In June 1989, nine months before declaring independence from the Soviet Union, Lithuania began publicly reasserting its national symbols. The Vilnius city authorities moved to rename the grand boulevard that runs from the Neris River to Cathedral Square – and houses most of Lithuania’s government and cultural institutions – after Gediminas, the founder of the city and one of the central figures of Lithuania’s medieval statehood.

The street’s name had become emblematic of Lithuania’s tragic history, trapped between larger powers intent on domination. Under the Russian Empire it was initially christened after St George, the patron saint of Moscow. Then during Poland’s interwar control of Vilnius it was renamed to honour the poet Adam Mickiewicz. The joint Soviet-Nazi invasion of Poland gave the Lithuanians a brief period to call it Gedimino prospektas, before the subsequent Soviet occupation dedicated it to Lenin, then Stalin, then Lenin again.

The move to reclaim the boulevard’s Lithuanian identity was an opening created by Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika. These reforms created new space for public expression and collective action beyond the control of the Soviet state. Given the learned habits of living within a totalitarian regime, the opportunity took several years for the public to fully realise, but once the opening was understood, it inspired a flurry of activity.

By the late-1980s, new civil society groups began to form around issues like environmental protection, national symbols were reclaimed and displayed, public singing of patriotic and folk songs became common and, critically, the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that had enabled Lithuania’s occupation were openly challenged. A new political movement called Sąjūdis established branches across the country, published its own newspapers and organised rallies. It legitimised the discussion of Lithuanian history, language, and sovereignty. It reignited the idea of an independent Lithuanian people in the public consciousness.

The choice of renaming Vilnius’s most important street after Gediminas was not merely about dispensing with Soviet iconography. Gediminas ruled Lithuania in the fourteenth century, when the Grand Duchy was becoming a political force in eastern Europe, conducting skilled diplomacy, forging alliances and competing with other European powers. Gediminas represented Lithuanian agency and ambition – a state that was not peripheral or subordinate, but one able to deal with more conventionally capable neighbours on its own terms.

The memory of this period mattered because Lithuania’s subsequent history was defined by the loss of autonomy. The partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth saw Prussia, Russia and Austria divide its territories. Most of the former Grand Duchy fell under Russian rule, while parts of what became called Lithuania Minor remained under Prussian, and then German, influence. The subsequent German and Polish struggles over Vilnius, followed by the occupations of the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again, placed the idea of a Lithuanian nation-state in perpetual uncertainty. Throughout this turbulence, a national story needed to be maintained in people’s hearts, providing a foundation for independence when the opportunity arose.

Gediminas’ importance to Lithuanian national psychology lies not simply in a glorious past that Lithuanians might hope to recapture, but in a set of ideas and approaches to statecraft that remain relevant to a small nation confronting more powerful neighbours. His defining challenge was preventing the Knights of the Teutonic Order from conquering Lithuania. Facing a stronger military opponent, he understood that force alone would not be enough. He wrote directly to the Pope and indicated a willingness (potentially not sincere) to accept Catholic Christianity to encourage papal intervention. He cultivated relationships with neighbouring rulers through dynastic marriage and courted the merchant elites of Europe’s commercial cities, recognising their competing interests as a tool to exploit divisions within the Teutonic Order.

Gediminas also sought to strengthen Lithuania from within, inviting traders, craftspeople and other skilled settlers to bring their expertise and resources to the country. His approach combined ingenuity, initiative and pragmatism – rather than accept the limits of Lithuania’s relative weakness, he sought to change the circumstances in which it operated. His legacy is a model of national creativity in which a small state does not merely suffer what it must from greater powers, but actively seeks to shape its own position in the world.

This made the renaming of Vilnius’s principal boulevard in honour of Gediminas more than just an act of national expression; it was a statement of future statecraft. Since restoring its independence in 1990, Lithuania has resolved that it will never again be dominated by predatory powers. Defiance and determination have guided its national ethos. But for a country of fewer than three million people, defiance alone is not enough: it must be matched by cunning, strategic courage and diplomatic audacity.

Being geographically bound to an instinctively belligerent great power presents a permanent challenge to Lithuania’s security and independence. Regaining its sovereignty created an opportunity to form new alliances, and Vilnius was quick to apply for NATO membership, but alliances are only as effective as the commitment to their principles and the political will sustaining them. What may have looked like an inviolate security guarantee when Lithuania eventually gained accession in 2004, now seems far less assured due to the Trump Administration’s revolutionary pivot of American foreign policy.

Lithuania, however, recognised the limitations of alliance dependence prior to Donald Trump’s political emergence. Many of the larger and more influential European states do not have the same pressing security concerns as Lithuania, and the United States itself has no territorial threats. NATO, therefore, creates a particular challenge for smaller states close to Russia: they are keen on collective protection, but cannot afford to let their foreign policy become entirely reactive to the larger allies who may interpret threats with less urgency.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 reinforced the need for a more entrepreneurial approach to Lithuanian security. Vilnius was adamant that condemnation alone would not deter Moscow and so advocated economic sanctions, an arms embargo, stronger NATO deployments in the Baltic states and military assistance for Ukraine. It warned that allowing Russia to seize territory by force without facing meaningful consequences would invite further aggression. With this, Lithuania was proved correct.

Lithuania’s belief was that the European response needed to be centred on deterrence rather than limp diplomatic protests that Russia could easily ignore. The country’s approach has been one of “offensive diplomacy” – using its own initiative to push other European governments towards more assertive countermeasures against Russia.

Such tactics upend conventional wisdom about how smaller states should behave in the international system. A cautious small state might seek security by avoiding controversy, maintaining cooperative relationships and waiting for larger allies to establish a common position. But this path can leave Lithuanian security in the hands of states which don’t feel threats existentially.

Offensive diplomacy reverses this dynamic. It allows Lithuania to show leadership, to set agendas and precedents, demonstrate moral courage that raises the political costs of inaction for larger states, build coalitions around positions that initially lack consensus and force other governments to reckon with choices they might otherwise be reluctant to take, or may consider postponing.

In late 2021, Lithuania made what was arguably its boldest act of offensive diplomacy. Bold, because it looked beyond its immediate security concerns with Russia towards the other authoritarian great power in China. When Taiwan sought to open a de facto embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania departed from Beijing’s preferred naming convention of “Taipei Economic and Cultural Office”, and allowed the mission to be called the Taiwan Representative Office.

Driven in part by then-Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis’s ambition to brand Lithuania as the vanguard of a defiant, “values-based” global order, the move also had a pragmatic economic incentive. Lithuania had developed a highly sophisticated laser industry, and these lasers are vital in the production of the semiconductors that Taiwan excels at.

Yet there was also a natural empathy for Taiwan in Vilnius: a small nation living under the shadow of an enormous superpower that denies its right to exist. Lithuania could not help but draw parallels to 1940, when Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov bluntly informed the Lithuanian Deputy Prime Minister, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, that his country would be absorbed into the Soviet system. Molotov framed the annexation not merely as a security buffer, but as the fulfilment of Soviet ideological ambition – much like the Chinese Communist Party’s own nationalist designs on Taiwan.

The decision to challenge norms in relation to Taiwan triggered Beijing to downgrade diplomatic ties with Vilnius, block Lithuanian exports and pressure multinational companies to exclude Lithuanian businesses from their supply chains. Following his election in July, current prime minister, Mindaugas Sinkevičius, has called the decision “maybe too brave” and sought to repair relations with China. But Vilnius still has no ambassador in Beijing, the Taiwan office has kept its name, while exports have largely recovered. Although remaining politically contentious within Lithuania, the tactic sought to exhibit defiance, accept the costs for doing so, but seek to create a new discourse on Beijing’s power.

This proved a little too ambitious, as no other country has followed its lead in relation to Taiwan. However, Lithuania’s actions gave urgency to the European Union creating an Anti-Coercion Instrument, giving the bloc a mechanism to navigate and deter economic coercion by third countries. The instrument seeks to defend a member state’s freedom from domination by ensuring that no EU state has to face a larger power by itself. This was a significant win for Vilnius’s approach.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this active approach to diplomacy has accelerated. Lithuania has repeatedly pressed for a more confrontational response to Russian aggression than many of its European partners were initially willing to support. Its approach is shaped by a judgement that Moscow’s aggression is not an isolated or timebound problem, but a persistent feature of Russia’s international behaviour. The burden of this behaviour falls disproportionately on the states that share a border with it.

Vilnius deduced Russia’s intent early and delivered Stinger missiles to Ukraine 11 days before the invasion. Since then, it has ranked among the largest providers of military aid to Kyiv relative to GDP, and has been a consistent voice urging other states to match it. Alongside Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania pressed Germany to deliver Leopard tanks as early as 2022, making the practical argument that Western tanks use standardised ammunition, so that if one country supplies the tanks, any other can supply the shells. Germany has since provided 18 tanks to the Ukrainian cause.

In April 2022, Lithuania became the first EU country to stop importing Russian gas, arguing that every euro spent on Russian energy funded its belligerence. The argument was also strategic: energy is a weapon, and dependence on it was a vulnerability that Moscow could easily exploit to weaken European action. That dependence was significant and not easily overcome, but in January 2026 the EU formally adopted a regulation banning Russian gas, with LNG imports ending at the start of 2027 and pipeline gas phased out by autumn that year.

Lithuania has pushed Europe to rethink how it confronts Russia’s shadow fleet, the network of ageing tankers that carry Russian oil outside Western regulatory systems, keeping Moscow’s revenues flowing despite sanctions. Alongside its Baltic neighbours, Vilnius argues that the fleet is a security problem, not merely a sanctions problem, as these vessels are also suspected of attempting to damage undersea infrastructure. The aim is to move the response from economic restriction towards maritime security and deterrence.

More than 600 vessels are now banned from EU ports and maritime services, but the more consequential change came in June, when Operation Irini, the EU naval mission created to enforce the arms embargo on Libya, amended its rules of engagement to allow the boarding of suspected shadow fleet vessels. A mission built for one theatre is now being turned on Russia’s tankers, which is the conceptual shift from economic restriction to maritime security that Vilnius has been urging.

Lithuania was an early advocate for frozen Russian assets should be used to fund Ukraine reconstruction, arguing that Russia should bear the cost of the destruction it has inflicted rather than leaving the bill to European taxpayers. Their position reflects a broader security calculation: ensuring the aggression has substantial financial consequences as a tool to deter future threats.

The EU has decided these assets stay frozen indefinitely, but it has not gone further as Belgium fears the legal consequences. Most of Russia’s assets sit with Euroclear, a Brussels-based company, and Belgium worries it will be left to pay alone if Russian legal challenges succeed. It wants guarantees from every EU government first. Lithuania has been urging the EU to find a way to assure Belgium that such action is safe.

For Lithuania, independence is more than the formal sovereignty of a state or the protection afforded by its alliances. It is a national commitment that must survive even if the institutions of statehood are lost. That conviction was forged through successive occupations, when the question was not about how Lithuania could defend itself, but how the Lithuanian nation-state could find a path to existence.

In February 1949, with the Soviet occupation entrenched and the odds against them, eight resistance commanders gathered in a farmstead bunker at Minaičiai and issued a declaration proclaiming their Council the sole legitimate authority in Lithuania. They chose the anniversary of the 1918 Act of Independence and grounded their claim in the 1922 Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that their defiance came with a legal argument attached. The state, in their conception, did not cease to exist when its territory or institutions were seized, or streets renamed; it persisted wherever people refused to accept its end.

On 13 January 1991, 10 months after Lithuania’s declaration of independence, Soviet troops moved into Vilnius seeking to capture its main institutions. Thousands of people gathered to defend the Vilnius TV Tower and other media outlets, while troops fired upon and drove tanks into them – killing 13 and injuring hundreds. Resistance persisted outside the parliament and the Soviets called off their plans to seize it. Lithuania’s independence would stand. Those defending its institutions were regular citizens, not soldiers, embodying the idea that when the state’s institutions are threatened, their defence passes to the people.

Both ideas, that the state persists in its people and that defending it is their duty, were enshrined in the 1992 Lithuanian constitution as legal principles. Article 3 gives each citizen the right to resist any encroachment by force on Lithuania’s independence, territorial integrity and constitutional order, and this right does not depend on a government surviving. Subsequently, the 1996 Law on the Basics of National Security turned that right into policy, committing the state to prepare for unconditional defence and total resistance through guerrilla warfare, civil disobedience and non-collaboration. Then in 2022, the Law on Armed Defence and Resistance to Aggression supplied the operating rules: resistance begins from the first moment of aggression, no one may restrict the right to resist an occupying power, and Lithuania will not wait for international assistance.

Yet, aggression nowadays takes forms more multifaceted and distinct from the traditional invasion of territory. Disinformation, cyberattacks, sabotage, petty crime and the manipulation of migrant flows have all been used by Russia to disrupt Lithuanian society. Moscow’s hybrid campaigns are designed to erode the Lithuanian people’s confidence in their own state. In 2023, the National Crisis Management Centre was created to coordinate the Lithuanian response across its institutions. Its guiding principle is that the state should be vigilant but not disturbed – as the measure of resilience is not whether a threat is made, but whether the country is disrupted by it.

Being calm and resolute is central to the display of national courage. It signals to Moscow that Lithuania will not be cowed, and it allows Vilnius to exercise agency beyond its conventional power. This is because moral courage creates leverage. A principled stand against a more powerful state attracts attention, strengthens a country’s reputation and makes its interests harder to ignore. The aim is not to simply demonstrate virtue, but to convert a principled act into diplomatic weight.

The willingness to accept costs is essential to this diplomatic signalling. Great powers rely on smaller states anticipating their displeasure and moderating their behaviour in advance out of fear. A state that stoically absorbs the penalty – as Lithuania did with China – complicates the calculation that great powers make. Taking a stand also confers authority, as a country without conventional power earns credibility because its commitment to an issue cannot be dismissed as rhetoric. That credibility becomes valuable when building coalitions and advocating for international rules.

A small state cannot eliminate the asymmetry of power, but it can refuse to treat that asymmetry as a limit on its agency. Lithuania’s influence comes from the capacity to initiate – to move the boundary of what is considered possible, absorb the early cost of doing so, and leave larger states to follow once the position has stopped looking radical. By reshaping how other nations evaluate their choices, offensive diplomacy establishes a small state’s position as the benchmark to which larger states must consider.

Lithuania’s security still depends on allies whose threat perceptions and political priorities may differ from its own, and whose willingness to act ultimately determines how far Vilnius can translate diplomatic influence into advantageous outcomes. That dependence is why initiative matters. Nearly seven centuries after Gediminas worked to change the circumstances Lithuania faced rather than accept them as inevitable, his enduring insight remains – the survival of a small nation can not to be reliant on the calculations of more powerful states, it needs to use its creativity to force those states to calculate with it.

In August 2022, I was in the Latvian capital of Riga when the government decided to demolish a 79-metre Soviet-era obelisk. The obelisk’s official name was “Monument to the Liberators of Soviet Latvia and Riga from the German Fascist Invaders”, highlighting the turbulence of Latvia’s position in the 1940s – first occupied by the USSR, then Nazi Germany, then recaptured by the Soviets. To the modern-day Latvians the obelisk was a humiliation, a symbol of Latvia’s precarious position wedged between great and predatory powers. For the country’s national pride, and for it to exert an independent spirit, the obelisk had to be destroyed.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 a revolutionary atmosphere had emerged in the Baltic Sea region. Not an atmosphere of fervour or unrest, but instead a revolution of the mind – a sense of clarity and resolve about the return of war to the neighbourhood and its implications. No ideological distractions, no whataboutery with the United States, no bullshit about NATO expansion, just the cold, harsh, reality that Russia is a permanently belligerent state, regardless of the regime that governs it.

Since 2022, I have spent much of my time living in Sweden. This has afforded me the ability to travel around the Baltic Sea region and write about what I find – from jumping on its ferries, to catching trains through Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Germany and Denmark, and developing a strong fascination and attachment to Finland – its defence thinking, policy shifts, and the unique status of the Åland Islands.

Each article I write has the looming shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cast over it. This Russian shadow is, of course, not new, but after a brief period following the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a hope that peaceful co-existence with Russia was possible. This now seems naïve. These are now, once again, “interesting times” for Europe, and interest in these times led me to purchase Oliver Moody’s book Baltic – an exploration of the Baltic Sea region’s history and contemporary politics, and how it has become one of the central theatres of modern geopolitics.

Always enjoying a concept, I thought - what if I read the book while travelling through the region? I had limited time, as I needed to get to Stockholm for election night, so I plotted a course where I could stop in Lithuania for a few days as I had a couple of article ideas to research, but otherwise make a mad dash from Poland, through the Baltics, up to Helsinki and then across to Stockholm, by bus, train and ferry – the kind of adventure I love.

Given the nature of Europe, despite living in Sweden, Copenhagen is my nearest airport. So I flew from the Danish capital into the port city of Gdańsk. Although it is Poland’s fifth largest city, Gdańsk played an outsized role in Poland’s recent history as it was within the city’s shipyards that the Solidarity political movement that broke the Communist Party’s monopoly on power began.

Gdańsk was also a “free city” in the inter-war period – neither German nor Polish, but a semi-autonomous city-state sitting between the two. This has given the city a distinct civic identity shaped by a resistance to imposed authority. As Moody notes, current Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk – a son of Gdańsk – tries to channel this mindset into a wider Polish conception of itself as an open, pluralist, European country, firmly resistant to authoritarian pressures (with a recognition that these authoritarian pressures are also internal).

However, upon landing in the city, the big European story was the state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region, with the radical nationalist party, the Alternative für Deutschland gaining just short of 44% of the vote to become overwhelmingly the largest party in the Landtag. The central principle in German politics over the past decade has been the brandmauer, or firewall (also known as the cordon sanitaire), where given the nature of the AfD, all other parties refuse to cooperate with them. But keeping the AfD out of power in Saxony-Anhalt now looks difficult.

Aside from Russia, the AfD is the other shadow looming over Europe, and one that creates an enormous complication to Germany’s Zeitenwende – or “turning of the times”. Announced by former chancellor Olaf Scholz, Zeitenwende is meant to be a reassessment of Germany’s long-standing assumptions about security and foreign policy. The country has been reluctant to exert its power following its atrocities in World War II as it remains psychologically scarred by its actions. Berlin has purposely weakened itself as a display of good faith. However, the current global environment means Germany can no longer withdraw from the world, it needs to now stand up and be a responsible actor.

The AfD believes that Germany should no longer carry any guilt for its Nazi past, but this does not mean the AfD sees Germany as a leading liberal-democratic force within Europe. The party is quite explicitly pro-Russian. It has an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia, sharing a rejection of universalist values, liberal internationalism and supranational institutions. It believes that Moscow should be able to determine, or heavily constrain, the strategic choices of the states on its borders, subordinating the security – or existence – of these countries to Russia’s whims.

The authoritarian receptors remain pronounced in the former East Germany, and the AfD has been able to capitalise on this. The living memory of the region’s integration with the Soviet-led bloc, and the propaganda that sustained it, means there is a continued sympathy for Moscow. The reassembly of Germany has not been complete – and has intersected with the uneven effects of globalisation – with the AfD seeing this as an enormous opportunity to exploit.

Like other similar nationalist parties – although more dangerous than most – the AfD wraps itself in the German flag as a form of subterfuge, attempting to sell itself as “patriots” while being actively hostile to Germany’s constitution, its alliances, its interests, and demographic realities. The party’s increasing political power is the elephant in the European room – a Germany of the past threatening to consume the Germany of the present.

Moody details this “identity crisis” within Germany. Europe’s largest state by population, the world’s third largest economy, and an advanced manufacturing powerhouse, it should have a major leadership role within the continent. Scholz himself stated that Germany would become “the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be”. Yet it remains, as Moody describes it, a “republic of fear” – constantly questioning its role in the world.

Germany’s support for Ukraine is large in absolute terms, but it has also been hesitant and indecisive about this support. Whereas Poland and the Baltic states have understood the stakes clearly, Germany can’t quite bring itself to fully abandon the assumptions of its old order. Zeitenwende has, instead, been a partial turn – or, indeed, one that much of the German public is reluctant, or hostile, to making.

There is no such quivering in Poland. The country had firmly decided that it will no longer be the plaything of authoritarian powers. With defence expenditure at around 5% of GDP – over double the larger European countries in Germany, France and the United Kingdom – Poland, as Moody notes, now “regards itself as a resurgent regional power whose interests, history and civilisational values give it a special responsibility to defend the frontiers of Europe against Moscow’s designs.”

Despite its own internal populist revolt, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has no sympathy for Russia, and while in government when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it embarked on an extraordinary programme of arms purchases from the United States and South Korea. Moody highlights that Poland now has more tanks than Germany and France combined.

Having visited Poland numerous times over the past few years, the idea of the country housing “civilisation values” that elicit a strong national pride has become apparent to me through its architecture – with Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles all prominent. Kraków, spared much of the violence of the Second World War, is a truly gorgeous city, and the riverside setting of Gdańsk’s old town is equally stunning.

However, passing underneath the central railway station in Gdańsk, you find yourself confronted with something rather bleaker – the architecture of its 20th Century subjugation. Poland has spent much of the past three decades renovating, redeveloping and demolishing its Communist-era buildings that sit alongside the country’s traditional city quarters. But this process has not yet reached the 1973-built Gdańsk bus station, which remains a dank brutalist blight.

I was there because there is no direct train from Gdańsk to Vilnius, so I jumped on the Brat-green Flixbus – the Ryanair of buses – for the ten-hour drive to the Lithuanian capital. Being Australian, a ten-hour drive is unremarkable, but in Europe it feels considerable. Poland is a large country, yet significantly smaller than it was prior to World War II. It lost territory to Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, although gained some from Germany. Its historically fluid borders – and the instability borne from this – has also driven its current defensive determination.

Traversing Poland’s northern regions from west to east, it is noticeable how lush the country’s countryside is, and unsurprising that it is one of the European Union’s largest agricultural producers. But also noticeable is the increased military presence around the Suwałki Corridor – the small strip of land that connects Poland to Lithuania in between the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and the Russian puppet-state of Belarus. It is one of Europe’s most strategically sensitive areas with the potential to disconnect the Baltic states from the rest of the continent. The Poles are taking no chances.

As is the norm within the Schengen Area, the bus passes into Lithuania without acknowledgement. Only by noticing a shift from the consonant-heavy Polish to the vowel-heavy Lithuanian on the road signs would you realise that you’ve entered a new country. Despite sitting all day, long bus trips are exhausting. Pulling into the Vilnius bus station in the dark, the task was simply to walk the 20 minutes to my accommodation and get to bed.

Moody’s chapter on Lithuania begins with a scene from 1940, when the Lithuanian deputy prime minister, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius, is ushered into a room with the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Lithuania had already been bullied into having 20,000 Soviet troops stationed on its territory, but Molotov’s intentions were now being laid bare, telling the deputy PM to face reality and that “smaller nations will have to disappear”, and that the Soviet system “shall reign everywhere”.

Yet as Moody acknowledges, it wasn’t just the rapacious ideological hunger of the Soviet Union that saw Lithuania this way. During the period between the two world wars, most Western diplomats also saw the Baltic states as unviable and provocative in their attempts at national self-determination. For 50 years this subjugated status was deemed both normal and inconsequential. But since 1989, Lithuania has been determined to make it unrepeatable, and themselves highly consequential.

My idea for spending a few days in Vilnius was to write an essay about courage as a foreign policy tool. Coming from a country with a timid national demeanour, and being endlessly frustrated by this, the bravery and fortitude of countries like Lithuania is something that intrigues me. I reached out to the Foreign Ministry to see if I could have a discussion, but my plans were thwarted by Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian PM and the current EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, being in town and the ministry being stretched thin with arrangements.

What they offered as compensation was rather flattering for a lowly scribbler such as myself. Lithuania’s new ambassador to Australia, Donatas Buktus, was in Vilnius and offered to take me out to dinner. He was only a few weeks into the job, and was about to make his way back to Canberra. Buktus’s previous role was as deputy ambassador to Ukraine, so his new job will be a little less eventful – and I’m not sure whether Canberra is a reward or a punishment. Given his last post, we went to a Ukrainian restaurant, drank horseradish schnapps, ate beetroot and veal soup, and discussed Lithuanian, Australian and global affairs.

The ambassador was also able to organise for me to visit the National Crisis Management Centre, where much of the Lithuanian response to Russia’s recent aggression is coordinated from. The Centre has eyes on Russian troop and aircraft movements in the region, but is also tasked with responding to the relentless disinformation campaigns, and greyzone tactics that Moscow deploys against Lithuania.

Yet Russia hasn’t been the only authoritarian state that Lithuania has had problems with recently. Due to the geopolitical realities of only being able to recognise one China, Taiwan (which is officially the Republic of China) has to call its overseas diplomatic missions the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. The Lithuanians, however, now being disinclined to eat authoritarian shit, had decided not to submit themselves to this convention and allowed the mission to be called the Taiwan Representative Office. This, of course, sent Beijing ballistic.

Being a friend of Taiwan, and impressed by the Lithuanians, I thought I should stick my nose into the situation and pay the Taiwan Representative Office a visit. The question I had on my mind was why would Taiwan, with its limited diplomatic resources, set up an office in Vilnius? The reason, I discovered, was that the Lithuanians have developed a highly sophisticated laser industry, and these lasers are vital to the production of Taiwan’s semiconductors.

Moody describes Lithuania allowing Taiwan to name its mission the Taiwan Representative Office an act of “unilateral bravery”. It was this, but it was also an act of economic reality. Although China is a major export destination for Lithuanian laser technology (amongst other products), the potential to integrate its laser capabilities into the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry lies with Taiwan. Enraging China was therefore worth the risk.

It is this appetite for risk that could be considered the national ethos of Lithuania, what Moody describes as that of a “rebel nation”. Despite its subjugation to the Russian Empire, Poland, and then the Soviet Union, Lithuanians have always maintained a strong spirit of resistance and commitment to their right to nationhood. Even with its overwhelming military superiority, it took the Soviet Union a decade to subdue the Lithuanian resistance known as the Forest Brothers.

In 1949, the Forest Brothers adopted a declaration asserting their own political authority over occupied Lithuania, and established an idea of Lithuanian sovereignty that lives on today. As Moody highlights: “The idea that the state could live on through partisan fighters even after its structures were destroyed by a foreign invader has a formal place in the modern Lithuanian constitution”. Lithuania’s Law on the Basics of National Security, adopted in 1996, goes further. It establishes a principle of total and unconditional defence, expressly including guerrilla warfare, civil disobedience and non-collaboration.

The Lithuanians firmly believe the blunt opposite of what Molotov and Western diplomats in the 1940s believed – that smaller nations would inevitably be eradicated. Moody acknowledges “how little success the Soviets subsequently had in their efforts to grind down Lithuanian identity”. Like Estonia and Latvia, Lithuania was “subjected to a wholesale social engineering”, yet this merely had the countereffect of heightening their spirit of resistance.

The spirit has now been transposed on the current era’s display of Russian belligerence. All three of the Baltic states have proved to be the most resolute in their support for Ukraine. Their governments have been among the loudest voices in Brussels and Washington pushing for tougher sanctions and faster weapons deliveries, driven by a conviction that Ukraine’s fight is, in essence, their own – recognising that Moscow sees the Baltics in the same way as Ukraine; as countries that have no right to exist.

After wrapping up my engagements in Vilnius, I jumped on a train to Riga. The train is a relatively new service connecting what was previously a highly fragmented regional network. The connection is a precursor to the Rail Baltica project, which will be a high-speed train from Tallinn in Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania and connecting into the European train network in Warsaw – something that isn’t currently possible due to different rail gauges used from Poland westwards.

In 2024, I wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine about this under-construction train line and its political symbolism while attempting to make my way through the region via the existing network. At the time there was no coordination of timetables, so a train from Tallinn to Riga would require a four hour wait at the border town of Valga. However, now this is no longer the case. I can’t be certain that my article inspired the coordination of timetables, but I’m keen to take the credit regardless.

The train from Vilnius that I was on now travels all the way through to Valga where an Estonian train waits to collect passengers. However, I wanted to spend some time in Riga, and would make the journey to Tallinn the following day – taking the old Soviet-era Latvian diesel chugger, made in Ukraine’s Donbas region, to Valga, before switching to the sleek, new, Swiss-made electric Estonian train.

The trains here are symbolic of each country’s capabilities. Latvia has lagged somewhat behind Lithuania and Estonia in the Baltics’ remarkable economic ascent since the fall of the Soviet Union. While Lithuania has its new glittering new skyscrapers, and Estonia has bounded into become a high income country, Latvia still has a little dirt under its fingernails. Riga feels like it’s still waiting for a post-Soviet paint job, and its retro trams and trolleybuses give the city a decidedly Eastern Bloc feel.

This atmosphere is exacerbated by Russian remaining the largest spoken language in Riga. This continues to be one of the most contentious issues in Latvia today. During their occupation, the Soviet Union deliberately sought to transform the demographics of Latvia and Estonia by bringing in large numbers of Russian workers. Latvia now grapples with how it navigates its demographic realities and the supposed sympathy towards the country’s greatest threat this creates.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Latvia has accelerated laws aimed at reducing the role of Russian in public life. It has legislated to move schools to Latvian-language education, ended Russian as an option for learning a second foreign language in schools (after English), and tightened residence requirements for some Russian citizens, including requiring Latvian-language proficiency for permanent residence. The aim is to consolidate Latvian as the common language of public life and weaken the parallel Russian-speaking sphere that developed under Soviet rule.

Where this becomes murky is in how the Soviet past, the current Russian aggression and merely speaking Russian get blurred together. The destruction of the obelisk in Riga in 2022 was part of what Moody describes as “a systemic campaign by the Latvian state to erase almost every visible trace of communist oppression from its landscape” – with Russia’s current aggression interpreted as the same thing. The problem is that over three quarters of Russian-speakers in Latvia viewed the obelisk as simply a symbol of Russophone identity, rather than one of Latvian subjugation. The obelisk clearly couldn’t stay, but destroying it may also have pushed Russian speakers further towards Moscow – something Putin is keen to exploit.

However, Latvia may be less divided than it seems, as it is also obvious that the country now provides access and opportunity for its citizens that Russia cannot. Moody quotes the former Latvian prime minister, Evika Siliņa, who states bluntly “the younger generation can choose: either they want to be with the Russians, or they want to be part of Europe. And they mostly want to be part of Europe.”

The reason I had initially started spending time in the Baltic region was due to both an Australian and familial connection. Following World War II the Australian government assessed its strategic landscape and concluded that it simply didn’t have enough people to defend itself. The policy borne from this conclusion was called Populate or Perish, but it faced a cultural hurdle. Australia was an insular and timid country, still very bound to the idea that it was simply a British outpost in the Pacific. Selling the country on immigration was going to be tough.

The immigration minister at the time, Arthur Calwell, devised a plan so hilariously simple, and an idea so completely of its time, that it was cunning in its genius. Calwell thought that if the Australian government was able to find a cohort of good looking people and have them be the first wave of new migrants to Australia, then Australians would think the immigration was an excellent idea. So officials were sent to the post-war refugee camps of northern Europe to round up hot people. This wave of migrants were called the “Beautiful Balts”.

While single, young, healthy adults were deliberately prioritised, some families were also selected, and on one of the first boats to arrive there were two young Estonian children. The pair grew up and married each other, and then their son subsequently married my sister. So with Estonia drawn into the family, I became drawn into Estonia. Fortunately, Estonia is a very easy place to become fascinated by.

Despite being grouped with Latvia and Lithuania as “the Baltics” Estonia is highly distinct. It is not a Baltic nation in the ethno-linguistic sense, but a Finnic one. Linguistically Estonian and Finnish are closely related, and are distantly related to Hungarian. All three, however, are completely unrelated to any other European language, having initially developed in the Ural mountains that separate eastern Russia from Siberia. Although the Hungarians were late arrivals, trailing the Finnic peoples’ move to Europe by about 2,500 years.

What is noticeable as you leave Valga station and make the journey towards Tallinn is how distinct the architecture in Estonia is from its southern neighbours. There is a strong Nordic feel, derived from both its close ethno-linguistic and cultural relationship to Finland, and both countries’ long histories as part of the Swedish Empire (150 years for Estonia, and 600 years for Finland). This Nordic sensibility was actively maintained during the Soviet era, where architecture could provide a subtle way of preserving a distinct cultural identity without raising Moscow’s ire.

What is also noticeable in Estonia is its economic transformation. Moody declares that “since it restored its independence in 1991, Estonia has raised its nominal GDP per capita 2,500 per cent”. He notes that it has built the best schools on the continent, rapidly increased its score on the Human Development Index, and, despite a culture of graft and corruption that exists in most former Eastern Bloc countries, Estonia now ranks alongside Canada in its government transparency. It has also developed a technology sector which a country like Australia, with a far longer period of prosperity, would be envious of.

Moody quotes former Estonia president Toomas Hendrik Ilves in stating that Estonia would like to become nothing more than another “boring Nordic country”. Yet the tragedy of its geography has made this difficult. Like Latvia, the early 1940s saw Estonia occupied by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and then the Soviets again. The dry Estonian humour encapsulated their predicament in the maxim: first hunger, then misery. Like their neighbours the determination to never allow this to happen again is now central to their being.

During the 20th Century the country maintained its belief that it would regain self-determination. Moody details how during the Soviet occupation, the Estonians engaged in an extraordinary form of cultural preservation. As the intense wave of “Sovietisation” sought to repress or eradicate Estonian identity, the public simply hid the nation’s important monuments and artefacts. The historian Mart Laar explains that “Under occupation it seems understandable that people could hide gold, weapons, even books, but risking everything to hide huge stone or bronze monuments appears absolutely implausible. But that is exactly what Estonians did.”

What also sustained the Estonians was the ability to pick up Finnish television and radio broadcasts. Initially faint signals were receivable, but in 1971 the Finnish public broadcaster, Yle, constructed a new transmitter that significantly increased reception into Estonian homes. Although Finnish and Estonian are not mutually intelligible in every context, many Estonians could understand enough Finnish to follow the broadcasts. It enabled the Estonians to see the world beyond Soviet propaganda.

What drives the connection today is the ferry service between Tallinn and Helsinki. However, the ferry to Helsinki leaves at the disrespectful time of 7am. So after a brief stopover in Tallinn I was up before dawn to make my way to the terminal. The crossing is just a bit over 2 hours, which, given the time of departure, can give Estonians a whole day in Helsinki before returning home in the evening.

I was also only spending a day in Helsinki. I was quickly running out of time to get to Stockholm, so I would be taking the overnight ferry to the Swedish capital at 5pm. Upon arrival, I decamped to the Oodi – one of the great modern libraries – to do some work while I waited for my next ship.

The short amount of time in Helsinki was disappointing. Over the past five years I’ve developed a powerful love of Finland. Living in Sweden, there is a noticeable condescending attitude towards the Finns, but I think they’re fantastic. Most of our current sociological and geopolitical problems could be overcome if we just developed a bit more sisu – the national character of Finland, which encompasses a mixture of courage, resilience, tenacity, and perseverance.

This has been the overarching theme of the Helsinki Security Forum, the annual discussions hosted by the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, which I’ve had the privilege of attending several times. The Forum has been designed to explain to the world that – we Finns are highly competent and know exactly what we are doing, and the rest of you are dangerously complacent and should pay close attention.

Central to this is Finland’s doctrine of “Total Defence”, what Moody describes as “an ability to plan and execute grand strategy over periods that extend into the geological.” Total Defence is a whole-of-society approach to national security, involving the military, government, businesses and citizens. It combines military preparedness with protecting critical infrastructure and maintaining essential services during crises. It encompasses everything from the country’s extraordinary network of underground bunkers, to its education system designed to make its public immune to disinformation.

In 1980, the Swedish historian Kristian Gerner wrote an article called “Kazan and Manchu: Cultural Roots of Soviet Foreign Relations”. His thesis was that Russia had a deep cultural instinct to divide the world into either Kazan – neighbours who can be subjugated and incorporated, or Manchu – neighbours who were strong enough to resist such predation and needed to be accommodated. Whatever ideological conception governs Russia, this instinct remained.

Finland, a country of just 5.6 million people, has made itself into a Manchu. The first demonstration of this came in 1939 when the Soviet Union attempted to invade Finland. Although it was able to capture 10% of Finnish territory, it did so at an enormous cost in terms of personnel. The Finns exploited their superior understanding of the terrain to inflict 5 times as many casualties on the Soviets. Moscow learned its lesson, and the Finns resolved to make sure that this lesson always remains prominent in the Kremlin’s thinking.

Finland’s other strategy for maintaining its independence during the 20th Century has often been unfairly categorised. Known as “Finlandisation”, the tactic was to make Moscow think that Finland was within its sphere of influence and therefore invasion was unnecessary, while simultaneously developing a military capability able to resist invasion, alongside a Westernised cultural and economic connection. Although Moody highlights that debates remain in Finland today about the extent of “bending” to the Soviet Union that was deemed necessary to pull off this trick.

Here Finland’s neutrality during the Cold War was simply a way of navigating the era’s geopolitical terrain. As Moody argues, Finland’s neutrality was practical, and this marked it as distinct from Sweden’s which was ideological. This made Finland’s move to join NATO following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine easier to pursue – it was simply the practical response to the times. The leap, therefore, was far bigger for the Swedes.

The leap across from Helsinki to Stockholm is only an hour by plane, however, the absolute best way to travel between the two capitals is via ferry. Watching drunk Swedes belting out Roxette songs may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but aside from the ferry’s duty free shop, it is the scenery that makes the trip worthwhile. If you can emerge early in the morning from your cabin and get up on the roof, you’ll witness one of the most truly spectacular entries into any city in the world as the ferry meanders through the Stockholm Archipelago. Sweden, for all you quiz hounds out there, happens to be the country with the most islands (although it may be pushing what actually constitutes an island).

Despite living in Sweden’s southern Skåne region, I adore Stockholm and seek to spend as much time there as possible. But this visit coincided with one of my other favourite things in the world – elections. Recently I’ve been trying to convince people that it is enthusiasm, rather than citizenship, that should define eligibility to vote in a country’s election. This seems unlikely, but for the Swedish election I managed the next best thing – talking my way into a press pass for the Social Democratic Party’s election night event.

One of the central issues of the campaign was the full removal of the cordon sanitaire around the Sweden Democrats – the country’s radical ethno-nationalist party (and not to be confused with the Social Democrats). Following the last election, the party was kept out of government, but provided a confidence and supply agreement (the Tidö Agreement) for the coalition of the Moderates, Christian Democrats and the Liberal Party. This election, the three coalition parties had stated that they would invite the Sweden Democrats into a formal coalition, should the numbers lead to such a result.

Unlike the AfD in Germany, the Sweden Democrats are not sympathetic to Russia and are supportive of Sweden joining NATO. They have apologised for their neo-Nazi past (“we promise not to do it again”), yet they remain hostile to Sweden’s demographic realities, and lazily adopted the Trumpian election slogan “We’ll make Sweden Sweden again” (Vi gör Sverige till Sverige igen).

The surprise on election night was that the Sweden Democrats lost just over 3% of its vote from the previous election (their first decline in votes since entering the Riksdag in 2010) – making it mathematically impossible for the Moderate/Christian Democrat/Liberal coalition to invite the party into a majority government. Despite achieving its worst result since 1911, the Social Democrats are in the best position to form a government, but establishing a majority coalition may be difficult, as with how the numbers fell, they’ll be unable to form a majority without Vänsterpartiet.

Previously, Vänsterpartiet, the former Communist Party of Sweden, has eschewed being part of a coalition government, choosing instead to snipe from the sidelines. But now they want in. However, the Centre Party – formerly a Nordic agrarian party, which now describes itself as “liberal feminist” – refuses to work with them. Vänsterpartiet are suspicious of the European Union and opposed to Sweden’s membership of NATO, as well as being mired in the postmodern identitarianism that dominates progressive politics within the Anglosphere. The Centre Party – unlike its ideological cousin in the Liberal Party – has kept its spine and made its principles clear; there is no cooperation with the Sweden Democrats, and no cooperation with Vänsterpartiet.

Of course, parliamentary cooperation is just one element of political and social influence. Both the Sweden Democrats and Vänsterpartiet – and their supporters – are susceptible to the cynicism and conspiracism that Russia uses to try and destabilise Western societies. For Sweden to navigate this, Moody acknowledges the work of the country’s Psychology Defence Agency, which attempts to address what is potentially the most consequential problem of our modern age - how do we make our publics immune to bullshit?

Alongside Elon Musk, the Russian government is the biggest disseminator of bullshit on the planet. Spreading disinformation is seen as one of the key tools in the “tournament of shadows” that Russia is engaged in. It is here, Moody explains, that the regime has come to believe that “the psychology of the opposing population was a new domain of warfare and grinding it down was a higher objective than anything that guns or bombs could achieve.” The purpose is to sow lies and foment mistrust to keep Western societies in a permanent state of anxiety and uncertainty.

As well as disinformation, there is a need to understand the wholesale range of tools that Russia uses in its destabilisation efforts. This includes simply buying political figures like former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to amplifying useful idiots like France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or indeed, U.S. president Donald Trump. Alongside this are the drone incursions into European countries and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure.

Yet there is also no attempt at disruption that Russia deems too small. Moody writes that “the Russians were increasingly hiring marginalised or disgruntled young ‘misfits’ for a range of low-level tasks such as arson, minor sabotage and spraying inflammatory graffiti.” This was something that Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre told me as well.

In seeking to understand Russia’s behaviour, Moody draws upon a novel by the Russian exile, Victor Erofeyev, called The Great Gopnik, which he describes as “an excoriating denunciation of Putin and Russia’s wider political culture.” The gopnik of the book’s title “is a ubiquitous figure across the Slavic world, a petty hoodlum who compensates for his intellectual limitations by bullying the weak.” The argument of the novel being that Russia is a gopnik state.

This is the tragedy of the Baltic Sea region. It is a gorgeous and fascinating area of the world, and I am grateful for the privilege of being able to move myself through it. Yet the region is one that has to live in a permanent state of vigilance due to the inflamed resentments, emotional incontinence and aggressive insecurity of its largest neighbour.

As the Finns, the Poles, and the Baltic states understand, there is no pretending this reality doesn’t exist. The only credible way to govern themselves is to make resistance and resilience their national ethos. But as Moody et al reported in The Times last week, speaking to many of the region’s defence ministers and security chiefs, there is also the need to be calm and not panic at every Russian provocation. Panic, of course, plays into Moscow’s hands.

Moody’s closing argument is that credible deterrence is Europe’s only option, because the only thing a gopnik understands is a fist bigger than its own. However, a credible European deterrence ultimately requires German power, and this is precisely what Moody's book identifies as the hinge on which the region's future depends. Yet with the current state of German domestic politics, this remains one of the great uncertainties facing both Baltic Sea region and Europe at large.

Pastiche is a delicate artform. It can often sit on the edge of parody, but it is usually born out of respect, borrowing the style and tone of existing works to create something new. It differs from plagiarism because it is open about its intent and meant to be clearly comprehended. It is used to signal lineage, to work inside a tradition, or to trigger recognition in an audience who understand and approve of the references.

This doesn’t mean pastiche cannot be funny. But it is more subtle than the blunt instrument of parody. Most music is a pastiche in some form. Musicians inspire other musicians and styles become attractive and desirable to emulate. Although acknowledging a lineage is often something bands avoid for fear of being deemed unoriginal.

It is odd, however, for a band to create a pastiche of themselves. Many bands have certainly become parodies of themselves, but pastiche requires far greater self-awareness. It requires a deep examination of a band’s music, its cultural and aesthetic choices and how its work is understood by the public. But in order to reach this point it often requires a rupture. An event so cataclysmic that introspection and evolution are the only rational responses.

Suede arrived in the early 1990s with a fully realised musical and aesthetic vision. Famously, they were declared by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain” before they had even released their first single. Their debut album placed them within the canon of British bands culturally wedded to time and place, albeit highly distinct from the flag-waving or cartoon nostalgia that would follow in the mid-1990s. Suede were the Britain of decaying suburbia, they found a grim eroticism in London’s council estates and tower blocks, the drugs, the casual relationships and casual violence.

This sensibility was packaged through glam rock’s androgyny and theatrics. It was the high drama of low circumstances. A form of working-class aspirational glamour – the secondhand leather jackets worn in an attempt to transcend an inherited environment, yet bound to it all the same. The band were highly literate, musically accomplished, and with the wry wit of predecessors like The Smiths – something often submerged beneath singer Brett Anderson’s gritty themes and swaggering showmanship.

Suede’s songwriting was built on an intense creative rivalry between Anderson and guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Butler. What drove the band’s ability to emerge on the British music scene with a compelling maturity were these attempts by Butler and Anderson to outdo and impress each other. With neither man willing to concede secondary status within the process, each song became honed with an eye to perfection.

Reaching the top of the British album charts in its week of release, the band’s self-titled debut became the fastest-selling album since Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome a decade earlier. It also won the band the prestigious Mercury Music Prize – awarded for the best album each year by a British or Irish artist. Yet, like all great bands, Suede were not simply about album sales or critical respect; they were a band people invested themselves in, they cultivated a devoted fanbase with a distinct aesthetic style – the kinds of people who understood the band as more than just “a good tune”.

Such devotion had a lot of material to work with. The sheer volume of exceptional songs that the band were able to produce in their early years was remarkable. Most musicians could spend their entire careers attempting to write a song as exquisite as My Dark Star, while Suede had the confidence – the arrogance even – to simply throw it away as a B-side. The first disc of the band’s B-sides and rarities compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies, could stand alone as one of their best albums, were it released as such.

Suede’s initial success signalled a shift in what the United Kingdom wanted from its guitar bands: less earnest, more theatrical, unashamedly interested in glamour and artifice, and a firm rejection of the Americanisation of British rock. It placed the band at the vanguard of what would become a revival – for better or worse – of British music in the 1990s. It made the band not just writers of great songs, but culturally important. A band you had to know and engage with to fully understand the UK.

Then came the rupture.

Three-quarters of the way through recording their second album, Dog Man Star, Anderson, bassist Mat Osman, and drummer Simon Gilbert made an extraordinary decision. Butler was to be expelled from the band. The guitarist’s controlling behaviour and undiplomatic demeanour were no longer tolerable. Due to a conflict over the album’s sound, and his dictatorial presence in the studio, Butler wanted the album’s producer removed from the project – issuing a “him or me” ultimatum. The rest of the band called his bluff and kicked him out of the band.

Butler’s vision for Dog Man Star was of a dark, elaborate art- and progressive-rock record. He wanted to create an album far stranger and more ambitious than their debut. An album epic in scope, brooding, complex and atmospheric – it was to be the kind of album you could get lost inside for days.

With Butler fulfilling his contractual obligations by recording from a separate studio, without his official presence in the band, the others decided to trim back some of his excesses. The Asphalt World was originally over 20 minutes long before being halved, while The Wild Ones was shorn of its 3-minute abstract outro and refashioned into one of the truly perfect rock songs of the 1990s.

Although the album failed to replicate the commercial success of its predecessor, it remained an phenomenal artistic statement. An album of bold confidence and restless imagination. Butler’s ornate musical compositions led Anderson to write surreal and claustrophobic lyrics, which he delivered through a theatrical vocal performance. The album was gothic, if not quite goth. By its release, Butler’s exit had added to this sentiment – giving the album a strange, posthumous quality. A band who had – seemingly – produced their eulogy while still technically alive.

Suede had found themselves in crisis, but they stubbornly decided that the dismissal of Butler wasn’t going to spell their demise. The stark problem they faced was how could they meet the promotional and touring commitments for Dog Man Star without its primary musical architect? Despite his poor interpersonal skills, Butler was one of the truly great musicians of his generation – a guitarist who took Johnny Marr’s intricate, chiming melodies and gave them a more angular glam and post-punk edge. Finding someone who could not only replicate his sound, but also move the band forward seemed impossible.

When the band announced that their new guitarist was a 17-year-old schoolboy, the prospect didn’t look promising. Richard Oakes had sent a cassette of himself playing songs from Suede’s first album to the band’s fan-club. The tape wound up in the hands of the band themselves, who initially thought the recordings were demos Butler had made. Oakes was capable of mimicking Butler’s unique and complex style, enabling the band to replicate the band’s songs live. The test, however, was whether he could compose, not just imitate.

Butler’s departure forced Suede into a period of introspection. The band had to work out what it was that actually made them Suede. How do you maintain continuity as a musical group when the guy who wrote all the music is no longer present? The key was to think about themselves as a cultural force, rather than just a band. What the band had produced was an outlook, a set of themes and a style of communication – both visual and musical.

The idea, therefore, was to take these stylistic components and fabricate a version of the band that was recognisably Suede, but distinct in approach from previous albums. Rather than the brooding, expansive songwriting of Dog Man Star, the approach on Coming Up was to create songs tighter, brighter and built around the immediate connection of pop music. They would take the idea of the pastiche and apply it to themselves: ten songs that could each stand alone as a radio hit, but which collectively embodied the ethos and essence of Suede as a cultural entity.

Coming Up’s concept required not only a high degree of self-awareness, but the ability to be self-deprecating as well. To understand the world that the band had created through their first two albums – the drugs, the melodrama and the rough glamour – and be able to make themselves the objects of their own satire.

This mining of the band’s subject matter, while pivoting its musical approach, can best be illustrated by contrasting the songs Daddy’s Speeding from Dog Man Star with Filmstar from Coming Up.

Daddy’s Speeding is a song about James Dean. It is built on an ornate lyrical romanticism of Dean’s fatal car crash, using it as metaphor for a glamorous but reckless masculinity, and the allure this holds within our culture – “Broken glass for teenage boys, trapped in steel and celluloid”. The music is one of Butler’s more complex compositions, beginning with a plucked acoustic guitar and sparse piano, before abruptly pivoting to a clipped, metallic guitar, then a carousel organ, before building to a layered, dense, intensity, until it all eventually collapses – depicting a car crash.

Filmstar, however, takes the same cultural idolisation and reduces it into a mocking simplicity – “Filmstar, propping up the bar, driving in a car, it looks so easy.” It recognises the celebrity romanticism of Daddy’s Speeding and twists the drama into a wry, knowing tease. Oakes’s guitar riff is blunt and repetitive, an exaggerated glam strut. The sound of a film star’s magnified public presence.

This was a way of making the band fun. Of course, the weight of this self-caricature fell on Anderson’s lyrics and vocal delivery, but Oakes also understood the mission, writing riffs that paid homage to Butler’s style while having the buoyancy to be radio friendly, and the sheen to complement the album’s design.

Coming Up’s conceptual approach found its exemplar in Beautiful Ones, a song that sought to distil an inventory of Suede’s cultural indicators into a signature anthem. It took the subject matter that on their first two albums would be dramatic and introspective, and made it outward focused, communal and singable.

Under pressure from Osman to write a guitar line worthy of a top ten hit, Oakes created a riff that was both intricate and propulsive. An instantly recognisable hook that could send a festival crowd into rapture upon hearing its first few notes.

Beautiful Ones also underlined how central aesthetics were to the band’s identity – a reminder that Suede’s glamour had never been incidental to the music, but a second, equally deliberate element running alongside it. The band had always been meticulous about their imagery, from maintaining a consistent band logo font across releases to the deliberately provocative imagery used on their album covers.

Coming Up produced a new aesthetic tool. During recording, when drummer Gilbert’s cousin, Neil Codling, dropped by the studio to borrow a suit for a job interview, he was recruited into the band instead. Beyond his multi-instrumental skills and a voice that complemented Anderson’s, Codling understood his visual role instinctively, playing the detached, cool foil to Anderson’s on-stage exuberance. His photogenic presence made him as important to the band’s image as to its sound – giving him a prominent role in the Beautiful Ones video.

The cleverness of Coming Up was that Suede didn’t try to escape the identity they had spent two albums creating. They embraced it, streamlined it, and shifted how they communicated it. They created a version of themselves that understood their own tropes well enough to be playful with them. In becoming a pop pastiche of themselves, they transformed the loss of Butler from a threat to their existence into an opportunity to expand what they could do.

The production of the album reinforces this pop pastiche on every level – the continent-sized hooks, anthemic choruses, the toe-tapping beats, the handclaps, and la-la-la’s. Nothing was subtle, nothing was hidden or designed to grow on you. Where the music was expansive – like on The Chemistry Between Us – it was earned through a gorgeous string-led outro that could capture the listener and transcend the standard time limits of pop music.

True to the band’s desire to write a record of start-to-finish hits, five singles were drawn from the album – exactly half its ten tracks – and each one reached the top ten on the British charts. The album itself outsold its two predecessors combined, expanding the band’s influence as a major cultural force.

Critics have long treated the album’s lightness as a diminishment. Those invested in the gothic weight of Dog Man Star may have found the transition odd or disappointing. But Coming Up’s lightness of spirit wasn’t the band lowering its ambition, it was a demonstration of it. It was a concept album, but the concept was the band itself. It was its own, distinct, artistic statement.

The standard critique of pastiche is that it has become the default mode of modern culture – not consciously chosen, but simply what we are left with once our culture lost the capacity to produce anything original. Artists, in this account, are without agency, left only to mimic what came before them.

On Coming Up Suede inverted this. The band weren’t out of ideas and pastiche wasn’t what they simply fell into, it was a deliberate, controlled strategy. One chosen when other options were still available to them. This is also what makes Coming Up such a canny album. It was a partial reinvention, but one that was self-aware and droll. The sound of a band post-rupture understanding what they had previously created, and deciding to make their most “Suede” album.

No-one wants to take a critical eye to sex for fear it might lead to them missing out on it.

The boundaries of sexually acceptable behaviour have expanded with remarkably little scrutiny of what drives male sexual desire, or of the sexual culture we have created around it.

Last week in Sydney a 16-year old girl was killed during what is now sanitised, condoned and even promoted as “sexual choking”. It was, of course, strangulation, and the language we use to describe such acts matters because it determines what we are willing to see. To call strangulation “sexual choking” turns an act of violence into a sexual preference. It takes this violence and places it in a category where ordinary moral and legal judgements are suspended.

Sexual strangulation has moved from the margins of sexual behaviour into the mainstream. What was once regarded as extreme or rare is now sufficiently widespread that women and girls can expect to encounter it as a seemingly “ordinary” part of sexual relations, despite the catastrophic injuries it can cause. The “rough sex” defence has become a tool to minimise criminal culpability. It is only England and Wales that have explicitly legislated to state that consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence, while Northern Ireland has separately undertaken a review of the issue.

If we had greater clarity about what is going on here, if we could bring ourselves to do the proper scrutiny of men’s sexual desire and how it feeds into our permissive sexual culture, then we would at least begin by treating strangulation as the criminal act of violence it is, rather than allowing the context of sex to obscure what is happening. But I suspect we won’t. The mirror is still too inconvenient for us.

Media in Australia has legitimised the act, and written sympathetically about the “heartbroken boyfriend”. It was seemingly just an expression of love that became an unfortunate accident. We’ve lost our goddamn fucking minds.

What would ordinarily be understood as a clear act of violence is deemed acceptable if it is perpetrated in the bedroom. Moving rooms somehow transforms violence into a “kink”. And this “kink” is something not to be shamed. Kinks are to be tolerated, or celebrated, even if they lead to death. A young girl’s role was to be the vessel for this kink, and it was the boy’s ability to “express his sexuality” that was most important. Her death, well, that was just collateral damage.

Yet an act does not cease to be violent because the people involved are naked, nor does consent transform every act into something harmless.

Within this moral vacuum, personal desire has come to be privileged over personal restraint. The assumption is that if a desire exists, an individual should be free to pursue it, regardless of the cost. This sits within a broader bastardisation of liberalism, where the freedom to exercise personal responsibility has been replaced by a freedom from responsibility.

Sex has become a prominent area where this bastardisation is visible. We have failed to ask whether a particular desire is good, healthy or worthy of cultivation, and instead ask only whether it satisfies an instinct and gains – often dubious – consent.

The sexual revolution made a mistake when it assumed that liberation meant the removal of moral judgement itself. A free society does not have to celebrate every desire merely because it exists. It can distinguish between freedom and harm, between pleasure and cruelty, it can set social boundaries around what it chooses to normalise.

As Louise Perry has written in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, in dismantling the old social mores around sex, we have replaced them with a culture that is unwilling to impose any limits on sexual desire and implications. We now believe that consent negates the nature of any act. Yet a woman’s consent does not alter the underlying character of a man’s intent. If a man is sexually aroused by the domination or suffering of a woman, consent does not transform that desire into something benign.

The burden of sexual freedom has not fallen equally on men and women. Men are, on average, physically stronger than women, and sexual relationships therefore contain an asymmetry that cannot simply be wished away by invoking consent. A culture that tells women they are liberated because they are free to participate in increasingly aggressive sexual practices, while treating male aggression as just another form of sexual expression, risks confusing women’s freedom with men’s freedom to exercise their worst desires.

Consent here is a flimsy justification because there is no genuinely safe form of strangulation. The physical vulnerability of the neck means that serious injury or death can occur even when someone believes they have consented to strangulation. This creates a fundamental distinction between consent and informed consent. People cannot meaningfully give informed consent to risks they do not fully understand.

The problem is compounded when violence is recast as intimacy. Strangulation is not made less serious because it occurs during sex. Nor is the desire to strangle someone rendered morally neutral merely because it is described as a kink. Somehow, through our deep aversion to examining and scrutinising male sexual desire, we have managed to reframe the concept of “attraction” into meaning “attracted to harming women”. And become ok with it.

Teenage girls and younger women are especially vulnerable to this murky world, where social pressures and the intensity of male sexual interest combine with the lack of fully developed adult capacities to analyse situations and make confident, informed decisions. Coupled with this are the physical realities that even a teenage boy’s hands wrapped around your throat can produce enormous force. A culture that eroticises male physical dominance is one that is profoundly risky for women and girls.

It is also a culture that has abandoned its humanity. In eroticising male sexual violence we have chosen a coward’s path to our social conditions. Humans have always possessed violent impulses, but rather than seek to civilise ourselves and restrain these impulses, we have instead funnelled them into a culture of sexual legitimacy. We find it far too difficult to interrogate the relationship between sex and violence, so we’ve decided to instead become comfortable with it.

We’ve also made some convenient excuses to avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror. The narrative emerging from this death in Sydney has been that the porn industry has socialised men into believing that strangulation is a legitimate form of “sexual expression.” This often frames boys and men as “victims” of the porn industry and weakens their personal responsibility. The reality is more uncomfortable: male desire and the culture the porn industry creates are mutually self-reinforcing. The porn industry didn’t invent the impulse to hurt women from nothing, it worked with a pre-existing demand and amplified, commercialised and legitimised it.

Porn entrenches this violent sexual culture, and its influence is utterly corrosive, but in order to have a serious analysis of why a 16 year old girl is dead from a sexual encounter we need to confront its actual psychological drivers. Why do men want to hurt women, and what is it about sex that is the vehicle for this desire? Why is an act that restricts another person’s breathing first interpreted as a sexual practice rather than an act of physical violence? And what does that tell us about the assumptions we have allowed to develop around male sexuality?

The central lesson from this girl’s death is therefore also the one we are most reluctant to acknowledge: not everything becomes acceptable when it becomes sexual. Some things remain violence, whatever room they happen in, whatever euphemism we give them, and however much we might prefer not to look too closely at male sexual desire and the culture of sexual freedom that has facilitated its brutal excesses.

With its daily absurdities, we’ve become desensitised to how thoroughly weird the Trump administration is. Not only weird politically, but weird as human beings. Trump himself is a cognitively dysregulated acid-trip huckster, but he leads a team who are just as emotionally chaotic, resentful, drama-prone, aggressive, manipulative, vindictive, psychologically brittle, desperate for validation, comically defensive, and haunted by their own personal inadequacies. It is a constant rollercoaster of petty psychodrama, unfolding from within the command centre of the American state.

Yet the ascent of these people to power is representative of our era. We are living in an era of wholesale emotional insecurity and psychological fragility. This is exhibiting itself in a multitude of different ways, but it is arguably the status anxiety of the modern male and how it is spiralling up into the Trump administration where it is the most impactful.

A prominent display of this insecurity has been Pete Hegseth’s “High-T Department of War” – an initiative to annually screen US service members aged 30 and over for testosterone deficiency and offer testosterone-replacement therapy where medically recommended, as part of his broader effort to maximise troops’ physical performance, resilience and their “lethality”.

Due to the volume of absurdities that emerge from the White House this dropped out of the new cycle without much scrutiny (which is, of course, the point), yet it was a development that highlights not only the pervasive status anxiety of modern men, but their odd predilections.

To the Trump administration – and the online swamps it swims in – national strength and the personal virility of individual men are one and the same. Men are meant to be warriors who exert their dominance and nations must do likewise. To be cooperative and conciliatory is to be a cuck. Unless you are constantly proving your manhood, the assumption must be that you don’t have any.

The renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War was due to the concept of “defence” being seen as wimpish and ineffectual. Real men are on the front foot. War is men taking action the way men should, and it is testosterone that is the essence of their power – the hormone of heroism, the biochemical of bravery, the secretion of superiority.

Yet, within this worldview, it is clear to see that men are fretting deeply about whether they are manly enough. Concerns about the testosterone levels of American servicemen has become a proxy for a wider cultural anxiety about masculinity, status and purpose.

Modern political institutions are viewed as increasingly feminine in both structure and values. Women’s education and advancement has been interpreted not only as encroaching on male domains, but creating a cultural shift away masculine virtues. Bureaucracies, universities, human resources departments and cultural institutions are portrayed as prioritising girly things like empathy, consensus and risk aversion over bold, decisive leadership and hierarchy.

Alongside this, falling testosterone levels, declining fertility and concerns about endocrine-disrupting chemicals are presented as evidence that modern society is weakening men. These biological concerns connect with culture anxieties to create a pervasive sense that masculine vitality is in decline, and civilisation itself with it.

It is only a High-T Department of War that can arrest this decline.

Yet like the culture it has emerged from this rebranding of the Department of Defense and its new High T policy is performative rather than substantive. It is the cheap clichés and stereotypes of masculinity – the weightlifting and the protein, the machismo and misogyny, and fantasising about the “warrior races” of the past – the Roman and Spartans. The louder this type of masculinity seeks to project itself, the more it demonstrates its underlying insecurity.

There is also something curious about this performance of masculinity, as it reveals not just how obsessed with masculinity certain men are, but how obsessed they are with other men. This performance of masculinity believes itself to be the height of heterosexuality, yet it is a dance performed for other men.

Elements of this are anthropological – men in the tribe needing to ward off outside men by puffing up their chests and grunting Tim Allen-style into the wind. Yet another part of it is uniquely modern, as it is men seeking the approval of other men. Men are not the audience for security, men are the audience to be impressed.

This is something both Helen Lewis and Kate Manne have identified within the “looksmaxxing” phenomenon – where young men seek to maximise their physical attractiveness. The assumption would be that this would be to attract women, but instead the objective is to prove to other men that you are capable of attracting women. Women are merely NPCs (non-player characters). Men are the main characters around whom all action revolves.

To understand the logical conclusion of this perspective it’s worth paying attention to one of the internet’s great weirdos – Will Blunderfield. Blunderfield sells himself as a “rewilding coach” – someone you hire to connect yourself to men’s primal, physical and sexual nature. He exists in the extremely online intersection of manfluencing, wellness, new age-ism, conspiracy, and absurd attention-seeking. He is fixated with the Spartans, the Samurai, and his “Celtic ancestors” – and especially these groups’ “ancient bro-bonding technologies”.

Everything that comes out of his mouth is pure bullshit, but there is one broader truth that he embodies where he is insightfully honest. To Blunderfield, the obsession with masculinity is unashamedly an obsession with men, and this obsession with men is sexual in nature. There is nothing more manly and High T than having sex with your “bestest bros”. And this is, indeed, how you prove yourself as a man.

There is no point being sexual attracted to women, these lowly creatures who don’t have the thymos for human greatness like men do. Your masculine virtue is not legitimate unless it is recognised – physically, in its natural glory – by other men of masculine virtue.

It is here we can also find the motivation of Pete Hegseth’s “High-T Department of War.” If masculinity is now a performance staged for the approval of other men, then the exhibition of war – with the department’s new name itself part of the performance – is simply this impulse conducted at the level of the state. This is distinct from a traditional Department of Defense, which implies a more restrained and responsible understanding of national interests.

The attempt to demonstrate this new High-T state posture through the war against Iran has proved how ineffectual this performance of masculinity is. Attempting to impress other men with a show of strength, the administration has instead been exposed as inept by the Iranians who were playing the game for real.

These are the consequences of a psychological shift created by an online environment where attention and the desperation for fleeting likes are more important than positive, long-term, real-world outcomes. It is a culture where symbolic displays of masculinity matter much more than strategy, planning and genuine capabilities, and where the fragile emotional needs of America’s leadership keep spilling into the machinery of the state.

And yet, the Trump administration has responded to their own weakness in the only way this culture knows how; with more bluster and buffoonery, convinced that they simply mustn’t have been beating their chests hard enough. They have never once contemplated whether it is the chest-beating itself that is their real problem.

Last week I was having a cup of tea with a friend from India and she was telling me about an article she had recently read on rural Victoria. Interviewed for the article was a farmer who was complaining that the number of potholes on the state’s roads are making transportation of goods difficult, alongside a series of other fundamental operational difficulties.

She observed that the complaints of the interview subject could have been the complaints of a farmer in rural Maharashtra, and that this was odd given the vast development differences between Victoria and Maharashtra.

This article was not a single isolated comment. Potholes in Victoria have become a recognisable major problem.

Potholes may not seem like one of the grand problems currently facing humanity, and often complaints about them are dismissed as “boomerposting” or minor inconveniences not worthy of serious political discussion. But as my friend identified, the pothole is symbolic of “getting the basics right”. Australia is a fabulously wealthy country, and one of the clearest measures of a developed society is whether it can reliably deliver the fundamentals. So why isn’t it?

My theory is that a country’s wealth and its development indicators not only breed complacency, but they also skew priorities.

Within a ten minute walk from my flat there is a train line and four tram routes. I happened to buy a car last year, but prior to that I lived comfortably without one for a decade. Yet I still rarely use the car simply because I don’t need to (and because I’m a public transport enthusiast). In cities like Melbourne and Sydney if you have quick and easy access to a variety of public transport options this is a sign of your immense privilege.

I firmly believe that everyone should have the luxury of the amount of public transport options available to me, but obviously not everyone does. But, more importantly, the kinds of people who do have such a luxury are also the people who are responsible for “getting the basics right”. Arseholes like me – that is, the political, bureaucratic and knowledge classes – don’t think about potholes because we’re on the tram instead. Without direct daily experience, the state of the roads is simply not at the centre of the government’s thinking.

Yet the issue runs deeper than decision-makers simply lacking daily exposure to the state’s roads. The priorities of the highly educated classes are shifting government away from what it should be doing at a more fundamental level. There are, of course, bureaucrats whose job is to identify and plan maintenance work. But the decisions about what gets prioritised, funded and staffed rest elsewhere, within a system that now has a different set of instincts.

One of the grand trends over the past few decades has been the significant increase in the number of people with university degrees. In the 1980s around 10% of Australians aged 25-34 held a higher education degree. Now, close to 50% of this age bracket do. Similar wealthy countries have similar figures.

Education is good, and no one should be suspicious of it in principle. But the rise in widespread higher education has created a shift in the social structure of these societies and one that has knock-on effects that we may not realise are significant.

The first is that the state has felt the need to absorb some of this larger cohort of educated professionals. This has expanded the state into areas where, arguably, a liberal state should be more hands-off. This is particularly evident with social issues that should properly sit within civil society, yet are increasingly claimed as matters of state responsibility, as social science graduates move into the bureaucracy and bring with them a presumption that such issues warrant state promotion and priority.

Alongside this, in its absorption of this educated cohort, there is a hiring process that skews how the state thinks. With far more people competing for jobs in the bureaucracy or as political advisors, how people differentiate themselves becomes key, and this leads people to distinguish themselves with more innovative ideas. The result is that the credentialed class competes for bureaucratic and political positions on the basis of who can generate the most compelling case for expansion and reform, not who can run existing services well.

This also converges with incentives of progressive politics, which is influential within the bureaucratic class. Progressive politics rewards the advocacy of more radical social ideas, and has the incessant need to prove that one holds the correct opinions. Advocating fixing potholes for farmers is not going to generate status within progressive circles – it isn’t radical, it isn’t the great cause du jour, and it does nothing to demonstrate ideological commitment.

All of this develops a culture within the state that devalues the general maintenance and good governance that is essential for our modern societies. The boring, repetitive, attention to detail that keeps a society functioning earns no reward – so “getting the basics right” becomes an afterthought as institutions instead focus on what are considered bigger, more status-gaining, issues. This creates a certain irony, as the class of people selected and promoted for being clever has built a system that fails at the thing that we expect from educated people – competence.

This sits at the heart of the current challenges to liberal democracy throughout the West. Liberal democratic systems have historically earned their consent through efficient and effective service delivery. Governance that is focused on the practical, everyday, aspects of people’s lives, rather than grand ideological visions or attempts at soulcraft. This unglamorous competence was a critical feature of the postwar stability that is now breaking down.

When this delivery starts to erode, so does this consent. This occurs not through any single big failure, but through an accumulation of little things that no longer seem to work well. People generally don’t lose faith in institutions over ideas, they lose faith via their daily experiences. And potholes are a daily experience of decay.

This creates the fertile soil for populist political movements that channel people’s practical frustrations into a broader narrative of betrayal and blame. Movements that generate a sense that the whole system, not just the roads, has stopped working for them.

This is what makes the neglect of basic maintenance dangerous. When the political and bureaucratic classes come to believe that the basics are beneath them, what they are really believing is that the experiences of the broader public are beneath them. It’s an enormous sign of disrespect.

It is also an erosion of the bargain that is made between the governing and the governed – that in exchange for well-paying and secure jobs, the systems of governance actually work well to everyone’s mutual benefit. This bargain is what farmers in Maharashtra still hope for, and it is what farmers in Victoria are now losing.

This is a short op-ed written with the hope of being published in the Australian Financial Review or the Melbourne broadsheet The Age. I got no response from either, but I think that is more a problem with the ideas they choose to publish, rather than the writing. So I thought I’d publish the piece here. It is obviously aimed at an Australian audience, but it has some universal themes for most Western countries at present.

Australia’s success as a country has been due to our high level of social trust. No society is without its problems, but we have far fewer than most because even as we’ve become a multi-ethnic society, we have maintained our ability to cooperate honestly and openly with each other.

Low-trust societies tend to rely heavily on kinship and ethnic ties, and maintain deep suspicions of those “not like us”. High-trust societies can interact confidently with those outside their immediate groups. They are more able to sustain the rule of law, create prosperity through productive markets, and build strong civic organisations that can flourish without state control. High social trust is liberal democracy’s load-bearing wall.

But this trust is now under threat.

The threat to Australia’s social trust is coming from two forces that believe themselves to be the opposite, but are actually similar.

The first is the rise of One Nation as a major political force. One Nation believes trust comes from cultural familiarity and that this familiarity is inherited through race. Therefore demographic change is seen to be undermining their idea of the country and its operating system.

The party believes it aims to preserve cohesion, yet its idea of ‘us’ is a narrow and hierarchical one. Its political tactics have followed accordingly – driven by the instincts of low-trust societies; reducing Australian society to a permanent contest between insular groups suspicious of one another.

The second threat to our social trust comes through postmodern progressive politics.

Multiculturalism began as a belief that people from different backgrounds could cooperate as equals within a shared civic framework while maintaining elements of their distinct cultures. Here in Australia, this has proved incredibly successful. But progressive politics doesn’t take success well. There is always an impulse to find new problems. Or, create them.

This has led to a bastardisation of multiculturalism, where instead of equal participation in a shared civic community, society has become viewed through ethnic power relationships. This has encouraged people to think about themselves primarily as an ethnicity, with historical injustices weighted onto them from birth. Progressive politics has abandoned a class-based view of society and adopted a race-based one (alongside other new identity groups).

The result is a worldview akin to One Nation’s where society is interpreted as a zero-sum struggle between ethnic groups rather than good faith cooperation among citizens. Which leads to one of the great ironies of our time, as Pauline Hanson is clearly our wokest politician – advocating for a “culturally safe space” for Anglo-Celts.

What is most dangerous is that these political narratives are self-reinforcing. The more Hanson talks about Australia needing to become a “monoculture”, the more it feeds into the obsession with racial power and oppression that progressive politics is mired in. This all pulls Australian society away from seeing each other as fellow citizens with shared responsibilities.

And it corrodes our social trust.

It also entrenches political division on top of ethnic division. Here we run the risk of further importing American-style polarisation into both our political system and daily social interactions. One of the great bulwarks we’ve had against social division in this country has been our weak political identities. No-one calls themselves after a political party the way Americans call themselves “Republicans” and “Democrats”, even if we may vote for the same party at each election.

This has allowed us to see ourselves as something bigger than partisan political actors. It’s allowed us to cooperate confidently because no-one walks around advertising their political allegiance as central to their being. No-one knows who you voted for, and it doesn’t matter anyway for our daily interactions.

Yet an intensified political arena risks changing that. It risks putting both political identity and ethnic identity at the centre of our social lives. It risks making Australia a more suspicious, cynical and ultimately a more dangerous place.

None of this is fixed yet. We don’t have to succumb to becoming a low-trust society. But resisting this requires leadership that is absent at present.

The Coalition looks to be opting out of the political system altogether, simply moving over and allowing One Nation to replace them. While Labor lacks the communications skills to explain to the public just how dangerous One Nation are, as well as lacking the intellectual fortitude to avoid being drawn into postmodern progressive narratives themselves.

If there was a time for some real clarity about what we have here in Australia, it is now – to understand how fortunate we are to live in a country where our problems are policy-related, not deep-seated cultural animosities. Economies, the rule of law, and civic life all rest on the same foundation of trust. We cannot be complacent about what may happen if this trust collapses.

For the ancient Greeks, friendship was essential to the good life. Aristotle described the ideal friend as allos autos or another self – not a copy of yourself, but an extension to you. Just as we cannot see our own face without a mirror, he argued, we cannot fully know our own character without a friend who reflects it back. Friendships are distinct from other social relationships – including family – as they must be reciprocal, requiring acknowledgement and commitment from both parties.

Aristotle identified three forms friendship could be based upon: utility, pleasure and character. The first values someone for what their company offers practically; the second for the joy it produces; the third – which is the highest form – is a friendship based on who we actually are.

While each of these models could be understood as separate forms of friendship, it is also clear that they can work in conjunction with each other. Usefulness, enjoyability, and mutual trust can work in harmony to produce a compelling friendship. It is here where we are not only able to navigate the world as social animals but flourish within it – both individually and together.

Yet, it is the final form of friendship, which Aristotle called philia, that is distinguished from the others by an important defining feature: it is friendship in and of itself, not as a means to something else. This form of friendship not created quickly, it is built and earned from shared experience, often hardship, and the accumulated knowledge of another’s character.

Friendship of this order carries a sense of duty. Recently the concept of duty has acquired negative connotations. In our age of advantagemaxxing there’s a belief that it is an imposition – an external threat to our self-interest. But duty is something far more important and profound. Duty is the mutually beneficial foundation of our social lives. It is an investment in each other, one that compounds over time.

As we’ve drifted away from duty, privileging self-actualisation as our primary social good, we have become more lonely, more disconnected, and more suspicious of each other. Duty is the concept that overcomes these personal, social and political problems. It is what gives us purpose as people, and restores self-worth and dignity. These obligations are broader than friendship, but it is within friendship where they are exemplified.

Let’s Eat Grandma are a duo built on the friendship between Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton. Their name is a grammar joke, with a comma dramatically changing its meaning, the kind of joke that amuses inquisitive teens. Friends since the first year of primary school in Norwich, they’ve been making music together since they were 13, releasing their first album as 17 year olds.

Their debut album, I, Gemini, carries the heavy imprint of teenage friendship – in-jokes, mutual intuitions, and a self-contained world of two built over years of closeness, where meaning is often encoded between them, rather than needing to be explained. It’s the kind of shorthand that develops through long mutual experience. The album comes across like a shared inner mythology, a friendship finding its eccentric expression through music.

The duo’s second album – I’m All Ears – was a more mature work, transforming from lo-fi bedroom must into a more sophisticated form of electronic pop, moving away from their often meandering song structures into music that is more produced and deliberate. It was also a more outward-facing album, no longer just speaking to each other, but now thinking about an audience that needed to be spoken to.

The album contained two extraordinary pop songs in the futuristic Hot Pink and ever shifting Falling Into Me, both exhibiting a maturity of sound and vision, and a distinct musical personality as a duo. It was clear that their songwriting had taken a significant leap forward.

This shift in the music reflected something happening in the friendship itself. I, Gemini had the quality of a childhood bond that hasn’t yet been tested – effortless and self-contained, the two of them a world unto themselves. I’m All Ears registers the first pressures of growing up: the point at which a friendship enters what Aristotle would recognise as a more mature phase – when two people start becoming distinguishable from one another, and maintaining the same ease of connection requires a more conscious effort.

For much of Let’s Eat Grandma’s early career, they were treated – and treated themselves – as more or less interchangeable. Their closeness was so total that audiences and the media regularly assumed they were siblings. Yet growing up changed this. As they moved into their twenties, they moved out of each other’s pockets. Even though they were still bound by their friendship, and by their band, there was a recognition that as adults there were different interests, different paths, and different obligations pulling each of them in competing directions.

Their third album – Two Ribbons – is where this registers in the music. For the first time they wrote the songs independently, making the album speak without the fused voice of their earlier work. Instead it is a work that is written from two separate vantage points. The album title reflects this: two distinct threads, running parallel, sometimes pulling in different directions, but often crossing over. It is about what happens when the friendship you build through childhood and adolescence develops a different shape in adulthood.

It is on the song Happy New Year where this takes form. It is a song written by Walton to Hollingworth about their friendship. The song acknowledges the strains of the shifting dynamics within their friendship, yet it endures because the bond is far greater than any competing interests could weaken. The song is an Aristotelian movement. Friendships of utility collapse under strain because what is being exchanged is being disrupted. Friendships of character survive – not in the same form, but deepened – because the utility, or the pleasure, is not the point.

Happy New Year is an expression of the duty of friendship. The song recognises the bond between them as an obligation – a commitment to each other’s character that holds regardless of circumstance. But duty is not passive; it requires action and purpose. The song was written after a breakdown in the friendship, making it an act of duty being fulfilled. Walton understands this by reframing their individual trajectories as a positive – It’s ok, say what you want to say, and that we’ve grown in different ways.

For Aristotle, a friendship based on character is not meant to be another version of yourself, allos autos means someone through whom you can see virtue operating in a form other than your own. A childhood friendship, like that of Let’s Eat Grandma, was in Aristotelian terms, a kind of proto-philia: connected and warm, but not yet the fullest version of itself because neither person had yet fully become themselves. Growing into distinct individuals is not a threat to this kind of friendship; it is the prerequisite.

Yet there is a complicating factor to this philia in the form of the band themselves. Walton highlights this through the line “and look at what I’ve made with you”. There is an obvious utility to the friendship, as there is a creative endeavour involved – the two rely on each other to keep the band going. Yet the acknowledgement here is something distinct, it recognises that the music they make is the fullest expression of their friendship. They’ve been able to convert their closeness into artistic merit.

There is also a wonder here that Walton is communicating. A sense that their friendship has a capability beyond what either of them could have anticipated. Most close friendships remain private; what is rare is when that closeness finds a form it can give to the world. This is not just marvelling at the music they’ve made together, but marvelling that there is something unique and important their friendship has provided to others.

If you hear or read a term or phrase repeatedly, you should treat it with suspicion.

This is my first rule of writing. It is a rule essential to both good writing and clear analysis, and has a distinguished precedent:

As George Orwell explained in his essay Politics and the English Language, the use of stock phrases and clichés is a symptom of intellectual laziness, where writers reach for preconstructed language rather than thinking carefully about what they actually mean – and, especially, the implications of the words they use. Generic, recycled language makes writing vague and imprecise. It conceals meaning, rather than clarifying it. Orwell argued that using habitual phrases does the thinking on the writer’s behalf and weakens critical engagement with the subject matter.

Orwell also believed that as these standardised and repeated terms and phrases spread through politics, journalism, and academia, they create an information environment of conformity without independent judgement. They anaesthetise the minds of both the writer and the reader, which makes us all easier to manipulate.

The key to being a good writer – or a good reader – is to keep a vigilant watch, to develop a mental list of terms to avoid and recoil when you read them. While some ubiquitous terms – like “so-called” – eat away at good faith and entrench cynicism, it is the shibboleth which directly attacks our critical faculties.

We are currently drowning in shibboleths – mass immigration, diversity, globalist, inclusion, uniparty, lived experience, woke, settler-colonialism, the establishment, late-stage capitalism, family values, marginalised communities, Judeo-Christian, silence is violence, deep state, real people, the science is settled, fake news. Each serves as a substitute for an actual argument and is often used to conceal the user's true intent.

This repetitive use of language is not meant to explain a position but to foreclose debate on an issue. Its repetition is intended to accumulate an emotional connection through familiarity, rather than earn agreement through reason. Yet lying behind this terminology is a choice about what to emphasise and what to obscure.

Those susceptible to authoritarianism tend to gravitate towards shibboleths because they implicitly understand that language is often the highest form of control. When language becomes normalised and institutionalised, it carries with it an ideological lens. Adopting a group’s vocabulary means internalising its ideas.

This use of language functions as a loyalty test. It is not only designed to signal whether someone is “inside” or “outside” a political community, but also to serve a disciplinary function. Refusing to conform linguistically arouses suspicion. It may not be enough to support a broad political objective; you are also pressured to use approved language. It is a test of conformity and obedience.

The power of shibboleths is that they simplify complex realities into easily repeatable terms and phrases. These can then be transmitted online, across activist communities and into the media, universities, political parties, governments and other institutions. Once embedded, they create what Orwell warned: formulaic language that substitutes for independent thought.

This does not mean that a shorthand is inherently bad. All societies require a way of communicating complex ideas in digestible packages. We cannot debate our big political issues without a vocabulary that can provide some orientation to the matters we need to discuss. The problem is when this language shifts from serving a descriptive purpose to becoming a substitute for analysis.

When the language around an issue has been pre-loaded with tribal meaning, then proper scrutiny becomes impossible, as the words themselves tend to shut down any critique before it can even begin.

A writer’s job is to explore a subject, seek its merit and value, to navigate nuance and complexity, to understand assumptions, outcomes and implications, and to make a compelling argument that highlights these. The job requires rigour and clarity of thought, to put aside the pull of political emotions and search for what is accurate and defensible.

A writer’s instinct should be to question why a term or phrase is being repeated. Who is using it, why are they using it, what is it obscuring, and what does its repetition tell you about the incentives of those who repeat it?

This leads to another important writing rule – A writer should reluctantly belong to groups and think independently of them whenever possible. Political parties, labels, sides, and identities should all be treated with great caution.

To define yourself primarily through a party or a label is to risk outsourcing your brain to others. It encourages you to fall into line with a group, clouding your ability to scrutinise with rigour. Giving yourself a label also encourages others to project opinions onto you that you may not hold.

This doesn’t mean not having political opinions, and it certainly doesn’t mean forgoing principles or a worldview. It is simply reserving the right to approach a subject on its merit, not filter it through a group position. It is about having the confidence to own your brain, to be secure in yourself, and to want to be an individual with independent ideas.

This is, of course, easier said than done. We are group-based animals, as for most of human history, being part of a group was a matter of survival. It meant protection, resources, and collective knowledge. Exclusion often meant death. When we feel insecure, we retreat into groups instinctively.

This pull towards belonging may be natural, but it is a major political problem, as, rather than gaining safety, retreating into groups makes us feel more threatened by other people doing likewise. This impulse has contributed to our modern political environment: one that heightens insecurity, eats away at individual confidence, and makes it far more difficult to analyse ideas on merit.

To break this cycle, writers should keep as far away from activist language as possible. Even when you agree with an idea, the objective should be to explain and advocate for it in your own words. This is the key to persuasion: to want to keep the reader engaged with an argument until the last sentence.

This reader engagement is undermined by the process of coding. The retreat into groups means that we are always looking for shortcuts to know which is “our team”. Here, terms and phrases – or yes or no responses to specific topics – get coded as either left or right, and then people position themselves accordingly. To write persuasively is to explain ideas in a way that bypasses this instinct, reaching the reader without activating the tribal reflex.

Coding gives the impression of thinking, but it is instead filing – placing an idea in a cabinet and closing the drawer, rather than taking the time to consider its worth, consequences, and meaning. What gets lost when we file is what actually matters most: whether the idea is true, whether it works, who it harms, and who it serves. These are inconvenient questions, and coding prevents them from being asked.

The great paradox is that intellectual elites are often the worst offenders at doing such filing. Rather than interrogating ideas, they instead compress them into approved categories – becoming designators of what an issue is and where it is placed in a conventional political framework, rather than analysts of what it means. Education becomes a mechanism through which linguistic codes are transmitted and normalised.

This is especially dangerous when it reaches institutions. Without the skills to interrogate language, these codes become embedded in governments, universities, and media organisations – and once internalised, they become self-reinforcing and difficult to remove. To advance within these institutions, it becomes a requirement to repeat the designated vocabulary.

When this happens, the purpose of these institutions starts to erode – governments risk legislating policies without sufficient scrutiny; universities can become less capable of cultivating complex thought and advancing knowledge; and the media creates intense polarisation that eats away at social cohesion and political stability.

Here, the writer should stand as a bulwark. The discipline is to develop a keen eye for how language is being used and misused. This means constantly testing terms and phrases for truth, effect, and intent, and remaining alert to how language can be used as a form of subterfuge, as authoritarian movements especially use language that is the opposite of its intent. Being attuned to repetition makes us less likely to fall for the ruse.

The responsibility of the writer is to expose logical fallacies and philosophical discrepancies that sloppy or dishonest language conceals. This is not merely intellectual rigour; it also produces far better prose. For it is not just the honest use of language that should be the writer’s focus, but the compelling nature of their ideas. The elegance of delivery is a demonstration of the quality of the analysis.

It is also a mark of respect for the reader. The writer’s aim is to earn the reader’s trust, and this trust isn’t genuinely earned through shibboleths. The purpose of these devices is to cajole and corral people, offering the reader neither curiosity nor contemplation. The appeal to tribalism implicitly concedes the weakness of an argument by abandoning persuasion in favour of reflex.

It is here that the responsibility rests with the reader, too. The reader who develops the same vigilance, who learns to notice when language is doing the thinking for them, becomes much harder to manipulate and harder to herd. This is because good writing and good reading are the same discipline. Both require the confidence to refuse borrowed thoughts.

Rape has always been excused. Though illegal on paper, in practice it is effectively decriminalised. It is rare that rapes ever get to trial, let alone lead to a conviction. There is an entrenched male presumption of ownership over women’s bodies, and the state has long been reluctant to push back too hard against what men feel entitled to – lest men turn their aggression towards the state. “Boys will be boys” remains our dominant social – and legal – attitude.

Last week in the United Kingdom three teenage boys were convicted of raping two teenage girls in separate attacks in late 2024 and early 2025. The boys filmed the attacks, making a guilty verdict by the jury difficult to avoid. Yet in sentencing Judge Nicholas Rowland displayed not only an extraordinary leniency – issuing rehabilitation orders, rather than a custodial sentence – but he went to great lengths to excuse the boys’ behaviour. Given this leniency the government has announced a review of the sentences.

Excusing the behaviour of boys and men for sexual abuse is unsurprising, it is, after all, the MO of justice systems, as they are often unduly concerned with the reputations of boys and men, rather than justice or sympathy for victims. However, what was astonishing were the excuses given by Rowland as they revealed a new suite of rationalisations that are now at the disposal of justice systems.

Rowland cited the boys’ ADHD, anxiety, and low IQ as mitigating factors, alongside a finding that they had a limited understanding of consent – which was, of course, the entire point of the trial, not a mitigating circumstance. However, more troubling was the highlighting of the boys’ ADHD and anxiety as grounds for leniency, factors that seem incredibly weak for diminishing accountability. In doing so, Rowland may have set an extraordinarily consequential precedent at precisely the wrong cultural moment.

Recent years have seen an explosion in ADHD diagnoses – a phenomenon that may reflect greater clinical awareness, but is also due to a significant broadening of definitions. Alongside this has been a wider tendency to medicalise what were once understood as ordinary difficulties: concentration, motivation, self-discipline. ADHD has quietly shifted from a defined developmental disorder into an expansive social identity, one that increasingly encompasses behaviours sitting well within the normal spectrum of human temperament.

This sits within a wider cultural shift to the therapising of everything. There is now an expansion of psychological frameworks beyond clinical necessity into the everyday interpretation of discomfort, conflict, and responsibility. Institutions, workplaces, schools, and online culture have absorbed the language of trauma, harm, and vulnerability to the point where straightforward moral reasoning is now being replaced by therapeutic reasoning.

Rowland looks to have internalised this pivoting from moral reasoning to therapeutic reasoning. When that logic reaches a court sentence hearing for a gang rape, the stakes of this cultural drift become difficult to ignore. It makes accountability more difficult, as expected standards of behaviour are minimised with excuses based on psychological diagnoses that may reflect nothing more than normal human traits.

What this does is minimise agency and responsibility, and severely undermines the social expectation that we be self-regulating beings. It has created the conditions where the excuses we make for rape now have a whole new menu to choose from. Not to mention widening the perceived legitimate defences rapists can claim for their own behaviour.

There is a desperation at the heart of modern progressive political culture to display empathy – to perform it, to signal it, to prove it. This creates a contest within this culture to try to out-empathy one another to gain social status. But such a contest inevitably requires new territories in which to place empathy, and it is here something goes horribly wrong. Empathy migrates away from those who need it the most – as this is deemed too obvious – and instead finds itself attached to those who don’t deserve it at all.

In this case, it landed on the perpetrators. Three boys who filmed themselves raping girls became the subjects of judicial compassion – their ADHD, their anxiety, their low IQ were deemed important factors, and given tenderness by the judge. The victims, meanwhile, were sidelined in a courtroom that was meant to provide them justice. It was empathy catastrophically misplaced, and misplaced using the extraordinary power of the state.

That this could be perceived by anyone as “progress” is genuinely bewildering. It is the language of care and inclusion being used to insulate perpetrators of sexual violence from consequence, while victims are asked to accept that the justice and dignity they deserve will be tempered by the weak therapeutic needs of those who violated them. It is a deep, dark regression of the human condition wearing the costume of social advancement.

The social signals this sends are dire. Young men need strong, consistent signals about acceptable behaviour – delivered with clarity and conviction. That is not what happened here. Instead, the judge has created more leeway, more ambiguity, more room for those who would take it. This sits within a culture that is already failing badly on this front – from the vicemaxxing of the American president all the way down to the increased brutality of modern sexual norms. The message about what is and isn’t acceptable is growing murkier.

Alongside young men, society more broadly needs a clear set of principles it governs itself by – this the platform on which social trust and cohesion is built. The state has a role not just in punishing wrongdoing but in projecting these principles, in drawing lines that inform people where they stand and what their societies are about. Throughout the West we are now failing to do this. We’ve instead created a choose-your-own-adventure ethics that has unmoored us as people, and made us susceptible to both poor legal decisions and authoritarian manipulation alike.

People need to trust institutions, and to deserve this trust institutions have to be able to think – clearly, rigorously, and with the intellectual resilience to resist fashionable concepts that may be mirages in advancing their fields. More importantly, institutions must understand how these concepts are incentivised and advanced into cultural, political and legal thinking without proper scrutiny.

The failure of Judge Rowland goes beyond the standard legal brutality towards victims of sexual violence. It was a submission to a new form of groupthink – one so desperate to locate victimhood in perpetrators that it has lost the ability to recognise it in victims. The result is a culture that looks to psychologically excuse people from personal responsibility, and institutions built on that culture will ultimately protect no-one.

There are two concepts which are central to understanding both the cultural importance and continued appeal of the Manic Street Preachers. The first is the band as "a portal" – a doorway into the vast library of music, literature, art, film and politics that furnished their work. The second is the band as "post-cringe" – able to pursue their art in a manner that can transcend any consideration of what is cool.

Both these ideas are why a book like Keith Cameron’s 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure could be commissioned – where the author examines the lyrics, themes, recording, and context of a selection of the band’s back catalogue. To be a fan of the Manic Street Preachers is not a casual proposition. The band are a culture in and of themselves. They’re not simply a band you listen to, as what is so compelling about the band has often been found beyond the mere sound they make.

Instead they’re a band you live inside. A band guided by their curiosity, ambition, and the dualism of their sincerity and absurdity. Alongside this, their encyclopaedic knowledge of the world-at-large means there are always new clues and paths to follow from their albums and interviews. Unlike most alternative bands who see interviews as forums to be evasive, obscure, and mysterious, the Manic Street Preachers have always been open, honest and forthcoming (as well as combative and funny).

The title of Cameron’s book comes from two sources. The first is from the band’s bassist and lyricist, Nicky Wire – a man always looking for a ridiculous idea for the others to talk him out of – suggesting they should write a concept album to counter The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs called 70 Songs of Hatred and Failure. This idea aligned with the band’s instinct for agitation, but also with how they understood their own project as a band.

The band’s original manifesto contained the statement that they would never write a love song. To do so would be a waste of a megaphone. The objective of music was to say something extraordinary, not commonplace. To emphasise this, the band’s first significant release was an anti-love kick to the face called Motown Junk. Which announced itself through the opening line:

Never ever wanted to be with you, the only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in.

Motown Junk’s theory was that rather than religion, it was actually the love song that was the opiate of the masses:

Motown Junk – a lifetime of slavery. Songs of love echo underclass betrayal.

Stops your heart beating for 1-6-8 seconds, stops your brain thinking for 1-6-8 seconds.

This is where the number of songs chosen by Cameron to analyse for the book comes from. One hundred and sixty-eight seconds – or 2 minutes 48 – was considered the ideal length of a pop song for radio at the time. As the band has released 319 songs to date, 168 was both a more manageable number, and one of symbolic value.

While as young political agitators, the band saw hatred as a motivating force, they would also consider their career to be a failure. Both in terms of not reaching their objective of total world domination, and through the loss of guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 and has never been found (he was declared legally dead in 2008). Given the band were primarily a close-knit group of friends (a gang before they were a band), this was an existential loss.

This nature of the Manic Street Preachers has been central to their appeal. Four childhood friends from a nowhere town in Wales kicking against the world. The shared lives and worldview, innate understanding and intense solidarity between them was integral to their music – and what has made them compelling beyond their music. They were not a band that could simply replace Edwards with someone else. The friendship was the band. The loss of Edwards was therefore a failure of concept. The three remaining friends continued without him, but the idea of the band was weakened.

The closeness of the friends was what allowed them to pursue a vision that people outside of themselves would find farcical. Following Motown Junk the band felt they needed a song to use as a retort to those who would envy their agitation, ambition and (projected) success. You Love Us was another deliberately confrontational song – a song of exaggerated confidence designed to goad the British music press into paying them attention. To them, it made sense to write such a song before anyone knew who the fuck they were. Eventually everyone would.

The band’s mythology has long been shaped by the idea of the grand folly – the spectacle of overreaching ambition: the attempt to build something vast, world-altering, and impossible, pursued with total sincerity and commitment, but which ultimately fails. The scale of their efforts, the intensity of their belief, and the gap between aspiration and outcomes is both amusing and captivating.

There are few grander follies in music than the Manic Street Preachers debut album – Generation Terrorists. An album that suffered from its bloated tracklist, its incongruous ideas, and shift in the musical culture between recording and release that made it passé as soon as it hit the shelves.

Surveying the musical landscape in early 1991 revealed to the band that punk had limited pathways to selling the 16 million albums they claimed their first album would. To achieve such a feat, the only path was through the United States, and in preceding years it was hard rock that had been culturally dominant. The idea struck them then to try to fuse together the confrontational radicalism of Public Enemy with the American everyman connection of Guns ‘N’ Roses. Big ideas and bigger riffs. To them it was a foolproof combination.

Only by the time the album was released the world had changed. Nirvana had struck, and gone was highly polished, balls-out guitar licks and in was a sound more abrasive and dissonant. Alongside this, there was a new youth posture of being disaffected, detached and authentic. To be cool meant restraint and disinterest. Boasting – one of the young Manic Street Preachers’ great skills – was now deeply suspicious.

Alongside their poor choice of musical style, the band also seemed oblivious to how their local political references could possibly find traction outside the United Kingdom. It is absurd to think that a guy driving his truck through rural Indiana would be singing along to a song about the British banking system called Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds. However, the band remained convinced that such an approach would be successful.

When the band did turn their lyrics towards the U.S it was with unvarnished hostility. Songs like Slash ‘n’ Burn and Democracy Coma were never going to connect with people to whom a loyal, uncritical patriotism was an integral part of how they understood the world.

Each move the band made was at odds with what could rationally produce the world domination they sought. But this is also what made them utterly fascinating – an irrepressible will, a romantic idea about what a rock band should be, and a belief that everything was of interest and capable of being incorporated into their world. A band who were both driven and weighed down by their ambition, incapable of connecting their goals to structural realities.

Aside from the mature outlier of Motorcycle Emptiness and enduring appeal of Little Baby Nothing (a song they wanted Kylie Minogue to sing), Generation Terrorists’ legacy lies within its sleeve rather than its sound. Here each song was given a quote to illustrate its theme and place it in a broader political or cultural context. These quotes included authors Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Camus, Henry Miller, and George Orwell, alongside Public Enemy’s Chuck D, and the Sleez Sisters, the fictional band from the film Times Square.

This approach to giving their music a wider context is one they have continued with every subsequent release – albums and singles alike – where there has always been at least one quote from philosophers, poets, actors, politicians, and novelists used to frame their music. It has been one of the central pillars of the band as “a portal”. To the fan, these sleeve quotes act as an invitation into the band’s world. This was especially important for teenagers looking to build their cultural knowledge. It provided both a list of other art to pursue, and made people feel like they were joining a movement with a genuine set of ideas behind it. This is what made the band exciting, and capable of generating a loyalty that could transcend the very uncool sound of their music.

Yet such aspiration for little reward also exhausted the band. There are few bands that have suffered so conspicuously from “second album syndrome”. Rather than adjust to the new cultural environment created by Nirvana, they doubled down. Only this time minus the fist-swinging political missives. As Cameron writes, Gold Against the Soul had the Manic Street Preachers “contemplating subsistence as a moderately successful career rock band”. Gone was the revolutionary fervour, gone was the agitation and spirit, and in its place was a mostly inward-looking album of middling FM rock designed to appease the blandest of radio station programmers and offend no-one.

Where the band did retain some wit and contention it was funnelled into Patrick Bateman, a six and half minute turd-metal epic about the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho (which also managed to squeeze in a back-handed reference to the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder). The song was initially identified to be the album’s first single, but their record company subsequently refused to release it – with its blasphemy being the stated reason, but foresight probably being the more compelling one. Eventually it would appear as a b-side, and earn itself cult status as a song so bad it has a strange magnetic appeal.

Gold Against the Soul was a clear failure, and has mostly been renounced by the band. However, it did have two redeeming features. The first was La Tristesse Durera, a song that demonstrated, like with Motorcycle Emptiness, the band had a genuine talent for a style of melancholic rock that could connect sadness to a hummable tune. With the song being written from the point of view of a World War II veteran, it was also a demonstration of the band’s willingness to transcend political sloganeering and address global affairs in a more sophisticated manner. Particularly through subjects that conventional progressive politics would deem unfashionable.

The second redeeming feature of Gold Against the Soul was that it was a necessary humiliation. It forced the Manic Street Preachers to reevaluate their approach and clarify their purpose. The band had come to the realisation that they had lost their connection to the music they actually liked as teenagers, and succumbed to a lazy mode of operation that reflected the compromises they’d made. These compromises had brought them neither total world domination nor the dignity of a distinct artistic vision. They had to change.

That change was dramatic. Gone was any attempt to make music that could appeal to a broad audience. In its place was an album of jagged gothic post-punk that spat and snarled. An album of dark, concentrated intensity that had the band interrogating the civilisation rot of the 20th Century; its wars, genocides, serial killers and other moral failings, alongside themes of haunting psychological struggle. The album was a bloodied J’accuse to all and sundry. They called it The Holy Bible. A title both consistent with the band’s penchant for provocation, and reflective of the album’s artistic merit.

With Blur following the herds down to Greece, the Manic Street Preachers had again failed to align themselves with the cultural moment, yet this time it was intentional. The album was a hand grenade hurled into Britpop’s cosy enclave of self-regarding nostalgia. Its thesis was that the 20th Century had lacked a true accounting of its atrocities and enormous cultural changes, moving instead into a comfortable post-Cold War triumphalism. The Holy Bible’s cultural affinity was to be found not within the field of music, but with Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes – the historian’s overview of the period between 1914-1991 – which was released serendipitously almost simultaneously with the album.

Unlike other bands who would use touring Europe as an opportunity to sample the local inebriates, the Manic Street Preachers had instead taken the opportunity to visit the former concentration camps in Dachau and Belsen. This experience led to two songs on the album about the Holocaust – Mausoleum and The Intense Humming of Evil – with Mausoleum’s coda containing what would be the album’s guiding philosophy, a sample of J.G Ballard describing his book Crash – I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

The Holy Bible’s overarching theories of the century’s brutality came via Of Walking Abortion and Archives of Pain. The latter’s argument was that there lay a lust for, and fascination with, violence deep within humanity’s soul, and the appetite for the rehabilitation of criminals is a sentimental lie that betrays the victims of violence. While rehabilitation may seem politically noble, it actually functions as a form of forgetting, making society more vulnerable to our violent lusts. The song is embellished through a sinister bass line, an escalating and intense instrumental outro, and a truly bonkers chorus that simply lists the names of mass murders and vicious political leaders (replacing Milosevic with Manic Street Preachers the second time it comes around).

Yet Archives of Pain was not alone in confronting progressive shibboleths. Through P.C.P the band critiqued what was then called “political correctness”. The song argued that such a social management system was driven by what Edwards called in his explanatory notes distributed to journalists as the “New Moral Certainty” – a conviction that has only intensified since. The negative effects of such linguistic policing and moral posturing were predominantly worn by both the working classes and those groups who these social rules claimed to be protecting.

It’s a song that continues to offend modern analysts of the album. As what the song demonstrated was the band’s stubborn streak of intellectual independence, and the sharp disconnect between their own socialism – rooted in the mining towns of the South Wales valleys – and the costuming of middle class progressive politics.

Yet the album’s legacy has been less tied to the political lessons of the 20th Century (lessons we’re now failing to heed), and more to the bleak emotional difficulties of its chief lyricist, Edwards. Prior to the album’s release he had been admitted to a mental health hospital, and songs like 4st 7lbs and Die in the Summertime were clear indications of his deterioration. Even the extraordinary boast of the album’s lead single Faster (that is, one who fasts) – I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer, I spat out Plath and Pinter – was indicative of the very opposite.

Six months after the release of The Holy Bible, in February 1995, Edwards and singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield were due to fly to New York for a promotional visit, instead Edwards left the London hotel where they were staying prior to departure, drove back to Cardiff where he left some items in his flat, and then remained undetected for two weeks before his car was found with a dead battery at a service station near the Severn Bridge crossing between England to Wales. There has been no trace of him since.

After six months of contemplating their continued existence as a band, out of habit Wire gave Bradfield a pair of lyrics, and Bradfield concluded they were both on a similar theme and decided to fuse the two together in order to construct some music. The process was an attempt to create some normalcy during a deeply traumatic period. Yet the result was spectacular, and something the band felt needed to be heard.

A Design for Life was driven by what Wire saw as Britpop cosplaying and commodifying British working class culture. The song was a vast, poignant hymn to the band’s own origins. It was also the sound of the band stepping out of the twin shadows of The Holy Bible and Edwards’s disappearance, and in doing so, achieving something that had previously eluded them – a massive hit single.

The subsequent album, Everything Must Go, produced another shift in style – more expansive and melodic, with an overarching sentiment that Bradfield would describe a “wistful resistance” – a form of euphoric melancholy that the band would come to perfect. All four singles from the album reached the top ten of the British charts, and the album would be certified as triple platinum. Although traction in the U.S continued to elude them, Everything Must Go would transform the band from cult curios into one of the United Kingdom’s biggest bands.

Yet this success was clearly bittersweet. The disappearance of Edwards was not simply a personal tragedy but a rupture at the very heart of what the Manic Street Preachers were – a band built on a deep personal bond between four lifelong friends. Music was the vehicle to express this bond, it wasn’t a bond established by the band. For Edwards to not share in their success diminished the ability to take full pride and celebration in their work.

Yet Everything Must Go was not without Edwards’ input. Five songs on the album featured lyrics written by him. These included Kevin Carter – a portrait of the Pulitzer Prize winning South African war photographer who committed suicide after being unable to cope with what he had witnessed (and been rewarded for). As well as the gorgeous Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky, a song ostensibly about animals in captivity – written after Edwards had watched a documentary on the state of Britain’s zoos – but which could also be interpreted as being an analogy for his own time in a mental health hospital.

What the band had achieved with Everything Must Go was distinct from their early conception of what success would look like. There was no accompanying youth revolution, it didn’t bring down the British monarchy, and there were no American stadium tours. Yet it did generate enough interest to demonstrate that the band’s irrepressible will was capable of finally connecting with the broader British public, and doing so while overcoming great personal loss.

This new connection with mainstream audiences offered the band an opportunity to place their ideas into the public consciousness. Which initially they understood. If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next drew upon George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, with Wire contemplating whether he would have the courage and be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War – or any modern equivalent. Despite its subject matter and its blunt and unwieldy title, the song became the band’s first number one single.

Yet the subsequent album – This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – failed to capitalise further on this opportunity. It was again an inward looking album, often far more concerned with Wire’s domestic world than political commentary. Where this worked well, like with Black Dog On My Shoulder, it was exquisite, yet much of the album felt resigned, timid and insipid. When Wire sought to make a bold statement through S.Y.M.M (which stood for South Yorkshire Mass Murderer) the lyrics were a weird metacommentary about writing a song about the Hillsborough Disaster, rather than directly addressing the administrative neglect that created the tragedy.

The overly earnest album title was taken from a speech by the founder of the NHS, Welsh Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan. It symbolised a conscious choice to connect more overtly with Wales. Songs about the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley to create a water reservoir for Liverpool (Ready for Drowning) and the Welsh sisters known as the Silent Twins (Tsunami) were expressions of this new interest in their country, but they were rare outward-facing songs.

This expression of Welshness was something that Edwards had previously resisted, wishing to avoid what he called “the Kinnock factor”, the certain demeaning attitude towards the Welsh, and the perceived unelectability of former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. This was exemplified by The Sun’s infamous headline on election day in 1992 “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.” The idea would stick with Wire as one that may have been the cause of their lack of early success.

The band had initially attempted to record a far more upbeat record with a producer whose background was in electronic music. Yet these sessions were not deemed successful and were abandoned. However, songs from it would surface as b-sides, with one, Prologue to History, beginning with the line – Were we the Kinnock factor? Driven by an Italo-House piano line, it was notable for its stream of references from Shaun Ryder (again) to British middle distance runner Steve Ovett. Despite being discarded as a b-side it earned a full page spread in Select magazine explaining its details.

Such interest in the band was indicative of their newfound success. Despite the languid nature of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours it matched the sales of Everything Must Go. Yet, there was a palpable sense that the band had lost their verve and spirit. Much of this had previously been supplied by Edwards, yet it was also the nature of success. Rather than success facilitating the fantasy of tearing down establishments – as they had conceived in their youth – success instead draws you into a cultural machine, presenting you not with freedom but with compromise.

In an attempt to reset and reclaim their edge, the Manic Street Preachers embarked on what could be seen as their grandest of follies – a concert in Havana. Cuba offered the romance of resistance – revolutionary iconography, anti-American defiance, the illusion of authenticity untouched by Western commercialism. The band had used the Cuban flag on their limited-edition turn-of-the-century single The Masses Against The Classes – a song less political statement and more a petulant response to those suspicious of their success. Cuba symbolised where the band felt more comfortable – as pariahs rather than as parishioners.

Yet the trip to Cuba was a familiar artistic temptation: the belief that a proximity to “history” or “revolution” can restore a sense of purpose and radical idealism. Instead, the band found themselves playing before Castro and being absorbed into the theatre of his regime’s propaganda. Rather than restore the band’s insurgent energy, they sold themselves to a political system they only partially understood. In the process, revealing how vulnerable artists are to political mythmaking and the allure of authoritarian state power. This would be subsequently acknowledged over a decade later on the song The Next Jet to Leave Moscow from their Futurology album.

The attempt to reclaim their youthful spirit via a new album was also an extraordinary failure. Named Know Your Enemy – a phrase generally traced back to Sun Tzu and The Art of War – and leading with Found That Soul, the album was both trying too hard to prove itself and a sprawling, incoherent mess of musical styles and weak subject matter. Where the band’s best albums – The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go – had a tight focus and consistency of both sound and vision, Know Your Enemy was the work of a band lacking in aim and purpose, or, like the trip to Cuba, actively seeking to detonate themselves.

Oddly, the album’s one great triumph – So Why So Sad – has become a song the band have disowned, seemingly disappointing by its lack of public traction, and the confusion created by writing the best Beach Boys song since the late-1960s. An occasionally lazy lyricist, So Why So Sad is one of Wire’s finest lyrics – subtle, not overreaching and paying close attention to each word, as he explored the duality of his personality as both an enfant terrible and lethargic homebody. The song itself is an exquisitely crafted gem, and a demonstration that the band’s musical imagination could extend beyond the guitar.

If Know Your Enemy was utterly baffling to the fanbase who had come onboard through Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, the band weren’t finished confusing people, and orchestrating their own decline. After their longest break between albums, the band reemerged with an electro-pop song called The Love of Richard Nixon. While the song title continued the band’s fondness for provocation, it was also borne from a fascination and studied interest in grand historical figures, and especially an interest beyond their headline reputations. The band have never been shy about trying to establish a public connection with unusual material – as hit and miss as this had been for them.

There was also a certain affinity between the Manic Street Preachers and the former president – both emerged from modest circumstances and were driven by a force of personality that willed their place in history into existence. Yet success, for each of them, coexisted with a persistent sense of visions unrealised and ambitions thwarted, alongside the obvious penchant for self-sabotage. The lyric “the times they fall behind you” could apply as readily to themselves as to Nixon – particularly during The Holy Bible period, where the band’s diagnosis of the world now looks prescient.

Prescient could also describe the subsequent album, Lifeblood. Despite its commercial failure, history has been far kinder to it, with a sound more aligned with the musical culture two decades on. The album was also more focused musically, built around sleek synthesised textures, controlled atmospherics and a coherent emotional tone that deliberately set it apart from the era. It was an album designed for a night home alone, rather than a night on the town.

Like The Holy Bible’s rejection of Britpop, here Lifeblood was a rejection of the prevailing musical culture of the early-2000s. A time when guitar music was increasingly defined by the retro-rock revivalism and laddish hedonism of bands like The Strokes and The Libertines – what is now labelled “indie sleaze”.

Despite the band’s long-cultivated image of provocation and fondness for rock ‘n’ roll mythology, genuine hedonism had never interested them; if anything, a deep suspicion towards those pursuing pleasure too enthusiastically had always sat at the centre of their worldview. The band’s rhetoric and public image were often at odds with their actual character: beneath the slogans, eyeliner and confrontational posturing sat a sensibility heavily rooted in the mining communities of the Welsh valleys – hard work, personal restraint, respect, helpfulness, loyalty and politeness. They are quite possibly the only rock band to whom punctuality is a core tenet.

These – now former – mining communities of South Wales are not just central to the band’s origins, but their origin story. The defining event of their teenage years was the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85, which hit South Wales with particular intensity – with mine-dependent communities facing an existential struggle against pit closures and state restructuring. This was not just an industrial dispute between the British government and the National Union of Mineworkers, it was a social rupture that was cultural as much as it was economic.

Coal mining had been central to the livelihood of the region since the late 17th century, embedding itself deeply into the fabric of South Wales. It fostered tightly bound communities defined by deep solidarity, where toil, workplace risk and mutual social dependence shaped everyday life. There was a powerful sense of collective pride in having fuelled the Industrial Revolution – a pride not from wealth or personal status, but the collective social esteem that the physical labour of the Welsh coalfields underpinned modern Britain’s industrial rise. What the government offered in replacement – the Pot Noodle factory – offered no such dignity.

The first song that Wire and Bradfield wrote together as teens was called Aftermath – a commentary on the Miners’ Strike. Ever self-referential, Lifeblood’s opening track was called 1985 and was a song about this first song. Yet 1985 is also about the cultural environment of the time, with references to The Smiths and Torvill and Dean. In interviews for Cameron’s book, Wire remains convinced that 1985 was music’s greatest year, and the song is more of a lament for his teenage years which offered both a social struggle and a vast cultural menu for inquisitive young minds.

The band have often discussed their blissful childhoods, and this has informed a sense of loss as a central theme of their work. The brutal economic change of South Wales, the broader rapid social and cultural change of the past forty years, and, of course, the disappearance of Edwards. Wire had skirted around the issue in several songs, but it wasn’t until writing Your Love Alone Is Not Enough did he address his feelings directly.

The song is blunt in asserting that Edwards owed them something more than just love, he owed the band his presence. An assertion that friendship was a shared commitment to lows, not simply revelling in highs, that Edwards didn’t acknowledge what he had – the privilege of a lifelong bond that offered unconditional support. The song also happened to be phenomenally catchy – enlisting The Cardigans’ Nina Persson for a duet – and revived the band as a popular success.

In 2008, Edwards was declared legally dead. The law in the UK stipulates that after seven years a missing person can be declared dead, but his family and the band had delayed this decision in hope that he might resurface. The band had continued splitting their earnings four ways, even on records that Edwards hadn’t appeared on, in case he did reappear he would have a considerable sum to live off. The official declaration of his death allowed this money to be released to his family.

Yet the declaration also allowed the band to enlist Edwards again as a songwriter. A few weeks prior to his disappearance, Edwards had given the rest of the band a binder of new lyrics. Those that had already been turned into demos – and Edwards had heard – appeared on Everything Must Go, but the other lyrics the band felt they shouldn’t touch. However, they now revised this decision, feeling it was time to give him a proper send off with a new album constructed with his input.

The nature of Edwards’ lyrics lent the band to revisit a sound adjacent to The Holy Bible, and they actively sought a visual symmetry as well. Whereas The Holy Bible had featured a painting by Jenny Saville called Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face) as its cover image, they returned to Saville again who supplied them with Stare for Journal for Plague Lovers. The band also used the same typeface, and the backwards Rs they had used in 1994 (itself a device borrowed from the Simple Minds album Empires and Dance).

Several songs concern Edwards’ time in a mental health hospital, and in particular his critique of the 12 Step Program and its religious themes. However, rather than entirely bleak, the album also deploys absurdist humour. Jackie Collins Existential Question Time – “Oh Mummy, what’s a Sex Pistol? – and Me and Stephen Hawking – “We missed the sex revolution, when we failed the physical” were both wry in a way that suggested that Edwards hadn’t entirely succumbed to despair.

Yet themes from The Holy Bible did reappear, notably on This Joke Sport Severed, the sister song to She Is Suffering. The “she” in this song was a metonym for “desire” and the song concerns Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths – the first two are that life involves suffering, and that it is desire that is its root cause. The song interrogates the darker mechanics of male sexuality, and its psychological hold on masculinity.

If She is Suffering was Edwards contemplating the first and second noble truths, then This Joke Sport Severed was him moving onto the third – to actually follow the logic through, and attempt the radical disconnection from human relationships that monks and ascetics have always understood as the only clean solution.

Yet through the song Marlon J.D there is a recognition that such clean solutions also come with costs. The song is written about Marlon Brando’s character in Reflections in a Golden Eye; a man whose rigid self-discipline is itself a prison. Edwards’ fascination with self-denial was apparent through a song like 4st 7lbs off The Holy Bible, yet the film itself demonstrates the pressure that builds – and ultimately bursts – from such austerity. And ultimately it did for Edwards too.

While it was one of the band’s more stylistically consistent and better albums, Journal for Plague Lovers also revealed a tension that had appeared during The Holy Bible. Although that album’s artistic merit made it a record of enormous cultural importance, writing music that served the nature of Edwards’ lyrics moved the band into terrain that made their mission of “mass communication” more difficult.

Following the darker style of Journal for Plague Lovers, the band returned to trying to write a widescreen, continent-sized radio anthem through (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love. A song that sought to embody the “euphoric melancholy” that had been central to their biggest hits. It was an attempt to reassert themselves as a band that could reach a broader audience.

Ordinarily this approach would mark a band as “uncool” in more musically discerning circles. Indie cool runs on a set of unspoken rules: understatement beats enthusiasm, obscurity beats popularity, and trying too hard is sin. Authenticity is everything, even though this produces its own performative behaviour. The in-group is maintained through the cultivation of taste and the signal that there are those who “get it” and those who don’t.

Modern progressive cultural politics imports this same psychological structure. Persuasion gets treated as pandering, big-tent messaging as a sell-out, and an attempt to speak to a larger constituency is seen as a compromise. Just as an indie band loses credibility by chasing a wider audience, a progressive political position loses credibility by being too broadly acceptable. The attempt to convince people becomes evidence of inauthenticity.

The Manic Street Preachers were built on a complete rejection of this thinking. To them, both music and politics was about mass participation. They were about having the communication skills to reach and convince people that something is of worth. While this approach may seem uncool to those who prioritise exclusive scenes or niche ideas, the band’s roots in the Old Labour culture of the Welsh Valleys gave them an instinct that persuading a large constituency was the whole point. The internal rules of indie scenes and modern progressive cultures seemed small in comparison.

Yet also central to the band had been the idea that the mainstream audience can handle bigger ideas in their pop music, and to recognise that being exclusive is actually a form of condescension. The band’s operating principles have been to be open to understanding all culture, to not be snobbish, to be curious, and to find something to appreciate in everything. Their attempts at “mass communication” were often spectacular failures, but the striving was genuine and generous.

This is what made the band “post-cringe”. They simply exist outside of the rules that constrain other bands. Part of this has been what Cameron describes as the “quintessentially Manics mangling of intent and outcomes,” which has been part of their charm, and what has allowed people to give the band a leeway to fail. The scope of the band has always made them worth more than the music alone.

This scope is what allowed them to write and record two completely distinct albums simultaneously. Two albums that highlighted the duality of the band. The first – Rewind The Film – was a paean to Wales, a predominantly acoustic and downbeat reckoning with ageing, loss, nostalgia, and the landscape of the valleys that made them as people.

It was a mostly inward-facing album, yet also contained a glorious burst of exuberance called Show Me The Wonder – a song that could be seen as their operating system. Four working-class kids from Blackwood hungry for music, literature, art, film and politics – it is a song that captures the band’s core conviction that curiosity is not a phase you grow out of but a discipline you maintain. That the simple act of paying attention to the world was both a requirement and a reward.

The second album – Futurology – was outward-facing, a love letter to European culture and political identity. Drawing upon the motorik rhythms of Krautrock and with the influence of electronic post-punk, it is – alongside The Holy Bible – the band’s most musically interesting album. Its idea was to be a statement of Britain’s European connection at a time when the UK was moving towards the self-destructive detachment of the Brexit referendum.

Although the album is often let down by lyrics that are trying too hard to fit the album’s intent, one song that avoids such a problem is the instrumental Dreaming a City (Hugheskova). Although musically a homage to Simple Minds Theme for Great Cities (albeit with some additional prog elements), it is the title of the song that is most intriguing.

Hugheskova was founded in 1869 by John Hughes, a Welsh ironmonger from Merthyr Tydfil – just up the road from Blackwood. Hughes had secured a contract to establish coal and steel works in what is now Ukraine’s Donbas region. The settlement that grew around his iron factory was initially staffed by workers recruited from South Wales. The city was renamed Donetsk in 1961 and grew to become Ukraine’s fifth largest. It is currently occupied by Russia.

Whereas Rewind the Film had looked back at the local platform on which the band were built, Futurology looked forward and outward, towards Berlin, towards the European modernist tradition, toward the idea of the continent as a shared intellectual and political project. The two albums together could be seen as forecasting the rise of Plaid Cymru as now the largest party in Wales – a party staunchly committed to the Welsh nation, yet also keen for Wales to rejoin the European Union.

Upon its formation, the EU chose the shade Reflex Blue as its representative colour as it carried no single nation’s associations. It was the colour of the ocean and the sky, it felt collective and beyond political structures. To the naked eye Reflex Blue and International Klein Blue are incredibly similar. Developed in 1960, Yves Klein had believed his shade of the colour dissolved the boundaries between the physical world and the transcendent, it was the colour that humanity lived inside, connecting generations and cultures.

For a band to whom “everything” has been their animating force, International Klein Blue carried with it a sentiment that clearly required a song. In a latter period where the band struggled to maintain consistency, International Blue, from the album Resistance is Futile, was a triumph. An uplifting slice of power-pop that took a concept that could otherwise feel distant and abstract and gave it warmth and a racing pulse. At their best, this was the Manic Street Preachers singular gift – the ability to find what may be an obscure idea and make it feel like it belonged to everyone.

Wire developed a niche for writing songs about artists – from Interiors (Willem de Kooning), To Repel Ghosts (Jean-Michel Basquiat), Black Square (Kazimir Malevich), Between the Clock and the Bed (Edvard Munch) and The Secret He Had Missed (Augustus and Gwen John). It was a demonstration of the portal evolving with age, still fascinated, still searching for ideas that can be converted into their own art. Still seeing the band’s mission as conduits.

It is this conception of the band as conduits that drives Cameron’s 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure. The unconventional structure of the book – navigating the band song-by-song – provides an accumulation of intimate details, rather than just the headline-grabbing moments, to create a fuller portrait of both their work and who they are as people. Cameron understood that the band’s follies and failures are not embarrassments to be explained away but the very substance of what made them worth writing about.

This is ultimately what has been central to the band’s appeal – not simply the music, but an investment in a particular way of moving through the world. An insatiable curiosity, a conviction that culture has no hierarchy, and the audacity to think that four boys from a small town in South Wales could create something world-altering.

Yet it has also been the contradictions at the band’s core that made them genuinely compelling – socialists with a fiercely independent streak, antagonists who were honour-bound to the courtesy and decency of the Welsh valleys, intellectuals who believed in pop and the importance of speaking to everyone. And an intensely loyal group of friends who were able to use their collective abilities to create an improbable artistic force, yet through the disappearance of Edwards were unable to remain fully together.

All of this – the contradictions, the aspiration, the follies, the success, the devastation – coheres into a single moment on Still Snowing in Sapporo, the opening song from their fourteenth album. Documenting their first trip to Japan, the song is a neat encapsulation of the band: an awkward, cringey verse coupled with a chorus you can see from space. An acknowledgement of the ambition they could never quite meet, the enormous loss they have carried, and the implicit recognition of the magnitude of what they had actually achieved.

The song concludes with the same immense idea that drove them as teenagers – “the four of us against the world.”

First brought into operation in 1997 – and adopted European Union-wide in 2003 – the Dublin Regulation is a European law that determines which state within the EU (and other signatories) is responsible for assessing asylum seeker applications and how decisions are then accepted within the union. It enables Europe to work as a bloc on asylum, and if refugee status is rejected by one signatory country then no subsequent application can be made to another signatory country.

Upon withdrawing from the EU the United Kingdom also withdrew from the Dublin Regulation. Asylum seekers rejected on the continent can now load up into boats in France and try to make a claim across the English Channel. Which they have in great numbers. If Brexit was about “taking back control” – with the implication that this control was of borders – then it has done the very opposite.

After last week’s English council and Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the main beneficiary of this lack of control is one of the men most responsible for the UK leaving the EU, Nigel Farage. With his Reform Party dramatically increasing their number of local councillors – and winning full control of 14 councils – as well as rising to become the second largest party in Wales, and equal second in Scotland.

The barking politics of outrage was always going to need a new thrill once it had caught the Brexit Bus, so the febrile atmosphere in the UK that Reform has capitalised on is no surprise. But what if Farage was actively seeking to create the very thing he has wanted people to be outraged about?

Farage is not alone in employing such a strategy. Either by design, or unwittingly, almost every major modern political movement seems to be working against their stated intentions. If we stop, take a breath and think a little, it is apparent that the motivations of politics are now geared towards creating problems, not solutions.

We can see this clearly in the creation of new ideological lenses. A doctrine like “anti-racism” has required racism to exist in order to justify its bureaucratic reach. The best way to animate racism is to encourage people to think about themselves primarily as a skin colour. To espouse a view of History that sees humanity as a zero sum competition between ethnic or racial groups. It was always going to lead us to where we are today – with a far more open and overt racism than we’ve had in decades.

From the immense personal power consolidation that proclaims to be “making America great”, to progressive NIMBYism that pretends to be concerned about housing affordability, everywhere you look modern political movements are engaged in a game of subterfuge. Claiming to be something that on closer inspection they are not.

Of course, politics has always been tricky. Politicians have long understood that emotionalism can shift more votes than dry rationalism. Yet previously emotional manipulation was often still grounded in a genuine commitment to a stated outcome. The manipulation was a means, but the cause was still the end result. This has now dissolved.

Our ideal political environment should operate on the assumption that political movements are trying to achieve specific outcomes. Groups organise around an issue, seek to advance that issue through a political party, hope that this party can win elections by persuading the public that this issue (among many) has merit, and then convert these ideas into policy.

But what if the incentives of power are now completely divorced from this process? Due to the need to maintain narrative power, positive outcomes now offer no political reward. Currently, there is a deep psychological lust within the West to be upset – and this is creating a strange new political terrain where solutions are not just unnecessary, they have become a threat to obtaining political power.

The psychology of our broad political cultures illustrates how this is being incentivised.

Progressive politics has always been driven by a desire for a struggle for a cause. At its best it has advocated for significant improvements to our societies and the advancement of opportunity for a broader range of groups within these societies. Yet as these improvements have become normalised the desire for struggle has remained. The instinct within progressive politics is that there’s always a more radical position, and this position is morally superior by default. There’s no recognition of, or contentment with, improvement.

However, as progressive politics has shifted to become a middle and upper class concern, new problems have needed to be manufactured – different from the financial betterment of the working classes – to maintain the struggle. Progressive politics can no longer legitimately claim to be fighting for material improvements, so it has instead turned to post-material ones like identity. It’s a way for middle and upper class people to claim disadvantage, to invent new struggles, and to seek power through narratives of victimhood.

This has created new institutional incentives to sustain grievance rather than resolve it. Resolutions to social problems would dissolve the sense of moral outrage and bureaucratic oversight from which progressive politics now draws its power. The result is a politics that depends on generating new categories of harm, and new classes of experts to staff bureaucracies and administrative bodies that encroach further into social life. These new bureaucracies just happen to advantage those well-educated people with credentials and articulation, and these people shift the focus of the state away from those with genuine material need.

Likewise, conservative politics has certain innate approaches that have been amplified and directed towards problem creating. Conservative parties have a time-tested tactic of ramping up people’s fears in order to position themselves as people’s security. Crime and national security have been the traditional levers – reliable, visceral, easy to pull.

However, modern conservative politics has gone further, expanding the menu of fear to include cultural displacement, demographic change, and a deep suspicion of fellow citizens. The threats now are not the foreign army or the criminal, but the political rival, the expert, the curriculum, the neighbour, and the rule of law. What was once simply a tactic to win elections is now the product itself – to create a permanent political atmosphere of intense anxiety and grievance, not to be resolved but to be sustained.

Yet the bigger shift in our political landscape has not just been the capturing of institutions or the intensification of bullshit, but a politics that has actively sought to create material problems, and especially material problems for those who can least afford them. Which returns us to Farage.

There is no doubt that the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union wouldn’t have occurred without Farage’s agitation. He was the Brexiteer-in-chief, using his persistent advocacy to manufacture internal division within the Conservative Party, which led to David Cameron’s catastrophic miscalculation to try to quell this division via a referendum.

The results of this have now become stark. Brexit has inflicted severe and measurable damage on the UK economy. By 2025, GDP was 6–8% lower than it would otherwise have been, investment had collapsed by up to 18%, and roughly one million jobs had disappeared nationwide. The average citizen was on average £2,000 worse off, trade with the UK’s largest partner is now bogged down in bureaucracy and delays – the very thing Brexit claimed it was fighting. While farming communities lost EU subsidies with no adequate replacement, and the fishing industry – one of Brexit’s most potent symbols – has found itself locked out of the very EU markets it depended on to sell its catch.

The cruelest irony is where this damage landed. The working-class communities of northern England – post-industrial towns like Burnley, Scunthorpe, Grimsby, and Hartlepool – voted overwhelmingly for Leave. But these towns, already stripped of manufacturing, mining, and steel, lost EU structural funds that had been designed for local regeneration, and the collapse of medical professionals moving from Europe to the UK has placed considerable stress on the NHS and social care services within ageing communities.

While proponents of Brexit will claim that what they were advocating for a restoration of sovereignty and a return of cultural dignity, there is no dignity in material decline. The hardship and emotional stress that has emerged has weakened the personal sovereignty of individuals and their ability to navigate the world comfortably. Alongside this, instead of having a pool of labour from culturally similar countries in the EU to draw upon, post-Brexit, businesses in the UK have subsequently sought labour from countries with less cultural affinity. Leading to an intensification of cultural anxiety and far greater social division in the country.

Yet it has been the withdrawal from the Dublin Regulation that has been Farage’s greatest plot. It has created the visual threat that Reform has used to escalate this cultural anxiety. It has also led to an administrative burden that has drained the British state. In 2018, prior to leaving the Dublin Regulation, boats carried just 300 asylum seekers across the English Channel. This exploded to 46,000 people in 2022 after officially leaving the EU and the Regulation, and over 200,000 in total since 2018. As a result, maritime enforcement costs have also increased, including £30 million spent on Royal Navy Channel patrols in 2022–23. Overall asylum-system spending has risen from roughly £600 million annually before the small-boat crossings surged to over £4 billion a year by 2024.

This created a sense of national crisis that Farage has been able to successfully exploit by ramping up people’s fears. Even though, through his advocacy to leave the EU, he is the man disproportionately responsible for creating the situation.

Brexit had produced the opposite of what it claimed it would. But this has been the point. Farage has been the architect of the very sense of national upheaval he is now building his political – and financial – power upon. He has played the game of subterfuge perfectly, and after last week’s elections he has further enhanced this power beyond just influencing events, he has made great strides towards capturing the state.

To confront and remedy this deceptive form of politics a new form of political and media literacy is required – one with a clear focus on outcomes rather than rhetoric, and one that stops taking movements at face value and starts asking who benefits from problems remaining unsolved, and who is actively invested in creating them. This is not an easy shift. In particular it requires the media to overcome their own gullibility and political cheerleading to explain political incentives, highlight real world impacts, and expose charlatans.

And it requires the rest of us to stop seeing snakes as saviours. To be clear-eyed about the intent of modern political movements, but without feeding the very cynicism on which they thrive. Because in a world of entrenched cynicism, it currently looks like the most nakedly cynical bastards are winning.

Human beings are inquisitive creatures by nature. This curiosity has cultivated an adventurous spirit, a desire to venture beyond our immediate surroundings, to observe what others are doing, and to absorb what might prove useful. This is the process of discovery and exchange – how ideas are born, fused together, and refined. It is through this endless cycle of encounter and adaptation that we have both created culture and expanded its possibilities.

The moment two groups of people have made contact throughout history, exchange begins, through language, food, religion, music, technology. This is not a modern phenomenon or a feature of our current instantaneous global reach; it is the history of humanity. At our core, we are relentless borrowers and enhancers of each other’s good ideas, and what we now take for granted as “traditional” is often the product of this process. Italian and Indian cuisine without tomatoes, or Thai food without chillies, would be almost unrecognisable, yet neither tomatoes nor chillies are native to those regions, having instead been woven into their cultures through this process of hybridisation.

Nothing is immune from this process. The language I am typing in now is classified as Germanic, but the majority of its vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. After absorbing French in the early centuries of the second millennium, English then set itself off around the world incorporating whatever it found useful. The great utility of the language – and the boundless pages of its thesaurus – is due its inherent disinterest in purity.

This cultural exchange does not dilute cultures, it is the mechanism by which cultures enhance themselves. Cultures that are frozen and suspicious of change tend to stagnate or fade. Living cultures, however, borrow, absorb and adapt from their neighbours, and allow their neighbours to do likewise. With each emerging richer for the transition. We may have created national borders for the sake of administrative efficiency, but it is the traffic across borders that is the real story of humanity.

Yet this natural and timeworn human process remains politically contentious. There is a great paradox at the heart of humanity: the same beings who are drawn instinctively towards discovery and exchange are equally capable of turning inward, retreating into the insular comfort of an in-group. The idea of cultural purity, of ancient tradition and custom, is emotionally powerful, offering people a sense of grounding and coherence – of an unbroken lineage passed down through generations.

This perspective has always been politically seductive, promising a world made simple, where there is one people, one story, and one uncontested sense of home. Its romance flourishes through nostalgia, imagining nations within a golden age before the contamination of outside influence. This is a past invariably more invented than remembered, yet it is a compelling political tool, and capable of great brutality when aroused to its extremes.

Yet suspicion of cultural exchange is not confined to jackboot nationalism. The romance of cultural purity has become a similarly powerful progressive political idea. It has been used to exceptionalise certain favoured groups, to place them outside of the common human story, and to declare that any act of cultural curiosity extended towards them is not an attempt at understanding and connection, but instead an act of “cultural appropriation”.

The accusation of cultural appropriation draws its force from postcolonial theory – the argument that cultural exchange has rarely been a transaction between equals. When a dominant culture borrows from a less powerful one, it does so on its own terms; extracting a concept or aesthetic while discarding the people, profiting from the utility of the idea while marginalising the source community. Culture, in this view, is not a commons to be freely shared but a form of property that should be guarded from theft.

Those who invoke the idea of cultural appropriation rely on two assumptions: that cultures are distinct and bounded, and that cultural elements belong exclusively to the group that originated them and cannot be hybridised. These are the exact same assumptions as ethnic nationalists, only filtered through the oppressor/oppressed binary to create a sense of sympathy for a less powerful group. This lens offers something seductive: the intoxicating thrill of pointing a finger, and a flattering self-image as the guardian of vulnerable cultures.

It was within this modern political environment of heightened cultural anxiety that Swedish songwriter Sarah Assbring – aka El Perro del Mar – boldly created her album KoKoro. The album’s premise was to continue her intimate and melancholic pop – inspired by lo-fi indie-pop, 60s girl groups, and soul – but to enhance it by constructing an album predominantly using non-Western instruments.

The intent was to create a borderless album, one that belonged to everywhere simultaneously. If pop music is the universal connector of humanity, then, Assbring believed, the creation of it should draw upon humanity’s vast array of musical styles and tools.

Of course, branching out from the traditional instruments used in Western pop is not new. George Harrison introduced the sitar into the Beatles’ music in the 1960s on Norwegian Wood. Not to be outdone, the Rolling Stones used the instrument to great effect on Paint It Black. This helped inspire the development of the electric sitar, a hybrid instrument that could be played more like a guitar. B.J Thomas, Steely Dan, and Led Zeppelin all embraced the instrument as providing a sound and feeling that the guitar couldn’t.

In the 1980s, Peter Gabriel sought to fuse what had become known as “world music” to the then-latest advances in electronic instruments to create a highly distinct pop sound. Then expanding this out of pop into Passion, his soundtrack to the film The Last Temptation of Christ. While Canada’s favourite punchline, The Tea Party, attempted to update Led Zeppelin for the 1990s with an array of different Middle Eastern and Indian instruments to augment their overwrought rock.

Yet what marks KoKoro as distinct is that it was made during an emerging period of intense cultural insularity, with its suspicion towards any kind of cross-cultural artistic expression. This suspicion masked itself through the mantra of “diversity” but in practice has advocated for the very opposite – an ethnic and cultural segregation that worked against humanity’s natural curiosity and desire for exchange. Within this climate, KoKoro was an act of courage; a refusal to let the demand for conformity restrain her creative imagination.

The starting point for Assbring was a visit with her son to a music museum that allows visitors to play instruments from around the world. This sowed the seeds for her to immerse herself in music from East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, the Middle East and East Africa. She then tracked down instruments that provided the sounds she liked – the Chinese guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi flute, Arabic strings, the hammered dulcimer, and Indian tablas and Ethiopian kebero for rhythm.

Her aim was straightforward: to find a new way to write pop music, one with influences that felt genuinely fresh rather than familiar. Obviously, the structure of her songs, and her style of singing, is in the Western pop tradition, but the aim was to augment this with sounds that could ignite new feelings, and a broader sense of musical purpose.

This is how culture evolves. The artist who encounters an unfamiliar instrument is not simply adding colour to their palette, they are restructuring how they hear, how they feel, and ultimately how they think. The guzheng demands a different approach to melody than the guitar. While the shakuhachi’s historical relationship with Zen Buddhism carries with it a unique sense of calm and space. To utilise these instruments is to allow another culture’s way of feeling the world to pass through you.

Here Assbring is no different to the ancient traveller or trader before her. She was simply drawn to new ways to construct her songs out of the usefulness of discovering additional elements. It is both curiosity and necessity that are the parents of invention. At the time, the tools she already possessed had reached their limit, and so, like any practical explorer, she went looking for better ones.

This translated into the themes for the album’s song, with Assbring wanting to address the condition of the modern human being; the state of the world, its pressures and moral direction. The concept was to create an album with a universal voice, and this required building it from sounds that belonged to no single place.

Lyrically Breadandbutter is her most direct statement of universal solidarity, a push back against the tribalism and division that Assbring saw hardening around her. The song is an insistence on our shared humanity and the blunt realities of our common origins. While Clean Your Window is a confrontation with the insularity, narcissism and conformity of the modern social and political environment.

Our modern retreat into insularity has been a search for comfort, yet the outgrowth of this has been to actually make us less happy. Ging Ging interrogates this directly – its lyric “happiness, whatever it means, it’s not enough” captures the restlessness of a society that has material comfort but remains profoundly dissatisfied. Politics, and its social expressions, have become increasingly fixated on groups and grievances, stoking vulnerability and discontent among subcultural identities and emotionally insecure majorities alike. The result is a complaint-driven worldview that feeds anxiety rather than resolving it.

It is curiosity that offers us the path out of this mire. Curiosity builds our resilience. It opens us up to the world and helps us navigate it with confidence. To understand the world is not solely to locate opportunity within it, but it is also necessary to overcome the darker impulses within humanity that seek to divide and segregate.

What KoKoro exemplifies is a kind of apprenticeship to the world: a willingness to learn from the unfamiliar, and to allow that knowledge to build upon and ultimately transform one's work into something that could not have existed otherwise. Assbring did not raid these traditions for exotic decoration – she was doing what humans have always done, reaching across boundaries in a spirit of curiosity and exchange. This is the mechanism by which music, perhaps more than any other art form, has always evolved.

Each of our cultural traditions is actually a layering of influences accumulated over centuries. Cultures are processes, not possessions, they are not bounded and static, but ever-evolving. No culture's identity is diminished by this acknowledgement. It is simply an honest account of how human creativity has always moved – through contact, collaboration, and exchange.

I propose a moratorium on references to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History until people have read the book and understood its content. Louise Perry wrote last week that Fukuyama’s thesis claims that we have reached an era where “conflict is impossible”. While former BBC Correspondent, Nick Bryant, has recently launched a Substack called History Never Ended. Barely a week goes by without someone using the book as a lazy analytical trope to contrast its ideas with the turbulent reality of our current period – “Fukuyama said history had ended, but look at everyone getting roused up!”

Fukuyama’s initial essay for The National Interest had contained a much overlooked question mark, while the subsequent expansion of his thesis was titled The End of History and the Last Man, with this additional analysis proving critical to understanding the argument in full.

His thesis began by arguing that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not merely mean a practical victory for the West of the Cold War, but something more philosophically ambitious – that liberal democracy offers the best possible framework for human flourishing. Both of the 20th Century’s ideological challenges to liberal democracy had failed to create a better or coherent alternative, one that could understand humanity’s natural pluralism and produce conditions that advanced the human condition. Fascism’s savage lusts and wanton violence could never provide stability – let alone moral dignity – while the totalitarian restrictions and economic illiteracy of communism failed to grasp humanity’s innate individual agency and desire to associate freely.

Drawing heavily on the work of Georg Hegel – albeit filtered through Hegel’s philosophical interpreter Alexandre Kojève – Fukuyama argued that History should be understood not as simply a sequence of events, but instead as a struggle between competing ideas about how societies should be organised. His thesis wasn’t that liberal democracy was perfect, but instead that there was no serious rival to it that could adequately produce more positive social outcomes.

Fukuyama did not argue that there would not continue to be challenges to liberal democracy. He highlights that liberalism’s universalism is difficult for some to accept. Ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism and socialism (amongst others) would create permanent agitations, but these were more reactionary emotions rather than serious structural alternatives. Fukuyama explained that the striving towards liberal democracy by states not possessing it would be messy, potentially incomplete, and often violent. Events would still happen, many of which would be highly consequential.

Yet it was the addition of the concept of “The Last Man” where Fukuyama grappled with what conditions could be like if liberal democracy had no serious competitor. Fukuyama borrowed the concept from Nietzsche as the archetype of a comfortable, self-satisfied modernity. Someone whose horizons have shrunk to simple personal satisfaction – what restaurants to eat at, what film to stream, or what tropical resort to holiday at.

Fukuyama pondered whether such a life was enough to satisfy human beings’ thymos – the part of the soul that desires not merely comfort but recognition, esteem, and the sense of having struggled for something. The concern was not that liberal democracy would be defeated by a credible rival alternative, but instead that it would be hollowed out from within, by producing a populace that was too uninterested, too risk-averse, and too cowardly to defend itself from the agitations of reactionary emotions.

Fukuyama viewed The Last Man with dread. He feared that without a serious ideological challenge, liberal democracy’s comfort and prosperity removes from our existence the great contests, sacrifices, and commitments that historically gave human life its purpose. Without the paths for our thymos to express itself, we would instead resort to discord to try and create a sense of struggle. Not because people are poor or oppressed, but because they are restless.

Which is where we find ourselves today. Far from being wrong about our current political agitations, Fukuyama predicted them. His analysis explicitly identifies the elements of humanity that lead us to struggle, and to struggle against peace and prosperity if that is all we are offered. Which makes the way his thesis is used in most contemporary commentary ironic at best, or deceitful at worst (or, more likely, just plain lazy).

In his 2018 book Identity, Fukuyama expands on how these agitations are now materialising in our current era. The book is framed by three elements of the human soul – alongside thymos’s desire for esteem, there is isothymia: the desire to be recognised as equal, which is central to democracy, and megalothymia: the need to be seen as superior – which threatens it.

What Identity argues is that the frictionless comfort of liberal democracy has not extinguished our megalothymia but has instead inflamed it. Deprived of the grand ideological contests that once gave struggle its meaning, the thymotic impulse has curdled into something smaller and angrier. It has powered the rise of authoritarian nationalism – where strongmen offer not policy but status through the intoxicating sense of belonging to a people whose superiority has been unjustly denied and must now be reclaimed.

It has also led to the fragmentation of identities into competing grievance groups, each asserting its own hierarchy of injury. This has created the rise of identity exceptionalism, where the “authentic inner self” has been elevated above all external obligations. Generating a demand for public validation, where institutions, norms, and fellow citizens bend themselves around the recognition of identities that are expressed as being beyond question or negotiation.

These expressions of megalothymia are often framed as opposites in public debates, but are instead symptoms of the same underlying disorder. The lack of grand ideological struggle has instead turned liberal democratic societies into internal battles for status and power. The Last Man, it turns out, doesn’t last for long.

However, while these reactionary agitations persist – and some have gained enormous power capturing governments and institutions – they are built on hollow foundations rather than establishing serious structural alternatives. The megalothymia that drives them is ultimately self-defeating, prone to the corruption, incoherence, and overreach that comes from movements built on resentment rather than any coherent vision of how complex societies should actually be governed.

As we have seen with the landslide defeat of Fidesz at the recent Hungarian election, there is a weakness to these attempts to create ideological competitors to liberal democracy. The system Viktor Orbán built promised greater pride and prosperity through politically captured institutions, but when material improvements failed to appear the broader attempt to morally restructure the society had nothing left to rest upon. It is likely that MAGA will suffer the same fate.

Governance that relies on the permanent identification of enemies is constitutionally incapable of the patient, unglamorous, and often anonymous work that functional societies actually depend upon. Liberal democracy’s unsatisfying procedures are not its weakness but its load-bearing walls.

Despite the inflamed megalothymia of our era, people still do understand that legal and institutional frameworks that provide neutral rules which apply to all citizens are preferable to those that are driven by identity, belief, or nefarious conmen. This becomes apparent when ideological challengers prove incapable of improving the practical aspects of daily life.

When given the opportunity to struggle for liberal democracy humans can draw upon extraordinary reserves of courage and effort, as we have seen in Ukraine. The complacency of liberal democracies is not replicated by those who have a clear understanding that the alternatives cannot provide anything remotely like its fruits.

Ukraine fights with valour because Russia has made the choice concrete: liberal democracy or corrupt brutality. The stakes may be high for Ukraine, but to consolidated liberal democracies, Russia is merely an irritant, not an ideological competitor – despite attempts to frame it as such by elements in the West hostile to liberalism.

While China possesses the scale and ambition to fill that role, it has so far failed to export a coherent ideological alternative. Its model of authoritarian capitalism is admired by opportunists and strongmen, but it offers no universal claim on human dignity or organising principle that could genuinely rival liberalism’s appeal. Beijing sells efficiency and order, but the interests of the party take precedence over any conception of the good life. Until a credible ideological competitor emerges, liberal democracies will continue to lack the external pressure that forces citizens to reckon with what they actually have.

This is the paradox that Fukuyama identified. When the struggle is existential like in Ukraine our thymos can activate with determination and conviction. Yet when liberal democracy is consolidated, the patient and unglamorous work of proceduralism doesn’t provide the soulcraft that humans crave. Liberalism’s defining commitments to tolerance and pluralism means it cannot offer the romantic moral community or civilisational purpose that authoritarian nationalism peddles, or the thrill of self-righteous grievance that postmodern progressive politics currently presents.

Here lies our eternal vulnerability as a complex emotional species.

It is the nature of public writing for commentators to want a neat binary to frame their analysis, but The End of History simply does not provide that. The misreading of Fukuyama is convenient to create a whipping boy to illustrate the world’s current ills. But his book is not triumphalist as it is often caricatured, and it doesn’t offer any satisfyingly definitive answers. It is a profoundly inquisitive work, and one that generates far more dilemmas to the human condition than solutions.

The Liberal Party in Australia are starting to panic. The success of One Nation at the South Australian state election – securing 22.9% of the vote, mostly at the expense of the Liberals – has been understood as an existential threat to the party. Yet the response has been predictable – to take One Nation’s hostility towards immigration and its culture anxiety and try to dress it up as semi-serious policy.

This has led to the party leader, Angus Taylor, to propose an “Australian Values Migration Plan”, which would prioritise shared values within the country’s immigration programme, not just skills or economic need. This would include stronger screening of migrants for alignment with Australian values, and tougher consequences (including removal) for those who don’t adhere to those values.

Taylor identified Australian values as “freedom, respect, fairness, and equality of opportunity,” including commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties. He claimed that migrants from liberal democracies are “more likely to align with Australian values.” This idea argues that political background and institutional familiarity as indicators of compatibility with Australia’s civic framework.

Yet there is a recognisable flaw in this conception. People born in China who migrate to Australia are not coming from a liberal democracy, but they are significantly under-represented in crime statistics relative to their share of the population. While second generation Chinese-Australians are the most upwardly mobile and high-achieving group in the country. How people adjust to liberal democratic societies depends on a range of other factors, it’s not solely about their origin.

Alongside this, Taylor is not really outlining what “Australian values” are if these values are common to other liberal democracies. There’s nothing uniquely Australian in what he stipulated. This may be because it would be incredibly difficult to embody the national traits of a country you’ve never lived in before. But it’s also because the Liberal Party hasn’t really thought through this policy. If it did it would have a little more substance and practical measures. It’s a policy for show, not implementation.

So while I am deeply suspicious of the Liberal Party’s motives – being driven by political panic and cheap politicking, rather than genuine concern for Australia’s social cohesion – I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that there should be a common set of civic understandings and bonds that provide a social glue within a highly multicultural society. Also, to protect Australia’s immigration programme a shared sense of belonging is incredibly important.

Of course, social cohesion is not simply about migrants integrating into a new country, it is a two-way street where there needs to be a friendly and welcoming culture from the native population, with a strong spirit of neighbourliness and empathy for those adjusting to a new environment. There is also a recognition that there are plenty of people who are born in Australia (or New Zealand, as was Australia’s most prominent Neo-Nazi) who don’t conform to these civic values that Taylor identified.

Yet to focus on the issues Taylor has raised, how do you build a civic understanding and commitments within new migrants? Most children of migrants will pick up values and cultural traits at school as part of the everyday interaction with other kids, teachers and the curriculum. While the workplace can also offer a practical environment that can also impart values and cultural traits. Yet work is often fragmented now, with less face-to-face contact. Particularly for the professional classes.

Like most Western countries, over the past decades Australians have drifted away from the community organisations that previously formed the social backbone of the society. This has weakened the civic space that new migrants can connect themselves into (although Indian migration has revitalised Australia’s local cricket clubs).

So there may be the need for a more formal structure to impart this social knowledge.

Since 2022, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and Sweden, and I’ve become aware of Sweden’s civic orientation classes (Samhällsorientering). Unfortunately, the visa I obtain is a temporary one, so it doesn’t afford me these classes, but I’m actually desperate to get in. Nothing could tickle my fancy more, so I’ve been reading about the programme instead. And I believe there could be a good model for Australia to take inspiration from.

I don’t think I am unique in being someone who would love such classes. There’s a progressive impulse to see such measures as suspicious – as some kind of brainwashing exercise to strip out people’s culture and make them into good little white people. But this is not the case. Most people want to know more about the country they’ve moved to. It is both rational and exciting for them to do so.

Samhällsorientering provides around 100 hours worth of classes for people in their first years of obtaining permanent residency. That is, importantly, before people become citizens.

What Samhällsorientering Teaches:

How the State Works

• Structure of government (parliament, government agencies, municipalities).

• How laws are made and enforced.

Democracy and Values

• Core principles like democracy, equality, and individual rights.

• Gender equality and anti-discrimination norms.

• Freedom of expression, religion, and association.

This part is quite explicit – Sweden isn’t neutral about values here; it’s trying to socialise newcomers into a liberal democratic framework.

Everyday Life in Sweden (Practical and Social Understanding)

• Accessing key services: how to use healthcare, education, childcare, and navigate housing.

• Labour market: the process of how jobs are applied for and obtained.

• Interacting with authorities: dealing with government agencies, understanding processes, and institutional trust.

• Family and legal context: basics of family law, parenting expectations, and children’s rights.

There’s a strong emphasis on the idea that rights and responsibilities go together.

Cultural Norms and Social Expectations

• Communication style: generally direct but non-confrontational, with an emphasis on personal space and respect.

• Workplace culture: informality, low hierarchy, collaboration, and punctuality.

• Gender equality: strong expectations around equal roles in work and parenting.

• Individual autonomy: independence in decision-making.

The overall aim is to reduce social friction by making implicit norms explicit. To help participants understand not just what to do, but why Swedish society functions the way it does.

For this, all these aspects of life in Sweden are also given some historical background. Focusing on the key developments that explain modern Sweden:

• The evolution of democracy and the welfare state.

• Industrialisation and social reform movements.

• Sweden’s shift toward gender equality and secularism.

• The development of modern institutions and public services.

How Samhällsorientering Is Delivered

• Usually in group sessions with discussion-based teaching – albeit guided by fixed content.

• Led by trained “civic communicators,” often with migrant backgrounds themselves.

• Encouraging questions and comparison with participants’ home countries.

The classes are designed to be delivered in the participant’s strongest language to ensure that the information is best comprehended. With the caveat that there are actually “civic communicators” who can speak this language.

None of this is meant to negate people’s culture – unless that culture conflicts severely with Swedish values (like female genital mutilation). Instead these classes are designed to give people the practical knowledge they need to thrive in Swedish society, including an awareness of local norms. Adjusting yourself to different environments is not the same as having your own culture stripped from you. Knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in different countries is actually a very handy life skill.

For Australia, there is an extra and incredibly important element to why civic orientation classes should be considered – our compulsory voting. The ethos behind compulsory voting is that each citizen should have a broad awareness of the country’s affairs, and to see themselves as responsible participants in these affairs.

Australia’s compulsory voting means that the onus is on the government – via the independent Australian Electoral Commission (and state commissions) – to make it as easy as possible to vote. But making it logistically easy to vote is only one element of this. Australia also has a complicated voting system, using preferential voting (ranked choice), and being one of only four countries to do so at a national level (Ireland, Malta and Papua New Guinea being the others). Australia’s Senate voting ballot is additionally complex, giving you two choices on how to cast a ballot (rank six parties, or rank every individual candidate – the latter clearly being the most fun).

Therefore making it easy to vote also requires giving the public the requisite knowledge to fill in a ballot correctly. Here there is a recognisable problem. The Australian Electoral Commission has just published a review of the large number of informal votes at the 2025 federal election – that is, people who didn’t fill out a ballot in a way that can be counted. Of the ten electorates with the highest number of informal votes eight have large percentages of people from migrant backgrounds.

It is perfectly legal to spoil your ballot to register discontent, but the report concluded that 73% of people attempted to vote correctly, but failed to place a number next to each candidate. Indicating a low knowledge of the correct procedure.

Most people will come to Australia from countries that do not have compulsory voting and therefore may have never voted before. Or may have come from countries without elections at all. People who have voted in their countries of origin before would probably just have had to tick a single box, rather than rank every candidate. Therefore, the government has a responsibility to provide people with the knowledge of how the system works so they can fulfil the civic duty that compulsory voting expects.

This, as well as broader civic knowledge, is incredibly important for migrants to be able to fully participate in Australian society. But civic orientation programmes also send an important signal to the native population that the country has an “operating system” which citizens plug themselves into. It can help cool the passions of those who are struggling with cultural anxiety.

I suspect the Australian government understands this all in theory, but the problem is political, rather than one of policy. Australian politicians lack the communication skills to actually explain complex ideas with clarity, and they are – or at least the Labor Party are – petrified of advancing policies that they believe could be misconstrued. Even with their current large majority and the fragmenting of Australian politics that will play to their advantage.

While the Liberal Party are especially terrible at selling such propositions because like all conservative parties they have an obsession with “toughness”, believing it to be a signal of “strong leadership” and “moral clarity”. When instead it just makes them look like pricks. Which is why they’ve just gone and made any discussion around civic values toxic to a large percentage of the population.

The key political lesson of our era is that everything is Nixon-in-China if you want to get something important done – that is, all policy solutions come from persuading your own “base” of the merits of a proposal that they would be instinctively opposed to. Which places the idea of building stronger civic commitments and bonds in the hands of the Labor Party – if they can withstand the inevitable bad faith hysterics from the Greens.

Liberalism is often mischaracterised as a philosophy of pure individual autonomy, but its survival depends on something more demanding: a citizenry that has actually internalised cooperative habits. A free society is not self-sustaining, it requires people who show up, who trust institutions, who feel a strong stake in the national project.

This is the paradox at the heart of much contemporary progressive politics. It speaks the language of community, solidarity, and mutual care, yet is instinctively suspicious of the very mechanisms – like civic orientation programmes, national service, shared public rituals – that might actually cultivate these behaviours. This leaves a political space open for the Liberal Party who think they can build community spirit with fists instead of flowers.

It’s a battle of two idiocies.

Australia has a genuine and pressing case for civic orientation: a highly multicultural society, a compulsory voting system that demands a high degree of literacy, and a weakened community infrastructure that once did the work of bond creating informally.

The policy architecture should not be complicated, as Australia has the ability to understand and adapt civic orientation models like Sweden’s. What is missing is a political party willing to make the argument outside of cheap political calculations. To promote the idea of strong civic bonds with sophistication, kindness and care. As the current government this opportunity belongs to Labor, although it seems unlikely they’ll have the courage to take it.

There are very few things in this world that excite me more than Canadian elections. The Sisyphean burden I carry through this life is to convince people that Canada is actually fascinating. No-one believes me, of course, because Canadians are very good at projecting an image to the world of being mundane and inconsequential. The New Republic once ran a campaign to find the most boring newspaper headline and the winner was “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative”.

However, this perspective is complete bullshit. Canada is a deeply complex and thoroughly weird society, and its domestic politics in particular is so relentlessly intriguing that were I confined to work on just one single issue for the rest of my life I would choose it. One could easily spend a decade or more thinking about the 1993 election alone.

Central to Canadian politics is the country’s permanent revolt against Duverger’s Law – that single member districts using a first-past-the-post voting system will naturally produce a two party system. Unlike their southern neighbours who live in total mental enslavement to Duverger, Canadians are a nation of cats with strong localised allegiances – and some often wacky ideas – which have historically led to a vast array of different political parties.

This has also created an environment where provincial politics bears no resemblance to federal politics, with unique parties that only run provincially, and parties that may have the same – or similar – names having no affiliation or organisational structure between them, either with a federal party or across provinces. The New Democratic Party (NDP) is the only party where their structure is like parties in Australia – with party branches federated under a national party organisation. Although the Alberta and Saskatchewan branches often do whatever they can to distance themselves from the federal leadership.

What makes Canadian politics even more fascinating is that – despite their reputation for being nice – the Canadian voter is one of the most ruthless bastards on the planet. Canada’s national sport is not ice hockey, it is murdering political parties. To Canadians, political parties serve a timebound purpose. When this time is up they are discarded like disposable nappies. Come October, this bloodlust looks set to reveal itself again in Quebec’s election, where after winning a massive majority of 90 seats out of 125 in the legislature in 2022, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is currently projected to win precisely zero.1

The only party that has been able to survive this murderous streak has been the federal Liberal Party – being the sole political party that has maintained a continuous parliamentary presence since confederation in 1867. This is because the only bastards on the planet more ruthless than the Canadian voter is the Liberal Party. They are a party whose overwhelming priority is to win and who have developed into a Terminator-like machine that will mould itself to the times to make sure they win.

Understanding the Liberal Party’s current position requires recognising how the party adapts and learns from its mistakes. In the mid-2000s, emboldened by a decade of having no effective opposition, the party tried something radical. It reached down to Harvard University to ask Michael Ignatieff to run for political office – believing that someone with his intellectual weight could make a great prime minister. That Ignatieff hadn’t lived in Canada for 30 years wasn’t considered a significant problem.2

The merger of the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties in 2003 created a viable adversary to the Liberal Party, and under Stephen Harper the new Conservative Party of Canada managed to eke out a pair of short lived minority governments in 2006 and 2008. By this time Ignatieff had ascended to the leadership of the Liberal Party, yet what followed was an unmitigated disaster.

The rough and tumble of politics is a difficult game for intellectuals. Analytical brilliance can struggle against the speed, combativeness and essential emotional intelligence of retail politics. Igantieff was simply no match for Harper’s discipline and drive, and the warm public connection of the NDP’s Jack Layton. He led the party to its worst ever election result in 2011, the only time in Canadian history that the Liberal Party had not been either in government or the official opposition. Ignatieff’s subsequent book “Fire and Ashes” is a fascinating self-portrait of this political hubris.

The lesson the Liberal Party learned from this episode was stark. Not only that politics was no place for professors, but that the smartphone had completely reshaped the landscape of political communication – making it highly visual and performative. This required a striking transition of party leadership, from the Philosopher King to the Instagram King. In 2015, it catapulted them from third-party status to a majority government.

Despite steadily decreasing in popularity, Justin Trudeau managed to hold onto the prime ministership for a decade, albeit with subsequent minority governments. This was mostly due to the structural advantages the Liberal Party has, with the Conservative Party remaining a regional party masquerading as national party, and the NDP having an odd status in regularly being able to win provincial elections, but no-one trusts them to govern federally.

Yet by mid-late 2024, Trudeau had run out of likes, and the party were facing the murderous wrath of the Canadian voter – with polling suggesting that it was heading for a wipeout greater than 2011, potentially reducing it to fourth party status.

Despite Canadian voters’ fondness for knives, political parties in Canada are not as enthusiastic about stabbing prime ministers as their cousins in Australia. However, conditions had changed so dramatically that extraordinary measures were called for. Although rather than the shirts off partyroom brawls of Canberra, Trudeau was politely pushed into resigning.

The necessity of this change was not solely due to Trudeau’s decreasing follower count, but by the return to Donald Trump the White House – this time more emboldened and aggressive. The party needed to find someone who could be far more adept at handling the hostility of its neighbour, and also chart a new national course under dramatically altered international conditions.

In Mark Carney they found a new leader with an intimate understanding of the world’s economy from his previous positions as governors of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, and, what revealed itself later as a broader theory about geopolitics and how middle powers like Canada can navigate a more turbulent world.

While Trump has posed a significant threat to Canada, he was a lifeline to the Liberal Party. It would be fair to say alongside seeing Trump as creating a national crisis – ever the opportunists – the Liberal Party have also seen his bloviating and hostility as a golden path to consolidating their own power.

Although the Conservative Party has done well to convince much of populous Ontario that its interests are tied to the interests of the resource-extracting provinces to its west, the party now faces another major structural hurdle in that a significant portion of its supporters are more emotionally bound to Donald Trump than they are to Canada. Current Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, has struggled to find the tone and political positions to overcome this reality.

This has allowed the Liberal Party to own patriotism at a time when patriotism has become a national imperative. It worked to transform the party from certain defeat into another government. But the party hasn’t stopped there, this call to patriotism has also allowed the party to exert a new level of dominance of Canada’s political system through cunning and guile.

As long as the Bloc Québécois continues to win a large chunk of seats in the country’s second largest province, it is incredibly difficult to form a majority in the House of Commons. There have only been three majority governments this century (from nine elections). Despite the Liberal Party successfully framing the 2025 election as a national emergency that required a strong government, it still fell three seats short of a majority.

But in a Westminster parliamentary system seats belong to individuals, not parties, and this has presented the Liberals with an opportunity. Rather than seek a majority through calling an early election, the party has simply decided to poach MPs from other parties. Since November, five MPs have crossed the floor to become Liberal Party members – four from the Conservative Party and one from the NDP. Each of these defections have framed their actions as being part of a “mission” to help Canada during a period of national uncertainty. It is expected that more will follow.

However, until by-elections held on Monday the Liberal Party didn’t quite have its majority because three seats had become vacant since the election – and it also loses a seat to create a Speaker. Two Liberal MPs had resigned – Bill Blair to become High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Chrystia Freeland to become Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine and the Warden of the Rhodes Trust (the dispenser of Rhodes Scholarships).

These two seats – Scarborough Southwest and University-Rosedale, both in Ontario – are among the safest Liberal seats in the country, and so Monday’s by-elections were easy wins. This gave the Liberals their majority, but in order to exert further psychological dominance they were hoping for a sweep of all three.

The third seat – Terrebonne in Quebec – was more complex. This seat required a by-election because of an odd administrative error that had led to the annulment of the result from 2025 by the Supreme Court.

Initially at the 2025 election the seat was declared to be won by the Liberal candidate by a single vote from the Bloc Québécois candidate. Yet it was subsequently discovered that Elections Canada had accidentally printed the wrong postcode on the return envelope of a postal vote, and a woman who attempted to vote for the Bloc Québécois had her vote returned to her – and returned too late to resubmit. The Supreme Court therefore had no option but to annul the result.

Given that Terrebonne has been held by the Bloc Québécois since the party’s formation in 1993, a win for the Liberals would be seen as a strong endorsement of the government, and also important to try and shift some people away from separatist sentiment with October’s Quebec election on the horizon and the Parti Québécois currently leading in the polls. The Liberal candidate won by 714 votes.

In his book Big Tent Politics: The Liberal Party’s Long Mastery of Canada’s Public Life the political scientist Kenneth Carty argues that the party’s ideological flexibility, ability to adapt to change, and its “brokerage” style of politics has been the key to its success. The party has positioned itself as a mediator between groups, initially between Anglophones and Francophones, Protestants and Catholics, and working class and economic elites, and then subsequently as the party that could facilitate the integration of Canada’s multicultural communities.

The party may have failed with its brokerage in Alberta and Saskatchewan since the 1950s – where it is factio non grata – but with its bulwarks in Toronto and Montreal it is able to offset these losses. When the Canadian public does push the party into opposition it is doing so in order to ask the party to renew itself, and the party is adept and learning these lessons and adjusting itself accordingly.

There are few parties in the world that have so successfully made their own interests and the national interests to be perceived as one and the same. This makes the Liberal Party an object of intense hatred for those who have been left outside their big tent, but equally in times of national crisis the party are easily able to position themselves as the natural custodians of national unity and sovereignty. They have been able to project themselves a safe pair of hands, while simultaneously having the ruthless cunning to out-manoeuvre and outlast any other party that seeks to challenge them.

In 1588, with the Spanish Armada off the coast of England threatening to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore the country to Catholic rule, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was born. He later claimed that “fear and I were born as twins”, and the emotion would become the dominant theme of his work. This work would set a baseline problem for the fields of political science and international relations, defining the worst-case logic for how human beings organise themselves and interact with one another.

What guided Hobbes was a belief that human life is shaped by insecurity, suspicion, and the constant anticipation of violence – a condition he describes as a “war of all against all.” His vision was bleak, yet from it he was able to construct a philosophy that he believed could encourage coexistence. When the threat of war against all went apocalyptic with the invention of nuclear weapons, military strategists found in Hobbes a ready-made blueprint – codifying the idea that peace depends not on trust, but on the fear of mutual annihilation.

By the 1980s, as Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union became more pronounced, the fear of nuclear war radiated throughout the culture. Alongside the daily news, there were the eerie public safety films, anti-nuclear protest movements that filled city squares, and books and cinema that extrapolated this fear out into dire scenarios, all creating an ambient sense of unease.

While fear often works in film, it’s not usually a great theme for pop music. Pop’s primary charm often relies on emotionally appealing feelings like love or nostalgia. Alarm and discomfort don’t get toes tapping or provide emotional highs. Yet this cultural fear also found its way into pop. Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, Depeche Mode’s Leave In Silence, and Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes all were written in response to nuclear anxiety. While Morrissey claimed, in his usual wry tone, that “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” – a very Hobbesian sentiment.

This nuclear dread ascended to the heights of the British charts through a pair of polka-dot clad Glaswegians called Strawberry Switchblade, with their single Since Yesterday. Packaged as an upbeat synth-pop song, lyrically the song is a quiet personal reckoning with impending destruction, as the dawning horror of understanding that the life you took for granted may be eviscerated. In this way, thoughts of yesterday become precious precisely because tomorrow has grown uncertain. Counterintuitively, it is dread that teaches us to appreciate the world, as with it comes the comprehension of what we may lose.

This is bleak, confronting stuff. Nuclear dread became a distinct fear as it was something you couldn’t run from or resolve personally. While other fears may be circumstantial, a nuclear war was omnipresent. Instead of being human scale, nuclear fear presented itself on a scale so disproportionate and all-inclusive that the usual instruments of survival were useless, or absurd. This was the fear of knowing that human annihilation was always technically possible, and always somewhere on someone’s desk.

Here there was a reliance on the responsibility of very few individuals operating under intense political pressure. People whose jobs were to act on orders which had unimaginable consequences. What made this more frightening was that fear doesn’t behave in a tidy manner under pressure. The theories of nuclear deterrence, the supposed restraints of Mutually Assured Destruction, didn’t seem strong enough.

The people tasked with monitoring, or orchestrating, the end of the world were subject to the full range of ordinary human weaknesses — fatigue, groupthink, confirmation bias, personal insecurities and the eagerness to please superiors. As well as a lack of vigilance from years of monitoring something that hasn’t happened. Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who in 1983 correctly judged an incoming missile alert to be a false alarm, is celebrated as a hero, but he actually represents something more unsettling: a reminder that the entire architecture of nuclear weaponry rested on one man’s gut feeling working with systems that could create false information.

Strawberry Switchblade were working with the existential loneliness of such an environment. Where the future offers such devastation, that whatever existed yesterday was undeniably preferable. The invention of nuclear weapons, intensified by the ideological conflict of the Cold War, established more than the ability to destroy the world multiple times over; it informed us that Hobbes’s worst-case logic was our unavoidable permanent condition.

If Since Yesterday represented a political and globe fear, then Trees and Flowers was a far more personalised form of fear. Perhaps an even more devastating song, it maps the interior world of agoraphobia, where there is overwhelming reluctance to be in public spaces, driven by the sense that the world beyond familiar boundaries produces a crippling anxiety.

Stylistically, Trees and Flowers dispenses with the synths and is centred instead on guitar and piano. Yet it is the use of oboe that is its key feature. An instrument not often used in pop, there is a clear inspiration taken from Art Garfunkel’s Bright Eyes, but even one of pop’s saddest hits is outshone by the gorgeous, meandering and melancholic oboe melody on Trees and Flowers.

Such melancholy is the byproduct of agoraphobia’s fears. Sadness weaves its way through a life that can see normalcy outside but cannot participate. What others perceive as ordinary becomes an intense threat, one that compounds anxiety with any attempt to engage with the world as it is.

Agoraphobia is frequently misunderstood as a fear of public spaces, but more precisely it is a fear of the self within these spaces. It is an intense vulnerability of existing in a world without guarantees. A controlled and well-defined space like a home has known boundaries where there can be greater certainty of events. Beyond those boundaries certainty fades. Agoraphobia strips away the faith in our own actions that most of us carry unconsciously.

Søren Kierkegaard understood dread as the inevitable companion of freedom. Anxiety arises because our lives are not predetermined, because each action we take has a degree of uncertainty. For an agoraphobic, this is not an abstract philosophical proposition but a lived, physical reality. Their dread is not over something specific, but is the defining feature of existence.

As he recognised by claiming fear was his twin, Hobbes himself was not a detached analyst of the emotion, but a man who experienced it as a lifelong companion. His political philosophy was an elaborate intellectual attempt to master the personal feelings he could never escape. For Hobbes, to be human is to be perpetually aware of vulnerability, to live in the shadow of what might be done to us in the absence of structure and safety.

What agoraphobia and nuclear dread share, beneath their difference in scale, is the same confrontation with vulnerability. Hobbes understood that humans do not simply fear specific threats, what they fear is unreliability. What Since Yesterday and Trees and Flowers together reveal is this connection between the personal and geopolitical. That trust and confidence are our most valuable currencies, and yet also our most precarious.

Each Indian election is the largest logistical exercise in human history. Yet last week the Indian government began what could be an even more complex task – a census to find the true figures of what is now believed to be the world’s most populous country. This is the first census conducted since 2011, when 1.21 billion people were counted.

The process will take a year to complete, and requires three million census workers to fan out across cities, towns, and villages, as well as trekking into isolated settlements high up in the Himalayas, as well as deserts, forests and remote islands. When the results are finally tallied, they will have major social, economic and political consequences, shaping both the domestic and foreign policy decisions the government takes over the next decades.

Central to this is the government’s plan to use the census data to expand the Lok Sabha – the lower house of parliament – from its current 543 seats to 816. In 2023, a new parliament building was completed for this purpose. This expansion will involve an entire redrawing of electoral boundaries to reflect up-to-date figures on population size and distribution. This will create a dramatic reshaping of what the Indian parliament looks like, and what regional interests are able to exercise power.

This reconfiguration is necessary as the current regional distribution of seats has been frozen using figures from the 1971 census. This has produced large undemocratic discrepancies between India’s states. For example, Tamil Nadu currently has 39 seats in the house with an estimated population of 85 million people, while Bihar has 40 seats with an estimated population of 135 million.

Over the past half a century the wealthier southern states have had far slower population growth – with fertility rates now below the replacement level. While the massive northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have expanded significantly. Uttar Pradesh currently has 80 seats in the Lok Sabha – 32 more than the next most in Maharashtra – but with an estimated population of 250 million it is still vastly under-represented.

The expansion of the Indian parliament is a necessity not just for fair democratic representation, but for MPs to effectively do their jobs. Currently the Lok Sabha has 107 seats less than the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, despite the UK having the population of the state of Gujarat. An Indian MP represents, on average, a constituency of around 2.5 million people, with some seats being far larger. Getting an audience with your local MP would be rather difficult.

Yet expanding and reorganising the parliament is highly political. With the governing Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) primary supporter base being in the populous Hindi-speaking northern states, there has been arguments that an expansion would favour the party. However, the seats the BJP lost at the last election – forcing the party to form a coalition government – were mostly across the Hindi Belt. So the reality might be more complex.

The greater implications will be felt in the balance of power between the south and north of the country. The five southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are likely to lose their weight in the federal parliament, and given their distinct economic structures this could significantly impact India’s foreign policy decisions.

Cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad have built thriving export industries in automobiles, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and software — sectors that rely on open trade and deep connections with global supply chains. Southern representatives in Parliament have long been the loudest voices for trade liberalisation and foreign investment. Losing relative power in the Lok Sabha may weaken their effective advocacy at a particularly delicate moment, when India has been positioning itself as a home for global manufacturers looking to be less reliant on China.

The economic contrast with the north is stark. Many northern states remain heavily reliant on smallholder agriculture, where farmers are acutely exposed to global price competition. The politicians who represent them tend to favour agricultural protection, higher tariffs on food imports, and a cautious – if not hostile – approach to trade liberalisation. The sticking point for countries seeking trade agreements with India has always been agriculture, but greater northern weight in the parliament could make this even stickier.

A northward shift in parliamentary influence would also tilt government attention towards domestic welfare transfers and rural development rather than urban-led outward-facing economic statecraft. India’s ability to credibly present itself to the world as a reliable node in global supply chains and an emerging great power with significant technical capabilities depends in part on sustaining a southern-led policy approach.

This means that the data collected by the census is not simply an exercise in determining how many people India has and where they are located. It will guide how the country organises its politics, distributes its resources, and engages with the world. Census data that reconstitutes India’s parliament will provide its northern states with the democratic representation they rightfully deserve, but it will also create stronger interests that may complicate the foreign policy calculations of New Delhi, and those of the governments and investors seeking to do business with it.

Australians had smugly prided themselves on their aversion to populist politics. We thought we were immune to reactionary revolts taking place in America and Europe. We thought our system of compulsory and preferential voting provided us with a bulwark against those hostile to liberal democracy – forcing politics to be about sensible and rational approaches to public policy. Not grievance and ideological fervour.

I had also previously made the case that Australia was a conservative society – in the dispositional sense, not the political sense – and that this made the attraction to chaotic political movements weak. Nothing could be more suspicious to an Australian than someone who rocks the boat.

Yet this looks to be changing. Or, as I will elaborate later, how chaos is understood and responded to may be distinct from our rational assumptions. An election last month in the state of South Australia saw a surge in support for the One Nation party. Sending a shockwave through Australian politics.

For some background for non-Australian readers:

One Nation has been the political vehicle for Pauline Hanson. The party’s official name is actually Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Hanson was first elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1996 in unique circumstances. She was selected to run in the seat of Oxley in Queensland by the Liberal Party, however after some disparaging comments she made about Indigenous Australians she was disendorsed by the party.

Yet, it was too late to remove this affiliation from the ballot paper. She won the seat, but the Liberal Party leader at the time, John Howard, did not allow her to sit with the party. She initially sat as an independent. In her maiden speech to parliament she claimed that the country was being “swamped by Asians”. Which set the tone for her initial time as an MP – race-baiting as a political platform.

In 1997 she formed One Nation and by the 1998 Queensland state election the party looked to have momentum. The party won 11 seats on 22.6% of the vote. Yet an early federal election later that year saw Hanson lose her seat, and then the party in Queensland began to crumble. By the time of the next election all 11 of them had left the party, choosing to sit as independents, form other parties, or not stand again.

This seemed to be the end of Hanson, and she soon faded from public view. But as is the case with politics in the modern world, things were about to get weird. She was invited by Channel 7 to be a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars” rehabilitating her in the public mind, and by 2016 she was back in the parliament, this time in the Senate. Since then the focus of her rage has been against Muslims, rather than Asians.

Given voting in the Senate in Australia is conducted by proportional representation – with each state being a single constituency – it is much easier to be elected to it than to the House of Representatives. Over the past decade the party has won several seats in the Senate with around 4% to 7% of the vote, depending on the state. But again, keeping these people inside the party has been difficult. Until recently, it has only been Malcolm Roberts – a man who has never heard a deranged conspiracy that he wasn’t enthusiastically convinced by – who has stuck by Hanson.

In final weeks of last year there was a noticeable shift in polling numbers towards One Nation. This led to Hanson pulling off a coup, convincing Barnaby Joyce, the former leader of the National Party – and former deputy prime minister – to defect to One Nation, giving the party a seat in the lower house. Even though Joyce himself is mad as a sack full of cut snakes, his defection gave the party greater credibility in the eyes of supporters of the National Party and the Liberal Party (these two parties exist in a permanent coalition with each other). Polling numbers continued to rise.

The first test of these numbers came at the South Australian state election last month. At the previous state election the party polled 2.6%, and given that the state is one of the most urbanised in the country, with over three quarters of the population living in the Adelaide metropolitan area, it was seen as not being fertile ground for the party.

Australian states function with the same Westminster-style parliamentary systems as the federal parliament, with each state divided into electorates by population. With an independent commission drawing these boundaries, not political parties like the United States. South Australia is the second smallest state by population, and so its House of Assembly has just 47 seats.

The polling numbers leading into the election turned out to be accurate, with the party able to gain 22.9% of the vote. However, due to this share of the vote lacking significant geographical concentration in many single member electorates this only translated to 4 seats. This meant it won one less seat than the Liberal Party, even though it secured 4% more overall votes state-wide.

Although seats are less important than votes here, as this lack of geographical concentration may be more of a problem when thinking about how to counter such political forces. A geographical concentration of votes would allow us to see the support for the party was within certain regions and demographics – and solutions could be devised to address this regional or demographic discontent. A more widespread vote means that discontent has permeated through multiple different regions and demographics. Discontent is in the water.

So what does this say about Australia and our current Age of Discontent throughout the West?

Maybe rather than us Australians being smug about our inability to be drawn in by such politics this is just a case of culture still coming to Australia by ship? We’re not superior after all, we’ve just taken a while to catch up.

What we are catching up to has been an overarching sense that the promise of liberal democracy – rising prosperity, political inclusion, and social stability – has felt hollow in the 21st century. Cynicism has intensified through seemingly purposeless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with the Global Financial Crisis which exposed systemic inequalities, showing that markets and governments often protect elites while ordinary citizens bear the costs of economic shocks.

Broad trade liberalisation has created winners in urban, skilled sectors, but as manufacturing has been outsourced to countries like China, regional and outer suburban communities have lost sources of work which provided social structures, pride and dignity. This has been intensified by housing shortages that have burdened people with massive debt, while stagnant wages and inflation has compounded insecurity.

Governments, the media and other cultural institutions have foregrounded progressive identity politics that people see as elite predelictions, disconnected from both the economic priorities of the broader public, and how people have traditionally understood the world. Together all this has fuelled a deep distrust in the political establishment, creating dynamics that have eroded faith in liberal institutions, leaving citizens feeling abandoned by the very systems meant to protect their livelihoods and provide them with an investment and voice in a country’s affairs.

As I wrote in Nations Against States, there is also a strong disconnect between how the state understands how it secures the country and builds prosperity, and how people understand the nation as primarily a cultural entity. All of this creates fertile soil for parties like One Nation to harness grievance and offer simplistic and emotionally satisfying remedies to highly complex problems – with these remedies often based around blunt hatreds and aggressive finger pointing.

As we’ve seen from the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and other turbulent movements in Europe there is a political paradox in our current era – where people who claim to be “conservative” are attracted to a chaotic form of politics. Where people see pyromaniacs as firefighters.

This can seem irrational, but there may be some method to the madness.

Political movements like Trump, One Nation, Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland and Rassemblement National can be understood as a form of “circuit-breaker” – a deliberate disruption of an existing political, institutional and constitutional order. These movements seek to overload the normal functioning of governance – entrenched political and cultural norms, bureaucratic routines, institutional guardrails. The logic is not just to try and govern differently, but to force a system-wide interruption that creates conditions for a new political and economic framework to emerge.

The economist Albert Hirschman described this as “Exit vs Voice”. In his model, citizens who are dissatisfied with a political system can either try to reform it (voice) or withdraw from participation (exit). There are many people throughout the West now who see the conventional channels for “voice” as futile. Instead they find themselves attracted to political actors who present themselves as the “exit” from the status quo – claiming they can break the system and create something new and better.

The current fracturing of Australian politics has produced a significant “voice” movement as well, via the Community Independents Project, which I wrote about in How To Reclaim Democracy. Interestingly, there is a by-election in the federal seat of Farrar on 9 May, and this looks to be setting up an Exit vs Voice contest between One Nation and the independent candidate – with the traditional large parties being sidelined.

The crisis of liberal democracy and the cognitive overload of the modern media environment has created fertile ground for the “exit” approach. In this context, circuit-breaker politics is seen by those attracted to it not as reckless, but as necessary, where only radical interruption can reset the system and produce meaningful outcomes for those who feel desperate within current conditions.

However, the circuit-breaker strategy carries grave risks. As we are seeing the United States. The consequences of tripping the existing system are unpredictable and highly volatile, and often this can create far worse conditions than those that the circuit-breaker sought to replace.

In the Australian context, the attraction of One Nation looks likely to simply create the conditions that will entrench Labor Party governments across the country. At the South Australian election Labor won 34 of the 47 seats due to One Nation’s surge weakening the Liberal Party. Such results will only aggravate grievance and conspiracy amongst those attracted to One Nation. The system may not overload, but if support holds at 20-25% it will instead create enough spikes that will damage the country’s political and social infrastructure.

Rummaging through a cupboard at his parents house one day David Longstreth came across a cassette case of the Black Flag album Damaged. As often happens with such long-forgotten items, the actual cassette wasn’t inside. But this got him thinking. What if he could recreate the album from memory? And, what if memory was not a facsimile, but an evolving state of reinterpretation? Where in trying to remember something, a whole new formation of it emerges.

Released in 1981, Damaged was one of the defining and most influential albums of American hardcore punk. An album through which much of the subsequent punk and underground scenes defined themselves by. It is a ferocious and claustrophobic record constructed out of a powerful sense of alienation, resentment and frustration. Shaping these emotions into raw, hurtling and abrasive short stabs of energy.

Although mostly written by guitarist Greg Ginn, it is Henry Rollins’s voice that embodies these sentiments and convincingly transmits Damaged into something that sounds like a man who genuinely believes the world has been rigged against him. Institutions and authority are not sources of order but suffocating restraints; the promise of life – respect, dignity, belonging – appears available to others but not to him. Aggrieved desperation is the overarching theme.

The album is one of the most viscerally masculine records ever made. The riffs are fast, jagged, and relentless, the vocals are intense. Everything is turned up to 11 as it externalises an inner chaos – kicking hard against all and sundry. If the frustration on Damaged has a target, that target is existence itself. It is music that wants to smash things, anything, simply for the sake of release.

Yet for all its thrashing, Damaged is also a record of some self-awareness. The band is not simply raging blindly – the album’s power comes from its tension between inarticulate fury and sharp social perception. There’s a wry element to its lyrics. A song like Six Pack is very funny, even as it illustrates self-destructive behaviour.

While we may consider ourselves to currently be in an era of heightened male grievance, Damaged reveals that these emotional wounds inside masculinity are not timebound. The permanence of male grievance is due to an instinct that masculinity must be constantly “proven”, through work, social life, competition, and peer recognition. The loss or denial of these markers are not merely personal disappointments, they are interpreted as a lack of male legitimacy. Grievance then hardens into personal identity, creating spiky, agitated personality traits.

The album is built around a belief that there are social expectations placed on young men that present a path with no viable route. Beneath the aggression of the songs lies a deep insecurity – a fear that the goalposts are always shifting, and that no matter what a man does cannot meet these social expectations.

The narrative that weaves its way through the album is that these expectations themselves are fraudulent. That the whole damn system is designed to produce failure. Anger, then, becomes the only available form of agency – although this is not expressed as a political anger with a coherent direction, but instead a primal howl.

On Rise Above, Longstreth fashions this howl into something more complex. Given his self-imposed concept of working solely from memory, his faulty recollection becomes an opportunity to expand the album’s musical palette. The fast, aggressive, riffs of the original are instead transformed into music more multifaceted and often ornate.

The walls of distortion are replaced by intricate, fingerpicked guitar lines that draw on West African musical traditions – patterns that are constructed to alter and evolve over the course of the song, rather than simply repeating. This is complimented by the use of strings that create dramatic shifts in mood which are highly distinct from the original, replacing its kneejerk feistiness with a broader range of emotions and demeanours.

This is the first of three major stylistic shifts. The second is Longstreth’s own voice – his warbling, lawless, delivery is extreme in ways that is unorthodox for even alternative music – capable of moving from a near-whisper to a throat-tearing scream within a single line. It’s a different form of intensity to that of Rollins, but it makes moments of fury within the songs more dynamic because they often surfaces from music that is otherwise carefully controlled.

It is this careful construction that presents the album’s third stylistic shift and its most striking feature – the complex vocal harmonies of Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche. These female vocals function as the most radical act of recontextualisation on the record, not only as a counterforce to Longstreth’s voice and the masculine rage of Black Flag’s lyrics, but by introducing an element that is so undeniably gorgeous. The rapid hocketing – where a single melody is split between two voices – underneath the verses of Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie is far outside the scope of punk.1

These sophisticated vocal arrangements are also at odds with the attitude of Damaged. While the lyrics remain more or less the same (or as well as Longstreth can remember them), the musical context around them has been so thoroughly transformed that the meaning they elicit creates a distinct change in what the album expresses about masculinity itself.

It doesn’t mock the frustration at the heart of Damaged, but proposes that the same pain might be carried differently. If the album is to make an argument, it is that masculinity’s instinct to constantly “prove” itself doesn’t need to be a whirlwind of fists and kicks.

Rise Above instead creates a more varied emotional palette. One of highs and lows, of active contemplation as well as frustrated release. On Police Story the contrast between the sparse and tranquil orchestral arrangement, and the abrupt stabs of acoustic guitar and Longstreth’s unhinged vocal delivery, creates this more of a varied setting. The burning hatred of the cops is still there, but it’s more reflective than confrontational.

The overarching sentiment is that beautiful, melancholic, and often unsettling music may be far more impactful than a boot to the face. Whereas Damaged exhausts itself with its own aggression, Rise Above creates a slower form of discontent. It takes the same raw material and creates a broader, more introspective, expression of male frustration. Where Rollins externalises, Longstreth internalises.

This more pensive tone aligns with the nature of the album itself as one constructed by memory. Due to this approach, Longstreth wasn’t working simply with Damaged itself, but the sediment it had left behind – the feelings and impressions of listening to the album as a teenager and then reconstituting these as an adult, with an adult’s wiser cognitive capabilities.

To reconceptualise Damaged like this required Longstreth to filter the album through everything he’d become since he first engaged with it. What emerged is a portrait of two moments simultaneously – the original experience and the expanded reflection of this experience. A document that morphs both nostalgia and frustration into something more mature and prudent.

Due reflection being central to the project, it was apt for Longstreth to rename the album after the one song on Damaged that does exhibit some contemplative maturity – Society's arms of control – rise above, we're gonna rise above.