrant, you can hold wildly different values, but, critically, if you abide by the law, we will all get on. It is this shared respect for laws born from natural reason and history which gradually foster working settlements through highlighting mutual obligations. If the Trump II re-set reasserts this Anglo-American reality, then the bumpy ride will achieve something.

A world-citizen, reacquainted with a relational ordering of society, via a reinvigorated public sphere, where the conversation is held open by the genuinely leaderful, is a curious prospect. A space where the human stands across the square and learns to interpret the micro gestures of their interlocutors, instead of repeating the script of an unworldly technocrat. A shoddy narrative passed down the chain from a political apparatchik. Someone, somewhere, was always going to respond to the Orwellian warning that a society of technocratic party slaves will do itself no good.

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