The Naïve Liberal's Progress

From the left to the right

I’ve never been into The Sex Pistols, but in recent years I’ve find myself echoing Johnny Rotten’s words a lot: “Do you ever think you’ve been cheated?” We have been cheated, but it takes a long process of discovery for many of us to realise that.

I was a child of the nineties and grew up in the era where global peace and prosperity seemed not just possible, but probable. Like many Jewish families in Britain, various of my family members described themselves as “socialist.” In reality, they were really social democrats (and monarchists!), but there was an unspoken sense that we had to remember that we came from poor immigrant tailors in the East End of London and should care about “the poor.” My grandparents, while not immigrants, did grow up in East London and my paternal grandparents lived there for most of their lives; many of my forebears on both sides of the family were in the clothing industry. Politically, however, I’m really talking here about my father and his father as they were the family members who talked about politics most. We were also strongly Zionist, which didn’t seem terribly significant at the time, but would become so in the coming decades.

I studied economics at A-level (exams aged seventeen or eighteen), which demolished any sense I might have had about socialism working. At this point, I started defining myself as a liberal in a vague sense, blurring the line between classical liberalism and welfare liberalism as many people do. I might have gone on with this unquestioningly, were it not for two things. One was my Zionism and a reasonable (and constantly growing) knowledge of Zionist/Israeli history. The other was the repeated burnouts and depressions that characterised my twenties and thirties, culminating eventually in my autism diagnosis (in 2021) and my final realisation that I am not going to have the “classic” middle-class professional career, along with the status, income and financial security that come with it.

The Second Intifada, which began when PLO/PA leader Yasser Arafat turned down Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 1999 and lasted until 2005, saw the creation of the modern media narrative on Israel, that of Israeli brutality crushing innocent Palestinian for no reason. The maintenance of this narrative required exaggerating the brutality Israeli military operations and ignoring Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties alongside various Israeli peace proposals, while simultaneously downplaying Palestinian violence and ignoring Palestinian rejection of said peace proposals, against a sustained misrepresentation of Jewish and Israeli history to portray the Jews as interlopers in the region who have never been interested in peace, only conquest and expansion. In the process blood libels like those around the death of Mohammed al-Dura and the imaginary massacre that the media said took place in Jenin in 2002 were created.

Richard Landes’ book Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad covers much of this territory; I will just note that, for the first time, I noticed discrepancies between what I saw in the mainstream media and what I knew from elsewhere, primarily from the Jewish press and general historical reading, but also occasionally from elsewhere. Occasionally, a mainstream journalist would say something that did not accord with the standard narrative as when CNN’s Anderson Cooper admitted in a blog post (but, tellingly, not on air) that Western journalists covering the Second Lebanon War were threatened by Hezbollah to show only their narrative. Sometimes, it would be a politician who told the truth, as when (former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs revealed a serious Israeli peace proposal that the media had simply ignored. Once or twice, it was even Hamas, as when they belatedly admitted that Israeli casualty figures for one war, which showed predominantly combatant casualties, were correct rather than the predominantly civilian casualties Hamas had claimed at the time, an admission probably made to gain funding from their allies by presenting themselves as good “martyrs,” but which was picked up by the Jewish media, although not the mainstream media (they never made this mistake again).

This led to the beginning of the unravelling of my trust in the mainstream media, albeit at first limited to Middle East reportage, which I assumed was a particularly bad area, perhaps due to the complicated history of the region, to Western narratives of post-colonial guilt or simply antisemitism.

Simultaneously, I could see the anti-Iraq War movement being hijacked by the anti-Zionist movement, as if the two conflicts were somehow related. When I saw photos of anti-war protests in the newspaper, there seemed to be as many Free Palestine banners as anti-Iraq War ones. The implication, of course, was that Israel was dragging the West into “imperialist” wars in the Middle East and, as it was advanced by innuendo rather than argument most of the time, it was hard to counter. It’s hard to disprove a knowing wink.

Around this time, I started reading George Orwell’s essays seriously and understanding politics more seriously as about power and language, things that permeate culture. Orwell was a lot of things I’m not: socialist, atheist, anti-Zionist. Yet his understanding of the way totalitarianism operates, especially totalitarianism of the far-left kind (the kind building an alliance with the Islamists over Israel-Palestine) seemed pertinent and helpful. His understanding of the corruptions that the left is prone to as well as his analysis of the abuses of political language are still relevant and invaluable. I’m not going to go over that ground again (see my article here), but that helped reassure me that I was not imagining things, that the left could, and is, subject to corruption.

As time grew on, I became aware and irritated by the liberal hegemony of Western culture, without at first having the words to describe it. This was a slow process that unfolded alongside my political development. Whether it was the assumption in fiction that extreme individualism, in the sense of meeting the needs of the self, should always take priority over the needs of the community (particularly in stories about some kind of cross-cultural intermarriage that would likely leave offspring abandoning the minority religion/culture) or the increasingly lazy attacks on conservatives and religious people by “comedians” (but only on Jews and Christians, never on Eastern religions and definitely never on Islam) and a general refusal of cultural creators even to try to understand people with a more conservative mindset, it seemed that a lot was being presumed rather than analysed, and by people who prided themselves on their knowledge, open-mindedness and tolerance. It took me a very long time to realise that I was naming a political reality here rather than just a clash between my religious values and the secular culture of the world of the arts.

When the Financial Crisis hit in 2008, I became aware of the poor standard of presentation of economics in the media and by politicians. The Conservatives and Labour were presented both by the politicians concerned and by a mostly left-wing media (including the BBC) as two starkly different parties, one standing for fiscal austerity, the other for more public spending, but their manifesto spending promises seemed very similar to me. Another telling moment came when reading the economist Paul Krugman’s book The Return of Depression Economics. Krugman praised President Obama for increasing state spending and attacked British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Cameron and George Osbourne for cutting it, but a simple internet search revealed that, even after these policies were implemented, British government spending was a significantly larger proportion of GDP than was the case in the USA. That a Nobel Prize winning economist (and one with a newspaper column called, “The Conscience of a Liberal”) could make such an intellectually dishonest argument was deeply dispiriting, as well as making me wonder what other misrepresentations were passing me by because of a lack of knowledge or expertise.

By this time, my experience as a long-term user of NHS psychiatric care (which I wrote about here), perhaps the most dysfunctional part of the NHS, as well as someone who had been on sickness and unemployment benefits for some time, led to a general frustration with the lack of discussion of the practical and moral capabilities and limitations of the state; of the moral case for free markets; of the practical and moral need for fiscal discipline; and especially of the unacknowledged, soul-destroying nature of being stuck in long-term welfare dependency. The argument being made on the left was, at least implicitly, that the state can do almost anything; that it should do anything it can do; and that there could be no downside to its actions, because it helps people and reduces harm. The idea that welfare dependency destroys the soul, teaches learned helplessness and creates perverse incentives to stay unwell or unemployed was barely even mentioned by this stage, even to shoot it down.

Then came 2016, The Year of the Great Disruption. I was a “reluctant Remainer” in the EU referendum. I had previously been pro-EU and even in favour of a federal Europe, but the disingenuous nature of the arguments made for the Lisbon Treaty in 2005, which was essentially an EU constitution, but which was not sold as such (indeed, the pro-EU side denied it was a constitution) and was continually sent back for ratification when rejected in referenda across Europe, convinced me that the EU was undemocratic. Even so, I felt that the economic benefits argued in favour of staying in. When Leave won, I thought we should honour the vote and was disgusted and horrified at those in the technocratic class, both right and left, who wanted to use lawfare and legalistic politics to prevent a democratic vote being enacted. I realised that, if there was a second referendum, I would vote leave, as a matter of principle, to honour the outcome of the first referendum. The nastiness of the EU in all of this, clearly making an example of Britain to prevent other states leaving, just made staying seem more odious.

A similar thing happened with Donald Trump over the next eight years, as I moved from shock at his victory, to disgust as the years progressed with those who used lawfare and constitutional chicanery to stop him being re-elected (however, I don’t believe the “stolen election” conspiracy theories). At the same time, I was, unlike most in the technocratic world, even on the notional right, curious about why people had voted for Leave and Trump. This led to research on immigration and the discovery, obvious now, but hidden from me from a young age by the liberal technocratic cultural hegemony, that immigration is not a win-win proposition, but a win-lose one. The middle class benefit from cheap labour and defame the working class who lose from suppressed wages and falling social capital, not to mention rising crime and Islamist terror. I became increasingly sceptical of a legacy media that seemed unwilling to present the truth about many things, not just Israel.

Whatever trust I had in the mainstream media would be demolished in the years after 2020 as Western society seemed to simply unravel before our eyes, while those in power attempted to keep up appearances of normality.

In the USA, COVID was a party political issue, but in Britain, this was largely not the case, so I complied meekly with lockdown and mask mandates and looked askance at those who thought the pandemic was overblown. I trusted in the empirical, scientific process and its apolitical application by government experts who considered all the relevant data and outcomes. In this, I was utterly wrong. COVID was not a hoax, but the regulations it prompted were an example of social media-fuelled mass hysteria (in which I was caught up), something seen in many other events in this period. Britain’s own, ongoing, public inquiry into COVID recently stated what some said all along, that full lockdown was unnecessary. It is clear that the negative effects of lockdowns are still ongoing, in terms of disrupted education to a whole cohort of children; loss of social skills among a whole population; worsening mental health for many and the unnecessarily bleak, comfortless deaths of those in isolation. Moreover, under Boris Johnson, politicians and civil servants flouted the rules they imposed on others.

Most absurd of all (and something I was angry about at the time) was the widespread, expert-sponsored ideas that the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter riots were legitimate and even praiseworthy during lockdown as “racism is a public health issue” (despite the fact that no one has ever proved that Floyd’s death, tragic though it was, was a consequence of racism, nor is it actually the case that disproportionately large numbers of unarmed black men are killed by American police each year). The description of the riots in the media as “mostly peaceful” while fires raged in the background was a further indication of the corruption of the legacy media, which was now on a par with Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi spokesman dubbed “Comical Ali” during the Iraq War, who famously denied the presence of US tanks in Baghdad while they could be heard in the background. This is what the legacy media had come to, what it had actively embraced: a politicised version of “truth” that was no better than that in a dying dictatorship.

Over the next few years a slew of other scandals would break showing coordinated deception and outright lying on the part of the entire ruling elite in both Britain and America: politicians, bureaucrats, academics and others. There was the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the attempt by the Democratic Party to run a presidential candidate who was incapable of governing, not to mention their failure to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. And this went unchallenged from a legacy media that had pilloried President George W. Bush as a moron unfit for office for a few verbal slips. There was the continuing fallout from the Russiagate false allegations against Donald Trump and the cover-up of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. And all of this largely came out due to alternative (online) media, not the legacy media, which attempted to suppress these stories wherever possible.

Here in the UK, the Pakistani rape gang scandal and its even more scandalous cover-up by politicians of all parties at local and national levels, police, the NHS and the media slowly emerged into daylight. I doubt that the revelations about this topic are over and it is clear that the lives of thousands of working class women were sold for the sake of a nebulous concept of “diversity” and to prevent race riots about failed multicultural immigration policies.

In many ways, this was similar to the collapse of the mirage of normality that had been constructed around the trans issue. We had been told that few children were being given irreversible hormonal treatment or surgery and that men simply did not use false female identities to enter women’s safe spaces and molest them. Suddenly, it became clear that children were being given unnecessary and often untested treatments on a massive scale and that rapes had become common in women’s prisons. Again, this came out largely due to a handful of gender realist activists using online media, because the legacy media were too scared or too complicit to intervene. This story, like the COVID lies and censorship was, in many ways, more damaging to trust than others, because it was not party political, but involved supposedly neutral, apolitical medical experts acting on the basis of dogma rather than science.

This further example may seem trivial, but I think it is telling. In 2020, we were repeatedly told by the legacy media that Donald Trump was the first living president not to attend his successor’s inauguration. A year or two later, I discovered that this simply is not true. At least three previous presidents (John Adams; his grandson, John Quincey Adams; and Andrew Johnson) had all refused to attend the inaugurations of their successors out of pique. If the media can’t, or won’t, get such a basic fact right, how can we trust them? That all of this happened against a backdrop of panic in the legacy media about “disinformation” and the rise of “fact checkers” who turned out to be politically biased themselves only makes more clear the extent of the moral corruption in journalism.

Finally came 7 October, the Ground Zero for many Jews’ trust in the institutions of the West. Even before Israel had moved into Gaza, while there were still Hamas terrorists in Israeli territory, there was an outburst of mass antisemitism on the streets of the West; of media hatred; of Western politicians queueing up to accuse of Israel of “war crimes” with no proof; and of NGOs and the UN gaslighting the Jews about what happened, particularly about the mass rapes committed by Hamas. “Believe women” did not apply to Jews. In the years to follow, there would be widespread, uncritical use of Hamas’ casualty figures by Western politicians, journalists, academics and activists (the lines between these categories are no longer clear) even after they had been comprehensively disproven. Above all, this was the point where I moved from observing gaslighting by authority figures to being directly gaslit, alongside realising that the government and the police in this country might very well let me be murdered, and would certainly let me be intimidated into hiding my Jewish identity in public, rather than risk Muslims rioting or even just not voting Labour.

Since then, it has felt, not like Western civilisation is about to collapse, but that it has already collapsed and we are standing among the ruins, wondering what to do next, not sure that we are even still alive, while all around people are trying to carry on as if nothing has changed. A number of episodes of the classic TV series The Twilight Zone revolve around people who, we discover at the end, are actually dead, but in denial of this. That is what Western civilisation has become, an uncanny realm, haunted by the ghosts of the living trying to carry on as before.

And yet, standing amid the debris on 8 October 2023, I found myself “surprising/A hunger in [myself] to be more serious”. I had always read in Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Jewish thought alongside some serious fiction and non-fiction (mostly history, Jewish, British and European), but now I wanted to delve more into these topics, alongside philosophy and politics.

As a result of these things, I gradually moved away from the liberalism that I had felt so sure of, initially to a feeling of political homelessness, which lasted a long time. Although I started voting for the Conservative Party around 2010 (I think in the general election of that year), I didn’t really identify with them (I still don’t) and for a long time I groped around for alternative terms for my political beliefs. For a while, I borrowed George Orwell’s term, Tory Anarchist, and I still do sometimes use it as I do think it captures something about my thought. However, it’s fairly meaningless (I don’t think Orwell ever defined it, although he used it for himself for a long time) and describes an attitude as much as anything substantial. I suppose that’s part of the appeal of the term, but it’s probably not helpful inasmuch as political terms, when we need them (which is probably less often than we think) do need to have some kind of commonly-understood meaning, otherwise we’re just playing language games and “performing” identity with the postmodernists.

Last year, I read Roger Scruton (How To Be A Conservative) and his argument that conservatism is more a feeling more than an ideology, a feeling that we have inherited wonderful things from those who came before us that we have a duty to pass on to those who come after us. I realised that I have had this feeling all of my life, long before I started voting rightwards, and that it is part of the reason I was never entirely comfortable on the left. I love the past. I love old things. I love old quotes and old ideas. I want to preserve them, even if they aren’t of practical use to us, just for their own sake. (I wrote about this here.) I also realised that the so-called Conservative Party in Britain have not actually wanted to conserve anything for decades (Margaret Thatcher, although revered by some real conservatives, was probably the turning point, more neo-liberal revolutionary in effect than conservative, even though she was personally socially conservative in many ways). This made me realise that I have been a conservative for a very long time, even if the Conservative Party has not been.

Also important was reading Mary Harrington on rejecting the concept of progress. This seemed shocking at first, but made sense on reflection. I accept that there has been scientific and technological progress, but not political progress, certainly not in a linear sense of constant improvement as defined by the left (albeit that they think it can be derailed temporarily by something they call “Fascism,” which means “things we don’t like”). As for moral progress, after 7 October and the reaction in the West, I no longer believe that we have come far at all since ancient times. Basic concepts like the sanctity of human life have been eroded in the West, alongside personal responsibility and objective truth. In their place, the ancient hatred of antisemitism has returned, disguised as antizionism. Similarly, the idea of innate human goodness, fundamental to liberalism and other progressive ideologies, has been disproven by the Holocaust and, although the West has proceeded as if this were not the case, 7 October simply underlines the point. Seeing people parading through the streets of contemporary Western capitals calling for genocide of the Jews, in the name of freedom, equality and “diversity” is a stark illustration of the failures of modern liberal and progressive thought, a failure to bring about the progress that they insist is part of the inevitable “arc of history.”

I remain a small-l liberal in the sense that I believe in liberal democracy, but this is itself a bedrock belief of Burkean conservatism and its desire for personal freedom from governmental interference in a stable social setting and the resultant illegitimacy of state restrictions on speech, association and religion and the desire for representative institutions. However, overall, I believe in small government, and the active promotion of traditional Western culture, the community and the family, and am a critic of mass welfare, fiscal irresponsibility, technocratic social engineering of society, multiculturalism and the politics of group identity at a level below that of the nation as a whole.

I fear my natural inclination is probably still somewhat technocratic, on some basic, instinctual level. After all, I’m elite university-educated, I value evidence-based solutions, am sceptical of the intrusion emotions in the public sphere (although the technocrats are kidding themselves if they think that hasn’t affected them as much as anyone else) and I think global cooperation is, in theory, a good idea. I still feel vaguely uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism or monarchism. Yet I interrogate myself on these points asking why I want them. Are they really the right answer to the question at hand or is it Hayek’s “fatal conceit” that society is simple enough to recreate at play again?

I am also aware I argue for a form of voluntary, local, conservative communitarianism that is, on some level, deeply conformist, while having a quietly non-conformist streak myself (that “Tory Anarchist” streak again). I have precisely this struggle with my identity as an Orthodox Jew who often feels a bad fit for a conformist community, but is stuck with it because I happen to believe deeply in it.

However, I think Nanny State technocracy has killed personal responsibility and community cohesion and initiative. The instincts of the populists (patriotism; monarchism; respect for religion; localism; community cohesion; traditional family values) are more natural, healthy and useful than those of the technocrats (republicanism and the desire for a “rational” constitution; internationalism and faith in highly corrupt international institutions and NGOs; militant secularism; professed indifference to or even hatred of family and country; multiculturalism; a notional and enforced “diversity” based on race, sex and gender, but not viewpoint; an eating away at the concept of the sanctity of life). Once populist values return, technocratic expertise can be reintroduced in an advisory capacity to democratically-elected leaders, as in the past, and with safeguards to prevent over-reach into government by experts. Political decisions must always be taken by elected officials responsible to voters and not by unelected advisors (as in COVID).

Yet, I am disquieted by the world today and not just by the battle between the technocrats and their woke spearhead against the populists, which has only just begun, and not just by the antisemitism erupting left, right and centre (in political as well as figurative terms). I have fears of a coming massive overcorrection and the growing popularity of far-right and antisemitic and Christian Nationalist views among some on the populist right, particularly in the USA. Populism, although right-wing, is often not conservative, if you appreciate the distinction. It often seeks to break down, not to conserve.

I am not part of the Very Online Right either and my encounters with them largely leave me cold, although I’m not sure why. I suppose they seem either frivolous controversialists or thwarted technocrats themselves. They use a lot of slang and refer to memes, neither of which I understand. Maybe this is the Groucho Marx thing of not wanting to join any club that will have me as a member, or a fear that they would not want to have me as a member after all.

Moreover, a lot of online right-wing analysis seems to be increasingly of a traditional Christian variety, even if not Christian Nationalist extremism, usually from people who have only just become religious. I think there’s desperate naivety (and zeal of a convert) in thinking that a Christian resurgence (if it comes, which is questionable) will reset our societies and solve all our problems. It’s Medievalism without noting the intolerance, obscurantism and, yes, antisemitism of the Middle Ages and especially the Catholic Church’s confrontation with modernity, in the sense of science and secular knowledge, in the Early Modern era (unsurprisingly, Medievalist C. S. Lewis is quoted a lot here; you could also look at contemporary Thomist Harrington again). There’s a difference between handing on the best of the culture of the past to our children and trying to live in the past without recognising its worst aspects. While I don’t think these writers tend to be antisemitic, there’s a real danger of naively not paying attention what the Christian Nationalists are saying as well as where their own ideas may lead. At a basic level, if we define the West as historically “Christian” (which up to a point, I agree with), what do we do with the non-Christians already living here? To ignore the Medieval Church’s treatment of its main non-Christian minority, the Jews opens the way to the return of intolerance and even violence.

Lately, I wonder if it is even possible to be a Burkean conservative any more. Controversial British politician Enoch Powell said that a conservative is someone who thinks that institutions are wiser than the people who run them. However, all our institutions have been captured by the technocratic, progressive hegemony. Populism often feels more like a revolt against institutions than an effort to reform them, and revolts and revolutions are distinctly unconservative. Conservatives favour evolutionary change. We are standing in the ruins and it is not clear what we can do to rebuild. The only way forward is restoration, but a restoration so drastic that it feels like building from scratch, albeit with old blueprints. Is this actually conservatism or something else entirely?

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