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 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.

Beginning in mid-2025, protests under the banner of “March for Australia” erupted across several Australian cities, concerned about immigration and national identity. The demonstrations drew disaffected citizens, nationalist groups, and some overt hate-groups, united by the belief that Australia’s immigration policies were undermining the country’s collective identity. Participants sought to challenge what they saw as a political consensus favouring high rates of immigration and to defend the shared bonds they believed sustained a common national identity.

In their rhetoric the movement presented itself as standing up for Australian sovereignty and cultural continuity. They seized upon concerns about the cost of housing and stagnant wages as a way of framing their grievances as being about more than just cultural anxiety. Yet central to the movement was a belief in defending a particular idea of national identity. The prominent use of the Australian flag – with its lingering Union Jack – was designed to signal a national story rooted in the country’s Anglo-Celtic heritage and civic manners.

The use of the word “for” in the rallies’ branding highlighted a belief that this conception of the nation was under threat and required extraordinary action in order to save. What this movement was seeking to create was an environment where Australia’s population numbers and demographics, as well as its cultural direction, could be debated openly rather than treated as settled policy.

Across much of the Western world, similar anxieties have intensified. Demographic change has unsettled traditional understandings of national identity, leading to an increased cultural threat perception — a sense that familiar social norms, languages and symbols are shifting and what is emerging in their place is something new and less comfortable. In an age of rapid information flows and algorithmic amplification of negativity and fear, these changes can feel existential. The result has been a politics of heightened sensitivity, where social unease can be harnessed and inflamed by political entrepreneurs.

There is a hungry impulse within progressive politics to point fingers and label those involved in such demonstrations as “racists”. This is undoubtedly true for some, but it is also an oversimplification of the psychologies driving such public displays. Scratch the surface of these motivations and you rarely find ideology first. Instead you often find a deep unease with the cognitive overload of the modern world, and a desire to find emotional grounding in the familiarity and the believed serenity of the past.

Humans developed a strong sense of social identity because, for most of our evolutionary history, survival depended on belonging to cooperative groups. Living in small bands, shared identity fostered trust, coordination, and mutual obligation — qualities that made hunting, defending territory, and raising children more successful than acting alone. In a world where people rarely moved far from their direct kin and where political institutions were weak or absent, individuals instinctively sorted the world into familiar categories: friend and stranger, ally and threat.

This psychological inheritance helps explain the pull of nationalism, which scales these instincts up to the level of the modern nation-state. It also explains why, in a highly multicultural society like Australia, many people can feel unsettled by visible social change even when the country remains objectively safe and stable. The threat is not material — it is psychological.

The human brain also prefers tidy maps of the world. It is why we instinctively shift politics into binaries, even though political reality is a far more complex web of intersecting ideas and interests. There is a need for cognitive closure — the desire for firm answers and clear boundaries. Ambiguity is tiring. Cultural difference introduces ambiguity everywhere: in language, behaviour, aesthetics, social expectations, even humour. For some people the response is curiosity; for others it leads to a narrowing of the boundaries of belonging. Stereotypes, after all, are simply crude tools for simplifying complexity.

This sits alongside the permanent cognitive impairment of zero-sum thinking. Here there is a tendency to see the world as a fixed pie, where gains for one group must come at the expense of another. Applied to demographic change, this mindset can turn immigration into a perceived contest for status, resources and cultural space. What might otherwise be understood as social and opportunity expansion is instead experienced as loss — the sense that the arrival and advancement of newcomers diminishes the standing of those already there.

These psychological tendencies converge with the strong premise within cultural nationalism about what holds a nation together. Instead of prosperity, institutions, or opportunity, it places identity at the centre. Here there is a belief that the nation is not simply a political arrangement, but a historic community — bound by shared language, customs, symbols, and inherited memory. Its continuity is therefore seen as fragile. If shared identity is the glue of social trust and belonging, then rapid demographic or social change can appear to be a dilution of this glue. It can feel chaotic and confronting.

From this perspective, the priority becomes preservation. There’s a belief that immigration policy should be dictated by the ability to absorb people into the dominant culture, where the maintenance of cultural norms and civic habits is essential. The underlying instinct is conservative in the literal sense of the word — an attempt to conserve an inherited cultural ecosystem.

Due to this there is an importance placed on narrative control. There’s a view of national stories — the shared myths and historical interpretations through which a country understands itself — as a form of social infrastructure. When those narratives are fragmented or contested, there is concern that the psychological scaffolding of the nation is threatened. Debates over school curricula, public monuments, language use (especially land acknowledgements), and national holidays therefore take on outsized importance. They are seen as disputes over the nation’s operating system.

There is a strong emphasis on the emotional dimension of belonging. The nation is seen as being sustained by a sense of familiarity and mutual recognition, something that cannot be engineered solely through institutions, and definitely not through markets. There is a slower rhythm to the nation that builds trust and understanding. Growth is far less important than continuity; ensuring that there are cultural foundations that each citizen can feel emotionally comfortable with even as change – economic or technological – inevitably occurs.

All these priorities are highly distinct from those of the state.

The central instinct of the state is to maximise the capabilities of the country it governs — to expand the resources through which it can generate prosperity, defend itself, and project influence to shape the global environment. National power rests on material capacity and human capital: economic productivity, technological innovation, military capability and institutional vitality. What the state seeks is scale — a larger labour force, a wider tax base, greater entrepreneurial energy and the capacity to sustain research, industry and security.

While the productive capacities of individuals matter, power in the international system ultimately accumulates in the aggregate. The simplest way to enlarge those capabilities is through people: a larger, more skilled population that deepens the economic base and broadens the foundations of national power. Creating the ability to navigate an increasingly competitive world with independence and confidence.

Due to these calculations, the Australian state’s current anxieties are vastly different to those who claimed to be marching in Australia’s defence. A continent-size landmass with a population of just 27 million people, much of its northern approaches are underpopulated and underdeveloped. It has a rising new authoritarian superpower in its region, as well as other new emerging great powers. Its security remains heavily invested in its partnership with the United States – a country that is now chaotic, unreliable and descending into the madness of authoritarianism.

The Australian Defence Force is thousands of recruits short of its requirements – with these requirements expanding by the day. The country’s diplomatic network is significantly under-resourced, while – Bluey aside – its cultural reach is negligible. Although wealthy and well educated, the country’s economic structure is unusually narrow. Much of its prosperity is concentrated in natural resources, finance and real estate rather than a diverse set of high-complexity industries.

It is here that the Australian state may see its most pressing concern. Its export earnings and public revenues are exposed to global commodity cycles and property market fluctuations, while also highly dependent on an authoritarian adversary in China. Innovation and high-value manufacturing remain underdeveloped, limiting long-term resilience, while its small internal market constrains economies of scale in sectors that require broad domestic demand. Even with trade and investment from abroad, relying on just a few key industries with a small population makes it hard for the economy to grow and stay vibrant.

On top of this lies what is now one of the world’s most pressing challenges — low birth rates. Although Australia’s fertility rate is not as severe as in some other wealthy countries, at 1.42 births per woman it remains well below replacement level. This is driving a rising dependency ratio, with fewer young workers entering the labour force relative to retirees, placing strain on public finances, healthcare, and pensions. At the same time, wealth is increasingly concentrated among older cohorts, while younger Australians face stagnant wages, high housing costs and tax burdens that limit the economy’s capacity for growth and innovation.

In this context Australia’s migration program becomes less a social choice than a structural necessity. The country’s governing capacity, economic structure, defence capabilities and global influence are all constrained by scale. Attracting people — particularly skilled migrants — is one of the few levers available to expand those capabilities. From the perspective of the state, opposition to immigration looks like an advocacy for weakness, vulnerability and decline.

While Australia has its own unique circumstances, broadly speaking this is the position in which most developed countries now find themselves. As birth rates decline, labour is becoming a highly contested resource in the global economy. Countries are increasingly concerned with scarcity — of engineers, nurses, scientists, builders, and younger workers more generally. Governments are now viewing immigration as a strategic tool: essential for maintaining tax bases and essential services, while keeping innovation systems supplied with talent.

This is creating a new form of geopolitical competition, one played out through visas, university pipelines, and recruitment policies. Countries are refining their migration systems to attract globally mobile talent — offering faster residency, flexible work permits, and pathways to citizenship for those who can contribute to the knowledge economy. The logic behind this competition is simple: talent, like capital, flows towards places that offer opportunity, stability, and long-term security. In a world of ageing societies, the countries that thrive will be those that recognise human capital not just as labour, but as one of the defining strategic assets of the 21st century.

However, for those who primarily see the country as a cultural entity this logic is deeply unsettling. The calculus of capability maximisation sits uneasily alongside the emotional impulses of nationalism. Where the state calculates economic vitality and strategic power, nationalism prioritises cultural continuity and social familiarity. The result is a growing tension within many democracies — a tension between the nation and the state.

Although nations like to see themselves as age-old and enduring, nationalism is closely tied to modernity. In Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner argued that the nation is not an ancient force arising naturally from culture, but rather a construct produced by the needs of industrial society and the modern state. This challenges the romantic notion that nations predate politics; in reality, the process often runs the other way: states, elites, and political movements cultivate national identity to embed authority and stabilise populations. Schools, bureaucracies, media, and political parties all play a role in shaping a cohesive “people,” while rituals, symbols, and selective historical narratives provide a sense of cultural continuity.

The psychological impact of this is powerful: people feel anchored to a shared past, even when that past has been selectively constructed. This is not necessarily negative. Gellner saw nationalism as inseparable from the modern era of mass political participation, part of the shift from dynasties and empires to modern nation-states. Nationalism arose at a time when governments needed citizens rather than subjects, when an expanded number of individuals could be expected to have a voice in public affairs, but those voices required an emotional language through which large societies could perceive themselves as a unified collective.

This aligns closely with Benedict Anderson’s analysis. In Imagined Communities, he begins with a deceptively simple claim: nations are imagined. Not imaginary, and not fabricated from nothing, but imagined in the sense that even citizens of the world’s smallest countries will never meet most of their fellow citizens, yet they still see themselves as part of the same collective story. What binds them is not daily interaction, but a shared mental image, a sense of “we.” Nationalism, in this sense, is less a political doctrine than a way of organising the social imagination.

Anderson demonstrated how this imagination became possible through the advancement of mass printing in vernacular languages in the early modern period. Newspapers, pamphlets and novels did more than just distribute information; they synchronised experience. When large numbers of people are reading the morning newspaper simultaneously they are participating in the same narrative of events. Over time this produced a shared temporal awareness – a sense of the nation moving through history together. This shaped the collective consciousness that imagined communities required.

We have now lost this synchronised experience. The fragmentation of media has dissolved this shared information environment into countless personalised streams. What remains is not a single broad narrative, but millions of parallel timelines – some may overlap, but without significant alignment. It is now quite easy to physically live inside one country, but mentally live within another.

Yet the yearning for a form of shared commitment remains. The nation’s positive power is in the human desire for connection and trust – the quiet assurance that citizens share not only institutions and laws, but a common understanding of the world they inhabit together. The nation’s negative power is when people believe that this connection and trust can only come through narrow and superficial markers like skin colour.

Across many Western societies, the common bonds that once anchored national life are showing signs of severe strain. A shared civic identity — built on broadly accepted institutions, narratives, and norms — is being increasingly pulled apart by rival ways of organising belonging. Progressive identity politics is fragmenting national stories into a mosaic of group experiences, elevating difference as the primary lens through which justice and representation are understood. In doing so it is challenging liberal universalist ideals that aim to treat citizens as fundamentally equal participants in a shared civic order.

Yet this has a mirror reaction in the form of majoritarian supremacy, which insists that the cultural identity of the historic majority must remain dominant and shielded from change. Although they present themselves as opposites, they are a dual assault on civic nationalism: one by dissolving the idea of a shared national collective, and the other by narrowing it to be an exclusive club not available to all citizens. The result is a politics where belonging is contested rather than assumed, and where the quiet habits of solidarity that sustain democratic life become harder to maintain.

This contest over the nation and its relationship with the state is creating a new revolutionary period in human affairs. One that we can clearly see in the United States through the presidency of Donald Trump. While Trump himself is little more than a self-serving caudillo, his ascent to the White House can be understood through this tension between the nation and the state. He has been able to harness an intense wave of distrust and discontent with the modern state, and created a profoundly destabilising movement intent on overthrowing the country’s liberal democracy in order to prioritise cultural identity.

Other movements throughout the West offer similar promises. From Brexit and Reform UK, to Rassemblement National, Alternative für Deutschland, and now the polling rise of One Nation in Australia, there is an emotionally powerful belief that liberal democracy as an operating system is no longer serving the interests of the imagined community. The state, therefore, has to be captured and realigned.

In The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm describes the period between 1789 and 1848 as being shaped by the twin forces of political and industrial upheaval. The French Revolution and the revolutionary movements that followed were driven by deep social and economic changes, including the rise of the bourgeoisie, the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and growing demands for political representation.

These upheavals reflected broader shifts within society, as traditional hierarchies and feudal structures came under pressure from emerging capitalist economies and new social classes. Industrialisation intensified these pressures, with rapid technological change, urbanisation, and expanding markets disrupting established patterns of work and community, creating both new opportunities and a sense of insecurity among those left behind.

Yet, industrialisation didn’t merely unsettle societies — it forged the nation-state as its solution, binding fractured populations together through shared institutions, an increase in common education, and the formation of a shared culture.

Comparable forces of transformation are now reshaping the present with similar magnitude to the Industrial Revolution. The digital revolution and the acceleration of movement across borders are among the defining changes of the early 21st century. Digital networks compress distance, allowing information, ideas, and images to circulate instantly across the world, while migration has created increasingly diverse societies that were previously more culturally homogeneous.

Together these forces are reorganising the structure of everyday life. Work, communication, and political debate now operate in transnational spaces rather than purely national ones, while cities have become crossroads of languages, customs, and global connections. The result is a social environment that is faster, more fluid, and more interconnected than the one that shaped earlier generations. Creating pressures that are now intensifying emotional insecurity, and leading to fissures between the nation and the state.

The synchronised national experience that once emerged from shared media and common reference points has been disrupted, leaving individuals to navigate a far more fragmented information and social environment.

In The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer argued that periods of rapid transformation generate feelings of dislocation and uncertainty, prompting some individuals to enter a heightened state of passion, and cling more tightly to beliefs, identities, or movements that promise stability — even if this promised stability requires attacking existing political structures.

Movements based on narrow identities or cultures can be understood not only as political or economic responses to structural change, but as psychological attempts to impose order and meaning on societies undergoing major transformation. Our current revolutions of connectivity and mobility are not only technological or demographic shifts, but profound reorganisations of social imagination that force nations to renegotiate how collective identity, trust, and political cohesion are sustained.

The danger is not simply that movements that privilege cultural identity over both pluralism and structural necessity will win elections. It is that the contest itself — fought over who belongs, who the nation is really for, and whose story gets told — gradually hollows out the civic foundations on which both the nation and the state depend. As we can see from the United States, an imagined community that can no longer agree on what it is imagining becomes ungovernable.

A state that cannot govern cannot provide its citizens the basics of what they need: security, efficient services, opportunity and prosperity. For the nation to have a positive – future-focused – purpose these elements cannot be dispensed within a heightened state of passion.

To guard against the splintering of the nation-state, the challenge is to find ways to reconcile strategic necessity and civic belonging. To cool the passions of those who experience complexity as chaos. Governments must maintain the capabilities required to sustain prosperity, security, and influence in an increasingly competitive world, yet they cannot do so at the expense of the social trust that allows societies to function. Indeed, social trust should be understood as a central capability of the country itself.

Liberal democracies may increasingly find that preserving an open political order requires investing in institutions that appear, at first glance, somewhat illiberal. Practices such as national service, civic orientation programmes, or stronger expectations of public duty can help cultivate a shared sense of responsibility among citizens who otherwise have no synchronised experiences and a limited imagined sense of common community.

The aim is not to suppress cultural pluralism but to reinforce the civic foundations on which pluralism depends. In a revolutionary era of economic and social change, these mechanisms matter precisely because the conditions that once generated civic cohesion organically — shared institutions, common media, overlapping social worlds — can no longer be taken for granted. Without some structured reinforcement of civic commitment, the modern nation-state risks becoming politically brittle, leaving it vulnerable to radical movements whose narrow understanding of the nation is at dangerous odds with demographic realities.

Berwick Street in London’s Soho district is slightly different now. In my early-20s it had a large number of record stores. It was the place to be on a weekend for a guy like me. While a significant percentage of my meagre income was spent on CDs, Berwick Street was also the place to just be seen flicking through racks. While new releases may come, and you may already know what would be in each section, the point was to be seen flicking through them nonetheless.

Nowadays Berwick Street has undergone an agglomerative shift. The record stores have mostly gone, replaced by tasteful men’s fashion. The kind of stores where you spend a lot of money to look like you made a bit of an effort, but not too much. Essentially Berwick Street has been servicing the same men over the past 20 years. Just in different phases of their lives.

At the end of Berwick Street lies a narrow laneway called Walker’s Court. Here, a different kind of servicing remains. Despite the accessibility of pornography on the internet, live action porn has had a persistent presence. Markets may shift, and men’s interests may change, but men’s interests also never change. And no market is more stable than one that bets on these most base masculine desires.

However, back when I lived in London, at the end of Walker’s Court, heading down towards the theatre district along Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a bookstore. Consistent with the shops around it the store had its “blue” section, but it also stocked a range of other books mostly related to art, music and culture. Music writing had yet to be dispersed by the internet, and alongside the weekly British music press there was a good market for books on bands, styles and scenes – for the men along Berwick Street who needed more in-depth detail than the NME and Melody Maker could provide.

Yet it was the British music press that provided the cultural scaffolding. During its peak the British music press’s job was to create a mythology around bands. It’s why bands who were shit, but had a good story, could still be compelling – good music was often secondary to good music writing. This is why British bands generally had a mystique and allure that couldn’t be matched by bands from elsewhere in the world. It’s also why Britain’s soft power has waned with the decline of the country’s music press. It was the platform on which Anglophilia was built.

As a teenage Anglophile this mystique made moving to London essential. In Australia, culture still came by ship (and maybe still does), and so Au Go Go Records on Little Bourke Street in Melbourne would stock the NME and Melody Maker, but they would be several weeks late. Despite this, reading them felt exciting all the same – but the potential thrill of buying copies of the music press the week they came out made it clear that London was the place I needed to be.

However, by the time I got there Melody Maker was dead. While the NME was still breathing, its trajectory towards becoming an online only publication was inevitable. Despite this, music had yet to transform into the everything everywhere all at once smörgåsbord it is today. Time still mattered to music, and London still felt like it was the place where now was happening.

One weekend, after doing the rounds of record stores, I popped into the bookstore in Walker’s Court. The store had a display of a blue-ish tinged book, with a close-up of a man’s face – too close to see who it actually was, but it was intriguing enough to pick up. A sale price of £5 was also enticing. The book was called 45 by Bill Drummond, and was a series of short stories from Drummond’s life to date. Media quotes on the back claimed that “Stories bristle with brilliantly insane schemes which often go awry…” and “a catalogue of ludicrous exploits and lucrative failures.” It looked like it was worth a read.

Although Scottish, Drummond began his artistic career in Liverpool in a band called Big in Japan. Big in Japan were notable for being a band less than the sum of its parts, having no success themselves, but each of the band’s members going on to find great success away from each other.

Holly Johnson would become singer in Frankie Goes To Hollywood; Budgie would become the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees; Ian Broudie would write both one of the most wholesome songs of the 1990s, as well as England’s unofficial national anthem, while David Balfe would initially play keyboards in The Teardrop Explodes, before forming the label Food Records, signed Blur, then became rich by selling the label to EMI. Blur would subsequently write “Country House” about him and his newfound wealth.

Drummond himself would first become the manager of Echo & the Bunnymen, before discovering the sampler, and in conjunction with electronic artist Jimmy Cauty, formed The KLF, who would launch a cultural assault on pop music by deliberately and brazenly seeking to infringe on copyright law. The two would lift fragments of well-known songs, TV themes, and news broadcasts and set them to new beats. The provocation was aimed as much at lawyers as listeners. To reframe pop music not as entertainment, but as a vehicle for confrontation.

The skill behind sampling – particularly from its emergence within hip-hop – was finding new possibilities within an existing hook – reframing and transforming music to create something familiar, yet unique. Taking this approach, the duo’s breakthrough came by fusing Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll”, The Sweet’s “Block Buster!”, and the Doctor Who theme, into Doctorin’ The Tardis (temporarily renaming themself The Timelords to fit the song’s theme). The pair subsequently wrote a book called The Manual (How to Have a Number 1 Single the Easy Way) – a step-by-step guide to the creation of a novelty hit.

Yet the pair were working with a vision far broader and more strange than just the creation of novelty songs. From the proceeds of their first number 1, they created an “ambient road trip” film called The White Room. The film traces the journey of Drummond and Cauty from their studio Trancentral in south London through Spain in search of the mysterious “White Room,” a transcendental space where perfect music supposedly exists, and where they would be able create the perfect pop record.

The romanticism of road trips inspired a temporary pivot away from pop into ambient music. The concept of their album Chill Out was that of a drive by night through the Gulf Coast in the United States. Taken as a whole 45 minute piece of music, fragments of sound drift in and out, as the road and wind pass by the vehicle, trains roll in the distance and radio stations scan in and out. It is a work in constant motion – sounds arrive, overlap, and recede, producing the feelings of moving through different environments without stop, mirroring the hypnotic rhythm of long-distance driving. The album is eerie, nostalgic and evocative.

Then came the bang. Anyone with an ear near a commercial radio station in the early-90s would know The KLF, although very few would actually know The KLF. Songs like What Time Is Love? and 3am Eternal may have been catchy dance-pop toe-tappers, but on closer inspection were filled with lyrics that were both highly self-referential and absurdist. As the radio was my closest childhood friend, at the time these were songs simply singable anthems, it was only after going down Drummond’s rabbit hole did what was actually going on start to reveal itself.

Central to The KLF was the idea that mythology was central to music’s power, and rather than a commercial product, music instead should be a surreal experience. The duo also referred to themselves as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMS) – taken from the satirical conspiracy novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy (with this also being a nod to the lost continent of Mu in the Pacific) – creating a world cryptic fantasy and mischief designed to blur the lines between pop music, performance art and absurd imagination (and convincing Tammy Wynette to play along).

At the core of this project was a belief that music loses its power when it becomes too rational. By surrounding their music with stories, hoaxes and rituals, The KLF sought to convey that pop’s appeal came from folklore – where it could be strange, exciting and resistant to neat explanations. An approach that led to both enormous success and wild acts of self-sabotage.

Invited to play 3am Eternal at the British Record Industry (BRIT) Awards in 1992 they instead hired Extreme Noise Terror to butcher the song, culminating in Drummond machine gunning the audience with blanks (before dumping a dead sheep at the awards’ after party). The duo then decided to dissolve The KLF at the height of its success, renamed themselves The K Foundation to establish an art award for “the worst artist of the year” (whose short list was identical to the prestigious Turner Prize but prize money double), and then subsequently took off to the Isle of Jura and burned £1 million.

This was all thrilling stuff. The actions of a highly creative mind which had both the audacity and commitment to pursue whatever wild ideas he could dream up.

It is this creativity and how it intersects with music mythology that drives much of Drummond’s book. Its opening story concerned a journey Drummond and Mark Manning had taken through Finland in the hope of placing an icon of Elvis Presley at the North Pole. Their theory was that the icon would radiate “good vibes” down the Earth’s leylines and bring about world peace.1 What the trip really needed, however, was a soundtrack – as was the concept behind Chill Out, any proper road trip required the radio play a central role.

With Finnish radio itself not sufficiently servicing the job, the pair decided to create a series of fictitious Finnish bands – inhabiting their own localised genres like Lapp-Punk and Arctic Soul – and then hire a group of local musicians to record songs by these imaginary bands. Drummond and Manning then created a Finnish record label, pressed the songs up as 7” records and let them float out into the record stores of the world, to be randomly discovered by those men along Berwick Street flicking through the racks.

Before the internet placed every detail of an artist’s life at our fingertips, mystery was an essential component of music’s appeal. A listener might have known only a few scattered clues – whatever could be gleaned from an album sleeve, a handful of photos, a place of origin – with the rest filled in by imagination. For bands who caught the attention of the British music press, these fragments could be expanded into narratives that made them feel part of larger social dramas rather than simply composers of songs.

One of the key ideas running through the book is that the true art of music lies in the stories surrounding it. It is experienced as moment, memory, and mythology, with tales accumulating and distorting over time. The attraction of a band often lay in what surrounded the music as much as in the music itself – what they were doing when they weren’t playing instruments, and what listeners believed they might be doing. This was the romance of music – the conjecture, fantasy and personal meaning. The enigma of Finnish bands that may or may not actually exist.

From “the classic four lads out against the world” of Echo & the Bunnymen to the “dickhead factor” of Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes, Drummond understood that compelling music required a conviction and projection of style – both aesthetic and attitudinal. Pop, in this sense, operated well beyond chord structure and vocal melody. It was an art form that thrived on personality, myth, and the space listeners were free to fill with their own speculation.

Of course, the modern music environment doesn’t mean great music cannot be written, Ditto by NewJeans is a perfect pop song, but the information overload of K-Pop leaves very little to the imagination. It may draw you in emotionally and make you feel connected to group members, but it doesn’t allow you to imagine your own vision of the artist. Given how tightly controlled and directed they are, the “story” around K-Pop groups isn’t very compelling. There are no fuck-ups and losers, no grand conceptual overreach, no antagonism and combativeness, no spicy quotes in the press. The mess of humanity; the things that give art a “lived in” experience, has been stripped out.

Which is what Drummond seeks to convey as music’s real attraction. The book returns to Finland as he finds himself drawn to creating a whole album by his invention of Kristina Bruuk – an Estonian woman, turned Helsinki heroin addict, and the permanent loser of the Finnish music scene. Convinced of her own genius, yet met with little interest in her work, it is her persistence and the rumours that swirl around her that makes her compelling. The type of outsider artist that – were she real – obscurity hounds would obsess over.

Alongside the project itself, what was compelling is how Drummond built this story around the number 14 bus route as he travelled from central Helsinki to the recording studio each day. This was not just the recollection of one of his artistic schemes, but a demonstration of the art of the short story. It is how a writer builds an allure of a place through its topographical details – transport routes, street names, or shops. He makes similar use of this device later in the book with London’s 68 bus route.

While road trips have their place, it is public transport that houses a city’s soul. There is no knowing a city without knowing its public transport, and the first, and most important, task when arriving in a new city is to get yourself on it. Far from being just a mechanism to get from A to B, public transport is how you observe and understand a place – one eye out the window, one eye on the carriage. It’s how you grasp a city’s urban structure, political economy, and the character of its people. For a writer, the most important skill is being a “noticer”, and there is no better place to notice things than on public transport.

Using public transport as a stylistic device was therefore just as important to me as Drummond’s imagination and audacity. It was here that the book provided me with something far greater than just a good read, it gave me a keen sense of purpose. I was going to become a writer. I was going to throw myself headfirst into the world, to have big, bold ideas and follow them towards their canny conclusions. I would become interesting and unique, and I would master the art of the oh-so-clever personal short story.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead, after much floundering and lack of direction, I ended up in the practical world of foreign policy, where – at least in Australia – the field is approached through the sober reality of what is possible to advance the country’s interests given the realities of hard power and the constraints of current global conditions. This is important work, but it’s not fantastical. There’s no mischief or myth-making, no wit and whimsy, just careful deliberation and measured, diplomatic, tones.

Alongside policy briefs and options papers, one of the central modes of influence in this field is the 800-word opinion piece, or op-ed. Here the objective is to present a clear viewpoint on a current affair, providing evidence and insight. The brevity of the piece means there is a focus on economy, with a tightly structured argument attempting to persuade the reader within a limited space.

This is something I’ve become quite good at, but given my itch to be a little bolder, I have also tried to use these op-eds to be more creative. I’ve sought to perfect the art of the format by finding an inventive theme or concept to frame my arguments, engaging in the slow reveal with knowing clues, to have an elegant rhythm and lyricism that builds towards a clever, biting conclusion. My goal has been to write an 800-word op-ed that can be hung in The Louvre.

However, editors often don’t understand what I’m trying to do, or privilege the “news hook” over my literary devices. This is a particular problem here in Australia where attempting to be original and clever is to invite suspicion. We don’t tolerate big or bold ideas in this country – the purpose of writing is simply to convey information. If you’ve got something interesting to say, or worse, a crafty way of saying it, you best say it elsewhere.

So there has been both an institutional and cultural restraint on my ambition – a field of furrowed brows within a nation that thinks using more than two syllables is an unnecessary effort. Despite this, I’ve got big ideas, a keen eye, and a broad and distinct knowledge-base that can stretch beyond the narrow lanes of commentary into something more imaginative and expansive. The writers who excel at this have a hungry curiosity, an ability to synthesise ideas across fields, and a flair for shaping observation and thought into artful prose.

In order to be such a writer, my starting point has been to go back to my original inspiration. Much like sampling, the idea has been to find a preexisting hook, insert myself into it and build something new and distinct. It’s not theft, it’s admixture and advancement. It is this device of artistic transformation that Drummond uses in his story The Smell of Money Underground, where he repurposes the artwork of Richard Long to create a new narrative and artistic gesture of his own.

Drummond had become interested in Long’s work as it aligned with his interests. Long’s art revolved around long walks through a wilderness, creating a stone circle in a specific locale, and then photographing it. The appeal here is obvious; if the terrain won’t allow for public transport, then foot is your best option, while stone circles carry a pagan mystique – evoking rituals of dance and offering, giving honour to unseen, mystical, forces.

With his recent cash-burning in Scotland, Drummond wanders into the d’Offay Gallery on Dering Street in Mayfair hoping to find a work of Long’s from the Isle of Jura. He has no such luck, but he is shown a work from Iceland called The Smell of Sulfur in the Wind.

Drummond recognises the broad location of the work as when he was 17 he and his sister had hitched a ride on a fishing trawler to Iceland and then attempted to walk across the island from south to north. The pair gave up around Lake Askja, near where Drummond thinks Long had created his stone circle. The symmetry compelled Drummond to purchase the photograph. It was US $20,000. Both the amount, and the currency, surprised him. He bought it anyway.

In November 2020, I travelled to Iceland to help a friend with a court case. The winter was bleak, and the situation bleaker, and this was made more surreal by the restrictions to normal life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was meant to be in Iceland for three months, but due to Australia closing its borders – and airlines continuously cancelling flights – I stayed for six. Despite these circumstances, I was enamoured with the place.

The country has an enormous gravitational pull. You feel on the edge of the world, the landscape looks alien, with its black volcanic plains, glacial rivers and jagged cliffs. It’s immense and dramatic. Björk had sought to capture the sound of this landscape on her Homogenic album – with its ominous, distorted beats and sweeping icy strings. This was geology as music, tectonic pressure in your eardrums, it created an attraction to the place long before I set foot inside it.

It is Iceland’s unique geography that has allowed the country to retain its idiosyncrasies, even as its tiny population has connected itself globally. The Huldufólk (hidden people) and Draugar (restless spirits) that permeate the culture create an additional otherworldliness. Unlike English, which in an act of linguistic cowardice dispensed with the letters ð and þ, the Icelandic language maintains its distinct look, transmitting the deep mythology its medieval sagas through its own topographical details like geographical features, place names and shop fronts.2

For Drummond, such folklore and mystery added an extra layer of power to Long’s photograph. There was a certain kinship between his own playful imagination and the whimsy of Iceland. The country also played a central role in his mental map of how things actually work. According to Drummond, the leylines that he and Manning had hoped to transmit “good vibes” down with their icon of Elvis at the North Pole had only three fixed points on Earth they continuously travel through – Iceland, New Guinea, and Matthew Street in Liverpool. It was obvious that Iceland had a magnetism that needed to be hooked into.

Despite this intimate connection, as the story progresses Drummond falls out of love with the photograph. He wonders what the purchase was actually about – the memory of the trek he and his sister took? His esoteric fancy for Iceland? The historic mysteries of stone circles? Or just the luxury of being an art-buying wanker?

So he decides that he will sell the photograph for the original $20,000 he paid for it (despite the fact that its value had risen); return to Iceland with the money in a box, walk across the island until he finds Long’s stone circle, and bury the cash underneath it. He would then photograph the stone circle from the same angle as Long, have it developed and framed, and then place it on his wall where the original lay. He will call it The Smell of Money Underground.

Yet selling art is a difficult business. Most people don’t have $20,000 lying around dedicated to whims, and given Drummond’s plan for the cash, anyone who might would probably be wary of being associated with him and his obtuse schemes. Despite having paid such a price for Long’s work, the d’Offay Gallery had considered Drummond too suspicious a character to interview Long for a magazine feature.

As was the case, Drummond had another layer of metacommentary planned – a book about his attempt to sell the photograph called How To Be An Artist. In the book, Drummond takes off on another road trip, this time straight up the guts of Britain, from Southampton on England’s south coast to Dounreay of Scotland’s north coast. He attaches “For Sale” signs to various structures, and gives a variety of talks to local community centres attempting to explain his relationship to art, why he no longer likes Long’s photograph and why he wants to sell it. The book’s point seems to be for Drummond to embarrass himself for his own pretensions.

Drummond’s talks elicit little but bemusement, and no buyers. So he devises a new plan to get the $20,000. He cuts the artwork into 20,000 pieces and tries to sell them for $1 each. Was this a radical act of artistic vandalism? Or an inspired form of artistic alchemy?

At the time of the book’s release I had a temp job managing the file archive for a law firm in the City and I rushed down to the Waterstones on Leadenhall Street on my lunch break to grab a copy. Most importantly, inside the book were instructions on how to secure a piece of the photo. Which I promptly did.

Depending on how you define it, I don’t really own art. In my flat in Collingwood I have nothing on the walls. I have a plan for framed maps of my favourite places – a big map of Iceland – and prints of metro systems I love, but I’ve never gotten around to buying any of these. I can’t claim to be knowledgeable about art in its conventional sense, I certainly don’t have $20,000 to spend on any. But this was a piece of art I understood. It was turned into words. It was an escalating aggregation of ideas. It was mischievous. And there was just a little piece of physical evidence to hold, which made me at least feel like I was an owner of art.

Until I lost it. After returning to Melbourne I lent the book – with the segment of photo inside – to a pair of friends. I was restless and keen on being elsewhere, so I decided to head to Montreal for a year. I didn’t need the book and the photo segment, I would pick them up when I got back to Melbourne. Except I never did – and as lending works, each year that passes the ability to ask for your stuff back becomes more absurd.

However, the situation is more complicated than just the informal statute of limitations on borrowed books, as the couple that I lent the book to happen to now run Perimeter Books up on High Street Thornbury – an art book store and publishing house. They know the value of the 1/20,000 of Long’s photograph more than most. That slither of photo – and the now out-of-print book – is sitting on a shelf in their house gathering allure and esteem. It’s a little piece of Drummond’s mind, it carries the weight of his catalogue of endeavour and adventure. No-one in their field is going to give that up.

Yet this tiny fragment of a photograph has grown in my mind into something enormous. Its monetary value matters little; the fragment has instead become totemic; it carries a charge of metaphysical power and permission. A leyline of voltage from Drummond’s mind into mine. By reclaiming it I would have the legitimacy to be the writer I wish to be – innovative, ambitious, and culturally savvy. In my possession it would be key: a vessel that contains the sparks of future ideas, a gateway to the expansion of my work, an audience, the interest of literary agents and publishers, and a neat conclusion to this story.

Such a totem of confidence feels essential because half the work of being a writer is convincing others that you have the skill to bring an idea to life — especially when that idea is strange, complex, or not immediately understood. This short story would be tough to pitch. For works like it, what you need is a reputation, a way for editors, literary agents and publishers to have belief in you. What you need is an exhibit of writing that demonstrates a body of knowledge, an inventive ability to synthesise ideas, and a mystique that sets the tone for future work. What you need is a showpiece.

Last week a curious job advert appeared in my inbox. The Victoria state government here in Australia is looking for a Senior Adviser, Policy and Research (anti-racism). The job will be based inside the Policy and Research Branch of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. A commission whose role it is “to help organisations better understand, prevent and respond to racism and race discrimination in a variety of settings.”

This all sounds like good stuff. Discrimination based on race is a scourge that humanity needs to transcend. On a superficial level “anti-racism” sounds like the antidote.

However, this is not the case. Instead the ideas it promotes are fast becoming the accelerant. And the state internalising its assumptions does not bode well for such a highly multicultural society as Victoria.

Anti-racism has emerged as a distinct set of ideas that are in direct challenge to the ideals of liberalism. Central to liberal ideals is that the individual is the primary moral and political unit, and that each person has equal rights and dignity independent of social status, class, race, or religion. Therefore, the law should treat each person as an individual bearer of rights and responsibilities, not as a representative of a collective group identity.

This is not what anti-racism believes. Instead anti-racism sees race as the primary moral and political unit that must be centred in all scenarios. It sees discrimination not as stemming from individual prejudice, but through persistent political or economic structures. It cynically believes that formally neutral rules are an illusion, that analysing society through group categories is essential to identify past injustice, and that organisations and the state should actively work to redress this past injustice through a series of privileges and hindrances (depending on the racial group).

Metaphysically, anti-racism believes that you are born with the historical inheritance of your skin colour, and you are permanently bound to the sins or victim status of it, regardless of what you do in life.

In the Hegelian view of History – that is, what is the world about? – anti-racism sees the world as a zero sum struggle between racial or ethnic groups. It believes that all social and political outcomes are due to this struggle. Here it holds the exact same view of History as white supremacists. Just because anti-racism sees itself working to reverse racial hierarchies this is not a repudiation of the concept of racial hierarchies.

Because anti-racism has now embedded itself within progressive politics (or politics that believes itself to be progressive), it is important to consider the structural conditions that have led to its emergence, how it is capturing states throughout the West, and why it will produce outcomes that are the opposite of what it claims are its intent – and what should be the intent of a body like the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission.

New ideas don’t institutionalise themselves; they require structural conditions that reward, amplify, and absorb them. To understand why ideologies like anti-racism are increasingly migrating from activist discourse into bureaucratic roles we need to comprehend current structural incentives within Western societies, and for this it is useful to consider the work of Peter Turchin.

Turchin began his career as a zoologist, studying population dynamics in animals; his work sought to understand how complex biological systems rise, fluctuate, and stabilise over time. However, he got bored with animals and turned his attention to studying human history; developing a theory about how societies rise and collapse, and what were the common conditions that lead to collapse.

Turchin’s thesis has been that societies start to fracture and collapse when its elites begin turning on other elites, and, by extension, the prevailing political systems. He has termed this as “elite overproduction” – where competition between über-elites intensifies, and when there are too many garden variety elites to be absorbed by well-paid or high status jobs. The resentments of both these scenarios start eroding societies.

The first cohort is today’s most recognisable problem. Who I’ve called über-elites are those Turchin refers to in their current behaviour as “counter-elites”. These are people of enormous privilege who – counterintuitively – strive to dismantle the systems that have provided them with this privilege in an attempt to exert even greater power.

The obvious modern examples are Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk. Trump has the most powerful and high status job in the world, and Musk is the wealthiest person on the planet. Yet alongside the rapacious competition they see themselves in with other powerful and wealthy people, what they don’t have is the respect of people with class and taste – which is what they actually crave. As a result they are attacking – and now capturing and eroding – political and social institutions as a form of petulant revenge.

The second type of intra-elite competition is more complex, but it is where we find the mechanics of how radical ideas become institutionalised.

Due to the significant increase in education over the past 50-60 years, there is now far greater competition for well-paid and high status jobs, and often not enough to go around. This is creating social turbulence.

Instinctively, I hate this idea, because one should never be suspicious of education and we absolutely should be striving towards having highly educated societies. The idea that we require a subaltern class without knowledge and capabilities is a repulsive one.

Yet, there is a recognisable issue here.

Educated people quite rightly expect that the efforts they’ve made to obtain degrees should come with the reward of jobs and social recognition that reflect these efforts. Yet without enough well-paid and high status jobs there are now strong incentives for individuals to differentiate themselves through more radical ideas as a way of obtaining influence and status within their societies. This is compounded by one of the central psychological pillars of progressive politics – that there is always a more radical position, and this more radical position is morally superior by default.

There’s a recognisable pattern in how these ideas develop and expand. Activists and intellectuals often distinguish themselves within movements and institutions by pushing arguments further, seeking attention, legitimacy, or moral authority. As earlier demands become normalised or partially institutionalised, the baseline shifts, creating incentives to identify new injustices or reinterpret existing ones in broader, more systemic terms.

Group polarisation and moral commitment reinforce this dynamic. Like-minded networks reward stronger signalling of conviction, while moderation risks being framed as complacency or complicity. Gatekeepers emerge to prescribe the “correct” language, periodically redefining language in ways that sustain their authority and weed out heretics. Emotional drivers — outrage, moral certainty, and identity investment — deepen the attachment to more radical positions, so that scrutiny of ideas can come to feel like betrayal rather than good faith debate about which political and social arrangements genuinely improve the human condition.

Due to elite overproduction, the state has felt the need to absorb some of this larger educated cohort and this has led to this process of radicalisation advancing into the bureaucracy. This has expanded the role of the state to be more active in social issues – areas where in liberal societies its role should be limited. This has also aligned with another progressive impulse – that for a society to value something the state has to do it.

This dynamic helps explain why the Victorian government is advertising for a Senior Adviser, Policy and Research (anti-racism). However, roles like this create an internal tension within a liberal democratic state: its constitutional framework and commitment to the rule of law rest on universal principles applied equally to individuals, while parts of the bureaucracy are tasked with advancing perspectives that are sceptical of that universalism. The result is a structural contradiction, in which institutions designed to administer neutral rules now advance ideas that prioritise group-based interpretation.

When a political framework places a strong emphasis on racial identity it encourages people to interpret themselves and others first and foremost through racial categories rather than as individual citizens – or, to judge people by the colour of their skin, and not the content of their character. When this framework dominates the public discourse it atomises society, dissolving the broader national and civic commitments that plural societies need to maintain cooperation.

Those who are already predisposed to grievance politics respond by tightening their attachment to group identity, drawing sharper distinctions between groups, and interpreting all social changes as attacks on their identity group. Such thinking is the primary psychological driver of conspiracies like the great replacement theory. These people thrive on racially essentialist thinking; the idea that racial groups are coherent, fixed, and politically primary.

Progressive politics is currently playing right into their hands, and so we are seeing a far more open and aggressive form of racism within Western countries. This has emerged because of another little quirk in progressive psychology. To progressives, the internal rule that “everyone is allowed to organise themselves politically by racial groups, except white people” makes sense. The West’s historically dominant group should “check its priv” and not exert itself politically the same way as minority groups. But white supremacists don’t play by these internal progressive rules, they see the encouragement of racially-based political organisation and recognise it as an opportunity to do likewise.

This relates to another eternal oversight of progressive politics – the impulse to create bureaucratic structures without considering how they could be used nefariously. Currently in Australia there has been a surge in polling support for the anti-immigration One Nation party. Do we really want a web of bureaucratic structures and data focused on race to be in the hands of a party whose leader has recently said “how can you tell me there are good Muslims?”

There’s a reason why regimes like the Nazis or Apartheid South Africa were obsessed with collecting racial data, and it wasn’t so they knew which important cultural dates to acknowledge. Central to liberalism must be the awareness of not concentrating too much power in the state because you never know who is going to use that power. Although France clearly has its political problems at the moment, its refusal to collect census data on race or religion is a demonstration of the state’s commitment to universalism over identity. Most importantly, this is also to prevent vicious political movements from having a tool at their disposal should they win political power.

Anti-racism is built on a belief that institutions and governments need to actively work to “rectify history”. The problem is that bureaucracies rarely do temporary measures. Max Weber recognised that bureaucratic structures become self-perpetuating, they operate on rules and process, and so can be hard to reform and difficult to dismantle once established. Even if history could be rectified – an absurd notion – these race-focused bureaucratic structures would not wilfully disassemble.

To be concerned about the centring of race in political discourse and bureaucratic structures is not the same as being suspicious of different cultures. Melbourne is one of the most diverse cities in the world and it’s a truly brilliant place to live because of this. Due to my staunch belief that food starts in Kabul and heads east, this is particularly advantageous for me.1

But multiculturalism at a civic level only works if there are a broader set of social commitments that can act as a binding agent. For this, the state needs to embody universalism – meaning the law and its policy frameworks dispenses no favour or discrimination to people based on racial or religious group. Universalism is what allows cultural difference to exist within a shared political framework; it ensures that diversity operates within common rules rather than competing systems of recognition.

When this principle weakens, tensions emerge not only at the level of theory but in the everyday lives of non-majority communities. The ideological assumptions of anti-racism often conflict with how these groups see themselves. Many do not want to be treated as symbolic constituencies rather than individuals with their own views and priorities. They may have left highly hierarchical and group-centric countries precisely because they value the egalitarian and liberal nature of Australia and want to participate fully in it. That aspiration can sit comfortably alongside pride in their cultural heritage. It reflects the complexity of human identity — a complexity that both racists and anti-racists struggle to accommodate.

I hope that my critique here will not be conscripted into the unhinged anti-Victoria narrative that now animates conservative politics in Australia.2 There is no grand conspiracy here, no coordinated descent into illiberalism directed from Spring Street. What we are seeing is something at once more mundane, but potentially more troubling: a government not thinking carefully enough about the ideas it absorbs and the language it legitimises.

The problem is not ideological intent but intellectual complacency — a failure to properly interrogate fashionable concepts before embedding them in policy, a lack of discernment about which voices are influential, and an inattention to the structural incentives that quietly push institutions in illiberal directions. The machinery of self-scrutiny that should discipline government decision-making is faltering. And it is this lack of judgement – especially on issues of race – that has the potential to become incredibly dangerous.

As an undergraduate at La Trobe University in Melbourne I took class with now-Emeritus Professor of Politics, Robert Manne. The class was an overview of the 20th Century through its great essays and books (non-fiction and fiction). It was the best class I’ve ever taken, and has provided me with an enormous direction with my subsequent work.

One of the essays studied in the class was Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless – written by the Czech playwright and dissident in 1978 while under secret police surveillance and harassment. The essay has come back into prominence after being used by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney to frame his address to the World Economic Forum in late-January.

As Carney illustrated, the central character of the essay was the greengrocer who places the sign “Workers of the World United” in his shop window. The greengrocer may very well have wanted the workers of the world to unite, but this was not his intent. Instead the sign was placed in the window because he knew not doing so would invite suspicion and a knock on his door. The sign served as a demonstration that the greengrocer was doing what was expected of him and therefore earned the right to be left alone by the authorities.

Havel extrapolated that this was part of the “living inside a lie” that governed communist Czechoslovakia, and other similar totalitarian societies. Living this way involved repeating slogans, performing rituals and obeying expectations to avoid punishment or exclusion. By doing so, individuals help sustain the system’s power, sacrificing truth and dignity in exchange for a fragile sense of safety and normality.

Carney’s argument was that the global community was similarly engaged in the ritual of performance. Mouthing platitudes about the “rules based order” that were designed to placate us as we avoid recognising the world is undergoing a dramatic shift in values. Or a “rupture” as Carney described it. Gone was the architecture of technocratic cooperation – or the attempt to create it – and in its place lay the blunt realities of raw power and rapacious will.

The resonance the speech had was not so much its diagnosis of the global environment, but the satisfaction of acknowledging these conditions. The speech was a relief value. It provided the permission to speak more honestly. With the added respect that Canada, a country which is shackled both geographically and economically to what is now a revisionist superpower, would so conspicuously take their sign down.1

More broadly, the sentiment of Carney’s speech highlighted the exhaustion of our current age. Modern political movements have appetites that are rarely satisfied. They are demanding and conflictual. These movements practice “total politics” – seeing public space as political fields to continuously claim through slogans and symbols. Offering no neutral space for civil society to inhibit and cooperate, and no respite for anyone who might want such a space.

Havel’s essay had already found a present-day resonance prior to Carney’s speech as a critique of modern progressive shibboleths. Land acknowledgements and bio pronouns can be seen as being akin to the greengrocer putting his sign in the shop window. Signals that people are doing what is expected of them, of holding the correct opinions, and therefore have earned the right to be left alone. Whatever sentiment these ideas had originally sought to convey now take a backseat to their social pressures.

These pressures, regardless of their social, political, or international manifestations eat away at our dignity. Dignity begins as a quiet insistence within the individual: the need to live in alignment with what one knows to be true. When that alignment is broken — when we speak words we do not believe or perform rituals emptied of meaning — we feel a subtle, yet profound diminishment. These little cuts compound into a sense that one isn’t able to live in a genuine and honest manner.

As these small acts of self-betrayal accumulate, they harden into social reality. A society organised around pretence teaches its members that truth is dangerous and costly. The façade becomes ambient — no longer imposed solely from above, but maintained by mutual silence and shared cowardice. Havel’s greengrocer reveals how oppression persists without constant violence: people internalise the public game of slogans and reproduce them themselves. In such a world, dignity is not crushed dramatically but slowly drained, replaced by resignation and cynicism.

What happens to individuals under a regime of façade also happens to nations in the international system. States, like people, hunger for dignity — to be recognised as legitimate, coherent, and self-respecting actors — and when they structure their external posture around fictions, that dignity erodes. Havel’s insistence was that dignity is not granted by strength, but by refusing to live within a lie. A nation may continue to function without dignity, but it no longer stands upright in the world.

The “rules based order” was meant to provide dignity to nations. For each country, no matter how small and lacking in power, to be respected within the international system. This was never going to be perfect, powerful countries would always throw their weight around. But the architecture of the system at least allowed smaller countries to turn up at international forums and feel like they had some form of voice and respect.

Carney acknowledging that this attempt at universal respect was now gone may have exposed Canada to having mouthed the slogan, but it also exposed the countries who have been undermining the system – United States, Russia, China. As Havel wrote, were the greengrocer to place a sign in his window that said “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient” it would be an embarrassment to the greengrocer. However, it would also be an embarrassment to the regime, as it would reveal the truth about their power. One that had nothing to do with the workers of world uniting.

This is why Donald Trump was so quick to dismiss Carney’s speech. His fondness for humiliation was exposed. And exposed by the country that arguably has the most to lose. Far from being embarrassed, Carney – and Canada – had displayed courage. Something that also embarrasses Trump.

Of course, the greater permission to speak freely that Carney has sought to establish doesn’t make this new reality any easier. Carney’s prescriptions are hard work and sober endurance. It won’t be fun. But acknowledging a problem moves us from a state of denial towards acceptance and action. It now gives us a sense of responsibility, which elicits far less anxiety – and far more dignity – than maintaining a façade.

Donald Trump and his administration have clearly signalled their intent to operate without restraint. Trump himself informed the New York Times last week that his power will only be restrained by his “own morality”. Which, given he is a civilly liable sexual abuser, an attempted coup instigator, and a compulsive liar (as the tip of the iceberg) shouldn’t instil the world with confidence.

His deputy chief of staff, and the administration’s prime psychopath, Stephen Miller, expanded on this theme in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper by stating bluntly: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

What the administration has articulated, through both its actions and its words, is an explicit worldview. One that is built around their own power and ability to exercise it at will. The constraints of laws, of constitutions, of personal ethics, and the realities of what we see with our own eyes, are all dispensed with. Instead the governing principles are the dark passions of humanity: anger, hatred, resentment, deception, and the urge to dominate. These passions are being exercised through the spectacle of violence. With both the spectacle and the arbitrary nature of it designed to cower people and leave the administration without challenge.

What the Trump administration is engaged in is domestic regime change. Plato’s original concept of “regime” was the ideas, form of government, the constitution of a society, and – most importantly to understand the MAGA movement – the moral character of the citizenry.

In less expansive terms, in modern Western countries the regime is liberal democracy. Governments may be won by different parties, with different platforms and policies, but the constitution – and the ideas it embodies – doesn’t change with election results.

Until Trump’s second term, the regime of the United States had been liberal democracy. Now the country is in regime purgatory. Given the decentralised nature of the country, and its muscle memory, much of the U.S still functions as a liberal democracy, however the office of the presidency is attacking and overthrowing its tenets by the day. Attempting to install a new authoritarian regime. With Trump as its emperor.

To understand the worldview of the administration there is a need to return to the philosophical thought experiments of humanity’s “state of nature”. Or, “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time”, as Miller aggressively put it. Were Miller a curious man, he would know that these laws aren’t iron, but both debatable and complex.

Trump is often understood as a Hobbesian creature. A brutish beast mired in vainglory who only understands the world in terms of his own advantage. Without a strong sense of order, Thomas Hobbes believed that these creatures would roam the Earth creating a permanent insecurity and a “war of every man against every man.” For Hobbes these dark impulses were an innate feature of humanity and political structures needed to be devised to restrain them. Rational individuals would therefore relinquish some personal freedom to a powerful sovereign to establish mutual safety.

Unlike Hobbes, John Locke believed that humans had greater moral capabilities. Behaviour was not inherent, but was formed. Character was developed from experience, reflection and guidance. Through positive education and experience, humans could be ethical agents capable of governing themselves through reason. As an extension of this, a character-bound population was necessary to create a virtuous government.

Locke was the most influential philosopher on America’s founding documents and the broader American project. And it is through Locke where we can see Trump’s regime change, in both the direct and expanded Platonic sense. To Locke, virtue lay in one’s own self-command – the ability to govern one’s desires, and to act with long-term rational judgement, not immediate impulse. Restraint and deliberation were the foundations of moral character. Things Trump and his acolytes clearly struggle with.

Which is why it might be Jean-Jacques Rousseau who reveals more about the nature of the Trump administration. Rousseau believed that humans in their state of nature were not motivated by dark impulses, but instead were fundamentally innocent and naturally virtuous. This may not seem Trumpian, but Rousseau thought that the corruption of humanity lay in the social institutions people were subjected to. That the social “chains” we see as civilisation actually restrained humans from being their true, authentic, selves.1

Rousseau himself was a scumbag. He had an extraordinary talent for quarrelling, falling out with many of his contemporary thinkers. He also fathered five children, all of whom he dumped in a foundling hospital in Paris due him considering them a burden on his freedom. In practice, he saw his freedom of action and pursuit of authenticity as his primary interest. Rousseau rationalised his personal failings as moral principles.

The Trump administration’s state of nature takes inspiration from both Hobbes and Rousseau. It believes that humans are guided by dark impulses, but that social and political institutions have no right to restrain these impulses. They believe that the institutions of liberal democracy – and modern social mores – are corrupting, and the only way for humanity to be its authentic self is for it to manifest a dog-eat-dog world. Where they are the biggest and hungriest dogs.

Like Rousseau, the Trump administration is centring their own personal failings as both a set of principles, and as a political project to fundamentally change the country, as well as the global order. The aggression of the administration – and the broader MAGA movement – is driven by modern men’s grim fragility. The status sensitivity, wholesale defensiveness, anxiety about appearing weak, the puffed chests, belligerent rhetoric, and obsession with the most vulgar and clownish masculine stereotypes.

These traits highlight the deep emotional insecurity that is at the core of authoritarianism. Trump’s relentless narcissism is not confidence. He may be shameless, but this disguises his brittle self-esteem. On some level he knows that he is a profoundly ignorant and grotesquely flawed human being. He overcompensates for this with bluster and brutality. Hoping that this will cower into submission those who could expose his flaws. It has worked perfectly on the Republican Party.

Those who lack the personal capabilities to navigate the world with compromise and cooperation, only understand the world of dominance and subordination. Either you are dominating people, or you are being dominated by them. The concepts of character, friendship and trust are beyond their comprehension. It’s also why something like a country’s constitution is so inconceivable to Trump. Constraints on the use of power are for suckers. But constitutions also expose him to legalities that he knows he cannot meet.

At the core of dominance lies a low tolerance for uncertainty. Ambiguity is experienced as threat and complexity as chaos, so the world’s multiplicity provokes fear rather than curiosity. This mindset seeks psychological safety through control: by trying to make the external world rigid and predictable, it compensates for internal emotional disorder. Where self-regulation, adaptability, and persuasion feel out of reach, domination becomes a substitute.

Force becomes appealing because it negates uncertainty quickly. It creates immediate, tangible outcomes, even if those outcomes are destructive or fragile. The logic of the Trump administration is that it can use the power of the White House in a way that can calm their anxiety over uncertainty. The problem is that the world is far more complex than just who has the biggest fist, and what Trump is doing is creating greater uncertainty, not less. Which may then inspire a greater use of force.

The struggle to understand and tolerate complexity is what leads authoritarians to hold a zero sum worldview. In each transaction between people or countries one party must win and the other must lose. There is a deep cynicism towards the possibility of mutual benefit. The notion of cooperation is both naïve and risky. The potential of being the loser inspires preemptive aggression. With this aggression being seen as rational, even virtuous, because it prevents imagined losses.

This zero sum worldview is also central to the authoritarian preoccupation with hierarchies. For the Trump administration the calculation is quite simple – the U.S is the most powerful country therefore all other countries should bow in submission to it. Domestically there is an inability to emotionally cope with the natural pluralism of the U.S, which is why the White House’s fist is also directed inward at American society.

That all people are created equally and endowed with certain inalienable rights is unfathomable to authoritarians. Instead there is the need to create in-groups and out-groups, to rank groups by favour and animosity, and reject wholesale any individual agency outside of group status. Obedience to group status and hierarchical position is expected, and any divergence is met with fierce hostility. Order is only understood as strict compliance with the demands of the apex group. Not through anything as “beta” as cooperation and trust.

Power, and the ability to exercise it, is seen as the only form of legitimacy. The violence that White House is currently radiating is held to be a pure expression of humanity. Deliberation, discussion, negotiation, policy, laws and process are all deemed to be artificial. They are not just impediments to the impatient, but are considered to be impositions on an authentic and effective form of human action. Real men act with force. They don’t draft anything for circulation and input.

The thrill of violence also serves as a bonding mechanism for the in-group. It demonstrates the risk of dissenting from the group, creating mutual assured incrimination to maintain loyalty and build cohesion. Violence also becomes a rite of passage. Being recruited by ICE to be one of the administration’s jackboots is now the highest form of honour for MAGA diehards.

An aggressive demeanour is also an attempt to reverse humiliation. Trump has never gotten over being deemed too uncouth for Manhattan high society. His administration collectively views Europeans as the same cultural elites who they crave acceptance from and then lash out at because they’ll never receive it. Their belligerence is an attempt to demonstrate how weak cultural refinement is in the face of boorish intimidation.2

The suspicion of NATO, the aggression against Denmark, the support for parties like the Alternative Für Deutschland, is all driven by their sense of humiliation and a belief that undermining the liberal democratic architecture of Europe will restore their personal dignity.

Of course, this undermining of liberal democracy in Europe is also designed to build a network of supplicant authoritarian states who will not adhere to the ethical and legal standards of liberal democracy, not create laws that constrain the administration’s friends (like tech companies), and who will know their place in the hierarchy.

Trump is obviously hostile to the restraints of liberal democracy, and will no doubt do whatever he can to prevent this year’s mid-term elections from running smoothly and fairly. However, the broader Trumpian revolution is the attempt to overthrow the country’s moral character. To refashion the country in the administration’s own image – malicious, corrupt, domineering, deceitful, ignorant, myopic, emotionally insecure, erratic and irresponsible.

The Trump administration are acting this way because they imagine that they can. They’re in thrall to the potency of the White House and assert that the purpose of the office is to wield its awesome power. Yet raw power is not as straight-forward as those who hunger for it believe. The intense polarisation of American politics may have protected Trump from his previous coup attempt, but those who unleash barbarity tend to eventually have it swing back towards themselves.

We are all so profoundly insecure. This is the pervasive sentiment that drives our current political and social movements. The chaotic emotions of MAGA, the obsession with gender – which includes masculinist clowns like Andrew Tate, the way we’ve siloed our media into informational safe spaces, and our attempts to sterilise the past as its realities don’t meet modern standards. It’s in our obsession with political labels, partisan teams, and social identities. We’ve become incredibly uncomfortable with being human, and seemingly incapable of being confident individuals.

These various manifestations of our insecurity have developed from the emotional stress of the pace of change. The economic and social revolutions of the past century, and especially the past 30 years, have unmoored us as people. Despite our ingenuity as a species, our monkey brains are still ill-equipped to handle such rapidly shifting environments. Leaving us anxious and with a heightened threat perception.

However, this anxiety has been compounded by a change in the way we discuss our world. Due to the brutal atrocities of the 20th Century, in its concluding decades we shifted how we viewed history. Rather than seeing history through the lens of the victor, we switched to prioritise the victim. For our own humanity this was essential, but it came with an unintended consequence. Social power now lies with your ability to present yourself as a victim of history.

Rather than seek to overcome our insecurity, we instead celebrate it. Victimology teaches us that insecurity and marginalisation is what we should be striving for. This may commonly be identified in postmodern progressive politics but is also clearly present in figures like Donald Trump who – despite being the president of the United States – is responsible for nothing, and always the victim of others. His return to the White House can be understood as the push and pull of a collective sense of victimhood and the waves of social resentment that has flowed from it.

Our insecurity is driving our retreat into what Søren Kierkegaard recognised as the danger of crowds. A phenomenon that aggravates itself. The more insecure we feel, the greater the need to submit ourselves into various identity and political groups. But the more we do so, the more we feel threatened by other people doing likewise. It is in this environment – where the confident individual is weakened – that “untruth” and authoritarianism thrives.

Insecurity craves political figures to submit to, so provides fertile ground for the reemergence of personality cults – from Trump to Jeremy Corbyn. These are figures who are deemed to be holders of the singular truth and pureness of spirit. Whose word is always gold, and who therefore all authority can safely be delegated to. Figures who can relieve you of the need to think for yourself.

While there has always been a desire within humanity to outsource our brains to others, our current collective insecurity has been inflamed by the peculiar form of narcissism borne from the online age. A paradox that sees the self as the most important entity, but this self must conform to group traits. This has created the cult of identity, which sees personal and group victimhood as a path to political and institutional power.

Alongside its designs on power, identity politics’ belief is that it is striving for authenticity. Yet in reality, it is the opposite. Instead of being authentic, identity is affected and laboured. It is the performance of personality, fabricated for the attention economy and then exported out into the polity.

Genuine authenticity doesn’t constantly think about itself. It is simply the confidence to be. But the confident individual doesn’t exist within a vacuum, there is no authenticity without a recognition of humanity’s social context, with its duties and responsibilities to others. Identity, however, is often anti-social with its rejection of both broader humanity and local culture. It sees self-exertion as its priority.

While identity believes itself to be culture, it is distinct in critical ways. Genuine culture exists within habits, manners and traditions. It is the unconscious inheritance of people within a community. It has no need to advertise itself. It doesn’t require a loudspeaker, overt symbols, or to be continuously affirmed. While nations may have flags, they don’t necessarily need them. Flag-waving is often an expression of the nation as an identity, rather than a culture. The contrived performance of a nation, rather than the subconscious application of its customs.

Nations and communities of confidence and resilience can handle debate and disagreement. They can house a myriad of ideas within a framework of common practices and interests. By contrast, insecure nations and communities – and especially political teams – demand conformity. They see those who don’t fall in line as threats and become aggressive in their attempts to police behaviour.

As insecurity and identity have taken hold throughout the West, we have become people without qualities. To be resilient and adaptable garners us no attention and therefore has no social worth. Neither does having the character to live by integrity and responsibility. This degradation of character has revealed that political norms – and even constitutions – are easily dispensed with by the corrupt and deceitful.

This degradation of character is being exacerbated by the pathologising of the human condition. Where normal, everyday, feelings or behaviours are deemed to be symptoms of a mental disorder. To have a hobby now is to be autistic. To be organised and tidy is OCD, to be disorganised and messy is ADHD. These “mental illnesses” have also become an identity. Repackaged as being “neurodivergent” and included in one’s social media bio.

Pathologising is not only central to victimhood but driven by a desire to have an excuse. We are eschewing personal responsibility and asking others to permanently deem us to be incapable of any adult task. We no longer have the capabilities to navigate the world with confidence. We no longer expect this of ourselves.

Stripping away character and confidence has left us devoid of the public narratives required to encourage positive action in our daily lives and to strive for greatness. As the philosopher Susan Neiman has recognised, the shift in our view of history has not just encouraged victimhood, it has taken away the hero as a central actor in the stories we tell and as an exemplar of human behaviour.

The hero encouraged virtue. The hero’s appeal is different to the appeal of personality cults. His role was to simply be emblematic of positive ambition, demonstrating principled leadership and human excellence. To provide inspiration, not submission. The hero played an especially important role in directing the energy of young men towards positive outlets. Giving young men guidance and purpose, without which their energy can turn chaotic and dangerous.

The problem we face now is that the desire for heroism remains, but without any positive extraordinary efforts within both our history and modern stories this demand is being serviced by people with nefarious ambition, like Trump and Elon Musk. These grotesque men are being valorised because they’re the only men who seem to be demonstrating any ambition, and there is no prominent counter-model to encourage our better angels.

The influence of nefarious ambition is not only degrading our political institutions, but our social infrastructure as well – creating the extensive mistrust that compounds insecurity. The relationship between bullying and victimhood is obviously symbiotic. There are real, genuine, victims who are subject to the brutality of others. But bullies tend to see themselves as victims of social conditions that aren’t servicing their psychological needs. So, as we’ve centred victimhood in our stories, we’ve created fertile soil for bullies to roam.

This practice of victimhood therefore weakens our mutual cooperation. The lines between perceived threats and genuine threats become blurred, and everyone who may be different – whether it be skin colour, religion, or political views – becomes suspicious. The practice of victimhood hasn’t advanced empathy; it has done the very opposite. It has led us to retreat further into insular, insecure, and agitated groups.

As economic and social change are conjoined twins (with the former one foot ahead of the latter), our social institutions – like religion – that could have grounded us through our escalating innovation have also been swept aside. We now lack the forms of organisation that gave us a broad common purpose and thicker social relations.

Despite disputes between religions and denominations periodically turning sectarian and violent, the traditional religions at their best restrained us from descending inward into parochial niche groups, and especially inward into ourselves. They could provide a social binding agent, even in plural societies of multiple faiths.

In this way, their merit was less about the worship of God, and more about asking us to think about others, rather than ourselves. You would turn up to your church, synagogue or mosque and it gave you a genuine, in-person, community. And it – hopefully, depending on the sermon – left you with a series of outward-facing ideas that inspired duty and virtue in your daily behaviour. The traditional religions could be character-building machines.

Although commitment to these religions has waned, our desire for mysticism hasn’t abated. It has instead found new outlets that are far less socially constructive. Our new mystical beliefs like wellness, genderism, and the sovereign citizen movement, are entirely self-centred. They see their primary obligation as being to oneself, and any communal duties and responsibilities are seen as discriminatory threats.

Such self-centred movements have capitalised on the privatisation of “the good”. A shift in collective thinking where maximising personal advantage is deemed life’s primary objective. Creating a social form of neoliberalism – where homo economicus has been joined by homo identicus. While the objective of homo economicus has been to simply maximise income as a worker and gains as consumer, homo identicus seeks to maximise social power by placing demands on societies to be recognised as requiring privileges due to group and/or victim status.

These demands of homo identicus are therefore in direct challenge to the rule of law. They seek to create law not on mutually beneficial principles where everyone is equal before the law, but instead where those of perceived victimhood status are favoured by the law. This has further incentivised victimhood as a path not just to social power, but state power. An incentive that movements like MAGA have also understood as an opportunity to subvert the rule of law through their own narratives of victimhood.

Our pervasive insecurity is now eating away at our institutional and political structures. It is eating away at our pluralism and social cooperation. It is eating away at our ability to derive genuine meaning from our lives, and it is eating away at our ability to be resilient, character-bound, confident individuals. The latter of which is our bulwark against authoritarianism.

Shifting our view of history from the victor to the victim hasn’t led us to learn from the brutal mistakes of the 20^th Century. It has instead created the conditions for the brutes to return.

If there’s one colloquial idiom that best encapsulates the Australian character it is she’ll be right. The “she” here could be anything, it’s not a person. The phrase means that whatever has occurred it is not a problem. No matter how big the problem, or how others may perceive an inconvenience, Australians will generally find it to be not much of a bother.

The phrase is indicative of Australians as a casual people – although our close Kiwi cousins take being casual to relaxed new heights (or lows). If something goes wrong, well, there’s a solution somewhere, there’s little point getting upset, we’ll figure it out eventually. Or, we just learn to live with the problem.

This extends beyond problems to the functioning of everyday items. If something works well enough then it’s fine. And fine is good. One of the little problems I have here in Sweden is that when I say “it’s fine” (which I do a lot, as I personally would never say she’ll be right) Swedes think I’m being critical.1 They think what I am saying is that something is just basic and not of a good standard. But “it’s fine” means that I am completely comfortable with what is happening. I have no need, or no desire, to ask for, or expect, anything else.

As a national ethos this compounds up into Australians being a people who shun drama. In fact, another phrase you might hear from Australians in place of she’ll be right is no dramas. The society as a whole has a social immune system that works to make sure conflict either never occurs, or is expelled quickly. Aside from the occasional fragile male ego, we’re never going to sue anyone. We’d much rather take responsibility for others’ mistakes than go through the hassle of any formal processes.

This tendency to admit fault when we aren’t at fault is a tool we use to prevent any tension. The unwritten social etiquette of Australia is that your obligation is to make sure every human interaction run as smoothly as possible. Even if it is to your detriment. Never make a fuss, never demand things of others, be comfortable with what you have, and always strive to give the social power to the person you are speaking with (and be genuine about it, not like the English who do this as a form of passive aggression).

This leads to other interesting tendencies. One of the paradoxes of Australia is that we have an accent that is truly grating – like a rusty nail being hammered into your ear drum – and this disguises an almost comical desperation to be helpful. We want to assist you, random stranger, but everything we say sounds like a verbal assault. This is compounded by our favourite word being one Americans tend to find offensive (and, confusingly, it could be an insult or a term of endearment, depending on the tone or preceding adverb2). Listening to us fucking sucks, but we’re actually doing everything we can to make your life easier.

All these traits are greatly positive and a big part of why Australia tends to work very well as a country. It’s also why political parties that have tried to import American-style hysterics into the country are faring so badly at the moment. Currently, there’s an insatiable lust for drama in the U.S, and Australians find this instinctively repellent.

However, there is a significant downside to what we can call she’ll be right-ism. This is that Australians are so completely comfortable with basic functionality that we don’t strive for excellence. The great heights of human endeavour are out of our reach because to pursue them requires being uncomfortable with what currently exists. Human excellence means having a vision for something better and to dive into creating it with passion and intensity. This seems both pretentious and completely unnecessary to Australians.

If there’s no reason to ever make a fuss, then there’s no reason to ever make anything exceptional. And as a result, we rarely do. This is reflected in our ranking on the Index of Economic Complexity, where our economic profile looks more like a Central Asian petro-state than the highly developed country we are.3 We have become so fabulously wealthy by just digging stuff up and putting it on ships that we’ve felt little need to do anything else.

This is Australia’s own unique “resource curse”, and prevents us from establishing other, more advanced, industries. It simply isn’t in our nature to innovate. So while Australia had a massive developmental head start on South Korea, there’s no way companies like a Samsung, LG or SK Hynik could ever originate in Australia. In Australia, if it works, it’s fine. And if it’s broke, well, you just stick some tape on it and it goes as good as new.

Yet this is a major strategic problem for Australia. Eventually the global energy market will shift en masse, our second and third largest exports – coal and natural gas – will fall off a cliff and we will have nothing in place to generate the kind of wealth they currently provide us.4 Given our casual nature we’ve developed no serious contingency. We may know this day is coming, but she’ll be right, something else will pop up. No need to be concerned.

Maybe Australians have the dispositional capabilities to adjust to economic decline? A little less of the things we want may not bother us too much. We’ll find a way to work with whatever we can muster up. We might even secretly love a test of our resilience. Being keen to prove just how undramatic we can be.

However, it’s likely that it has been our wealth and our peace that has bred our she’ll be right-ism. We think most things aren’t a great fuss because we’ve never truly had any significant problems. We think we can easily adjust to most situations because the adjustments we’ve made previously haven’t been so great. We’ve had the enormous luxury of being casual. And were this luxury to disappear, our national character might go with it.

This would be a great shame. The positive attributes of Australia’s national character outweigh the negatives. Our accommodating nature is important to who we are, and something we should be proud of. Our aversion to drama makes the country a very pleasant place to live. Yet being comfortable with mediocrity and thinking that anyone who strives for excellence is a wanker does us no favours. It limits our capabilities and prevents us from converting our natural advantages into exceptional human endeavours.

So contrary to our collective inclinations there’s room for improvement. The problem is national characters are hard to direct because they’re not conscious. They exist within customs and habits, and are not transmitted through any active instruction. But change comes through necessity, and this necessity is approaching. However, rather than a wholesale creative destruction of who we are as a people, a more subtle form of innovation is necessary.

Humanity’s current great structural problem is our decline in birth rates. This has moved from just being a phenomenon within highly developed, wealthy countries into becoming more widespread. Even countries that still have birth rates well above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, are seeing their figures decline. Given the exponential nature of the phenomenon, once the population starts to decline, it will decline rapidly.

Low birth rates impact every facet of human existence. The most direct dilemma they create is the greater burden on the working-age population to support those in retirement. But the issue extends to the ability to maintain local and national services, to what technological advances we are able to achieve (or preserve), what problems we are collectively able to solve, and all the way through to the global balance of power and the implications of which types of states can exert their will on the rest of the world.

The reasons to explain the decline in birth rates are numerous, from the waning of religious observance, the rise of women’s education, better access to contraception, general economic insecurity, the lack of affordable housing (with enough bedrooms for multiple kids), concerns about climate change, weaker social expectations around “settling down”, other delayed adult norms and less individual social resilience. Alice Evans has argued that the rise of smartphones and the enormous cultural shift they have created is also having a significant impact.

In the United Kingdom, Australia and United States, women state that they ideally would like more children than they are currently having. Which means that alongside the confluence of the reasons above, there may be another factor that is proving highly influential.

Yet this is a reason that people may find difficult to acknowledge or confront. Women nowadays – rightly – have a higher expectation of men for both partnership and fatherhood. Men, however, are not rising to the task. Instead, the response of many men to these new social conditions has been an intense wave of resentment and hostility – which is in turn spiralling up into our current political instability.

Like almost everything, the insanity of modern political culture is preventing us from seeing this issue clearly. Our current approach to politics can be formulated as – Person X says Y and I don’t like Person X therefore Y is wrong. And this formula has attached itself hard to this issue. Concern about low birth rates has been “coded” as a conservative issue, but this a deeply superficial understanding of their impacts.1

Certainly the pro-natalist movement has some unsavoury characters, from the attention-seeking weirdos Malcolm and Simone Collins2, to the 54 year-old teenage edgelord, Elon Musk. Many reactionary groups have seen declining birth rates as evidence that women should have never been allowed out of the house – hoping that the issue can drive a return to a world of women’s submission to men’s social control. Spend any time on Twitter and you’ll witness the most repulsive scumbags on the planet believing that the issue has given them free reign to relentlessly post vile and insane misogyny.

These reactions, and their political manifestations, are exacerbating the problem by making men even less appealing for partnership and fatherhood. As we can see from South Korea – a highly patriarchal society that hasn’t evolved as its women have become some of the world’s best educated (and most culturally savvy) – if men’s attitudes and broad social structures don’t change, women will simply avoid men altogether. And they will be entirely justified in doing so.

Yet the implications of this are dramatic. Societies without youth lack verve, imagination and confidence. Governments won’t see long-term investments as economically justifiable. Their focus will be on how to best manage decline – becoming highly anxious and combative in the attempt. The democratic calculations of political parties are completely different when a country’s median age is almost 50 – as Japan’s is – compared to a country with a median-age in the mid-20s. Democracy will become a game of protecting older generations’ advantages, rather than providing younger generations with opportunities. We already see this in housing policy throughout the West.

This means that the state of our menfolk is our most pressing political concern. Rather than being a “women’s issue”, declining birth rates should be seen as a men’s issue. It’s one of men’s behaviour, attitudes, and character. It’s one of how we, collectively, as men, develop a sense of responsibility. How we find positive purpose, duty, kindness, and personal humility. How we come to actually like women.

Men may find this offensive and difficult to accept. I can hear the “not all men” chants already. Yet instead of jerking our knees and clenching our fists, this requires us to stop, take a breath, and exhibit some maturity. At present there is a deep insecurity within masculinity and it is attaching itself to an intersecting web of negative influences and aggressive online movements. This includes people like Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh – tiny, pathetic, men who think that acting out the most brutal and clownish masculine stereotypes is what constitutes being a man.

Theirs is the chest-beating of humanity’s decline. A cultural impotence convinced of its own virility. Featherless peacocking. An approach to human relations so hilariously out of touch with current human conditions, yet spreading all the same. Creating a chasm between the sexes that is sending the species into a potentially precarious retreat.

Humans have a tendency to see our existence as a zero sum game. We believe that the more people there are, the less resources there are to be shared around. We retreat into groups and feel that other groups are unfairly receiving more of an imaginary finite pie. Yet the past few centuries have proved the opposite to be true. The extraordinary increase in comfort and luxury, as well as a vast reduction in global poverty, has been driven by our ability to collectively compound our resources for each other.3 The current wealth and creativity of humanity is inextricably tied to the revolutionary rise in people.

Now a similar revolution is taking place with the education and advancement of women. This is unlocking a vast new capability for humanity that had previously been suppressed. The problem is that this advancement doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These gains for women don’t come at the expense of men, yet many men think or feel they do. Zero sum thinking is difficult for us to overcome. Particularly when men’s sense of personal pride has been tied to a structural social superiority. New forms of social relations can feel like a loss.

The success of this revolution for humanity – and for humanity’s reproduction – therefore requires us to think about how we minimise men’s resentment towards women’s agency and advancement. Or, ideally, for it to gain enthusiastic male support.

What we need is a masculinity that is pleased that women are flourishing. Men who understand this as a strengthening of humanity, and recognise that it contributes to the conditions of their own advancement. I suspect this would be highly attractive to women.

To build such men we are required to think seriously about masculinity and what it needs from our social structures, without returning to structures that disadvantage or oppress women. As we are now seeing, when women are given freedom and opportunity they thrive, but young men especially require greater guidance, purpose and discipline. There’s an emotional fragility to masculinity that means men struggle without social reinforcement. Without this reinforcement, men become agitated, and when men get agitated they tend to get agitated straight through Poland.

As Richard Reeves has written in his book Of Boys and Men, manhood is something that men feel the need to continuously achieve. It is something that needs to be “won” and won again. “But what can be won can also be lost. Hence the fragility.”4 This means that we now require more sophisticated methods of providing social reinforcement.

Reeves argues that due to boys maturing more slowly than girls they should start school a year later – what is called “redshirting”. Across every measure of educational success from kindergarten up to post-graduate studies, girls and women are now overwhelmingly out performing boys and men. This is leaving young women without a large cohort of young men who could be considered suitable mates.5 Starting school a year later gives boys more time to mature into both the educational and social aspects of schooling.

Writing recently in the New York Times, Reeves and Robert D. Putnam highlight that the early 20th Century also experienced a crisis of masculinity. The response to this in the United States was a wide-ranging establishment of new civil society groups designed to channel boys and men’s chaotic energy into positive outlets. Big Brothers and the Boy Scouts were founded, and there was huge expansion of youth sporting leagues and athletic associations. The objective was to create a “mature, pro-social manhood”. What was critical to this was the leadership of other men.

Yet given the relentless cynicism of our current era – and the online distractions that compound men’s social alienation – a firmer hand may be required. Last year, while attending the Helsinki Security Forum, I had the opportunity to visit the Santahamina military base and speak with some young men doing their national service. Finland’s mandatory national service for all adult males is not solely about the threat from Russia, it is about the socialisation of young men into society. It provides them with professional development, social capabilities and most importantly a sense of purpose and civic responsibility.

Previously I had been suspicious of the macho culture within militaries, and how national service may encourage and imprint these traits onto young men wholesale. Yet, defence forces may be unique as institutions that are capable of providing discipline and strict social expectations on young men without making them feel like their masculinity is being threatened. National service may enable young men to “win” their manhood early, and hopefully develop the character and emotional security to not have to constantly prove this manhood in ridiculous and dangerous ways as they rejoin society.

What I observed when talking to these young Finnish men was a serious sense of duty. They understood the reasons why they were there and the importance of what they were doing. Of course, sharing a 1340 kilometre border with a permanently belligerent country provides stark clarity about the world for the Finns, but duty is something we can foster within young men without having Finland’s tragedy of geography. If men need a grand purpose, then they are now being presented with one.

Rather than see women’s greater expectations on partnership and fatherhood as an imposition and react with resentment and malice, there’s an opportunity to see this as an opportunity and responsibility. For men to carry these expectations on their shoulders. Men’s need for pride and status may be persistent, but it is also malleable and harnessable. There are enormous prideful rewards to be won in impressing women with your character. In presenting yourself as fatherhood material.

For the bulk of human history it didn’t matter to the species that men didn’t particularly like women. But now it does. The biological conditions for reproduction are insufficient, it is the social conditions that have become paramount. It remains an extraordinary risk for women to go anywhere near a man, and it is a risk many women are now unwilling to take.6 We, as men, have to acknowledge this and take responsibility for rectifying it.

Due to biological realities, the vast weight of humanity’s existence has been carried by women. The effort men have needed to make by comparison has been miniscule. But the world is now facing an era where men’s tiny biological efforts need to be supplemented with a great new endeavour in temperament and virtue. The times have changed, and now humanity’s biggest question is whether men can meet them.

I have a theory that the current madness of American politics can be traced back to a seemingly very little thing. Little things can seem inconsequential when they are normalised, but they have a tendency to spiral up into much larger things when they become institutionalised. From here they become instrumental in creating cultures, and cultures are incredibly powerful.

In 31 states and the District of Columbia when you register to vote you are asked to pick a party you wish to be affiliated with. This may seem normal in the U.S, but it’s a practice not replicated in any similar democracy. Here in Australia you register to vote solely as a citizen, not as a fan of a particularly team. For any official organisation to have a record of the party you support would undermine the ethos of the secret ballot – even if you are not compelled in the U.S to vote for the party you registered your affiliation.

My theory is that this bureaucratic detail of registering party affiliation has had an enormous influence on the strong party identity in the U.S. It’s why people who aren’t elected representatives call themselves Republicans or Democrats.1 It’s what has led to the entire framework to discuss American politics being build around a form of anthropological categorisation where people are analysed like members of an ancient tribe where we have no way of knowing their personal attributes, only collective ones. It’s what has allowed these parties to not just own the political system, but to own people souls.

It has created an absurd form of allegiance that when a political party radically alters the ideas it stands for – like the Republican Party has – people still vote for that party, because they identify with the label, and not the platform. Today you could put Joseph Stalin (R) on a ballot and almost everyone registered as a Republican would vote for him.2

This past week the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed the social scientist Alice Evans about the global decline in birth rates and its social consequences.34 This little exchange caught my attention. In the first part of this clip Evans says something incredibly revealing. What is extraordinary about it is that, as a Brit, it’s an assertion she would never make about British politics, but is one she’s comfortable making about American politics – that Republicans have more babies therefore they will win more elections.

This assertion is based on an observation about the intensity of American political culture, and the structural – and mental – hold it has on American society.

The assertion is that Americans are born into political affiliation and that this is immutable. That Americans lack the capabilities to assess ideas on their own merit, or navigate the world outside of party identity. They inherit political positions from their parents and this is almost fixed.5 But more than this, it is a belief that in the U.S a political party shapes your behaviour and beliefs – not you, the citizen, shaping political parties – and by extension, a political party shapes the very nature of who you are as a person.

What such an assertion concludes is that American politics is now sectarian. That the U.S has become Northern Ireland in the 20th Century – the only thing you are is either a Catholic or Protestant, all your descendants will be exactly the same, the only thing you believe is that you hate the other sect, and every single aspect of the society is governed by these perspectives – from the schools you go to, to where you work, to where you live. The objective of politics is to use the power of the state to advantage your group and to fuck down on the other group.

You see this sectarianism in the way Americans casually say “red states” or “blue states”. Like these are “Catholic areas” or “Protestant areas” of Belfast – with their “peace walls” built in-between. The culture of political identity is so entrenched – and this has sorted itself geographically – that most states are now one-party states.

This is being intensified by the whole nature of modern politics being built around identity groups. The politics of identity relies on outsourcing one’s brain to others. It sees the objective of life – not just politics – as being part of a group, rather than being an individual. It has insecurity at its core. People want to know what positions they should hold, or how they should behave. Rather than being confident in oneself. It’s the opposite of authenticity. And it is the vulnerability that sectarianism preys upon.

Because sectarianism is based on insecurity, it instinctively seeks emotional safety inside the in-group. However, the more it does, the more it compounds and intensifies this sectarianism. It’s a doom loop, and one with potentially violent and destabilising consequences. As we saw on 6 January 2021.

The question is whether Americans are able to transcend this thinking, or whether they are now bound to it? That once a party becomes an identity is there no escape from the spiral of sectarianism?

In her book, How Civil Wars Start UC San Diego’s political scientist Barbara Walter pinpoints two core features that create fertile ground for civil wars. The first is the classification of a country as an “anocracy”. This is a term for countries that have a mix of democratic and authoritarian features. They lack the strong impartial democratic institutions that allow people to work together to achieve acceptable compromises, but at the same time lack the authoritarian muscle to prevent violence from occurring. The U.S is now an anocracy.

The second feature Walter cites is the calcification of identity politics. Where people organise themselves in identity-based factions and are incapable of understanding the world outside of these factions. As identity is housed in people’s souls, it is far more powerful than simply different policy choices, or even economic interests. It feels existential.

I suspect that far too many incentives are built into American politics to weaken these problems – from the way both traditional and social media operate, to the way primary elections are run, to the politicisation of almost every role from dog-catcher up to Supreme Court justices, to it being very unlikely that registering a party affiliation will be removed from voter registration forms given that these forms are not created by independent commissions.

While many states include more than just the Republican and Democratic parties on their forms (to give the appearance of a broader polity), this doesn’t nullify the problem of party identity. It still incentivises people to call themselves by a party name, and therefore encourages them to understand the world through the lens of group identity.

The lesson for the rest of us, and our bureaucracies more than anyone, is be very careful about the unintended consequences of the forms you create. Especially in this Age of Identity.

A couple of weeks ago I applied for a job. I don’t want a new job. But this was only a two-day a week job, and I currently have two days a week free (or I did when I applied). I had hoped to spend these two free days working on my own writing, but this job advert drove itself straight into my prefrontal cortex with lights and sirens blazing.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) needed someone to help formulate new language policy guidelines. Ideally they were looking for a candidate with a background in linguistics, but I thought what they really needed was someone who spends a disproportionate amount of their time in mental anguish at the lazy language that journalists use. So I thought I’d apply.

But as I figured my application would likely go nowhere, rather than a standard cover letter I instead wrote them a short piece of writing highlighting some of my major bugbears. Maybe they would find the writing amusing, or maybe they’d at least call for a chat to discuss some of the issues I raised.

I’m yet to get a call.

But rather than this being a colossal waste of time, I thought I would adapt and expand the commentary/application for this newsletter. Some of my arguments were drawn from my essay Our “So-Called” Problem – so may be familiar to longtime readers.

Journalism operates on the assumption that there are pre-established receptors in the audience’s mind it needs to tap into. To do so, the language journalists use is often cliché, with stock-standard phrases, or conventional or overused terminology. The use of such standard terminology is not only terrible communication, but it also frequently fails to accurately explain subject matter.

Central to journalism fulfilling its mission to inform and educate is journalists maintaining a vigilant eye on their own work, as well as the work to others – to recognise what terminology to avoid. This involves examining commonly used terms and phrases and questioning whether they are accurate and useful. And especially what they may imply.

Yet at present this vigilant eye is missing. The pace of digital journalism makes a conscious examination of terms and phrases difficult – there’s a lack of time to breathe and think. Instead, the terms and phrases used by other journalists are seen as the terms and phrases journalists should use. Embedding them further.

This problem is twofold. First it is one of confidence. When we lack confidence we mimic the behaviour of others – outsourcing both our own voice and our minds. When this lack of confidence is wholesale it produces a media environment mired in platitudes and banality, leaving us less, not more, informed. What Orwell described as language used for “concealing or preventing thought.”

Which leads to the second problem of not prioritising critical thinking skills – that is, the ability to interrogate language. For the media these skills should be pronounced and instinctive. To find overused or standardised language repulsive as a reflex, and because these terms and phrases often house incredibly bad ideas.

The example I find most useful is the linguistic virus of “so-called”. At its worst so-called drips with cynicism and bad faith. Its primary purpose is to discredit the noun that follows. So intense is this cynicism that we’ve developed the wild tautology of so-called being coupled with scare quotes. Or so-called “scare quotes”. Even if its use is due to laziness rather than malice, this laziness lives in submission to the phrase’s inherent cynicism.

This laziness also leads to language that lacks connection to a subject. Despite the Australian public currently trying to build a new multi-polar political system, “both sides of politics” is still used habitually. Even in the U.S where there are only two parties, there is no “both sides of politics”. Politics is a multi-faceted pursuit involving by a complex web of ideas, interests, culture, traditions and psychologies. It is not a team sport. It becomes a team sport when you’re only capable of describing – and therefore understanding – it as such.

This makes other team-based language also detrimental to journalism’s mission to inform and educate. The “-ists” (leftist, rightist, centrist) are awful, clunky, language – alongside demonstrating a shallow understanding of politics. It may be untenable for the ABC to abandon using the left-right spectrum completely, but there should be a greater awareness of its modern lack of utility1. And definitely both people and organisations should never be described as “leaning”, as has become a common framing.

Australian media does not want to become like its counterparts in the United States, where every individual or organisation has to have “liberal” or “conservative” precede their name. As if the audience is incapable of considering an action or quote on merit, and needs to be emotionally guided towards their favourite team instead. We should recognise how this style of journalism entrenches partisanism within the public2 – and to understand the divisive political and social conditions that flow from this.

There is a necessity to be aware of the unique political and cultural conditions in Australia and not let the dominance of American politics and culture dictate our political framework or journalistic styles.

As part of this, the ABC should see its role as defending the Australian dialect from Americanisation. I cannot understand why Gen Z is pronounced “Gen Zee” by Australian journalists. It’s as if this age bracket is deemed to be solely American, and the convention on the spelling of American proper nouns has been extended to pronunciation. It’s perplexing stuff.

The inattentive habits that drive Americanisation also drive journalism’s tendency towards reductionism. There’s constant inclination to strip out nuance and complexity at the expense of accuracy.

I live in a permanent state of exasperation at how the Coalition (which is four distinct parties)3 is persistently reduced to the acronym “LNP”. Having to mutter “the LNP only run in Queensland” at almost every article I read is getting tiresome. Aside from being lazy, the acronym is also practically useless during elections as the Liberal and National parties often run candidates against each other.4 Who is the “LNP candidate” in such seats?

The same habit of using “LNP” as a shorthand also leads to Australian Rules Football being described as “AFL”. Which is the equivalent of someone claiming they are playing “NBA” when they’re just going down to the park to shoot some hoops. There is no need to conflate the sport with its premier league. Especially because the Australian Football League (AFL) is a Stalinist monstrosity intent on consuming everything in its path.5 Referring to the sport as “AFL” only feeds and legitimises their obsessive need for control.6

This kind of pedantry wins me no friends in Australia. Australians feel syllables are an unfair burden and are always looking for ways to reduce them. Linguistic shortcuts are deemed to be both a human right and a source of national pride. To make an extrapolated argument, this perspective is so deeply embedded in the country’s psyche that it is one of the reasons why Australia ranks so laughably low on the Index of Economic Complexity. The bare minimum is the national ethos.

Any language policy seeking to counteract a national psyche is probably doomed to fail. But there is an opportunity for the ABC to instil manners in their journalists that can at least attempt to counteract its excesses. Striving to be precise is essential, as is being curious about nuance and complexity. Explaining complexity with clarity should be the guiding ideal of public communication, not mistaking simplicity for intelligibility. And at the core of their work, journalists should instinctively always be questioning language to determine its merit.

What I avoided here is arguably the more consequential problem with modern journalism – the uncritical adoption of activist language. What I fear is that the person hired for this position will seek to entrench this language, rather than challenge it.

However, I found that once I started thinking about modern progressive language orthodoxies it became a more substantial piece of work worthy of its own post. There is a need to explore in depth the reasons why these orthodoxies have developed, what their purpose is, and why these terms are often counter-productive to the people they claim to be in service of.

However, as a stop-gap, this piece from The New Republic a few years ago – The Left Has A Language Problem – is good at explaining some of these concerns. And it concludes with advice that gets to the heart of both journalism and the “political regeneration” that Orwell wrote of – the ability to be persuasive and to always write for those who may not initially agree with you.

On Saturday night Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, appeared on the hugely popular British podcast The Rest of Politics – with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. The interview was strategically placed as we are currently in an election campaign here in Australia (with an election on 3 May), and politicians are starting to understand that podcasts are now often where you can gain significant reach. Although British, The Rest is Politics has a huge global audience – enabling Albanese to speak to Australian voters and bring the country into the line of sight of people outside of Australia.

The interview was mostly a softball one. Campbell being a former Labour Party operative in the UK was keen to help its sister party in Australia. While Stewart – a former Conservative Party MP – is deeply suspicious of modern conservative politics.

As an amusing aside, Stewart, with his deference towards institutions, referred to Albanese as “prime minister” when asking a question, while Campbell called him what we call him in Australia – Albo.

Yet in their final softball question, something which seemed of little consequence actually revealed quite a lot. Knowing that Albanese enjoys listening to music (although who doesn’t?) Campbell decided to ask him for some music recommendations. Albanese understood this was an opportunity to promote Australian artists, but without putting much thought into it his immediate reaction was to say Cold Chisel.

Cold Chisel were (or are, given nostalgia tours) a bogan-rock band active from the 1970s and early 1980s. Unless you were making an uninventive parody of Australia there is absolutely no need for anyone to pay any attention to Cold Chisel. In citing the band, Albanese demonstrated that there is a considerable lag between Australia’s political leaders and the country’s modern-day culture.

Something is happening in Australia that the political class seems unaware of. There is a massive cultural shift taking place that is incredibly important for Australia’s integration into its own region, and for the development of a more distinctive Australian culture tied to this integration.

Australia’s most successful musical artists at the moment are in K-Pop groups. The Australian dominance of the industry is under-recognised and under-appreciated phenomenon. And it is highly symbolic of the evolving nature of Australia. Rather than London or LA, Seoul is now where many Australian artists are seeing their opportunities, and – even more importantly – where young Australians see their cultural interests.

Several years ago when I was working at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne there was such an intense interest in both Korean studies and the Korean language that the university was desperately trying to hire more Korean experts to facilitate the demand.

South Korea’s cultural output is a soft power behemoth. But there is also a soft power circulation here. With the interest fans have in various K-Pop group members translating into interest in Australia. These artists now have a global reach far beyond Australia’s other biggest names. Rosie has 25 million more Instagram followers than Chris Hemsworth. If the Australian government understood this it could leverage it.

While South Korea may be the current country of attention, this is more broadly about Australia’s cultural integration into Asia. It’s about recognising how it’s not just demographic shifts, but cultural interests that are building something new and exciting in Australia. And it is about how important culture is for driving Australia’s regional knowledge and relationships.

As cultural reach comes from wealth (that is, having the time and money to be creative), Indonesia will enhance its cultural reach as it moves up to the world’s 4th largest economy by 2050. Maybe this is what will finally enhance Australia’s relationship with is massive near-neighbour – as Australia’s youth develop an interest in the country?

It remains Australia’s greatest strategic oversight for Indonesian to not be a compulsory language in Australian schools right now. Waiting until Indonesia’s cultural reach expands may be too late to build the kind of intimate relationship Australia needs with the country – as by then Indonesia will consider itself in a different league. However, even then, will Australia’s leaders recognise this cultural reach when it appears? By that time they might just be entering the early-2000s.

Albanese’s response to what should have been – as he responded to a different question – “a full toss outside leg stump”1, was symbolic of the lack of foresight in Australia’s political leadership. Built on a lack of knowledge of the present, let alone a vision of the country’s future.

Were the PM a little more switched on he would have understood that to a global audience there was an opportunity to project an image of Australia that was a better reflection of the country as it actually is today. To talk about young Australians’ massive global success in K-Pop groups – even if this isn’t his taste in music, as PM, the idea should be to pivot the question to promote the national interest.

It was a chance to make the country more interesting to those whose knowledge of the country is limited. Not drag the audience back into a past that Australia is evolving away from. But I suspect Albanese doesn’t know about this evolution. So he went for the musical equivalent of Crocodile Dundee instead.

Australia has always been a democratic innovator. The secret ballot began its modern widespread usage in the then-colonies on the Australian continent in the mid-19th Century. The world’s first permanent independent electoral commission was established in South Australia, as was Saturday voting – which is the norm everywhere in Australia. South Australia was also the second jurisdiction after New Zealand to allow women to vote, and one of the first to remove property ownership from suffrage. Preferential – or ranked choice – voting was adopted Australia-wide in 1918, and voting was made compulsory in 1924.

Many of these innovations are credited with infusing stability into Australian politics and society – notwithstanding our political parties’ fondness for “knifing” sitting prime ministers. Compulsory voting means that elections are won and lost on kitchen table issues. The dark emotions of ideology are not particularly beneficial for either political ambition or to “get out the vote”. Preferential voting gives oxygen to a wide range of political forces, while also generally producing majoritarian governments.

This stability is incredibly important to the Australian psyche. Australia is a conservative society – in the philosophical or dispositional sense, rather than as a political identity. The distinction here is incredibly important, as Australians look outwards at parties like the Republican Party who may call themselves “conservative”, yet have instead become intensely radical, chaotic and destabilising. Donald Trump seems almost perfectly designed to offend Australians’ sensibilities.

The political concept that best captures Trump’s rise to power – Max Weber’s “charismatic authority” – has negligible traction in Australia. Of Australia’s prime ministers, it is only Bob Hawke (1983-1991) who possessed anything resembling this idea. And his public connection was mostly due to the very low-stakes of his fondness for having a beer.

Instead, Australians have an innate suspicion of charisma. Potentially this is due few of us actually possessing any, but it’s also tied to what is known as the “tall poppy syndrome” – our tendency to denigrate those striving for too much success. Part of this is driven by the country’s egalitarian spirit, but another part is a mechanism for social policing. To prevent what is considered the greatest sin in Australian society – being a dickhead.

This syndrome may hinder Australians from achieving the great heights of human endeavour, but it also keeps our politicians in check. Populist politicians in the minds of Australians are mostly dickheads. They are seen to be breaking the central covenant of Australian politics – that the country’s affairs will be guided with competence, and without any personal grandstanding.

While these political and social guardrails have mostly worked well to keep Australia stable and prosperous, there is currently a strong public sense that this covenant is being broken. Our individual politicians may still be relatively boring, but our political parties are seen to be straying from the public expectations of them. There’s too much cynicism and bad faith, a lack of integrity and accountability, and not enough focus on bigger structural concerns. Australia’s short three year terms doesn’t help parties lift their eyes towards the horizon.

Australia’s two largest parties - the Labor Party and the Liberal Party – are also 20th Century beasts struggling to find consistent policy platforms within the new conditions of the 21st Century. Demographic shifts, new sets of economic interests, and new cultural motivations are scrambling how these parties see themselves, and how they engage with the public.

To rectify this, Australia’s spirit of democratic innovation has kicked in – but rather than any new top-down structural initiatives, this innovation is now emerging from the bottom-up.

Australian politics is in the midst of a very Australian mutiny. Slowly and methodically the public are building a new party system. They are doing this not by completely wiping out political parties – as their Canadian cousins are fond of doing – but by simply going seat-by-seat over several elections and replacing MPs from the major parties with independents. This is maintaining the stability of the system while simultaneously transforming it into something new.

Rather than driven by grand ideas and political passions flowing out of universities or crowding into city squares, this Australian political rebellion began in a sleepy rural electorate, around the kitchen tables of ordinary citizens. It started with a very simple question – how can politics work a bit better to improve the conditions in our community?

Rural electorates in Australia tend to be massive. The seat of Indi in the state of Victoria is far from the largest, but it is still the size of Belgium – yet home to only around 160,000 people. It has a pair of small cities in Wodonga (pop. 40,000) and Wangaratta (pop. 30,000), some prime agricultural land, but mostly covers the “high country” of the Australian Alps.

Believing that issues within the electorate were not reaching the halls of power in Canberra, in 2012 a group of locals formed a research project called Voices for Indi. The group traversed the seat, organising chats in people’s homes, seeking to build a decent picture of the district’s interests and concerns. They called the format of their research Kitchen Table Conversations – ideally having no more than nine people to encourage active participation, and structured around a series of key guidelines designed to facilitate conversation. The ideas sourced from these discussions were then collated into a report.

The plan was to take their report to their local MP, the Liberal Party’s Sophie Mirabella, hoping to have her advocate for these ideas in the Liberal Party room – as the country was moving towards a federal election the Liberals and their coalition partner the National Party were likely to win (and did). Yet the meeting didn’t go as planned, with Mirabella wrapping it up in ten minutes and declaring “The people of Indi aren’t interested in politics.”

Mirabella’s dismissal of the group shifted the plan. Voices for Indi would instead find a candidate who could best represent their report to run against Mirabella. The former president of Australian Women in Agriculture, Cathy McGowan, stepped up, and despite Indi being one of the Liberal Party’s safest seats, Mirabella’s 20 percent margin vanished, with McGowan winning the seat by 439 votes. Mirabella tried to reclaim the seat in 2016, only for McGowan to extend her margin to 8705 votes.1

This caught the eye of some residents of Sydney’s affluent North Shore disgruntled with their local MP. This MP happened to be the former prime minister, and human faultline, Tony Abbott. Despite being replaced as PM by his party in 2015, Abbott was biding his time on the backbench in the hope of finding his way back into the PM’s seat. Instead, a new Voices for… group was formed, it followed the organisational guidelines laid out in Indi, and at the 2019 election Abbott was gone.

Then came the rush. The defeat of Abbott exposed a fracture in the conservative Liberal Party (apologies for the cognitive dissonance for American readers). The country’s wealthiest electorates – traditionally the Liberals’ impenetrable bulwark and where they would run their best political talent – could no longer stand the party. Unlike in the U.S where wealth has simply swapped parties, these electorates could never bring themselves to vote for Labor. However, the prospect of an independent MP who embodied the pragmatic classical liberal space the Liberal Party was abandoning offered them a path forward. More Voices for… groups were formed and in 2022 six more seats were won.

What began as a civil society group simply seeking to take the local temperature has evolved into a movement known as the Community Independents Project. It has public clout and reach, well organised crowd-funded financial backing, and an army of volunteers who dwarf the numbers that the major parties are able to muster. As Australia moves towards a 3 May federal election, there are now 37 Voices for… groups across the country running candidates for the 150-seat House of Representatives.

While core issues like climate change and political integrity have enabled these local candidates to gain national media attention, the broader traction they’ve secured has relied on two core pillars that resonate with Australians’ conservative dispositions.

The first is that political parties are increasingly seen as agents of instability. While the Labor and Liberal parties have reacted to the rise of strong independent candidates by claiming they will destabilise the parliament and country, Australians think the opposite.

As American politics dominates our newsfeeds, Australians look at the U.S and recognise that a strict two-party system creates nothing but distrust and division – scything through national politics, local communities and even families. That there is a rabid “us vs them” culture, and inflamed political passions which lead to party advantage being deemed more important than national interests. There’s also a hell of a lot of dickheads. To prevent this from influencing Australia further, the only solution is to weaken political parties, and weaken the incentives that drive their tribalism.

Party discipline has always been strong in Australia – compelled by the Labor Party’s strict policy that to vote against the party means to be expelled from it. While the Liberal Party allows its MPs to vote their conscience, the party’s media cheerleaders relentlessly hound anyone who does – effectively keeping MPs in line.

This is no longer acceptable to Australians. What the public instead seem to be striving for is a return to a 19th Century political culture – where political affiliation was far looser and an MP’s primary purpose was to exercise individual judgement on behalf of their constituents.

While this may be a romantic and hopeful vision of politics, the second pillar driving the movement is more striking and consequential – Australians are seeing male politicians as a destabilising force. The eight MPs elected so far via the movement have all been women, and of the 37 candidates running at this election 30 are women.2 As the movement swings back towards its rural roots, of the seats most likely to be won by these candidates, only one is a male.

Politics obviously attracts those keen on power, but as political scientist Brian Klass has written in his book Corruptible, politics also attracts those with “dark triad” personality traits – narcissism, being manipulative, and showing a lack of empathy. These traits tend to be more pronounced in male politicians. Our current volatile global era is clearly possessed by the egotism, fervour and flailing of modern men. Australians are concluding that it's actually men who are too emotional and irrational for political power.

What marks the Community Independents Project as distinct as an emerging political phenomenon is that it is a pro-system movement, rather than an anti-system one. The nature of the movement is based on incremental change – of doing the legwork to build and consolidate itself within existing structures, not seeking to tear them down. It understands that it's not Australia’s political system that is the problem, just the way it is being utilised.

Australia’s national character would never tolerate grand political gestures, or any politician claiming to be liberal democracy’s saviour. Instead, protecting liberal democracy is achieved via the very simple idea of ordinary citizens thinking about what matters to their community, building new civil society groups around these issues, and channelling these through genuine and trustworthy local candidates. In doing so, most importantly, the Australian public are exerting themselves as the real owners of Australia’s political system, not its major parties.

No-one is woke in North Korea.

This may be an ridiculous – or obvious – thing to say. But within it lies a series of ideas that may explain why the Trump Administration is behaving the way it is.

First it should be acknowledged that Trump is not exactly an ideas man himself. He functions purely on instinct, and these instincts are driven by his insatiable ego and rapacious need for dominance.

However, there are now people around Trump who have sought to furnish these impulses with a worldview, and funnel this into policy (or at least executive orders). And this worldview is being guided by an extreme reaction to the last 60 years of economic and social change in the West.

Several years ago I wrote an essay for Quillette seeking to explain why political parties who called themselves “conservative” had instead become agents of instability. My idea was that that the ideology of “fusionism” – which became fully internalised in parties like the Republican Party and the Conservative Party in the UK in the late-1970s – was an ideology at war with itself. Advocating for the permanent revolution of ever freer markets, while simultaneously running a counter-revolution against their effects.

I argued that this created a wholesale discombobulation. In particular within those of a “conservative disposition” – who struggled with change. This emotional disorder was now filtering up into the aggressive and chaotic behaviour of these parties.

What I sought to explain was that economic and social change are siamese twins, albeit with the former taking the first stride forward. Or, to put it another way, the freer humans are to exchange with one another, the greater the change that is created.

Change, of course, is values neutral. Some changes to our societies are positive, others are negative. Change is a constant in the world. However, change accelerates change. This is not just the technological “creative destruction” identified by Joseph Schumpeter, but also a “social creative destruction”. As I wrote:

This has proved incredibly confronting to us as human beings – even to those who embody these social changes.1 Of course, the human brain is highly adaptable in ways other animals are not, however, while we may have transcended much of our primal environment, we are still tied to – and limited by – certain animal instincts. No matter how much we innovate, we still crave surety and stability. And this is something our monkey brains currently feel like we don’t have.

This is not to denigrate free trade. Most people in the West live lives of the most extraordinary luxury compared to our ancestors. Australia’s GDP per capita of around USD 65,000 affords a lifestyle far superior to that of kings of the past. Even those of us who earn less than that still live in great comfort. This is the magic of markets and how trade – for the most part – raises all boats. It is why there has been a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past 40 years.

But luxury, or a lack of poverty, are not the same as certainty. As our material comfort introduces a whole new array of complex social forces. Something the world is currently struggling with. Which, again, is not a yearning for a more simple, less prosperous, time. Just a recognition of our current reality.

Often in the pursuit of certainty humans can be highly irrational. Willing to overreact and upend whole political and social structures. In his book The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer argued that revolutions are responses to change, not the drivers of it. What revolutionary movements are actually doing is trying to cope with change by seeking to control it. This is clearly what the Trump Administration is currently doing.

Trump himself may be economically illiterate – and see trade solely through his zero-sum need for personal dominance – but people like Peter Navarro who are driving his regime of wholesale tariffs do have a sense of the world they wish to create. And how to create it.

Their equation is quite simple – to arrest change we need to inhibit trade.

This, of course, is correct. It understands the connection between trade, technological and social creative destruction. It also understands the inherent cosmopolitanism of trade – something I wrote about in Adam Smith vs the Ultra-Nationalists. To fear the world, to shrink from it, and to obsessively control what you can, requires preventing people from exchanging with one another.

But this also happens to be sheer lunacy.

No-one is woke in North Korea because it is a society effectively frozen in the 1950s. By sealing itself off from global trade and human interaction it halted the forces of both economic and social change. But with this has also come a crippling poverty, a brutal totalitarianism, and a people who live inside an insane reality entirely constructed by the country’s overlords.

The United States is unlikely to become North Korea – even as Trump attempts to mimic the patrimonialism on the Kim family, and the Republican Party obsequiously praises of him as their Dear Leader. The U.S is far too integrated into the global economy and is far too instinctively liberal2 to be changed in the way the administration may wish. But they will do a lot of damage to both people’s livelihoods and make the world a far more dangerous place. Trade, after all, is a relief value for global tensions.

With this they may not care. With the fervour of revolutionaries, the administration is driven by their absolutism. And through this absolutism the superficial calculation they have made is that if freer trade created a world they find difficult to handle, then trade must be inhibited to achieve mental relief. They’re unlikely to be swayed from this perspective.

The deep emotional immaturity of these people cannot be overstated.

Because both politics – and being human – is not about absolutes. It’s about understanding the complex web of ideas, interests, incentives, traditions and evolving cultural forces that comprise humanity and seeking to find some workable way to produce decent outcomes. Of finding ways to balance the advantages of trade with our dispositional requirements for surety and stability.

And this requires maturity. There is no perfect, bad stuff happens, terrible ideas occasionally gain prominence, we learn from these and try to improve instead. All change isn’t positive, there are good and tested reasons why culture and traditions become embedded, and there are good reasons why we should exercise individual and political restraint. There are also good reasons why change is sometimes necessary.

It’s our responsibility to make assessments about these things – on both a personal level and through the collective of our polities. As adults we are afforded the duty to think about our societies, think about our personal behaviour, and demonstrate character in the face of things not always being to our liking. We should be capable of navigating a plural world, and hold competing thoughts in our heads simultaneously.

Upheavals like Trumpism occur when we abandon these critical faculties. When we think that we can make the Earth stop spinning – when we think there’s a single figure who can produce a perfect future. When our overcorrections are so unhinged and so incontinent that they don’t alleviate the ordeal of change, but accelerate it instead.

During the post-Cold War era the defining human archetype has been that of “Davos Man”. Taking his moniker from the alpine Swiss town where the World Economic Forum holds its annual meetings, this was a person who was not just a wealthy elite, but also those cosmopolitan and urbane, a citizen of anywhere, comfortable within any culture, but having no genuine commitment to any. A technocratic tinkerer, whose approach to politics is one of uninspiring problem-solving through the application of expertise. Davos Man corresponded with Francis Fukuyama’s “last man”, from his book The End of History and The Last Man. A vision of what humans may become if peace and prosperity became universal.

Davos Man may still exist, but as the dominant figure of our current period his power has been weakened. In his place a new era-defining archetype has risen – one we can call DARVO Man.

DARVO is a concept developed by the University of Oregon psychologist Jennifer Freyd. It stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender, and describes the behavioural patterns Freyd observed studying interpersonal abuse. Perpetrators frequently deny their own actions, attack anyone who provides evidence of these actions, and claim that they are the real victims in the given scenario.

It’s not difficult to see how these behavioural patterns scale up from the interpersonal level to political actors or state-level actions. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are all masters at using DARVO as a tactic. Wherever you find authoritarian impulses you’ll find DARVO behavioural patterns. It is a mode used to exert power in its most brutal sense – to make truth inconsequential.

Rather than composed and distant like Davos Man, DARVO Man is a maelstrom of unrestrained emotion, driven by a fragile, needy ego. Someone who doesn’t see domestic or global problems, only personal ones. At a political level he may wrap himself in national symbols, and claim to be working in the national interest, but this is only ever a subterfuge used to advance blunt personal interests.

While Freyd may have mapped out this behaviour in relation to modern interpersonal belligerence, the psychological drivers of DARVO were recognised by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes as he grappled with the major disruption of his lifetime – the English Civil War (1642-1651). Hobbes designated these impulses as “vainglory”, and saw it as the primary source of the chaos that political institutions should seek to overcome. As discussed in The End of History… – and then expanded upon in his book Identity – Fukuyama highlighted this same impulse as “megalothymia” – the desire to be recognised as superior to others, and to dominate over them.

Both liberal democracy and the liberal international order emerged as an attempt to both maximise human freedom while constraining vainglory through mutually beneficial institutions. But institutions are not perfect, and can easily be captured by both bad ideas and nefarious actors. The charge against Davos Man has been that under the guise of rational and neutral universal goods, global institutions born from the ashes of the Second World War entrenched elite interests and status. DARVO Man, by contrast, kills the pretence – shamelessly demanding loyalty and submission from institutions.

Both these approaches can be understood through Freyd’s subsequent concept of “institutional betrayal”. Where the behaviour of an institution becomes divorced from its initial purpose – creating harm to those who rely on it. The more the credibility of institutions erode, the greater the cynicism towards the idea of mutually beneficial rules accelerates. It is within this environment of wholesale cynicism where DARVO Man thrives.

As a tactic, DARVO is often successful in family courts or in cases of sexual assault because justice systems sympathise with perpetrators, embracing the idea that they are actually victims. That is, perpetrators are seen as victims of laws or social expectations that have no right to constrain or hold them to account for their behaviour. This is because institutional betrayal creates a new set of values – one where belligerence is a positive attribute. Where it is deemed a demonstration of rightful power, with a display of ambition that should be rewarded, not punished.

At a national or international level we can call this values shift – the soft power of hard power. Where people project their own megalothymia up into actors like Trump, Putin or the CCP, and find their belligerence to be admirable and thrilling. This is the world we are moving towards. A bizarro world where truth and justice have no authority – where appeals to decency are mocked mercilessly. It’s a world women often have to navigate, and now one where broader societies and non-great powers are joining them.

Yet we are not without agency to resist this world. How we respond to institutional betrayal is through Freyd’s third concept of “institutional courage” – the commitment to truth and moral action regardless of the cost. While institutions can often seem impersonal, they rely on the integrity of those who work within them. We each bear personal responsibility for our own conduct, whether it be interpersonal, in our place of work, and in our communities and nations.

However, in a world that has shifted in values this can prove difficult. The courage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, or former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, attracts relentless hostility from those whose own vainglory has attached itself to figures like Putin and Trump. This is because while courage can inspire courage in others, it also exposes cowardice. And this exposure can breed defensiveness and resentment. A siloed polity makes this resentment feel like community.

Hobbes understood that stability required more than just strong institutions to create order. That it also required the cultivation of character, and the civic virtues of modesty and humility. It is these civic virtues that form the bulwark of institutions. They are what allow institutions to function for mutual benefit, and to guard against institutional betrayal. They are what Hobbes called our “covenants” to one another, which secure peace and stability.

Yet DARVO Man’s modern ascent is built on a rejection of these covenants. As Hobbes wrote in Leviathan:

To make covenants with brute beasts is impossible, because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right, nor can translate any right to another: and without mutual acceptation, there is no covenant.

This is because DARVO Man doesn’t see humans as social beings – with social obligations. He is antisocial in every sense. He sees security not in norms and rules, but in cowering the world into submission to himself. He is solely motivated by his lusts and the impulse to pursue them at will. The only laws he sees are the calculations he makes with regard to those he perceives as bigger DARVO Men. As we witness with Trump’s appeasement of Putin.

Hobbes’s blindspot was that he failed to see how vainglory could capture the state. That public office could offer the promise of impunity, and therefore attract the worst of us, not the best. Hobbes saw chaos only emerging from the bottom up, not top down. But it is clearly both, and in a democracy, the relationship between them. With the vainglorious striving for unrestrained power – and gaining the endorsement of those who wish to give it to him.

As this relationship reshapes our world into games of deceit and dominance, we should recognise that Davos Man won’t save us from DARVO Man. As much as Davos Man has benefitted from the post-Second World War order, he lacks the courage to stand in its defence. As Fukuyama wrote: “The last man at the end of history knows better than to risk his life for a cause… Men with modern educations are content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism.”

To Davos Man, to throw an elbow in liberal democracy’s defence is seen as no different to its erosion. The paradox at the heart of liberalism is that it breeds complacency towards its own preservation – seeing its principle of tolerance as extending to those who are intolerant.

At his worst, Davos Man sees the protection of his comforts in his own submission to DARVO Man, as we witness with figures Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. The fear that their fabulous, unfathomable, wealth may be even slightly threatened by Trump’s caprice leads these men to bow and scrape before him – in a naïve attempt to seek favour from a man who does no favours.

Alongside these failures of character, the broader structural failures that Davos Man has presided over has fuelled the dangerous rise of DARVO Man. The post-Cold War world accelerated the permanent revolution of economic and social forces that gave us the great wonders of modern cosmopolitanism and convenience, but unmoored us from the norms and obligations of our old maps of humanity. Davos Man drove this acceleration without any awareness of the discombobulation it would bring – or any investment in structures that would ground us within these changes.

This was the weakening of both the nation as a civic institution, and well as the weakening of the community groups where humans cultivate their civic virtues. Men especially have struggled to find a sense of purpose in this more fragmented world. While young women have excelled as they’ve gained greater freedom and opportunity, men require greater direction and social encouragement. Without a sense of positive purpose they convulse out of communities of virtue and reach for grotesque figures like Trump, Elon Musk and Andrew Tate – with their fiefdoms of relentless aggression and megalothymia.

As his era ends, we should recognise that Davos Man’s core failure was one of misinterpretation – of failing to understand the balance of elements humanity needed to thrive. As liberalism didn’t just give us freedom, it also gave us responsibility. Both personal and institutional responsibility. It expected each of us to step-up and grasp these gifts – for us to develop character and accountability as power was decentralised away from absolute monarchs.1 Liberalism saw capabilities in humanity, but these would need to be fostered and fortified. As the dark emotions of vainglory also lurk within humanity, and they are easily aroused by conditions that undermine our security – there to be exploited by the DARVO brutes who feast on insecurity.

Although the left-right spectrum can occasionally be a broad convenient short-hand, it doesn’t really have much to do with actual ideas. It’s more of a vibes-based approach to politics, or for people who need a team to support (regardless of what this team advocates). When trying to understand ideas, I would argue that it actually obscures more than it illuminates. Which is why one of my writing rules is to never use it. Although it is a rule I will break in this article for stylistic purposes.

The left-right spectrum is for people who think politics is about simply categorising things and then orientating oneself by these categories. It has little to do with determining merit, recognising outcomes and understanding implications. It fails to comprehend the world as a complex web countless intersecting and overlapping forces. A world where there are no neat baskets.

Looking at Donald Trump is an illustrative way of recognising why the left-right spectrum is pretty useless for understanding modern politics. Trump represents a significant ideological shift in the Republican Party, and so it is important to understand these shifts. For the sake of making a provocative argument to prove my point: Donald Trump is the most left-wing candidate to ever run for the presidency of the United States.

This seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but engage with anyone who would call themselves a Marxist, Socialist or Communist and you’ll discover many of them are in awe of Trump, and there are very good reasons for this. As there are several areas where there is a strong alignment on issues and approaches to politics. Here I will outline them:

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Undermining America's Influence and Credibility

A deep suspicion of the United States is a central tenant of those who consider themselves “far-left”. The U.S is seen as world’s most nefarious actor. Something I wrote about previously in The Anti-Hegemonic Reflex. Therefore anything that weakens America’s position in the world is deemed to be a great positive.

Trump invites greater suspicion of America. He’s an avatar for those who see the country as grotesque and uniquely self-centred. The damage that Trump, and by extension the Republican Party, are currently doing to U.S soft power is significant. Much to the delight of those who hate America.

Of course, Trump loves to wrap himself in the U.S flag and the symbols and rhetoric of America, but this is all subterfuge. It’s a way of advancing his own personal interests by wearing a cheap nationalist suit. If we understand America’s founding documents – and therefore “the idea of America” – as having been born out of 18th Century Enlightenment principles (however imperfectly applied), then Trump and the MAGA movement are incredibly hostile to America.

While the flag and the nationalist chest-beating may be difficult for far-left to stomach1, they’ll take the result of an America at war with itself and of an America whose standing in the world is deteriorating.

Hostility Towards NATO

One of the U.S’s major advantages over the last 80 years has been its network of likeminded allies. These are alliances based on a shared set of values that are built on more than just raw power and narrow interests. And can be contrasted with an alliance of states who are compelled for fall in line with a larger power, as was the Warsaw Pact. Although the far-left would see the U.S’s allies as also being compelled, because this is the nature of authoritarian thinking. It struggles to comprehend the idea of choice.

As a residual hangover from the end of the Cold War, the far-left hates NATO. The purpose of NATO was the ensure the collective defence of Europe against the Soviet Union. This created the impetus to hate NATO, and this has been maintained with Russia’s current form of authoritarianism. After the fall of Soviet Union most of the former Warsaw Pact countries rushed to join NATO – well aware that authoritarianism and belligerence are innate in Russia, and that NATO was the only guarantee of them not falling again into Moscow’s grip. The far-left resents this.

Trump is deeply suspicious of alliances. There is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship with Trump. Either everyone is working for his narrow interests or they are burdens or traitors. In NATO he only sees an institution that is not sufficiently working in his personal favour. So his objective it to undermine it.

Also, Trump has a very peculiar fondness for Putin, which is part of his homoerotic fascination with “tough guys”. In Trump’s world tough guys are entitled to whatever they like because they are so big and strong and macho and cool. NATO prevents Putin from getting what he wants.

This is music to the ears of the far-left, who would love to see NATO dismantled. This is driven by their hatred of the West2 and desire to see Russia “take back” states like the Baltics that have offended them by become the exemplars of European values. But it is also driven by Realist dogshit that believes great powers have more substantial and legitimate rights than smaller states, as well as deeply naïve groups like Codepink3 who claim they are for “peace” but are actually for submission to brutes. Which they believe will create peace.

Fondness for Dictators and Scumbags

Alongside his love of Putin, Trump is also in awe of other dictators like Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. He’s jealous of their power, he lusts after it. This is, of course, related to his instinctive hostility towards the restraints of liberalism.

Trump’s love of foreign dictators and scumbags is matched by the far-left, who will love anyone regardless of their behaviour and brutality as long as they are perceived to be “anti-American.”

Suspicion of Free Trade

While he clearly doesn’t have the same suspicion of wealth as Marxists4, this has nothing to do with a fondness for market forces. Contrary to how the media uses “market-friendly” and “business-friendly” interchangeably, established businesses hate the market. What they want is for the government to protect them from competition. Trump has imported this mindset from his own businesses into his view on what should be U.S economic policy.

Trump has sold himself a Tariff Man. Tariffs are, of course, a tax on consumers. But they are also consistent with the nationalist economic thinking and idea of economic self-sufficiency that the Soviet Union pursued. Foreign trade comes with suspicious ideas, and if you are trying to maintain ideological purity trade needs to be limited. Free trade also decentralises power in societies, something centralising ideologies like Communism cannot abide.

Alongside this, the zero-sum worldview of mercantilism fits comfortably with the zero-sum political worldview of authoritarianism. By restricting competition monopolies or duopolies can be created that favour the few. The objective is rent-seeking. While the Soviet Union owned everything, creating a supra-monopoly, other authoritarian states seek to make compacts with captains of industry to control how goods are exchanged. As freedom of exchange creates both economic and social forces that they cannot control.

Hatred of Liberal Principles and Institutions

As a man of limitless narcissism and lust for power the idea of institutions that are designed to constrain power are a clear affront to Trump. For individuals like Trump, and ideologies that are also obsessed with power, liberalism is the one true enemy.

The restraints of constitutionalism, the division of powers, the rule of law, limited government, freedom of the press, assembly and religion, defence of human rights, all get in the way of exercising power.

Due to social-democratic and liberal parties’ belief in process and compromise, the far-left absolutely despise them with a rabid intensity to match anything that MAGA can ferment. This mutual hatred of liberalism means there will always be a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when the opportunity arises, no matter how much the far-left and fascists claim to be opposites.

Suspicion of Democracy

Central to Trump’s political project has been the undermining America democracy. Through the lie that he won the 2020 election, and his attempts to overturn it.

Key to understanding modern authoritarian movements is the subterfuge – how these movements use language to hide their true intent. When Trump and his supporters talk about “election integrity” they means the very opposite. Claiming an election is rigged is part of the attempt to rig it. This goes in concert with Trump’s constant projection – always accusing others of what he himself is guilty of.

The far-left also despise democracy, or claim that it is “not real democracy”, with the latter being their form of subterfuge.5 This suspicion is driven by the ultimate in authoritarian thinking, that of “false consciousness”. This concept believes that public don’t actually know what they want and they need a leadership that is more enlightened than themselves to tell them what to think and how to behave.

Because ideology is a dogma that cannot be questioned, the whole idea of democracy as the balancing of competing ideas, interests, cultures, and psychologies needs to be squashed.

A "Total Politics" Approach to Public Policy

What Trump has promised should he win the presidency again is the politicisation of everything. He has learned that in order to consolidate his power it means turning the bureaucracy into loyalists. People whose job it is to serve Trump’s interests, not the country’s. Here he shares a worldview with the far-left regimes that have bureaucracies that must be ideological pure, and reject evidence-based objectivity in decision-making.

The goal is to dispense with the idea of bureaucratic advice without fear or favour. To instead produce advice actively with both fear and favour. Where there is no speaking truth to power as power it too emotionally immature to handle it.

This approach to politics sees the state as a tool to use against one’s enemies. With every single aspect of how the state functions being filtered through an ideological lens. The purpose of capturing the state is to persecute the people you don’t like. Whether you’re upfront and honest about it like Trump, or you wrap it up in theory like the far-left.

The Love of Political Violence

The capturing of the state also comes with the fantasy of capturing the state via a glorious violent revolution. As John Ganz has explained, the MAGA movement entered into its Sorelian period with the myths of the Big Lie and the violence of the insurrection.

The purpose of violence that that it overwrites both truth and process. It disdains the idea of both reality and compromise. It believes that the fist and the gun can bring their fantasies into fruition. While the far-left saw the attack on the Capitol Building as a thrilling display of political violence, they were also a bit aggrieved that while they’re were still in their bedrooms playing with their Heroes of Socialism action figures, MAGA were the ones actually acting on these violent fantasies.

Conspiratorial Worldview

Those with a large degree of cynicism and obsession with power project their own lusts for power onto everyone else. How they would act if they had power is how they believe the world currently works. They’re unable to comprehend the world in any other way.

Ideological fervour leads to people being unable to understand how people couldn’t think exactly like them. Therefore there must always be some dark conspiracy at play that is manipulating people from seeing the light. And that these dark manipulative forces are those that guides History.

Conspiracism is also driven by, and preys upon, deep insecurities. It’s no coincidence that as we’ve come to encourage and even celebrate insecurity in modern Western culture that conspiracism has risen with it. Donald Trump is an incredibly insecure man. Although he couples this with a brash shamelessness that seeks to disguise this, but which only exacerbates it. People who are similarly insecure and narcissistic are attracted to this, and also attracted to the conspiracism around him. As Luke Hallam has written in Elon Musk Goes Full Conspiracist:

Personality Cults

One of the ironies (or subterfuges) of communism is that it claims to be a collective philosophy, but always concentrates power in the hands of a single figure. Someone who is believed to be the holder of the singular truth, whom everyone else must fall in behind. Whether it be Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Castro etc.

When you strip away the rhetoric and arcane theorising, this makes sense. Collectivist ideologies need conformity. And those with the emotional need for conformity need someone to fall in behind, and a group label to give themselves. These people are easy prey for people who wish to proclaim themselves as having the vision and will to create a glorious new world.

This is why personality cults form around the most grotesque figures. People of character and principle are by nature inquisitive and collaborative. They would never claim to know all, or have the power to cure every ill. They respect norms and conventions and, most importantly, experience shame. The more repulsive and outrageous Trump is the more he appeals to those who need a larger-than-life figure to submit themselves to.

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So what is actually going on here with these alignments? It’s fairly obvious that Trump has fascist impulses, so why is he so aligned with people who would claim they are opposed to fascism?

First is the nature of authoritarianism. It is first and foremost a psychology. This psychology may attach itself to different political movements, but is driven by the same impulses. I would argue that ideologies serve the purpose of trying to give a lust for control some semblance of legitimacy. It’s also why when authoritarians gain power, whether they are communist, fascist, or theological, they all tend to behave in similar ways.

Trump is quite unique in that although he uses nationalist rhetoric, his political project is so nakedly about his own personal power. His use of ideology as a cover is pretty weak.

The thrill of Trump for all authoritarians is what Eric Hoffer identified in his book The True Believer as a hatred of the present. People who are permanently frustrated and who believe that the world is owing them something they don’t have. To them power, control, and burning to the ground those who they believe have it over them is the ultimate objective. It doesn’t matter where this chaos comes from.

If you hate the present and wish to see it destroyed, then Trump is clearly the figure currently most capable of doing the most destruction. Regardless of what you claim to believe, Trump is the thrilling avatar for your frustration.

Unfortunately, we have failed to learn the lessons of the 20th Century in regards to authoritarianism. Or what we learned was only temporary. My fear is that people have to see the destruction authoritarianism brings before they reject it. But I’m hoping that enough Americans understand its threat clearly enough on Tuesday.

Like many people at the moment, I am currently in a heightened state of anxiety. With just over a week until the United States presidential election the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House fills me with dread. It may seem odd for an non-American to care so much about a foreign election, but due to the scale of America’s influence what happens there is of critical importance to the rest of us.

There is a perspective that second Trump presidency may just mean it will be four more years of unhinged ranting and relentless weirdness. Good fodder for comedians and memelords, but with an expectation that day-to-day life will go on in a regular way. I am no so confident. Because Trump represents and encourages a new era we have entered into. One of impunity – an era where norms are attacked, rules are for suckers and accountability is weak. Where no-one believes in or adheres to mutually beneficial practices. Where impudence reigns.

So much of our daily lives are governed by conventions that rely on fealty and character. The things that we rely on for our day-to-day activities don’t just work automatically. They are guided by a series of norms and rules that people instinctively understand and submit themselves to. We depend on institutions and structures that have specific roles that they perform well, with an implicit recognition that to politicise everything would mean that these structures will start to degrade.

This is what we are seeing now.

The U.S is unique in that it politicises almost every public role. From local dog catcher all the way up to the Supreme Court, everything comes with a party or political identity. It means that the concept of neutral, or mutually beneficial, rules are under constantly stress. It makes everything seem political, and in a two party system, everything feels “us vs them”. Trump’s political project has been to recognise this institutional stress and actively seek to press it to breaking point.

Due to these structural failings the country has been reliant on the personal restraint of politicians. Trump has understood that without such restraint the norms, rules, conventions, laws, constitutions, and democracy itself can all be easily subverted. That if you have enough gall and shamelessness you can refuse to submit to all of these in the name of party politics. Or, in Trump’s case, to serve his rapacious and insatiable ego. The public have been primed for such “total politics” by the system itself.

What concerns me is the influence this is having not only in the U.S, but globally. Trump has opened a Pandora’s Box of new behaviours that other conmen and brutes will see as an opportunity. We are already in an era of greater global impunity –whether it be Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, and with China’s assault on the international law in the South China Sea. A Trump victory sends a powerful signal that the world is now much more of a dog-eat-dog free-for-all.

Extraordinarily, it will also mean having a U.S president who is sympathetic to dictators. The narrative that Trump is an “isolationist” is a misleading one. Trump has ideological sympathy for the world’s strongmen. He fancies them, he wants to be like them, and this is only one step away from wanting to align and collaborate with them. Or at the very least allow them to have their way. What kind of world will we have when the two most powerful countries are both actively hostile to conventions, rules and norms?1 It won’t be a more stable one.

This global instability will exacerbate the tensions with everyday relations between individuals – as we are seeing with the conflict in Palestine/Israel. A world of impunity will further erode our bonds of trust. Erode a sense of good will. And create social conditions where norm breaking and a rejection of social responsibility feels necessary. Making cynicism, selfishness, and an obsession with power the traits that guide human relations.

A culture of impunity thrives within these dark emotions. Current U.S politics is demonstrating that there are no consequences for lies and bullshit in the pursuit of power. Whether it is from Trump himself or the conga line of dipshit sycophants that surround him. A culture of total politics means that these people are daring institutions to hold them accountable. Yet the mechanisms of accountability have been undermined and corrupted. There’s little trust in their functions, and sowing this mistrust has been by design. It paves the way for impunity.

When poor personal conduct is rewarded it disincentivises positive conduct – within domestic politics, international relations, the functions of key institutions, and our daily personal interactions. Being elected president of the U.S is an extraordinary reward for a man of such vile malevolence, and so the signal it sends is massive.

My fear is that we probably won’t truly understand the effects of this degradation until it creates widespread and daily difficulties in people’s lives. Even those who are attracted to Trump, who want to set the world on fire, won’t understand the implications of this until its their own house is caught in the blaze.

What I am also concerned about is that elite classes, like my own, may comment on these problems in the abstract, but won’t feel them in our daily lives. Those with social capital and the financial and educational capabilities to negotiate a less rule-bound world should be permanently cognisant of how those without these resources will fare in such a world.

But I don’t think they will. There is an insulation from this degradation. Which is in itself a danger. This insulation is part of the social conditions that has led to a figure like Trump gaining such traction. Comfort breeds obliviousness.

Despite my worry, I still remain hopefully that Kamala Harris can win. Trump, of course, will try to set fire to the country if he loses. It’ll be a chance for institutions to stand up again and defend the country. If they do so the incentives to overthrow rules and norms becomes weaker. If character cannot convince people of their importance, a dead end may be the best we can hope for.

After Hurricane Helene created widespread havoc and destruction across the southeastern United States, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – known for being one of the more absurd members of Congress in amongst stiff competition –claimed that the natural disaster was the work of nefarious forces.

“Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

The accusation she was supposedly making was that the weather event was created for political purposes. Either as some way of shifting votes in the communities affected, or as retribution against people who don’t support President Joe Biden.

It is now incredibly common for such a rank stupidity to be thrust into our eyeballs. daily. We live in an era where making outrageous and farcical claims is a central component of the public discourse. While previously we could dismiss absurdity as the rantings of fringe loonies – something to laugh at or mock – there is actually something serious going on here. People are increasingly comfortable with being publicly stupid. And as irrational as it sounds, this stupidity serves a political purpose.

Outrageous statements have long been the tactics of autocrats. Their need to rouse people up through dark emotions has been central to their path to ascendency. The objective is to create an intense assault on people and institutions that operate within reality. To sow a permanent mistrust in anything other than the charismatic authority of the autocratic figure. Rules, norms, the law and constitutions all need to be subverted or destroyed in aid of something grander, more visceral and emotionally satisfying.

Part of this discrediting of reality is also tied to the relentless cynicism of authoritarian movements, and how those with authoritarian personality types often project their own approaches to politics onto others. Majorie Taylor Greene may believe Joe Biden is turning the weather on political opponents because this is exactly what she would do if she had such abilities. People who live permanently inside bad faith believe that everyone else operates solely via bad faith as well. Integrity and virtue are entirely foreign concepts.

But absurdity is also used as a loyalty test - if you can induce people to live inside lies, to recite obviously false claims, then that is an enormous power. Those willing to make a public fool of themselves for a cause or a political figure are demonstrating the ultimate form of submission. The more shameless and obviously false the statements the greater power the movement demonstrates.

Alongside this, is the sense of group identity that comes from people collectively believing things that are wild and fabricated. Conspiracy is a greater bonder of people than mundane reality. As Michael Caulfield from the University of Washington has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

Yet what we are living through at the moment seems to also be something else. Rather than just the cynicism of power lust, we are seeing people who are desperate to be lied to. Desperate for dark fantasies to be true. As Peter Pomerantsev highlights, people are giving the “middle finger to reality”, and this speaks to something more fundamental happening within humanity at the moment, something deeper within the human psyche. And something that stretches far beyond the emotional turbulence of Donald Trump and his surrounding clownshow.

While we humans may have great rational faculties, we are also mystical beings. There’s a yearning within us for the fantastical. In the West at least, having mostly dispensed with the old religions hasn’t ushered in an era of greater rationality, it has instead led us to seek out new forms of mysticism. New ways to try and be more than the material reality before us.

However, unlike the old religions, this new mystical yearning is not refined and focused, but chaotic and dissonant. It hasn’t been honed over millennia, seeking to soothe rather than arouse, and aware of its role and limitations. It is also not making any compromises with the state. It wants to be political. It wants devotees, submission, and power. It wants countries to be governed by a new sweeping post-modernism – where these societies are reduced to an intense battle of competitive self-involvement. Where how one feels about something – no matter how absurd – is more important than verifiable reality. It wants this psychodrama to be policy.

In his much-misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama recognised that there was something innate in humanity that needed a struggle. That rationality would never be satisfying enough for us. The book wasn’t triumphalism, it was a warning – something that has clearly come to fruition:

This need for struggle and the yearning for mysticism are incredibly difficult to counteract. They combine forcefully within our current era of performative excess to make stupidity incredibly enticing to many people. This may mean that stupidity in public life may never be eradicated. At best it can only be limited.

How we limit stupidity though is the dilemma. Doing so may start with the simple notion of treating people as adults, with the capabilities and responsibilities of adults. Where there are actual consequences for dishonesty, where we encourage people to think. Coddling people only exacerbates the environment where people expect to be lied to, and want to be lied to – an environment where clowns roam freely and bullshit is highly profitable. It is within the expectation of adulthood that maybe we can hope to overcome politics as a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novel.

The big event of last week was the Indian election result. For those that don’t follow closely, due to the enormity of the task, Indian elections are conducted in stages – this election had seven stages between 19 April and 1 June. With votes counted and declared on 4 June.

India has always been one of my great loves, and there’s very little on this earth that can excite me more than an Indian election. While the previous two elections have been dominant affairs for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of prime minister Narendra Modi, this election was a far more complex and interesting affair.

The headline from the election is that the BJP lost the majority it has held since 2014. The party is still overwhelmingly the largest in the 543-seat lower house or Lok Sabha (with 240 seats), but it will now be reliant on some regional parties to maintain a government – the Janata Dal (United) (JDU) from Bihar in the north of the country (with 12 seats), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) from Andhra Pradesh in the country’s south (with 16 seats), and the Shiv Sena from Maharashtra in the country’s west (7 seats)

The result was a repudiation of the narrative which preceded the election that the BJP would consolidate or further enhance its power within the country. With prospect of the party gaining a “super-majority” which would have allowed it to change the constitution. Instead the result looks to return the country to the period from 1989 - 2014 where cobbling together often diverse and unwieldy coalitions was the norm. Which, counterintuitively, may deliver more stability by curbing ideological excess.

Aside from the BJP and a handful of other parties, ideology isn’t the dominant motivating force in Indian politics. Most parties are transactional and opportunistic. Regional parties especially are seeking outcomes exactly like this, where a bigger party is reliant on them to gain a majority and this reliance can be used to funnel resources into their states. These parties can be fickle and will switch alliances depending on where they best see this opportunity. In what now looks like a very canny move the JDU switched from the Congress Party-led Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (an incredible shoehorned acronym - INDIA) to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) weeks before the election.

The thinking is that being reliant on other parties may weaken the BJP’s ideological excesses – it may push them to focus on development, which is what these parties will be seeking for their states. Although the Shiv Sena is one party to share the BJP’s Hindutva ideology, it’s not opposed to transaction and opportunism itself. The party split in 2022 and there are now two Shiv Senas and the second – with 9 seats – is part of the INDIA alliance.

However, even if both the more ideologically flexible JDU and TDP were to switch to the INDIA alliance this alliance would still be 10 seats short of a majority. And their respective power in amongst a large jumble of parties would be far weaker than it currently is within the NDA. So this would give the BJP confidence that the coalition is safe. The BJP has given ministries to 4 other parties within the NDA alliance outside of the JDU, TDP and Shiv Sena, to give itself some extra security should the Shiv Sena pull out.

Where the BJP lost seats should also push it to focus far more on development, rather than communal tensions. For the BJP the Hindi heartland has always been its primary focus. It can be argued that the BJP have been regional party themselves, it’s just that this region is large and highly populous. The Hindi heartland, or Hindi Belt, comprises the states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. As well as Delhi. Although Hindi – or Hindustani to be more accurate – is a dialect continuum, and so there is contest over what may or may not be Hindi, and its use doesn’t neatly follow state borders1. Hindustani also includes Urdu. Hindustani is the language of Bollywood, even though Bombay is in Maharashtra.

In Indian politics the main prize is Uttar Pradesh, a state of 250 million people who send 80 representatives to the Lok Sabha. The next largest state by seats is Maharashtra with 48 seats. Doing well in Uttar Pradesh is the first step towards winning elections.

It should be noted that seat distribution by state is based on the 1971 census and there have been significant populations shifts by then. Bihar (130 million people) is more populous than Maharashtra now, but has eight less seats. There are plans to expand the Lok Sabha to 848 seats with the new Parliament House, which makes sense given that the lower house currently has 107 seats less than the United Kingdom’s House of Commons while India has 1.33 billion more people.2 However, there will be an enormous fight over the census data to distribute seats by state, as states like Tamil Nadu (with 39 seats and 72 million people) will most likely their lose their current weight in the federal parliament.

Uttar Pradesh was the primary area where the BJP lost seats this election losing 29 seats in the state. While across the Hindi Belt the BJP also lost 10 seats in Rajasthan, 5 seats in Haryana, 5 seats in Bihar, and 3 seats in Jharkhand. Although it mostly held firm or gained single seats in other Hindi Belt states.

The Hindi Belt is noticeably poorer than India’s south. The BJP had come to power in 2014 promising to be a party of development, who would drive India towards becoming a great power, or even a superpower. Although significant gains have been made over the past decade, there are still a great number of people who haven’t seen their opportunities and livelihoods improve, particularly in the north. The BJP have tried to disguise this by focusing on emotive and inflammatory rhetoric around religion. But the Indian voter is more savvy than the BJP calculated. Indians have always taken their democratic duty to punish parties not delivering seriously, and although the BJP have still formed a government, they have been given a slap across the face from the voters who the party had felt they could consistently rely upon. This is significant.

However, looking deeper into the numbers there is something more complex going on outside of the Hindi Belt. Overall the BJP lost 92 seats that it held at the previous election, but it picked up 32 new seats for a net loss of 60 seats from the last election (63 seats lost in total, as they gained three defectors during the last parliament).

And this is where it gets interesting and where the dominant narrative may be missing something. Because the BJP have mostly been a party of the northern Hindi Belt, it has always struggled to gain traction in the southern states (bar Karnataka) as well as eastern states like West Bengal and Odisha. So while the party lost seats in its traditional heartland, it actually made significant gains in regions where it has been traditionally weak (bar West Bengal, where it lost seats).

The most notable BJP gains were made in the eastern state of Odisha, a state that has been recently dominated by the Biju Janata Dal. The party won 12 of Odisha’s 21 seats at the 2019, but were completely wiped out this election, with the BJP winning 20 seats and the Congress Party 1 seat. Compounding this, simultaneously with the federal election, a state election was also held where the Biju Janata Dal had been in power for 25 years. Yet the BJP were able to secure a slim majority. This new major presence in Odisha is a massive gain for the BJP.

Alongside this, the party have also gained seats in the south, increasing its seats in Telangana from 4 to 8, from zero to 3 in Andhra Pradesh, and winning its first ever seat in Kerala – something previously thought impossible given Kerala’s demographics of large Christian and Muslim communities. Although the party failed to win any seats in Tamil Nadu – which was expected in a state with its own political traditions and sensitivity to language politics – the BJP will be incredibly pleased with the inroads that it is making in the south.

While the BJP also lost considerable seats in Maharashtra (16) and Karnataka (8) it knows that it can win seats in these states. The loss of seats this election doesn’t mean they can’t be won back at the next election. However, winning seats in states where it previously was a non-entity puts these states on the table now for the party. So while the party may have lost their majority and weakened their hand within this current parliament, they actually strengthened their hand as a party with national reach.

The other party with national reach – the Congress Party – also strengthened its hand, increasing from 52 seats up to 99. While the party only gained about 2% extra in votes, a smarter use of the First-Past-The-Post voting system with its alliance partners (to make sure they weren’t taking votes off each other) meant that it had a far more efficient vote this election. Its seat count also gives the public the sense that the party is no longer in terminal decline. Having confidence in a party’s ability to win can often be an important driver of voter intention.

Overcoming the BJP’s 2019 majority was always going to be something that took at least two elections to do. This election demonstrated that the party is not invulnerable, and if it fails to provide adequate development and opportunity in the north the voters will notice. Although the BJP will see gains in the south as a potential offset, all roads to Delhi still lead through Lucknow.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a blunt demonstration of how global health has the ability to impact all facets of human organisation. From how people work, to education, supply chains, social and cultural norms, as well as geopolitics. And, of course, how societies can protect the health of their people. This realisation has clearly placed greater importance on the work of the World Health Organization (WHO), and its annual forum the World Health Assembly (WHA), as the peak institutions for global public health.  

The WHA convenes in Geneva this week. The theme of this year’s assembly is “All for health, health for all” – a noble sentiment. It is an objective that recognises the collective responsibility all countries have in not only their response to new viruses, but also how a variety of immunisations are rolled out to vulnerable communities. As well as striving towards the global goal of universal health coverage. 

However, as WHA discussions take place, the meaning of “all” will be rather flexible, as one state that won’t be included at the 4-day summit will be Taiwan. 

From 2009 to 2017 Taiwan held observer statues within WHO. This status was an acknowledgement that although Taiwan is only officially recognised by a handful of countries, in all practical measures it is an independent state whose knowledge and contributions to global public health were essential to the functioning of WHO. 

However, after the election of Tsai Ing-wen as president in 2016, China pressured WHO to exclude Taiwan. This formed part of Beijing’s larger campaign to isolate Taiwan internationally. Which has also included successfully seducing 10 states who held formal diplomatic relations with Taipei to recognise Beijing instead, and blocking Taiwan’s accession to other major international bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization and Interpol. 

Of course, multilateral bodies are never going to be free of political wrangling. However, China’s rise as an authoritarian global power – with its deep suspicion of liberal internationalism – means that beyond mere politics it is the overall missions of these institutions that are coming under greater stress. 

In 2020, WHO’s Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward demonstrated the extent of this pressure in an interview with Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK. When asked about Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic Aylward first claimed to not hear the question, then he simply hung-up the call, and upon reconnection claimed that “we’ve already talked about China.”  His behaviour was not that of an organisation that is committed to global public health, but instead one that is operating in fear of reprisals should it not toe Beijing’s line.  This institutional capture has continued, as in the lead up to this week’s WHA, Taiwanese journalists have even been refused permits to cover the forum. 

An organisation as important as WHO has a responsibility to privilege the best possible information. This is not possible without it being truly committed to objectively collecting and analysing data from all governments and related agencies. It is also not possible unless it embodies the ethos of transparency.

Here there is a stark difference to how China and Taiwan approach their governance. Taiwan has understood that for its own security it has needed to embrace the ideals of transparency to prove itself a trusted and good faith actor to countries whose assistance it needs to deter any Chinese aggression. Despite its exclusion from WHO, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan engaged in a patchwork of mini-lateral arrangements to share its knowledge openly to ensure that its findings were being incorporated into other states’ analysis. 

In an approach developed after the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, Taiwan established three principles that aided its response to COVID-19 – Time, Trust, and Transparency. Given Taiwan’s essential knowledge of what goes on inside China, it was able to identify the problem ahead of other countries, activate its Central Epidemic Command Center and provide clear public information that brought its citizens on board with practical preventive measures quickly.  

This was in contrast with China, which operates an opaque system of governance that sees the disclosure of accurate information as a threat. Initially Beijing denied WHO entry into China to investigate the origins of the virus, followed by, according to WHO, withholding critical data. When then-Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, made the sensible suggestion that there should be a formal inquiry into the origin of the virus to better prepare for future pandemics, Beijing’s response was an extraordinary tantrum and a series of trade sanctions placed on Australia.

Additionally Beijing engaged in campaigns of obfuscation and spreading of misinformation in order to deflect attention and avoid responsibility as the country where the virus originated. 

A state which embraces the ethos of transparency should clearly be deemed more valuable than one that doesn’t when it comes to global public health. Of course, the realities of power will mean that WHO are unlikely to endorse this distinction, but it is one that undoubtedly hinders their work, and is a matter that other member states should find deeply concerning. Especially given we have just lived through the enormous disturbance of a pandemic – which has included a significant effect on political stability, not just loss of life and economic and social costs. 

We cannot assume that COVID-19 was a once off. More frequent international travel, the process of urbanisation, increased human-animal contact, and how disease carrying insects adapt to climate change all mean that there is greater potential for diseases to spread and mutate more easily. 

This makes the politicisation of global health and submission to the Chinese Communist Party’s turbulent emotions a dangerous path for WHO to maintain.  Despite a demand from Beijing that only “one China” is formally recognised, this doesn’t preclude Taiwan’s involvement in international institutions. In support of Taiwan’s participation in the WHA, the chair and the ranking member of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senators Jim Risch and Ben Cardin, issued a statement that made this distinction clear: 

Alongside this, Resolution 2758 does not authorise the PRC to represent Taiwan within the UN system. And, of course, how could they? Beijing cannot issue so much as a parking fine in Taipei. It has no credible way of gathering reliable data within Taiwan, and could not be trusted to accurately convey this data even if it could. The exclusion of Taiwan from WHO creates a significant blindspot for the organisation’s mission. 

It should be no surprise to WHO that viruses don’t care for political borders. They don’t care who thinks they have sovereignty over whom. In an interconnected world, the success of viruses relies on failure to cooperate across borders, and their deadly impacts on whether all relevant institutions have the best available information to limit their advancement and negate their effects. 

All states have an equal stake in quality information and the global coordination of best practices in health, and the mitigation of risks. Unfortunately, WHO undermines the credibility of this global information sharing when it submits itself to the demands of a state that not only seeks to exclude others from a vital multilateral institution, but whose authoritarian and defensive character is in grave tension with the spirit WHO needs to embody.