In Barry Hughart’s classic fantasy novel of ‘Ancient China that never was’, Bridge of Birds, a tyrannical emperor finds that there are limits to his power. While he could confiscate the peasants’ weapons, he could not stop bamboo growing. And when the Duke of Ch’in saw 20 million needle-sharp bamboo spears marching towards him, he hastily abandoned the empire.
The Ch'inless Wonders of Globalism made a similar mistake: they could march through the institutions, but they couldn’t take away our votes, much as they’ve tried. Now, they’re watching with dismay as hundreds of millions of angry peasants sharpen their pencils and march to the ballot boxes.
Much mentioned among my friends is the feeling that the re-election of Donald Trump last year confirms that his ascendancy marked not an aberration but the arrival of a new order.
Have your barf bags handy as the elite self-congratulation moves into full ego-stroking mode.
The technocratic, good-mannered, optimistic and consensual politics we grew up with, and which has prevailed in the West since WWII, is not a normality to which we will inevitably return, but a part of history.
As Kyle Reese says, in The Terminator, “You just don’t get it, do you?”
Maybe at the poncy dinner parties of Oxbridge graduates, they really believe this horse shit. The rest of us have seen the naked face of Globalist tyranny play out in everything from Covid authoritarianism to the concerted effort to sacrifice raped young girls on the altar of Diversity. There’s been nothing “good-mannered, optimistic and consensual” about the Globalist world order for those of us who weren’t invited to the ‘better’ sort of chardonnay-and-wagyu beanos.
Oh, and you just know they’re going to lay ‘far right’ on with a trowel. I mean, this is the Times, after all.
I am not the first to observe that change is in the air across the West as the far right rises and liberal democracy crumbles. As writer Aris Roussinos points out, liberalism is “the last of the great 20th-century ideologies”. Having emerged triumphant from its titanic struggles with fascism and communism, it is now its turn to exit history stage left, swept from the scene by populists, demagogues and strongmen.
Because we haven’t seen demagogues and strongmen plundering Western taxpayers and bleeding their children to keep their Forever Wars churning along. Or arresting people over mean tweets while millions of violent immigrants run rampage. Not to mention locking entire populations in their homes and breaking out the truncheons on anyone asking for their basic freedoms.
But the basic problem whichever bougie twit penned this fatuous drivel has is that, like so much of the chattering class, he cannot even use words to mean what they mean. Most notably, ‘liberalism’.
Like many Americans, he makes the mistake of confusing left-wing authoritarianism as ‘liberalism’. To this fundamental mistake, he adds the conceit that Boomer hedonism is also ‘liberalism’. Which is the same lie peddled by the creepy post-’60s founders of Queer Theory, who tried to slide their personal fetishes about everything from cross-dressing to paedophilia under the door of ‘liberation’.
But dramas on the international stage do not make an era. Culture, manners and technology matter too. Candidates for signs of epochal social change include the sexual revolution (or asexual revolution) of the 2020s. The decline in young people having sex is often seen as a rejection of the sexual liberation of the 1960s but it arguably marks the end of a much longer trend towards sexual liberalism that can be traced back at least as far as the bohemian upper middle classes of the 1920s.
Even where he correctly identifies the malaise, he is utterly incapable of correctly diagnosing the cause – the very post-’60s ‘New Left’ hegemony he clearly yearns for.
Literacy is now declining for the first time on record. A recent OECD report finds adult reading proficiency is falling around the world. The crucial moment may not have been the arrival of the smartphone but the more recent dominance of short video.
Because it has nothing to do with the concatenation of nonsensical ideological nostrums the Boomer left and their heirs have foisted on generations of schoolkids. Everything, from the miserable failure of ‘Whole Language’ reading to the classroom-re-education campaigns around climate change, ‘indigenous’ fetishes and creepy sexualisation.
Conservatives who are succeeding in forcing a return to what worked in the classroom for centuries are seeing immediate and startling results: kids are learning to read and do maths again.
So, yes, say goodbye to all that, you fatuous, prating, elite twits – and good riddance.
