Thoughts on the War with Iran

I don’t have any great insights on the war. It’s probably more notable what I don’t know or don’t think than what I do.

I think I write adequate prose, possibly verging on good, but unfortunately I do it extremely slowly. I wavered for half an hour over “shall I just get Grok to write up these notes properly”, rather than take two weeks to get round to doing it myself, and finally plumped for just posting the notes. If you want them turned into a real article, you can use the LLM of your choice.

Not gone as well as Trump expected

Probably a mistake. I don’t think he would have gone for it if he knew we would be here today.

Israel

I’m not an Israel-hater or an Israel-lover.

The argument that Israeli govt & allies in DC manipulated US into war is very strong.

By itself that doesn’t make it bad (though it probably is).

Not a repeat of Afghanistan/Iraq

But possibly worse…

Iraq military was defeated quickly – the problems came with occupation and working with a new government.

Even that might have been successful if the new government was explicitly subordinate to the US, not some stupid democracy.

Problem of Iran is completely different – the military is not defeated.

It is possible that the attacks on military, infrastructure & command are destroying it, and it is a matter of weeks or months until it is gone. Also possible that there is a level of functioning govt & military that will survive years/indefinitely, like Ukraine. Way beyond my expertise to say which. Who is going to run out of missiles / money / civilian morale first? Don’t ask me. These questions are really complex and I can’t see anything clearly through the propaganda.

I have confidence that Trump has no intention whatever of occupying Iran and supporting some new govt, assuming the war goes well enough that that even becomes a possiblity.

Not the same as “no boots on the ground”, raids & incursions are already happening, I think.

Exit Strategy

If Trump can’t get out of it in a reasonable timeframe, he is 100% done.

Negotiating some kind of deal is a realistic possibility, depending on how well the actual fighting goes (and I can’t tell).

Again, occupation and US-backed regime was never on the table.

Apparently the Israelis like Pahlavi. I’m a royalist but the consensus seems to be that that’s not realistic. Complete regime change is not even a goal. If it happens, that’s fine, but the war could be moderately successful just by sufficiently intimidating the existing regime.

I don’t know what the attitudes & factions are of the Iranian population, and I don’t believe anything I am told about them.

Hormuz

Markets seem to believe the impact on shipping will not be sustained. Presumably they think everybody involved has strong enough interests in getting it moving that it is inevitable. We are watching a game of chicken, and one side or the other has to swerve.

Note that Russia is still paying Ukraine fees to carry oil or gas through its pipelines (I think). The spice must flow.

My impression is that the US can’t fix it by force except by basically winning the war (which is not out of the question).

Alternative theory: we are really heading for a New World Order where gulf oil is unavailable, US sits pretty on its own supplies, and Europe & Asia suffer? Seems far-fetched. Massively helps Russia. Lots of practical complications around refining etc. Can US become self-sufficient (“net exporter” is not the same thing, because of those complications) quicker than a Russia → China route solves their problems?

Upsides

As far as I can see, the main gain of all this is seeing how modern technologies and military doctrines actually work in a real war, and building that experience into everything from the Pentagon to industry to the men on the front lines.

Destroying the fake & gay “rules based international order” is also a plus. “What if Russia tried assassinations” lol. “what does Kier Starmer think?” who gives a shit?

Related, show of strength and willingness to use it is a benefit for the US. However, that depends on it not being an obvious failure. Too soon to say.

Also lancing the boil, so to speak. This Iran thing, and the nuke issue especially, has been hanging as a threat for decades. Just getting it over with maybe makes things better? On the other hand, that’s what people said in 1914 and it didn’t work out, while the Cold War never got to that stage and that’s probably a good thing. Pretty damned thin as an argument.

Is there an argument that if it ends fairly well, it cements Trumpism? The line would be, we have a new kind of US leadership that wins wars and doesn’t drag them out into pointless sinks of lives and money. Maybe if it had been a crushing success in three weeks that would have happened. I think we’re already past the stage where it could be a triumph, we’re just hoping for “not as bad as we feared”.

Later Thoughts

22nd March

It occurs to me, a couple of days later, that I am misremembering the invasion of Iraq. It took 3 weeks from the US and allied forces landing in Iraq in March 2003 to the fall of Baghdad, and every step of the way I was being told that it was going to be a disaster, the Republican Guard would hold out forever, casualties would be enormous, etc. etc. If you think that because the occupation of Iraq was a disaster, and the invasion was a bad idea in the first place, that makes these wrong predictions somehow OK, you are not the kind of person I want to hear from. They were wrong predictions based on wishful thinking or basic misunderstandings of the world.

The same people are now saying that Iran cannot be defeated. Maybe this time they’re right. Maybe, like in 2003, they are again wrong but actually winning the war still won’t do any good. I didn’t know for sure in 2003, and I am less sure now.

Obviously the situation is different. I wrote above that a full ground invasion of Iran was not a possibility. I’m feeling now that I might have been overconfident of that, but, even walking back the certainty I expressed, it is still not what I expect to happen. So, while with hindsight the Iraqi military was never going to successfully resist invasion in 2003, it is not so clear-cut, to my inexpert eyes, that the projection of air power into Iran is similiarly unchallengable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. In any case, as I originally put it, the failure scenario in Iran is not Afghanistan, it is Ukraine.

Peter Hitchens says “We can and must stand up to Donald Trump”. Even if he is right that this war will wreck the world — and he might be — “we”, meaning the readership of the Mail on Sunday, cannot, in fact, stand up to Donald Trump. He is the president of the USA. He will probably not even send us a picture of a hamster. It is one thing to question the reasoning and motivations of the war, and to try to anticipate the outcome; it is another thing to imagine that anyone in Europe has any say in it.

Last minor correction: per Candide on X, my factoid about Russia paying Ukraine for pipelines was true up until 2025 but is no longer the case.

Epstein Island

My tastes in fiction are terrible, as I’ve mentioned on one or two occasions previously, but in the pile of pulp thrillers and semi-porn are some outstanding books by Gavin Lyall. In subject matter they are just more crime or espionage thrillers, but his observations keep occurring to me as I read the news, even half a century after some of the books were published.

In The Secret Servant, written to be a television series starring a young Charles Dance (it wasn’t very good, the plot was way too complicated for TV), the protagonist, “Harry Maxim”, is assigned to bodyguard a military strategist, who is attending some weapons trials. After having dealt with an intruder, he approaches the representative of the arms company whose products were being evaluated:

Maxim found it difficult to begin. “I haven’t mentioned it to anyone else… There was a girl in Professor Tyler’s room…”

“From what I hear tell, there’s usually a girl in Professor Tyler’s room. There certainly was at Princeton.”

“You provided this one.”

Brock narrowed his eyes. “Sure.”

“And there was a newspaper reporter staying here.”

“That’s right. He got one of the other girls. Were you thinking I was setting up Professor Tyler for a nice dirty story?”

“I was just asking.”

For a moment, Brock was about to get angry. Then he shook his head and said gently: “Harry, it’s a long time since I told anybody about the birds and the bees, but I’ll try … Fact one: we aren’t going to get any British contract for the mortar. We never were; I could smell that the moment we got here. I assume there’s a political reason, but I don’t know why.

“But so what?” He took a gulp of coffee. “There’s no winning in being a bad loser. Next year maybe we’ll sell you the biodegradable anti-personnel mine, or something new in rifle grenades. I could talk your ass off about what we’ve got coming up there.

“I believe I will have something stronger.” He filled up his coffee with Irish whiskey. “Fact two : if you think I was setting up your Professor for a little blackmail, you’ve blown your tiny Neanderthal mind. For one thing, I really do admire him as a military thinker. Sure, knowing him could be good for trade – or it could be no good at all, particularly if your prime minister loses the next election. Then the Professor would be back in the wilds of Cambridge, England, without any say in policy.

“But—” he stood up and made slow mark-time movements, stretching the stiffness out of his legs. He must have been sitting there a long time, Maxim realised; “—but let me tell you something that would be very bad for trade indeed: any whisper that we went in for blackmail. Giving big commissions, sweeteners, call it bribery if you like – yes, that happens all the time. In most of the countries we do it, there isn’t even a word for it : it’s just a way of life. And it hasn’t hurt Lockheed or Dassault or all the others that there’s a rumour they give away free money. They get it all back in the final purchase price anyhow.

“But blackmail . . . never. Last night I brought along those girls just the same as I made sure the hotel had the Professor’s favourite brand of whisky, that they wouldn’t serve us shellfish, that I had some good cigars to offer him. Harry, this is just routine. If it had been boys instead of girls, I could organise that, too. And when you send me somebody who just wants to talk business, I’ll be very happy to talk business and get to bed early. Until then…”

He sat down again. “Major Harry Maxim, takes coffee black with plenty of sugar, doesn’t drink much but is particular about beer, doesn’t smoke – except maybe a cigar? How’m I doing?”

Maxim smiled quickly. “Pretty well.”

“And it would be girls not boys, if anything. Sheet, you should hear some of what we have to organise in the Middle East or Latin America. Europe’s supposed to be easy territory.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Servant_(Lyall_novel)

I just always assumed that Epstein was doing the same thing. He made a lot of money managing investments for very rich people, and his clients and prospects got all the entertainments he could lay on for them, including celebrity speakers, including girls, including underage1 girls if that was their taste.

It’s not nothing — it’s crime and corruption and I have no inclination to defend it. But it’s always happened, and always will happen, and occasionally people will get properly busted for it, and usually they won’t.

Now the idea that Israeli intelligence, via their connections to Epstein and Maxwell, could have been getting something on the side is not insane. It might or might not be true. But as the “Brock” character above implies, it’s not something they could have been making any regular use of without destroying the whole thing. Very bad for trade indeed.

Europe as a Superpower

The following is an extract from my very first blog post, over twenty years ago:

…Another factor which has tended to mislead American observers is, I suspect, that during the period of the cold war they tended to underestimate the differences between Europeans and Americans. Confronted for the first time with these differences in the context of the war on Iraq, they are falsely attributing long-standing attitudes to Islamic influence. One longstanding European position is secularism. While the trappings of Christianity survived past the middle of the twentieth century, the Northern European countries have not been Christian for a hundred years, or in the case at least of France, for two hundred.

Another of these attitudes is anti-Americanism. I believe that this is pervasive across the European elite, at least at an emotional level. This emotional attitude can be suppressed for political reasons, and largely was during the cold war, but if one considers the substantial minority of Europeans who saw the USA as more of a threat than the USSR through the 60s and 70s, it is hardly surprising if a larger group is more afraid of the vastly more powerful USA of the 21st century than of the likes of Saddam Hussein. Nor is this fear of the USA as irrational as some Americans might think. Western Europe has not been in conflict with the USA since the end of the Second World War, but that was a result of Europe’s acceptance of American dominance in the face of the threat of the USSR. With that threat removed, many Europeans wish actively to prevent a single-superpower world. The rhetoric is about providing a balance or counterweight to American power, as in some quotes from an article in The Observer:

“The implications of a unipolar world are bad for everyone concerned. If America stands aloof from global problems, it is accused of isolationism. If it intervenes, it is accused of imperialism. Either way, it becomes a target of resentment and violence. For the rest it means frustration and impotence.

Complaining won’t do any good. The rest of us have to raise our game and provide America with partners they can’t ignore. For Britain, that means building a more united Europe with a more coherent foreign policy and a strong single currency. It’s either that or another American century.”

– David Clark, former special adviser to Robin Cook at the Foreign Office.

“If one country must be so dominant militarily, then it is probably better that it is the United States rather than another country. However, history suggests that such dominance leads to abuse and it is encumbent on the rest of the world to find ways of restraining the United States through international law, countervailing power and dialogue.

The European Union, which has achieved parity with the United States in trade and investment, has a major responsibility in this endeavour. Plans for a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) therefore need to be accelerated and EU governments need to commit adequate resource to it”.

-Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs

These people are not commentators or pundits, they are policy makers. Implicit in phrases like “find ways of restraining the United States through … countervailing power” is the option of at least credibly threatening the USA with military conflict. This is one of the major driving forces behind enlarging and strengthening the EU. If European politicians are already thinking in terms of fighting against the USA, then they are not going to be in any hurry to oppose the wave of Islamism which is currently the USA’s most active enemy. Just as France supported North American rebels against the British Empire in the 1770s, and Britan and France supported the Confederacy against the Union in the 1860s, these Europeans are likely to be sympathetic to any minor power that is likely to weaken the USA.

I am attempting to characterise a political view that is widespread across Europe. In Britain, it is known as the “Post-War Consensus” — essentially the mainstream political orthodoxy prior to the Thatcher revolution. It is a significant minority view in Britain, but is still the dominant ideology across much of the Continent, notably France, and, equally importantly, in the institutions of the European Union. The key elements of this ideology are a highly regulated economy, protected industry, the welfare state, and international institutions such as the EU and the UN.

Since 1980, some compromises have been made on the economic front, towards liberalisation of trade and deregulation of markets, but they have been strongly resisted and there is still a huge constituency for reversing them. It can be described as a left-wing but it was shared by the mainstream right until the 1980s, and is in a sense conservative — seeking to return to the status quo of the 1960s and 70s. If you ask a member of this group whether there is a “clash of civilisations”, he will probably tell you that there is. But the threat to civilisation he sees is not militant Islam, it is Hollywood, and deregulated markets, and globalised world trade. It is not the crescent moon that is overwhelming Old Europe — they’re coping with that fairly well — it is the Stars and Stripes that is the banner of the enemy.

That is the real problem, as far as many Europeans are concerned, with the War on Terror. There are ways of dealing with a terrorist threat at home, other than attacking its sources abroad. These ways may be more effective or less effective, but that is not the issue. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, whatever their effect on Islamist terror, demonstrate that there is one military superpower in the world, that can act alone even beyond its traditional “sphere of influence”. This is more of a shock to them than a few airliners flying into skyscrapers.

Even to moderate British, who would not align themselves with this Post-War Consensus view, there is still a tradeoff: damaging terrorism is good, but it has to be set against making the USA more powerful and confident. It must be amusing to the anti-American thinkers in France or Germany when American critics paint them as weak or effete allies, when in fact the reason they are not joining the fight alongside the USA is that their sympathies lie with the other side.

And the following was posted a few days later:

I blogged recently on how many in Europe are planning to build a new superpower to challenge the USA, even to the extent of being able to oppose it militarily. I didn’t get round to explaining why they would fail.

The European members of NATO spend $200bn a year on defense. The USA spends $393bn.

Britain and France, who between them account for something like half of that $200bn, have much of their military tied up in former colonies

Britain is reducing its forces.

But that’s only the start. Except in a “total war” situation, defense spending has to come, in a sense, out of discretionary income. Europe’s economies are already struggling under the weight of high taxes and expensive welfare systems. There is just nowhere they can find the money to fund a superpower-grade military. Even enlargement doesn’t help here; bringing in Eastern European countries adds significantly to the total size of the economy, but whatever extra tax revenue becomes available for military must be used directly for defending the new nations’ borders. Indeed, as the new nations are expecting subsidy “structural funds” from the wealthier nations, their accession leaves less in the pot for military adventures.

The facts are, Americans are used to spending 3.5% of GDP on defence, and Europeans (except for Greece) aren’t.

Of course, as the USA has a much higher rate of economic growth than the EU members, the existing gap is just going to widen.

But all this is built on the idea that an EU Common Foreign Policy, theoretically established over a decade ago by the Treaty of Maastricht, is even possible. There’s been no sign of one yet, and again, the enlargement of the Union makes it less likely that unanimity can be reached. While it seems that the latest round of centralisation will be difficult to get accepted, the idea of having countries’ own servicemen directed by a policy made by other countries is hardly on the cards.

This objection links with the previous ones, as the countries where there is the most enthusiasm for the idea of challenging the USA are the ones with the most stagnant economies and the lowest growth. The countries with the healthiest economies are the ones least hostile to the United States. This is not coincidence; the hostility to the United States is rooted largely in hostility to the economic system which enables growth. (The text of the speech linked to in that article is very much worth reading).

All of the above seems relevant and important today. The first post also discussed Islam in Europe, and today reads as if it was from another planet; I addressed that here in 2017.

Conversation about Civil Service

This is a conversation I had on Twitter on 3rd January 2017. I’ve referenced it a few times since, because it was so interesting and important.

The other party “SL” currently describes herself as “Retired lawyer… Enlightenment values and the rule of law. Pro-Europe.” I’ve scratched her handle here because I’m sure she wouldn’t want to be dragged back into all this after 8 years, and it’s not about her, rather I assume she represents the “Enlightenment values and the rule of law” people well. The discussion even at the time was notable for being reasonably polite and rational.

The initial trigger was a tweet by slightly nutty Labour MP Kate (now Baroness) Hoey. I don’t care about her.

I’ve pasted the tweets below. Note that this all took place over a couple of hours, and we replied past each other quite often, so it isn’t in X today as a single thread, rather there are a lot of branches. Therefore some lines below are replies to things further up the page, not to the immediately preceding.

@SL Civil servants are independent. In trying to politicise them you are a disgrace to Parliamentary democracy.
@someone-else She’s not on that again, is she? She didn’t even know MEPs were elected. Twerp.
@SL And she doesn’t know that civil servants are politically neutral.
@someoneelse This Post is from a suspended account
@SL False. The independence of civil servants is a vital underpinning of our democracy.
@anomalyuk who told you that?
@SL Who’s asking?
@anomalyuk someone who has read the Fulton Report
‘the Civil Service works under the obligation of political accountability’
@SL Who told you that?
@anomalyuk That’s the official report into how the Civil Service is supposed to work
@SL There have been many such reports, not one. “[T]he official report”? Comical.
@anomalyuk [link to the text of the Fulton report. The link no longer works, and I cannot now find a text, though there are pdf scans: https://www.civilservant.org.uk/csr-fulton_report-findings.html]
@SL No, it doesn’t say what you claim.
@anomalyuk Chapter 1, Paragraph 13. 2
@SL which was in 1968. Read the current sources of law and practice.
@anomalyuk an employee COP isn’t talking about ‘underpinnings of democracy’
The goal of impartiality since Northcote-Trevelyan3 has been for efficiency
per-term political appointees are likely to be less able than permanents
This is a (good) argument of sacrificing some democracy for efficiency
@SL I don’t know what you’re on about. The impartiality of civil servants is provided
for by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. See ss 5-9.
@anomalyuk I’m still genuinely curious where your bizarre theory came from, BTW.
@SL Here are some actual sources.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/civil-service-conduct-and-guidance
http://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Code-of-Practice-for-Staff.pdf
A handy extract

@anomalyuk So (1) you retract your claim Fulton doesn’t say what it in fact says?
and (2) an ‘underpinning of democracy’ is new since 1968?
@SL No idea what you’re on about now, sorry. If you’ve a point, feel free to make it.
@anomalyuk I was not arguing that aiming for impartiality is without merit: I was disputing the ‘underpinning of democracy’ claim.
@SL “Aiming for” impartiality? It’s a statutory requirement. Under the rule of law.
@anomalyuk The (very hard) job of running a civil service is balancing professionalism with political accountability.
@SL A separation of powers underpins democracy.
And this discussion is about being an impartial civil servant. Subject to rigorous statutory obligations.It’s up to minsters
to set political goals. Civil servants implement them.
@anomalyuk there are a few threads now to this discussion. This [“A separation of powers underpins democracy”] is the one I care about (your legal claims are no doubt correct).
The ‘separation of powers’ historically never meant between politicians and civil servants.
Executive, Legislature and Judiciary were the traditional three branches. Crown/Prime Minister & Civil Service not separate
@anomalyuk The idea of a Civil Service with independent power gradually arose in the late 20th Century.
@SL Because our executive and legislature are one. It’s to give effect to a modified separation of powers.
@anomalyuk It arose around the same time in the USA, where legislature and executive are separate.
I tend to assume it’s part of the general managerial revolution, along with the ‘post-war consensus’ in politics.
but I’m interested in alternative theories. The idea that it is more democratic to do things this way is new to me.
@SL Independent power? I was talking about impartiality.
@anomalyuk How is ‘separation of powers’ not about power?
@SL Impartiality is a duty, not a power.
@anomalyuk How does the separation of powers, which you brought up, not me, come into it then?
I get impartiality. If a CS is too tied to a party, then when that party leaves, he leaves, replacement lacks experience…
..and possibly ability, government becomes amateurish and incompetent. As was the case before 1850s
My impression from you is that an impartial civil service should be a ‘check’ on executive power. That’s what I don’t get.
@SL Impartiality obliges a civil servant to tell the minister what is true, not what they want to be told. That’s very important.
@anomalyuk I would still class that as an ‘efficiency’ rather than a ‘democracy’ consideration. But I think we’ve got to the end.
Thanks very much for persevering, it’s been educational.

Where are we now?

In 2016 I wrote about the prospects of President-Elect Trump.

President Trump may save the system for another two or three decades (first by softening its self-destructive activities, and later by being blamed for every problem that remains)… of course the man is just an ordinary centre-left pragmatist, and beyond immigration policy and foreign policy becoming a bit more sane, there is no reason to expect any significant change at all… I expect real significant change in US immigration policy, and pretty much no other changes at all. I expect that Trump will be allowed to make those changes.

This projection was based on my fundamental model of how politics has worked. That context is best put in my 2013 piece Chances of Success.

The only thing that can save the Cathedral is conservatism, a moderating of the headlong progressive rush that can slow the rate of failure down so that the old methods [of evading responsibility] will work. That has happened before when the rate of leftward movement became dangerous to the whole structure. But, while the effectiveness of its rule has deteriorated, the ability of the left to emasculate and marginalise conservatism has increased. The chances of a Thatcher or Reagan appearing in the next decade or so to slow the rate of decline and provide a scapegoat for some of the failures looks very slim. The worse things get, the more likely it is that some serious conservatism might appear to staunch the bleeding. If it can’t happen in ten years, maybe it will happen in twenty. But if it can happen, that means that the Cathedral’s monopoly of cool, and, more importantly, respectability, has already frayed. If a long-excluded conservatism can gain status, then so can we. And if it can’t then the decline continues to gather pace and the failings of the state continue to become more obvious.

Needless to say, 2017-2021 didn’t quite pan out the way I expected in 2016. As I had observed in 2013, “the ability of the left to emasculate and marginalise conservatism has increased.” Progressivism had become less competent than ever before, and conservatism had also become weaker and less effective. The central 21st century phenomenon of the politically powerful believing their own propaganda (the decline of conspiracy) prevented them from taking the lifeline that Trump offered them. Rather than accepting a minor correction, they acted as if — and probably genuinely convinced themselves that — they were fighting off the destruction of civilisation. The Trump administration achieved less than nothing, and the Biden period which followed amplified everything that had made a correction necessary in the first place.

November 2024 was groundhog day: the correction was still necessary, doubly or triply so after the orgy of progressive revenge over the previous four years. But a lot of illusions have been dissolved. What does the next four years hold?

There are three possibilities: First, Sonny & Cher start to sing, and 2017 repeats itself. Trump is stymied by the bureaucracy and the courts, and we roll on to 2028 to find out whether his supporters give up or revolt.

Second, my prediction of 2016 actually happens this time. Immigration is reduced, the “Diversity” commissariat is dissolved, but the fundamental Modern Structure of media democracy continues, with rather better prospects than before. Probably Vance succeeds Trump, and to regain office in the 2030s the mainstream is forced to accept a portion of the new reality: restricted immigration, and more emphasis on the interests of the poor than than on those of the exotic.

Third, everything changes. The progressive lock on elite media and education is broken, and a new reactionary regime is put in place. Patriarchy replaces DEI. The young and fashionable posture around theories of racial hierarchy and national greatness rather than equality and national cringe. Welcome to the new golden age, or the new fascism, or both.

I discard the third idea out of hand. That is not actually Trump’s goal, or Vance’s, or Musk’s. Their goals seem pretty extreme by today’s standards, but are actually pretty much to restore the policies of the Clinton administration.

So the real possibilities lie in between that and nothing. I’m open to accusations of doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, but I’m still plumping for the correction. I would not be shocked though if it doesn’t happen.

What would then happen after, though, is the real question. Trump succeeding is the stable, “Nothing Ever Happens” option. Trump failing is the “leads to catastrophe”. The (largely unimportant and unnecessary) lies told by the public health establishment during the pandemic have permanently discredited science to a degree that could not have been imagined before. Frogs are being boiled far too quickly. I wrote in 2016 that Neoreaction would have been better placed if Hillary Clinton had won, because the regime was heading for the rocks. I’m not so sure now. Catastrophe can take many forms, and Neoreaction, while coming along quite nicely in terms of elite penetration, still has a very long way to go before becoming the alternative system in waiting. If 2028 produces an actual fascist reaction, or an economic collapse leading to Chinese global domination, for instance, are those good things? I tend to think not. As always, it’s pretty much unguessable, because we have entered this unstable mode of escalating response and revenge, and it could end anywhere. Will there be four half-swings of the pendulum before it breaks, or five? I have no idea how to predict that. But if neoreaction’s chances of succeeding the old ideology in a relatively orderly way improve, the idea of a real catastrophe becomes less attractive.

What’s most interesting about the first days of Trump 47 is the malleability of culture. We are seeing levels of “you can just do things” never thought possible. If you can get fired from a government job for saying DEI is good, instead of for saying it is bad, then overnight anti-DEI is respectable and normal people just go along with that.

(I’m most curious about the impact here in Britain. So much of our political culture is pure imitation of America, to the extent of MPs blathering about things being “unconstitutional”. The “diversity” agenda has always been obviously an American import. If it flips there, does it necessarily flip here, even without a matching political change on this side? Or is the feed one-sided, from the American prestige institutions to Britain, with the actual government and population not part of it?)

The other existential threat to our civilisation is the CO2 scare. Here again, Trump offers a mild correction, sufficient to go a few more decades. But if that correction is followed by a vengeful reaction? Or vice versa? It’s the pendulum again: maybe the Milliband net zero excess will have such disastrous effects in Britain that we react to become an energy-rich haven before 2035, and that would be because of Starmer and Milliband. It doesn’t seem likely, but many big things that happened in the last 20 years did not seem likely before they happened.

Returning Narrative

I avoided all of this over Christmas.

I found the H1-B debate tedious and depressing. On the one hand, while it is possible to argue that the smartest people in the world immigrating into America to do business is a bad thing and should be stopped, it is hardly reasonable to expect, say, Elon Musk, to agree, since that is what he and many of his peers and friends did.

On the other hand, to jump straight from that to saying it is good that whole companies or sectors of the economy become colonial outposts of another country, with that country’s culture and language and expectations, because they can be hired 15 or 20% cheaper, is rather a stretch.

In between these two extremes are questions of balance and numbers. Nobody I was seeing arguing on either side seemed willing to admit that, which I found annoying. As to where the balance should be, well, that’s a question for Americans, not for me.

I’m intimately familiar with the equivalent situation in Britain, but, while I think it looks pretty similar on the ground, Britain’s commercial culture and relationship with the foreign countries in question are sufficiently different from America’s that my observations would confuse rather than illuminate the question.

I’ll just make one only tangentially related argument. The concept of the “refugee” when it originated, related exclusively to people in highly developed countries displaced by religious or political conflict. The related historical observation that countries have often been significantly enriched (without scare quotes) by inflows of such refugees goes with this — whether we are talking about Hugenots in Britain, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or indeed white South Africans. Mass migrations from undeveloped countries are simply a different kind of thing. Extending the legal conventions and organisations that emerged around Europeans expelled in World War II and its aftermath to those suffering the normal run of civil wars and famines in semi-civilised regions is a clear mistake.

The migrations of people from subject colonies is a third thing again. One would expect that to occur to the extent that colonial power sees it as beneficial, and to be reversible if desired. One would expect it to end when the colonial relationship ends.

Kamala is (Whale) Cancer

The first real lesson of the election is that whales don’t get cancer because the cancers get cancer before they get big enough to kill the whale4.

Put another way, the ideals of the modern left are very bad for society, because they obstruct effective organisation by encouraging disruptive behaviour, allow corruption by removing personal responsibility, and assign people to functions based on identity rather than ability.

However, a political movement also is a society, and those ideals are not only destructive to society, they are destructive to the political movement that advances them.

Trump could easily have been beaten by a good candidate. A below-average career democrat like Biden was able to beat him (OK, maybe that was fraud. I don’t know. The fact that there was a somewhat even national swing towards Trump compared with 2020 suggests possibly not, to me)

Trump talked about running for president for decades, but he didn’t do it until 2016 because he couldn’t win. He beat Clinton in 2016 and Harris now, because they were bad candidates who got the nomination through a combination of corruption and diversity ideology.

If you can’t say that a bad candidate is bad, if she is a woman or a minority or both, then you will necessarily get bad candidates. If you are corrupt, then you will get bad candidates through corruption rather than good candidates on their merits. If you do not hold people responsible, your staff will spend campaign money on meeting their favourite pop stars rather than on getting votes.

The Democratic Party has poisoned itself with the same poisons that it poisons the country with.

The catch, of course, is that the Republican Party is not much better. It wasn’t only the Democratic opposition that was so unusually weak in 2016 that Trump could beat it. Perhaps the Republican party is less captured by its own bureaucracy, and their third-rate candidates were not so vulnerable to maverick outsiders appealing to the primary electorate against the party machine? Sanders had his own popularity, but he was more effectively nobbled than Trump was, although at least as much effort was devoted to nobbling Trump. On top of their corruption and diversity ideology, the Democratic Party’s bureaucracy and authoritarinism undermined its ability to select an electable candidate.

I think this is also a big part of the mechanism of one of the big questions of our age, “Why did politics go insane?”

As mass media became more appealing — newspapers to radio to television to social media — what Americans call the “ground game” of politics became less important. The parties of the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries were really serious organisations, with millions of members, regular meetings, publications, social events, and fully organised and directed for campaigning. People who were heavily into politics lived and breathed this organisation. Today you can be important in politics by making memes on social media, and have no idea of what goes into creating and maintaining an organisation the size of a 1950s political party. Thousands of people can evolve ideologies on Twitter or Tumblr and never notice that those ideologies are a complete barrier to getting anything done in the outside world.

However, the organisations are still important to the process of selecting candidates, even with America’s primary system. And what just happened was that an organisation made disfunctional by anti-organisation ideology picked a terrible candidate.

Democracy’s Strength

Not paying attention, I missed my only regular commenter when he finally came round to my position on democracy 5:

But it is highly wasteful. Enormous amounts of money are being extracted from the public to secure the election of someone who does not rule the country, this function being really exercised by his “advisors”.

I would warn my new acolyte, though, against overstating the case. As opponents of democracy, we have to recognise and explain the fact that the most successful societies in human history have had this democractic form of government, (even while the actual elected politicians were senile or powerless) or else we have no right to be taken seriously.

Yes, democracy is certainly expensive. But to conclude that it is wasteful you have to show that the same end can be achieved more peacefully.

The useful purpose of democracy is to persuade the population that their rulers are legitimate. There are other ways of doing this, but they aren’t obviously more efficient. I quite like the era of divine right, myself, but that required the state to run a religion that would proclaim the legitimacy of the monarch. Brute force has a long track record, but the policing bill gets pretty expensive. Running government as a sideline of the entertainment industry is probably significantly cheaper than running it as a sideline of either religion or the military.

I do think that this crude comparison is in essence the basis of democracy’s strength and its dominance of the twentieth century. At the same time, it is very obviously missing the point. The cost of political parties, campaigns and voting machinery makes up an insignificant fraction of the real cost of democracy, just as the cost of employing soldiers and secret police is a small fraction of the cost of military dictatorship, and the cost of supporting a priesthood is a small fraction of the cost of theocracy. In each case, the true price paid for maintaining the legitimacy of a regime comes from the incentives it puts on people to behave in destructive ways, inside and outside of the governing institutions.

The impact of democracy is the gross dilution of power and responsibility that comes from giving the population a role in resolving disputes among the rulers. The way for a faction to succeed is to take control of and expand the organs of propaganda — the media and educational institutions — until we get to the situation we are in today where the society’s ideological commitments are to those ideas which succeed in power struggles within those institutions, no matter how destructive they are in both the population at large and the actual government.

We are not talking about simple clean categorisation. In practice every government employs a combination of democratic rhetoric, armed force, and appeal to higher moral authority, to improve its perceived legitimacy. The other obvious price paid for legitimacy — the subsidy of supporters — is huge in democracies but at least comparably large in any of the alternatives.

The most effective road to legitimacy is for the regime to be just accepted as inevitable, or as obviously superior to any available alternative. We do see that in some places, generally after catastrophic civil war or economic collapse, but it tends not to last for more than a generation or two before the next round of rebels or radicals or foreign agents manages to undermine it.

I don’t, then, have any silver bullet to fix government. I fear that the current world-ruling regime is past saving and will collapse, but I am not impatient for that to happen or optimistic about what will follow it6. The principle I stand for is that government just is and it is better to accept and support it, even in its imperfections, than to oppose it and force it to spend even more on self-defence. I would apply that even to the present establishment, but the tragedy of democracy is that by supporting it in fact I am opposing it in theory: my unconditional support is a denial of its very premise of legitimacy — that it is and ought to be subject to the whims of the populace.

If someone is to play Chief at this time of day, it should be the right Thain and no upstart.

Yes2ID

There’s a specifically English tradition that the government doesn’t concern itself with the identities of the ordinary men and women of the country. Prior to the twentieth century, births and deaths were registered by the church, taxes were collected on land or trading of particular goods. There was never a national bureaucracy keeping records of individuals.

(There’s a famous quote about how prior to 1914 Britons would hardly have any routine contact with any officials of the government. Orwell? Keynes? I can’t find it and I’m quite annoyed7).

A census was introduced in 1801 to guide recruitment strategy for the Napoleonic wars, and National Registration was brought in in 1939 for the Second World War, and abolished later. Measures such as National Registration smacked of Napoleonic totalitarianism. The government exists to serve the people, not the people for the government. My life is no business of the government until I bring myself to its notice, by committing a crime, or travelling abroad, or handling large amounts of money, etc.

I was firmly aligned with that tradition, supporting No2ID, opposing Voter ID, even grumbling incoherently about CCTV cameras.

I still really like the idea of such a light-touch, minimalist state that has no reason to know how many people live in a town or what that bloke’s name is who is sitting on the bench outside Costa. Warm feelings of free Anglo-Saxons and the Wintagemot, and all that (although of course in pre-modern societies nobody had anonymity, so that’s a kind of fantasy).

But we don’t live in such a state, or anything remotely resembling one. Today we live in a state which relies on at least a quarter of the money earned by each member of the working population for its survival, which provides an array of services from traffic direction to heart surgery to everyone, and also in which a dozen private companies already know how many people live in each street and what the bloke on the bench outside Costa watched on TV last week.

As I mentioned at the weekend, the state also has a register of births, a passport database, a register of electors, a driver licensing database, a National Insurance database.

We are not talking in 2024 about whether or not identity details are a concern of government, we are only talking about whether the government should manage its identity database efficiently or inefficiently.

People who are of any positive value to society are massively visible to the state. Citizens of the nation of car drivers, taxpayers, glow in .gov.uk cyberspace like planes approaching an airport. The only people moving in darkness are illegal immigrants, gypsies and underclass, flashing on just once a fortnight to collect their cheques.

Totalitarian is a strong word, but it is obviously the case today that to the extent that a government of an advanced country leaves any area of its citizens’ lives alone today, that is a policy choice, and not either a result of any limit of capability or of tradition. For better or worse, limitation on government today comes from government, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise.

I’ve written a few times before that Feudalism cannot exist today because it was caused by the technological incapability of central government to supervise regions. It seems equally true that the individualism of classical liberalism cannot exist in a world of £20 CCTV cameras and 4TB SSDs. It depends not on limited government but hogtied government.

Of course surveillance does not directly impact our freedom of action. It doesn’t necessarily mean we will become much more tightly limited in our actions. But of course, in practice we already are. We can’t say what we like, we can’t burn what we like, we can’t buy or sell what we like —not those of us with regular jobs and fixed addresses and cars, anyway. Why weep over the hostile underclass facing the same supervision?

Is growing totalitarianism the only future? Yes, probably; as I say, it’s a matter of technology. I would prefer otherwise, but if you’re going to act politically as if the world were other than it is, you might just as well be an anarcho-communist.

Ineffective government is bad government. Effective government is often bad government too, but at least there’s a chance. My view is that the intense stupidity of politics is to a large extent an effect of the practical impotence of politicians. Make those with responsibility less impotent, and at least there’s an incentive for them to become less stupid. (The aligning of power with responsibility is the other requirement, the central NRx principle, but doing that is a separate question. Today it’s the case that nobody has power).

I feel bad writing this. I am betraying what I once stood for. Give me a programme for achieving personal freedom that starts with keeping government databases more incomplete and inaccurate than Amazon’s, and I’ll recant.

Mini: Voter ID

This is the first general election with a requirement for ID documentation to vote. I’m opposed to elections, so this is not a concern of mine either way. However, I used to argue against voter ID. There are other arguments though, and it’s quite an interesting subject.

My old argument was that the government does not and should not run elections, and relying on government issued documents gives them too much control. Of course, postal voting makes this argument irrelevant, but I opposed that too for the same reasons.

The safeguard on elections was always transparency. Polling stations are public, you identify yourself in public and are given a paper in public, ballot boxes are visible and collected and counted locally in public. To commit electoral fraud you have to do it in public.

I recently discussed some of this in Holland with an assortment of Europeans. Their attitude was different —they have always had official government ID used routinely for many purposes. I always sneered a bit at that; our government does not need to track us all individually.

Today though I recognise that that model is just not appropriate in an era of mass income taxation, welfare state, and mass immigration. The British govt has never tracked and identified every person. But it is unfortunately past time it did.

So on voter ID, I still don’t care, but the government’s half-arsed attempts to cobble national identity management out of birth registration, national insurance registration, driver licensing and passports do actually need to be rationalised into true national ID. I hate it.

(Originally a tweet thread, 4 July 2024)