'They really don't care Margaret'
So called political firebreaks are the equivalent of a fender in a forest fire.
[Counterposed to economic markets, liberalism and bloodless cosmopolitanism, the communal-cultural] …organic counter-picture [was] first lived and practiced unreflectively, then articulated by Herder and by countless ‘romantic organicists’, ‘national populists’ and ‘romantic rightists’, stressing totality, system, connectedness, particularism, cultural specificity, favouring Gemeinschaft, roots, ‘closed, cosy’ communities, ‘Blut und Boden’
[Steven Lukes, Forward, Gellner Language and Solitude 1995: iv-v]
What is their end-game?
This is from Twitter. The moment an Islamist kills a German policeman. I can’t verify it.
can provide chapter and verse
“This photo from 2024 is perhaps the perfect visual representation of Germany: A police officer subduing the victim of an Islamist attack while the Islamist, who had been detained by patriotic citizens, broke free and stabbed the police officer in the back, killing him”
It’s very difficult to understand how mainstream conservatives-lite (CDU, CSU, Conservative Party etc) or even social democrats and liberals, imagine the end-game will play out.
The catastrophe of many cultures
The trajectory for this kind of incident is all completely one-way. If the UK admits a large tranche of refugees/migrants from Gaza, it seems likely that radical Islam will play out in the streets and in our communities with growing violence and incomprehensible disregard for innocent lives; and that this will engender an equally vicious response. And as the migrant communities grow larger and more self-sufficient, they develop parallel cultures — ways of being, habits of mind, structures of horizontal peer-pressure and social conformity that are completely insulated from ‘mainstream society.’ And so on … ad infinitum.
I used scare quotes because it is difficult to understand what ‘mainstream’ might mean any more. In the UK it has been at least a generation since kids all appeared in school on Monday morning having listened to the same ‘Top 40’ in the pop charts, or since more than half the country watched prime-time soap operas, BBC dramatizations, Dr Who — let alone the stereoscopic BBC/ITN News or Newsnight, Panorama or Question Time.
So whatever news and current affairs conversation is going on in Muslim homes, or between parents and 2nd or 3rd generation migrant kids, let alone in the Mosques or the refugee hotels — the discursive milieu which is forming the taken-for-granted ethical precepts, attitudes, and geopolitical worldview of a large and growing, spatially and culturally separated, minority of the population —it’s hidden. In experiential terms, it’s simply not available to us. It is difficult to imagine how any BBC journalist or liberal academic can possibly claim to have even the vaguest insight about what is going on inside these communities. But then they are equally out of touch with ‘mainstream’ provincial communities — or anyone who doesn’t have a Nexus or ETIAS fast track visa for the international shuttle service.
Liberals are like people who get out of the Tube and try to get around using Harry Beck’s topographical map of London. Their maps only show important nodes and connections; not terrain or real distance. They lack on the ground knowledge — particular granular context. Away from the Tube stations, or away from London (or Berlin, New York) they haven’t a clue.
After all, they have shown repeatedly, with Trump, with Brexit, that they don’t really have any idea about the lives, pressures and motivations of ordinary working class voters. So why would we expect lucid and imaginative anthropological insight from arm-chair liberals who live a long way from the reality of community life on the ground, whether in Luton, Malmo, Munich or Michigan.
On the other hand, where we do have survey data, the picture is troubling. In 2024, 46% of UK Muslims supported Hamas in its conflict with Israel, with 75% actually denying that the terror group were guilty of rape or murder during the October 7th attack. And of course there are other measures that we could reach for. A simply metric is how individuals and organizations respond to events — publicly, in front of the camera, or privately in what they don’t say or do. So when two Muslim immigrant nurses in Australia said they would kill Jewish patients, you’d think that, if there was the kind of mainstream that those ‘reasonable’ spokes-folks for the liberal centre always claim, the Islamic media machine would get into gear and start spinning ‘dismay’ and ‘outrage’ etc. In fact, the opposite was the case. Foregrounding a coalition of prominent Muslim groups and leaders, including Muslim Votes and Muslim Votes Matter, The Guardian, gleefully reported (are they not bloody awful people btw!!) on the ‘selective outrage’ that accompanied (right wing) reporting of the event.
In other words: they want to kill Jews, they are happy to say that they want to kill Jews, but if you acknowledge that they want to kill Jews or report their own words about wanting to kill Jews — then the Guardian will peg you down as a bad actor and an Islamophobe.
This reaction is actually rather telling. What it tells is that Muslim communities in the West are now of such a size that three things are beginning to happen. Firstly, moderate and reformist Islamic voices are being drowned out — and in some instances killed. Thus although Gaza’s top academic cleric, Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, along with 11 clerics in the UK distanced themselves from Hamas and condemned the attacks, their, somewhat strategic, protestations were outflanked by an unholy alliance between Islamic radicals and leftists, such as Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish who compared the Hamas leader to Nelson Mandela). Such stupidities have since become the norm on the progressive left.
Urban Muslim communities are now large enough to become self-sustaining. With their own schools, shops, cafes, businesses and institutions, they are able to operate with much less interaction with ‘mainstream society’. Women, in particular, live in cultural isolation, often without learning the language let alone developing a respect for the culture of the host nation. Politically, demographic ascendancy is now looking like a tangible prospect. With the Muslim population growing at 10x the rate of the wider population and in the context of crashing fertility (see Stephen Shaw at ARC 2025), it may well happen within the lifetime of my own children. Political Islam is already an established feature of the political landscape in the UK. In constituencies such as Tower Hamlets with a 40% Muslim electorate, why would it not be. The impact of Islam and the Gaza terrorist war had such a great impact on the 2024 election — no less than five independent Palestinian supporting MPs — that Labour strategists have been scrambling for ways to ‘rebuild bridges’ with the Muslim population. For radical Islamicists, this provides a powerful incentive to segregate further and batten down the cultural integrity of what they see as a caliphate in waiting.
Multiple-ethnicities versus multiple-cultures
Multi-ethnicity is not a problem if reconciled with a shared culture — which is to say a mythos, a high level of mutual identification, a shared origin story and corresponding set of values. Seeing beyond the tribal identities of ‘Greek and Jew’, Christianity offered the first and most powerful mechanism to move beyond ethnic tribalism. Ethno-nationalism has offered a different way to coordinate and align the allegiances of millions of people beyond the immediacy of local tribes. By definition, it doesn’t lend itself to multiethnic states. To the extent that community is an act of imagination (as Benedict Anderson argues), Christianity plus a progressive, civic-national story of nation-state construction has provided this in many Western societies. But there are intrinsic limits relating to the relative pace of inward migration vis-a-vis internal integration. Increasingly ring-fenced ethnic diversity, social-spatial segregation AND a hostile Manichean religion make it very hard to imagine what bridge building might look like, going forward.
Pew research from 2016 painted a stark picture of the changing demography of Europe
In their high immigration scenario, which has indeed unfolded, Europe’s Muslim population will reach 14% overall by 2050 with Britain, France and Germany at 17%, 18% and 19% respectively
But the balance will now shift inexorably because it is driven not just by migration, but differential fertility rates. In the UK, Muslim women have more children and the percentage of 16 year olds in the Muslim community is twice the national average.
Finally, the consensus within such communities about the merits and imperatives of engaging with the ‘mainstream’ is disappearing. Twenty years ago, radicals and moderates alike would have shared a desire to protect the Muslim ‘sub-nation’ from attack or vilification — to play the part (sincerely for moderates) of honest citizens united in their desire to see a successful multi-ethnic and multi-cultural community. Suggestions with regard to Sharia law, that were whispered in the ears of Tony Blair and and Peter Mandelson in the 1990s, are now becoming intransigent political demands. Radical Islamicists no longer feel constrained to hide their long term agenda. Moderates are cowed by the very real fear of community backlash and even violence and assassination.
Civil war, Balkanization, or the Bogside: The future is a different country
So here we are. In Britain and across Europe, there has been unsustainable immigration. Multiculturalism and secularism have undermined the one thing — a shared Christian humanism — that has in the past allowed multi-ethnic societies to prosper. Economic stagnation has destroyed the capacity of the welfare state to shore up relationships between groups and to integrated incoming communities. And the scale of immigration has meant that dynamics within communities (bonding capital) are outstripping the links and interdependencies between them (bridging capital).
Until very recently, talk of civil war and societal collapse was a prerogative of right wing political entrepreneurs such as (@lotuseaters ‘ Carl Benjamin or Tim Pool) or broadly left-wing, prepper-type, limits-to-growth, collapse-merchants. Over the last five years, however, societal collapse has become a legitimate prospect for academic investigation. Thus we find the otherwise sober and nerdish Professor of War Studies at UCL, David Betz arguing recently:
“The most unstable are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own. By contrast, in societies comprised of many small minorities ‘divide and conquer’ can be an effective mechanism of controlling a population”
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany are long established nation-states with cohesive historical narratives and shared identities. They now have large and growing internal minorities that are spatially and socially concentrated in cities, and even more cohesive in terms of language, culture and an embattled religious identity. According to Betz, this is a perfect recipe for violent, sectarian conflict and balkanization.
Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.
Just in case the reader misses the point, he brings to mind the ‘reinforcing spiral’ in Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ — an stanza which ends: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (listen to his interview with
here)Liberal individualism is not a given
The point Betz is making is basically that we cannot take the stability of liberal nation-states for granted. Rather the opposite. Civic-democratic peace in a society of individuals is a situation so far removed from the historical norm as to be truly extraordinary. The preconditions for such stability are economic-energetic and institutional-cultural, namely:
Social complexity made possible by high throughput of energy and materials. An extended division of labour and high levels of individual social and spatial mobility is a high energy proposition — period.
Continuing economic growth to generate surplus that can be redistributed through progressive taxation and the welfare system.
A long process of coercive dismantling of tribal and clan forms of association; and the embedding of individualism as the economic and sociological default.
A coherent cluster of liberal democratic and legal institutions — all deeply entrenched in the affective and habitual mindsets of both the general public and members of the various overlapping elites.
A deeply and widely shared pattern of mutual identification between individuals (rather than families or groups) as citizens; and a complete absence of sub-groups (tribes, clans, religious groupings) with competing forms of shared identity and loyalty.
Nested solidarity and the corrosiveness of radical individualism
The liberal-left establishment in the West has always been blinded by a utopian form of Enlightenment internationalism. This was an unreasonable and untenable radicalization of the Christian Imago-Dei — because it posits a theologically-mandated solidarity between all qua human individuals, whilst at the same time denying the hinge-reality of a transcendent God. Such secular humanism is the water the left swims in, but it derives from Protestant individualism in which the nested and concentric claims of solidarity rooted in the family and neighbourhood, were overthrown in favour of a more radical universalism. Thanks to JD Vance, this concept of the ordo amoris and its detractors has become a lightning rod for Christians who either endorse, or alternatively are uncomfortable with, the idea of a civilizational or cultural Christianity (not least
and his interlocutors here).Whatever its theological merits, the case against nested solidarities strains against sociological realism, which may indeed be the point — Christians are not necessarily called to realism. At the same time, only activists were surprised when the national signatories to the Second International so quickly went to war with each other in 1914. Likewise, social democrats since the 1940s have been willfully blind about the extent to which the welfare state depends, by definition, on an exclusive form of solidarity based upon citizenship. The willingness of workers across large and variegated welfare states to pay taxes to pay for vulnerable people separated by great distances and possibly dialect and culture always depended on the existence of pre-political ‘we identity’ — a level of mutual identification that could underwrite a community of fate or destiny. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ depended upon a precognitive assessment that ‘we are all in this together’ — a community of fate rather than choice. Where that is present, people will make sacrifices for each other. Where it is not, generosity tends to be muted. Germans were happy to pay for East Germans (all those East Germans now voting AfD); but not, in 2008, for bankrupt Greeks (although they were fellow Europeans).
For most of the last century, this exclusive solidarity, although civic-national, was class-based. Historically, the social compact and the consensus politics that made it possible emerged from a class compact between organized labour and corporate capital. This was clearest in the tripartite corporatist social democracies of North Western Europe. However, it depended on decades and in some cases centuries of ‘nationalization’ — the project of welding disparate tribal and regional identities, language-cultures and dialects, into a cohesive national ‘imagined community’. The four nations in the UK had to become ‘Britain’ — despite centuries of mutual animosity. This meant the suppression of Welsh and Gaelic language right into the 20th century, and the extinction of Manx and Cornish and other. In France, Eugene Weber’s famous study shows how the project of active forging ‘France’ out of constituent provincial identities (Basque, Breton, Gascon etc) had to be continued even into the 20th century. The take-away is that the welfare state was only possible after an extended period of coercion, violence and sometimes even genocide — prerequisite processes for the establishment of a solidaristic, citizen-based ‘we identity’.
However, by the 1940s, the ethnic and linguistic/cultural dimensions of this unpleasant lead-in to the welfare state could be suppressed in the national imagination. National origin stories focused on heroic/mythic national solidarities that transcended tribal and class squabbles. For the victors in World War II, the myth-making continued unabated after the war. For Germany, the national narrative was much more problematic — and the fall-out from this continues into the present. However, in all cases, what ‘regulation theorists’ called ‘the long boom’ allowed, the national framing to be given a titular status in favour of a moderate class compact. According to this story, labour and capital came together in the cause of cooperative capitalist growth, moderated by the re-allocative powers of the Keynesian welfare state.
In these happy circumstances, class conflict could be endlessly moderated. The troublesome necessity of an implicit but durable shared mythos could be downplayed. Instead the political class genuflected to the loud but weak kind of Kantian universalism that generated the postwar regime of ostensibly apolitical human rights and a round(ish) table of United Nations. It is perhaps not surprising that such circumstances led post-war visionary rationalists to start dreaming of a united Europe. The trouble is that, as alluded to above, such abstract solidarity doesn’t emerge naturally. Historically it has always been a function of coercion and violence. You can’t make Germans and Greeks affectively ‘European’ just because some economists think it might be a good idea.
There are two (left- versus right-brained) ‘mainstreams’
It’s not true, from a sociological point of view, that the ‘mainstream’ has completely imploded in the Internet explosion of individuation and social mobility. In the sense of a national ‘we’ encompassing the culture of both locally-rooted and place-bound working class communities and a provincial but cohesively national middle class — where everyone from the Queen downwards watched East Enders, The Bill and Life on Earth — there is no longer an overt foundational culture. But in the kind of subtle taken for granted patchwork of unconscious fragments, that perhaps only an outsider such as Bill Bryson, might discern — the overlapping imbrications of English-Scottish-, Welsh- and British-ness are still ‘knowable when seen,’ albeit impossible to pinpoint.
The political mainstream on the other hand, is less self-effacing — which is the reason for its blindness. This is the ‘globalist, liberal, elite’ that we are always hearing about from culture-warring pundits on the red-lined, right.
The political dynamic is increasingly being driven by a contest between these two mainstreams:
The mainstream of the people (MoP): precognitive, protean, only tangentially self-aware, permeable and ill-defined but with a growing sense that something is wrong. Without political mobilization this is is a ‘common-sensical’ (in Gramsci’s sense) and aesthetic sensibility that remains inchoate and impotent.
The mainstream of the elite (MoE): abstract, judgemental, definitive, utopian and internationalist in outlook, MoE represents the globalization of the old national elites, refocused on capital cities and detached from provincial working class life.
In some ways these two antipodes in the political landscape — yesterday expressed in the tension between the Afd and the CDU/SPD — are not new. Describing the problems inherent in nation-state formation in Europe in the wake of the imploding Hapsburg empire, Ernest Gellner described them (in Language and Solitude) them brilliantly.
‘There are two fundamental theories of knowledge. These two theories stand in stark contrast to each other. They are profoundly opposed. They represent two poles of looking, not merely at knowledge but at human life. Aligned with these two polar views of knowledge there are also related, and similarly contrasted, theories of society, of man, of everything. [They are] ... the individualistic/atomistic conception ... [and the] organic vision’ (Gellner, 1995: 1–5)
The former is, Gellner claims, associated with Descartes, Robinson Crusoe, Hume, Kant and Bertrand Russell — and also for the philosophers with the Wittgenstein #I of Tractates. It aligns with empiricism, rationalism and positivism, with ‘Gesellschaft’ and economic markets, liberalism and bloodless cosmopolitanism. The latter ‘communal-cultural vision’, he describes as:
‘the organic counter-picture, first lived and practiced unreflectively, then articulated by Herder and by countless ‘romantic organicists’, ‘national populists’ and ‘romantic rightists’, stressing totality, system, connectedness, particularism, cultural specificity, favouring Gemeinschaft, roots, ‘closed, cosy’ communities, ‘Blut und Boden’ [Steven Lukes, Forward, Gellner 1995: iv-v]
The organic vision corresponds to the internal and self-referential language games of Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein #II’s second philosophical revolution) Gellner’s book centres on the observation, the the alignment of the elements within these poles and the tensions between them was intense across the declining Habsburg Empire not least in Poland, Austria and the Balkans, where ‘the confrontation of atomists and organicists …meshes in with the alliances and hatreds of daily and political life.’
From the perspective of ideas I have been floating in recent posts, MoP is a right-brained, EMIC sensibility that is inarticulate, implicit lacking articulation and coming to the party late. The MoE on the other hand, is ETIC — abstract, objective, cognitively exegetical, overt and cartographical: an externally mapped, expert sensibility, driven by explicit theories and worldviews. The perspective of the elites is knowing, powerful and certain. It is effective, and works, right up until the point where it fails — catastrophically. Think of the failure of imagination on the part of the British elite in the face of Brexit, or Democratic commentators in 2016 and again in 2024.
Political firebreaks are not going to work
The political fire-break is meant, so the theory goes, to preserve this liberal mainstream — in effect to insulate the etic, left-brained liberal elite with its highly elaborated topographical map of the world from reality. In the case of Germany and the UK (and of course Sweden, France etc), ‘reality’ is encroaching in the form of provincial, working people not doing as they are told. Less globally connected but with greater investments in the integrity of particular places, communities and landscapes, a sizeable and growing minority are voting for ‘emic’ political parties which privilege a feeling, a sensibility and a gut feeling of ‘what is going wrong.’ Although Reform UK, the AfD, Le Pen’s National Rally, Swedish Democrats and of course MAGA are quite different, they share a rejection of the standard Harry-Beck style topographical map of the world that has guided politics and the international political order for 80 years.
From the perspective advanced above, these insurgent parties are ‘emic’ and, in McGilchrist’s sense (@iainmcgilchrist) , right-brained — expressing the interior, implicit, inarticulate common-sense ‘we’ that has been suppressed in the interests of the liberal political order. The strategy of shaming and shunning revanchist right wing parties worked in the post-war period — mainly because consistent economic growth mitigated the kind of epistemic and psycho-affective incoherence created by moderate immigration. But this is no longer working. The scale of immigration is out pacing the capacity for integration. Economic stagnation creates vicious and public trade-offs between public spending on immigrants and services for citizens (anger not assuaged by cack-handed ‘fact checking’).
The claim is that the strategy is about protecting the mainstream of society. But the fire-break that stops the German conservatives from working with AfD, or the Tories from accepting the legitimacy of populist, working class right-wing politics of someone like Tommy Robinson is not defending a sociological mainstream — which is to say constituency of ordinary people; nor a public version of the body politic around which the majority of society could coalesce. This is evident in the discomfort frequently shown in relation to national flags or the entire historical narrative of the nation state. It’s difficult to articulate a sociological mainstream even whilst insisting that everything must be ‘decolonized’. Rather the firebreak is about defending the liberal political-academic-media-industrial-complex (‘Moral PAMIC’ — too ugly an acronym to take off) i.e. the increasingly brittle but labyrinthine and over-connected web of universities, think tanks, NGOs, charities, corporations, consultancies, newspapers, media companies, government departments, local councils, activist groups — all of which are defending and being guided by a map of the social and political world that simply doesn’t correspond, any longer, to reality.
The strange thing — and it is quite bizarre if you think about it for more than 2 minutes — the establishment constituencies all know this. It’s probable that some delusional commentators really did think Kamala Harris might hold the line in America. But after Trump’s election and particularly after JD Vance’s rather large dose of Grandma’s Home-Truth last week, it is now impossible that anyone in the German establishment think that a coalition of the virtuous centre will do anything other than than increase the power of the populist tsunami that will eventually sweep them away. The SPD and the Greens have no choice. The CDU/CSU’s resistance to the new reality is jarring. In the UK a similar dynamic is playing out. There can be few in the Labour Party or among the Tories who are now not taking seriously the prospect of an outright Reform victory in the next election.
For different reasons the tipping point for dramatic political re-organization is very high in Germany and the UK — in the former because of the shadow of Nazism; in the UK because of a deep—seated reasonableness, a longstanding comfort with multi-ethnic community, a capacity for integration and a voting system that mitigates against change. However these bulwarks are now maxed out. The scale of imposed cultural change and coercive disintegration/dissembling is visibly out of control. The steady stream of terrorist incidents is difficult to construe in terms of small numbers of bad apples in an otherwise healthily diverse social ecosystem. The sense that the mainstream parties no longer grasp reality is greatly increased by the absurd and often disturbing positions taken in relation to other hot-button issues (men in women’s prisons etc). Combined with geopolitical vulnerability, impending economic collapse, a growing recognition of military weakness (and not least an unwillingness to serve and fight in the rapidly diminishing pool of young men) — and perhaps most significantly — the unassailable evidence from America that change can be rapid, shockingly deep, structural and awe-inspiring, seismic catastrophe for the liberal political order would seem to be a good bet right now. I give them 5 years.