On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also.

(p52)

Culture can never be wholly conscious — there is always more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background of all our planning. (p94)

The disintegration of class has induced the expansion of envy, which provides ample fuel for the flame of ‘equal opportunity’…

Instead of congratulating ourselves on our progress, whenever the school assumes another responsibility hitherto left to parents, we might do better to admit that we have reached a stage of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly; at which many parents cannot afford to feed them properly, and would not know how, even if they had the means; and that Education must step in and make the best of a bad job.

(p104)

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

(p108)

It is against the background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe would survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith… If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through centuries of barbarism…

The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent… This unity in the common elements of culture, throughout many centuries, is the true bond between us. No political and economic organisation, however much goodwill it commands, can supply what this culture unity gives. If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together.

(p122-3)

The rich class did not hold the empire so long as the ancient hereditary nobility had held it. Their title to dominion was not of the same value. They had not the sacred character with which the ancient Eupatrid was clothed. They did not rule by virtue of a belief and by the will of the gods. They had no quality that had power over consciences, that compelled men to submit. Man is little inclined to bow, except before what he believes to be right, or before what his notions teach him is far above him. He had long been made to bend before the religious superiority of the Eupatrid, who repeated the prayers and possessed the gods. But wealth did not overawe him. In presence of wealth, the most ordinary sentiment is not respect; it is envy. The political inequality that resulted from the difference of fortunes soon appeared to be an iniquity, and men strove to abolish it.

The Ancient City, de Coulanges

Homo homini deus est.

Feuerbach

Kirilov: Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God and from the annihilation of God to —

Narrator: To the gorilla?

Kirilov: To the physical transformation of the earth and man. Man will be god. He’ll be physically transformed. And the world too will be transformed… Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself… He who dares to kill himself is a god… All my life I think of one thing. God has tormented me all my life.

The Devils, Dostoyevsky

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

This blog explores ideas about culture, religion, class, education and politics of the twentieth century’s most influential poet, T.S Eliot. In the 1940s he wrote some essays which were published in 1948 as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

Here is a link to a free internet PDF. It’s in the official Collected Works which also has some drafts.

Eliot was both the century’s most influential literary modernist and one of the most influential conservatives. He described himself as ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. It’s fascinating to see such a combination analyse culture and politics. Walking down the street thinking about this book, into my head popped, as it often does, the scene in Spinal Tap where Nigel, looking at Elvis’ grave, says ‘It really puts perspective on things, doesn’t it?’, and David replies, ‘Yeah, too much perspective’.

Here are some of the big questions he addresses:

• What do we and should we mean by ‘culture’?

• What are the conditions for the development of culture? How has it evolved?

• What is the relationship between ‘culture’ and religion? How important is Christianity in the growth of Europe’s civilisation? What are the implications of its disappearance? If Christianity perishes and the old European education is destroyed, what next — ‘centuries of barbarism’ until something new eventually grows?

• To what extent can conscious human decisions ‘change culture’? How realistic are progressive-socialist-communist hopes they can ‘build a new better culture’? For example, central to any culture is the tension between centralised and decentralised power, and the tension between unity and diversity in religion. How much can these things be shaped by individual decisions? To what extent are even the most powerful individuals almost entirely a ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, that is, most of their influence is unintended and unpredictable? (Modern political theory teaches its elites both that a) the future is inflexibly determined by ‘forces’ and b) we’re almost entirely free to shape history and human nature as we wish in accordance with our progressive emotions and ‘ideas’, so it’s not surprising these elites try to enact disastrous schemes — a point made by Eliot and Leo Strauss.)

• How do political progressives think about culture, class, elites, education? What does the idea of a ‘classless society’ mean as an ideal and if pursued as a political project? Does the progressive dream of a classless society inherently mean the dominance of a new sort of elite? How will the elites of progressive politics, of communism, differ from the old elites of aristocracy and the upper middle class? What does government by elites, rather than class, mean for culture and education?

• Does high culture — defined by art such as Antigone or Dante — need a class based society where culture is passed on via partly hereditary, though organic, classes? British culture evolved with the aristocracy playing a crucial role including in providing ideals and criteria for others — can high culture survive without such an aristocracy? What happens if this role is taken by elites selected by politics who then try to shape culture for politics?

• Does a mass society — capitalist or socialist — inevitably destroy education standards?

• Can high culture and/or a class system survive a capitalist society with technological change? Is a capitalist society inherently self-destructive because, inter alia, its incentives for individuals over time destroy families and classes needed to preserve and pass on critical elements of the culture on which it relies? Is the modern idea of ‘meritocracy’ (i.e society and incentives should allow each individual to ‘progress’ to whatever role ‘best suits their abilities’) — central to modern Anglo-American capitalism — actually long-term self-destructive? Might the instincts of the old aristocrats pre-1848 be right — that the great local mason should stay a local mason, and a society which puts him on the train to the university in the city, because ‘he’s intelligent and would benefit from education’, is a society killing itself in a few generations? Over 500 years, there has been a transition from aristocratic to bourgeois to democratic society and a transition in the importance of blood, money and achievement — but what if a shift to elites based on some definitions of achievement has (somewhat paradoxically?) led to a decline in creative elites?

• What are the connections between the decline of European culture ~1850-1940 and the emergence of totalitarian politics? For example, Eliot thought that the rise of fascism and communism was accompanied by a growing isolation of Europe’s creative elites and a decline in sharing of ideas between them — both domestically, observable in England and elsewhere, and internationally — a decline partly responsible for Eliot closing Criterion in 1939. Is totalitarian politics attractive partly because the shift from primitive to advanced culture meant a shift from an unconscious identity between religion and culture to conscious exploration of the tensions, and this is a psychological burden — a burden which totalitarian politics promises to remove or relieve?

• This relates directly to what I’ve described as elite fragmentation and polarisation. In one sense the internet makes it easier for creative elites in one area to see, appreciate, and interact with those in other areas. If you look at early optimistic internet predictions, you will see many hopes for what this would bring (and great naivety, cf. Eric Schmidt on politics and internet pre-2016). And with some unusual individuals this has happened and particularly some very young people seem to have developed internet superpowers in this regard. But overall the opposite has happened as I’ve explained. It is strikingly illustrated by how the majority of the old ‘mainstream’ political-pundit world, with its centre of gravity in the New York Times and FT etc, have made the Trump-supporting subculture of Silicon Valley into caricatured hate figures — fascist, selfish, lying and fake. The loathing is such that this ‘serious mainstream’ has had to convince itself that ‘AI is fake’, ‘like a crypto scam’ etc because it’s impossible to face that this subculture might be building things worthwhile. No, everything about them must be bad. The pundits extended their ‘everyone against us is an idiot’ to the people building the most advanced companies and technologies. The guy who figured out how to catch spaceships with chopsticks is, as AOC said — ‘this dude is not smart’. Far from creative elites sharing ideas more than in the past, they seem to be moving away from each other, faster than efforts to reverse the process can take effect. This is entangled with and compounded by the way in which different elites increasingly see each other as delusional and/or evil, therefore discussion between them has declined. (It’s also connected to the effects of the left’s cancel culture because the costs — to family, career, business, social network etc — of being seen to stray from acceptable opinions seemed so high that many withdrew from public debate and institutions swiftly radicalised, driving more out etc.) Instead of arguing, elite groups WhatsApp screenshots of each other’s tweets to like-minded WhatsApp groups and discuss the other’s disintegrating sense of reality and morality. So the process Eliot saw in the inter-war period, but which began before 1914, has accelerated with the internet even though the internet makes it possible for the opposite to happen. See below viz AI/Silicon Valley.

• What are the connections between progressive politics and the relentless attacks on the family, the core unit of cultural transmission?

• What are the connections between the development of western philosophy, including rationalism in all its forms, and the decline of religion and growth of progressive politics?

Rationalism, progressive politics, modernity

Reading Eliot’s book invokes many of the same fundamental issues described by Leo Strauss and Oakeshott. So this blog connects to the blog on Oakeshott and rationalism, the blog on Leo Strauss and philosophy, and the blog on Dostoyevsky. Much of what Eliot reflected on in the 1940s was predicted by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.

Eliot, Strauss and Oakeshott all trace the rise of Rationalism in the West, its effects on philosophy, on politics, and on culture. All trace the rise of the individual from 13th century Italy and the counter-forces. All examine Nietzsche’s view on the story of the West and his predictions of how European rationalism was poisoning itself and would end in ‘immense wars of the spirit’, in anti-rationalist movements, cults, and politics. All consider how else we might respond to the fundamental problems of modernity and technology. Survival requires technology. Developing technology imposes restrictions on politics, and, Strauss agreed, made it impossible to return to living like the ancients, even if we want to reject aspects of modern philosophy.

All three are trying to consider the interaction of ideas (e.g rationalism and its opponents such as Rousseau, of Descartes versus Pascal, of Machiavelli against Plato), of material forces (e.g industrialisation), of the relationship between culture and politics including the development of ‘mass society’ and democratic politics, of the effects of modernity on education. All three examine how these things came together in the catastrophe of world wars and totalitarian politics — and how we might escape repeating the nightmares of the 20th century.

Strauss wanted us to revive classical rationalism, take seriously the ancient perspective on philosophy and reject aspects of modern philosophy, not because we can reject modernity — technology makes that impossible — but because we must find a way through it other than repeating the horrors of the 20th century. Eliot wanted Christianity and other aspects of old Europe’s culture to revive and warned that without them we would not resist barbarism. Eliot agreed with Nietzsche’s prediction that the liberals who thought they could ditch Christianity but keep Christian morality would be proved wrong, and the effects would be quite different and very much worse than they expected if those deluded liberals prevailed politically.

Eliot takes it for granted that most people will continue living where they were born and this is good. What are the implications for our culture if our political regime comes to believe that importing millions from the Third World who believe in other gods is good in every way (for culture as well as the economy), while increasingly seeing the original population, and its resistance to being replaced physically and culturally, as a problem to be managed in similar ways to how the old imperial administrations viewed native populations? What if governing elites in the West come to define its own moral hierarchy — because of mutant strains of rationalism — in terms of replacing, rather than nurturing, its own culture? What if ancient churches echo with the chants of Islam, as the rainbow flag of LGBTQH+ hangs behind? Eliot’s perspective on ‘diversity is our strength’ is ‘fascism’, according to the output of the median MP, and PM, of the last 20 years. The gentle old conservatism he represents is long dead, killed by the mutant rationalism he deplored. Is he right that to overcome this mutant rationalism, we must restore parts of Europe’s pre-democratic culture, and if so, how could this happen? Any revival will be a long slog over generations, so what are the first tasks…?

The series on People, Ideas, Machines

XIV: Lessons from preparing for government in 1979 & how No10 worked in the Thatcher regime. Hoskyns’ Just In Time.

XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

Other related stuff…

On rationalism and politics (2022).

On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

On Tolstoy and War and Peace.

‘Italics inside quotes’ is Eliot, all bold is me.

There is a summary if you don’t want to read it all, click to the bottom then scroll up.

Reading Eliot’s ideas while also watching the unfolding AI/agents developments naturally makes one think about artificial cultures the agents will create, how Silicon Valley is thinking about politics and culture etc. A few thoughts at the end.

If you feed Eliot below into any models and get interesting outputs, please post in Comments or WhatsApp me.

I’ll post shortly about developments with yookay politics, Farage’s very clear decision on Reform’s direction, Iran etc.

Introduction

Read more

Yeah it’s harder to get a GP appointment than tickets for One Direction back in the day, you call in and you’re 55 in the queue, then it’s cancelled, it’s insane.

I don’t think he’s [Farage] Far Right, I’m branded Far Right but I’m not, I’m Right, and he’s just Right too, I feel moderate but the left has gone so far left it makes anyone seem like we’ve changed but we haven’t, and the BBC lies about it and calls us all fascists. But there’s not enough of a team. My worry is we have a split and we’re stuck with Labour.

We’re reaching the point where Labour got in cos the Tories were a disaster then we’ve had a disastrous Labour government, so give Farage a go just cos we need any alternative. The Tories are irrelevant, on the sidelines. Would it be good? Are any of them?! He’s different to the other two. But his Party isn’t up to being a professional government yet.

He’s convincing [Farage] but I question if he’s a team player, he’ll find it very hard to be PM, how will he run all the departments? I can see him winning but then failing as PM.

I live in a village called [X], in ten years it’s been overrun, we now call it Halal [X], it’s a small English village but it’s now got mosques, there’s rows and an edge, and there’s white flight, I‘m selling my house and I’m leaving, the people who’ve arrived don’t want to live by our rules and they’re not working. I work, my kids work, the immigration system is out of control. [And he UNDERestimated the level of immigration by a lot]

It’s like they [MPs] hate us, they’re not on our side.

Swing voters in swing constituencies…

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

TS Eliot, Notes on Education and Culture

Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?

Wang Huning, close adviser to Xi

What has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years?

“Immigration and also the total scorn of the elites. In France, immigrants from northern Africa, who are usually Muslim, don’t integrate well.”

Doesn’t integration take time?

“In France, it’s the reverse. It’s the second or third generation that is making trouble. We are witnessing a dis-assimilation. It’s a catastrophe.”

Houellebecq interview

I said last year I would spend less time this year on SW1 until the old system cracks open. This blog is finishing off a 2025 project. It has two sections.

1. A summary of a deep market research project I did in October/November. Voters’ top priorities? Views on Starmer, Kemi B, Farage, Jenrick and the parties? Views on Net Zero and conservation? The NHS? The cost of living? Immigration, boats, communities shifting ethnically? Welfare/benefits? The aesthetics of rightwing videos? (Aesthetics polarise emotionally even when people agree on facts/problem/policy.)

2. Some sketches of how SW1 Insiders are likely to respond to opinion. What will they absorb or distort, how will their behaviour change? How will the SW1 system evolve 2026-29?

It’s not about what I think should be built. I’ve explained that many times. The question is whether people with talent, money, ambition and willpower will decide to cross the Rubicon instead of fish in it. There’s a policy agenda which, with the right leadership and campaign, would deal with most of our most acute problems and have the support of a majority in Parliament — but the existing parties repulse, like an immune system repulsing an invader, the combination of the plan, the detail, the talent, and the campaign, and the combination doesn’t make sense to how Westminster en masse thinks of ‘politics’.

As you watch Starmer collapse, remember — SW1’s experts, heads of TV news, FT pundits, the Institute for Government etc told you Starmer and Sue Gray were ‘the serious grownups’ who would bring ‘calm stability’ after ‘Brexit chaos’. As Andrew Marr, ex BBC political editor put it:

We have to be optimistic. Just having a stable government there for five, ten years. With ordinary down-to-earth serious people talking like the rest of us in charge of the government. A plan that doesn’t shift very much. A wall of money coming in from around the world… A little haven of peace and stability…

MPs are hysterical over Epstein after spending 20 years suppressing investigation and reporting of industrialised child abuse here because it undermines their cross-party consensus on immigration policy. Outside SW1 you might think that the Epstein affair means they’ll now have to deal with the grooming gangs differently. After all, Epstein is an American paedo scandal but the gangs is a domestic paedo scandal on a much vaster scale, right? No, dear reader, Epstein will blow over, SW1 will move on to the months of soap opera over Starmer’s replacement and will continue ignoring the gangs, which will continue to operate, meanwhile Whitehall is incinerating documents over child abuse before it becomes a criminal offence when the new fake Inquiry starts… The system will continue working as intended… (Look at how much the BBC covered Rupert Lowe MP trying to uncover the gangs this week: 0.)

British politics is in a doomloop similar to many western countries:

A. The deafening verdict of voters in election after election (Brexit, Trump 1 and 2 etc) and the drop in support for old parties everywhere is that Insiders have failed and voters want change — a failure of ideas, institutions, and operational competence, a failure to take or impose responsibility for failure (cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, financial crisis, covid, Ukraine etc). Old parties, old state bureaucracies, old institutions of all kinds — from the EU and NATO to the media and universities — have seen an epic collapse of trust.

B. Insiders’ response to this repeated verdict is a) doubling down on more of the things voters keep rejecting, especially importing men from the worst places on earth, b) an increasingly deranged discussion among themselves that ‘the real problem’ is actually the voters, because — fooled by disinformation, ‘Russian interference’, tech oligarchs etc — they have embraced populism, racism, fascism, and c) the solution is to ‘restore trust’ in Insiders’ ideas and institutions and give them more power and money.

C. Those Outsiders who want to replace this doomloop between voters and Insiders can’t coordinate to build a political entity to do it.

To voters, Insiders are the villains and Insider failure is the cause of the collapse of their trust. To Insiders, they are the traduced victims and the cause of the collapse of trust is the evil treachery of other elites, the interference of evil foreigners (‘Putin did Brexit!’), and the ignorance and stupidity of voters.

Insiders destroyed their own OODA loops. They radicalised Left but can’t see it so their entire orientation is off kilter. Ironically it wouldn’t be hard to be a popular government — but the changes needed are fiercely resisted in a pathological self-defeating pattern by political-bureaucratic elites, because of the stories they believe, the powerful forces of mimesis which surround them, and the disintegration of feedback mechanisms. E.g ‘Stopping the boats’ is operational childsplay, doable in days according to UK forces asked to plan to stop them — not even in the 100 most complex/difficult government problems — and the entire problem is Insiders’ determination to prioritise keeping the legal barriers to solving the problem particularly the ECHR/HRA.

Voters think, ‘we keep voting for change but they won’t change’. When politicians try to change even modestly, they find it almost impossible to make the state bureaucracies evolved since 1945 follow orders. Officials across the west have dug in and grasp that the collapsed talent level of modern politicians, their incentives etc mean that officials can just refuse to change and almost always win. After covid, the old parties everywhere united in supporting the very bureaucracies responsible for killing millions and widespread disaster. Sunak and Starmer supported and empowered the precise Cabinet Office system which destroyed their ability to do what they said they would do, then both were totally bewildered by their political collapse then continued babbling support for what killed them.

These processes are part of a long-term cycle of regime change, very similar to the 1840s-70s.

So we’re in a holding pattern. The long-term entropic forces of Westminster’s pathological vandalism demonstrate themselves weekly in a torrent of humiliation — Westminster has made us a tragi-comic global internet meme. Westminster watches itself to see how it will react to the uselessness of two more duds in charge of the two old rotten parties — duds much of SW1 tried to elevate as ‘serious people’.

Farage tells people ‘after May’ Reform will start showing a transformation yet he’s spent his time recruiting some of the worst Tory dregs to help him persuade voters to vote for ‘change’. The voters are more angry and desperate than ever, but Westminster can’t cope with the feedback.

Elites have fragmented and many now also want something radically different, but this process is different in different countries. In America it’s been accelerated by Elon and the MAGA Silicon Valley network. In Britain, there’s a lot of private whining at dinner parties but very little public action. Most people with money and/or talent have kept hoping vainly that the old system might fix itself and don’t want to make enemies. Starmer has scuppered that hope but there remains no clear solution.

The gap between a) what’s really needed to solve our problems and b) what’s acceptable in Insider dinner parties is relentlessly growing — it’s much bigger than it was in 2020 and ‘what’s needed’ will seem more inconceivable for the median SW1 character the longer we continue on the Brown-Osborne-May-Sunak-Starmer trajectory. As this gap grows, elite fragmentation grows and it becomes harder for people to have meaningful discussion. Insiders seem more and more determined to try to drag what they think of as ‘the progressive arc of history’ back towards 1998, their comfort zone between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. They quote Blair on ‘open vs closed’ and ‘radical centrism’. They speculate on rejoining the EU and other changes to squash pesky demands for change — we had it cracked in the nineties, we just need to find our way back, they tell each other at Lake Como conferences on ‘alienation and populism’. This seems more and more delusional to Outsider elites who in turn seem more and more ‘extreme/fascist’ to Insiders. Bridges between networks become harder to maintain socially as informational lightcones separate on WhatsApp groups, X/Bluesky etc.

I think it will be resolved this year whether: A) Starmer and Kemi are binned as I said would happen last year, and the two old parties are irreversibly splintering, B) Farage’s promises are true or the cynics are right and it’s clear that a Reform government would be just another SW1 clownshow, C) whether elite fragmentation generates a serious alternative, or D) if not, then the rush to the exits — of talent and money — will accelerate as people realise that the next election is heading for either a Farage clownshow or a red-green-yellow-Hamas-troon-ScotNat-rainbow coalition, raising the probability of financial crisis and street violence, which may arrive anyway before then given SW1’s disintegration.

Westminster can’t solve the problems caused by Westminster and broader cultural forces acting over many decades. The historical solution is a section of elites allying with a majority of voters but it’s intrinsically hard for elites to coordinate before collapse given the asymmetries of risk and rewards, hence the pattern of regime collapse. Elon’s historic decisions changed America’s trajectory partly because huge errors by the Biden White House provoked a critical mass of dissident competent elites to take the plunge and coordinate. What would something similar here look like? And if it becomes clear all options in 2029 are worse than today, where does the energy and talent that does not emigrate go?

Everything will be under more pressure because SW1 united behind escalating the dumbest war in recent history and won’t be able to hide the disaster — or the vast historic prize NATO has given China — for much longer. The psychic nightmare for SW1, and the entire ecosystem which peddled Ukraine fairy tales, as they’re forced to confront this will generate more pathological responses. Tories and Reform will support mad ideas which emerge from the deep state to be burbled by Starmer as he fades out — a PM who at international meetings increasingly resembles a mentally impaired hobbit at a Gondor wedding staggering around in terror of being trampled by the Big Folk. Awful as things are, they can get much, much worse fast.

Such exercises in examining voters’ beliefs always generate many interesting things. One concerns immigration which I explore in detail below.

Those who consider themselves the ‘serious sensible people of SW1’ — i.e those who radicalised sharply Left post-2015 towards Greta-Gaza-‘trans’, but think the problem is voters radicalising Right — have continued their post-referendum doubling down and persuaded themselves of new fictions regarding immigration including the idea that the polls showing voter concern over immigration reflects media coverage which makes them greatly over-estimate the scale of immigration. If you believe this then you naturally believe other things about what’s happening and what political entities should do.

I suspected this is delusional so decided to see what voters think about this hypothesis. I was surprised by how deluded. It turns out that the mainstream voters I explored actually greatly under-estimate the scale of immigration — and not by 10% or 30% but by a factor between 5X and 30X. Over and over, normal voters estimate the scale of immigration since January 2021 at ‘200,000, 50,000, 300,000, 100,000, 700,000, 250,000’ — i.e roughly 5X and 30X times lower than it is. And when they are shown the real numbers and graphs since 1997 and 2021 — million after million after million — they are almost all ‘shocked’. They aren’t buying ‘diversity is our strength’. They are much more hostile to Labour and Tories and much more supportive of much stronger measures than most Tory MPs.

The lack of voter knowledge combined with what voters do think and know is an indictment of the SW1 Right but also a) a sign of where opinion will go as awareness of reality spreads and b) a huge opportunity. A competent campaign — think ‘£350 million’ but on immigration today — driving carefully chosen numbers and stories to jiujitsu SW1 fear and rage against themselves and hence build support to solve the problem, would be disastrous for Labour, Tories and Whitehall.

How could this be true when ‘the right wing media constantly exaggerates the problem’, I hear you ask?! I explain this and other interesting things below.

When I do these exercises on voter opinion, I’m trying to figure out the truth and avoid confusing a) what voters really believe, b) what I want them to believe or not believe and c) what I/others could persuade them to believe. Politics is plagued by research efforts that really are done to make money, produce evidence to support arguments/action people already want to make/do, curry favour, build relationships, get promoted etc.

I try hard not to kid myself about the difference between my views and normal voters. As I live mostly in London this has got harder, compounded by becoming famous so talking to people directly is refracted through a fog. I was surprised by lots of what we found. If you’re reading this blog, probably your life is financially easier than the median voter and you spend a lot more time looking at politics than the median voter. If you spend most of your time talking to comfortably off graduates, I urge you to discount what you want to be true, the emotions of your social network and how you and they feel about ‘political identity’, when you read what voters say below. Our first job is ‘not to fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool’.

How to summarise what I found?

Voters are angrier and more fearful and more hateful of Westminster than ever before.

On the other hand, they greatly under-estimate the real scale of immigration; they are almost totally unaware of the insane immigration cases regarding sex criminals and murderers and terrorists; they do not understand the scale of the debt; they’re mad about the scale of benefits cheating but greatly under-estimate its scale; they don’t understand the depth of vandalism of the armed forces; they understand problems with the police better than MPs but still under-estimate them; they’ve become more realistic about the NHS and the implications of immigration and ageing for it but don’t trust any mainstream political force to make significant changes; they’ve become much more hostile to SW1’s consensus on Net Zero but don’t realise the scale of mad costs SW1 locked us into and how hard it will be to change to sensible policies on energy and environment.

Although voters are more pessimistic than ever and more realistic than Insiders, they are not realistic enough about the extent of the rot so there is scope for hatred of both old parties to grow a lot and desire for something new to grow a lot — and this dynamic is demonstrated in groups when one talks them through various things.

Further, consider that what you read below about voter hate for the old parties was before the resurrection of the Epstein scandal in the last week. Already record lows of trust and record highs of hate will be even worse now and, given the inevitable continual crumbling of SW1 in coming months, even worse by summer.

Another ‘conspiracy theory’ comes true

I’ve written many times how our political crisis is illustrated by how often high status Insiders, including people who present ‘the news’, describe something as ‘a conspiracy theory’ then it turns out to be true. Those people mostly fell hook, line and sinker for the actual big conspiracy theory of the past 20 years — the Russiagate hoax on Brexit and Trump, created by the likes of Jake Sullivan to undermine the legitimacy of Trump.

Here is another good example.

Last May I wrote on this blog about UAE bigshots appalled at how we’re dealing with Islamic nutjobs. I had just talked to a) a CTO of a tech firm who’d just been there and b) a British soldier who’d just been there. Both had been to dinners with bigshots and both told me, within a few weeks, the same story about their conversations. So I wrote this (bold added):

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe.

At Christmas, the UAE finally got sick of complaining in Whitehall and briefed that they are limiting students coming because of our problem with extremist radicalisation and mad universities.

People pointed out how my original blog had triggered The Rest Is Politics. Rory ‘Kamala will win easy’ Stewart and Alistair ‘45 minutes’ Campbell did their show about my blog last May, describing it as ‘a conspiracy theory’ and how it illustrated generally I’m a psycho who spreads ‘bullshit’ to cause chaos, that’s ‘very very Cummings’. You can see a clip of Rory here which they tweeted out.

In the clip they tell their fans that I claimed this information came from organisations with ‘ludicrous acronyms to sound like he’s on the inside line … and classified information nobody else knows about’ etc. As you can see above, I didn’t say anything about classified information or ‘acronyms’, I just stated it as a fact. Rory also repeats the myth that I write Elon’s tweets, which for some reason No10 spread a year ago and is also ludicrous, and claims I’m in the pay of the Emirates (just like I was ‘in the pay of Putin’), while I’m one of the few senior people in SW1 who has never taken a penny from them or even been there — Rory and AC cannot say the same! SW1 invents things about me then believes their inventions, a constant process.

Apart from the general process of elite polarisation and the collapse of consensus reality I’ve written about a lot — and touch on below — their claims about ‘conspiracy theories’ is connected to the radicalisation of SW1 on Islam illustrated by one of many dismal Christmas stories.

Over Christmas, it turned out that most of SW1 — Labour and Tory MPs, the FO etc — and much of luvvie world had mobilised to give an Egyptian nutjob British citizenship and lobby the Egyptian government to release him from jail, which they finally did. Already, characteristically pathological of SW1. But then it beautifully turned out that the nutjob had said all sorts of nutjob things on Twitter including open calls for violence against Jews.

The PM welcomed his release and described bringing another nutter to Britain as one of his ‘top priorities’. No10 therefore had to scramble to the ‘we were useless’ defence and claim the entire campaign over years — which they said was ‘top priority’ for No10 and the PM — had never involved anybody ever doing any checking on the nutjob before mobilising SW1 and Hampstead. So No10’s defence was — neither the PM, any other minister, or anybody else in Whitehall involved in the campaign to release this guy and bring him to Britain ever checked why the Egyptians might have jailed him. Forget all the capabilities of the deep state, nobody — from the Foreign Office to The Times leader writers — even did a quick google search. Absurd as it it, they had to say this as the alternative is ‘we knew what he said and that’s why we made him a priority’. (Obviously some people in Whitehall did know he was a nutjob but they couldn’t admit that.)

These two stories are related. Middle East regimes see Britain as a dangerous source of radicalised nutjobs and decades behind them in dealing with this problem. It’s similar to how Middle East regimes have leapfrogged European regimes in many technology areas and are now more important to Washington and Beijing than Europe is, but the European/yookay story is in a timewarp where obviously we are more advanced than them.

(At roughly the same time as No10 was tweeting that it’s their ‘top priority’ to import more Islamic maniacs, Whitehall was also banning this white Dutch young woman politician from entering the yookay because she tweets stories of illegal immigrants killing Europeans and criticises yookay immigration policy. More very logical government from a government giving away the Chagos islands, importing terrorists and giving them millions, and using government lawyers to attack British special forces via lawfare using lawyer friends of Starmer and Hermer, both friends of the disgraced lawyer who invented abuses by British soldiers and, obviously, escaped jail.)

The phenomenon whereby the authorities define something as a ‘conspiracy theory’, and the old media especially the BBC reinforces the claim, then it turns out to be true is particularly striking regarding stories about extremism/Islam.

For example, in 2024 much of SW1 supported Starmer attacking those claiming the killer of the three school children was connected to Islam — ‘dangerous disinformation’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’ they screamed, and used this to justify jailing people. Then No10 admitted weeks later the PM had been told immediately the killer had been downloading Al Qaeda manuals on terrorism.

In January 2025 as the grooming gangs story resurfaced, the PM gave a speech claiming ‘the real story’ was not the gangs themselves but the radicalisation of the far right, ‘disinformation’, and Elon spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ about Islam. The BBC and much of SW1 cheered Starmer. ‘Best PM speech’ said NPCs like Lewis ‘what’s Article 50’ Goodall. A few months later, SW1 had to do Narrative Whiplash and finally accept the need for an official gangs inquiry — which, obviously, they have delayed and delayed so that Whitehall can destroy documents and ensure that it drags out like the fake covid Inquiry for years, while the gangs still run riot.

SW1 cross party consensus has normalised weekly marches by Islamic nutjobs calling for another Holocaust — ignored in SW1 but watched around the world. This week the marchers are cheering Iran’s slaughter of 20-40 thousand. And in the background, the PM, Attorney General, the Cabinet Office and MoD send their lawyers to wreck the lives of British Special Forces who risked their lives to stop Islamic nutjobs killing us. Tories like Ben Wallace signed this off, Labour continued and sharpened it — and this is watched carefully around the world by people who understand what this means about our political elite. We will all pay.

The SW1 characters who live through cycle after cycle of Narrative Whiplash never face the cognitive dissonance. At the same time SW1 was praising Starmer for rejecting an inquiry into the gangs a year ago, its pundits were also herding to a) Starmer is doing brilliantly with his ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine where Russia’s offensive has failed, and b) MAGA hostility to Zelensky is a disaster for Farage, ‘populism’s peaked’ etc. Remember that? No, neither do they…

Also bear in mind when you hear ‘conspiracy theory’ a new trend on the Left. For many years they described the Great Replacement as a ‘conspiracy theory’. But there is a growing trend for left politicians to adopt the term and argue — yes, we want to replace the old whites, replacement is good, replacement is inevitable, if you don’t like it you are fascist! Check out this Spanish politician. The Spanish government legalised 500k illegals last week. She took to the stage to state that they will then give them a vote to make real ‘replacement theory’, and this week the same government announced a big set of censorship measures to ‘counter hate’ from the natives. She is not a freak. The same dynamics are at work across Europe and in SW1. Our own NPCs have got a software patch and many are shifting this way…

Read more

Some Governments are in office but not in power; the Civil Service is always in office and always in power.

Prime Minister Baldwin, 1925

From the decision to elevate the general administrator, the mandarin, and grant to his corporation supreme influence, much of the present discomfiture of the country has followed. Hardly ever has so anachronistic a change occurred in a vital organ of a great empire at a worse moment. The discrepancy between tasks and means is still steadily increasing.

Thomas Balogh, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, 1959

The British have formed the habit of praising their institutions, which are often inept, and of ignoring the character of their race, which is often superb. In the end they will be in danger of losing their character and being left with their institutions, a result disastrous indeed.

Lord Radcliffe, Reith Lectures, 1951.

The failings of the upper echelons of the Civil Service were an important part of the British sickness. The Civil Service helped to shape, and was shaped by, Britain’s post-war malaise.

Hoskyns

Why did the politicians and civil servants seem so completely out of their depth? Were we in the grip of some historically inevitable process about which we could do nothing? Was some new political coalition … a necessary preconditions for any cure?…

They [SW1 discussions] did not start from a shared understanding of the problem. The discussions would therefore range haphazardly over problems, causes, symptoms and possible solutions, getting nowhere…

All big problems in human affairs have these characteristics. They are not problems of the kind one deals with in day-to-day life. They are systems problems in which complex processes are beginning to go wrong, where destructive chain reactions run out of control.

Hoskyns’ reflections, mid-1970s

A tiny incident but it told me a lot and suddenly made me feel, more completely and irrevocably than ever before, that the Civil Service are the real enemy of hope for the future and they are therefore my enemy.

Hoskyns on a personnel dispute with the Cabinet Secretary, 1979.

In a job like mine, experience of politics was less important than experience in getting difficult things done.

Hoskyns re the value of normal SW1 experience

A country’s history is not changed by politicians who are unable to control their own diaries.

Norman Strauss

The actions and style of the Major-Heseltine-Hurd-Clarke-Patten team, almost a counter-revolution, indicated that large parts of the Conservative Party had been unable to internalise the new politics… The long march back through the semi-socialist institutions never happened.

Hoskyns reflecting on the Thatcher project and Major

UPDATE: 28/11, finished. JH leaves and reflects.

I’ve added a Summary and some Questions for those thinking about how to be the next PM.

Plus some corrections, minor edits of main text.

In 2026 this blog will steer clear of these SW1 issues. I’ve done this to death and it’s time to move on. Starmer’s replacement will be another iteration of the broken system with added farce, chaos, and financial market involvement. The issue is how fast that implodes and whether anyone embarks on trying to hire a team such that the PM after Starmer’s replacement ditches Northcote-Trevelyan and we have the first government that controls the government in living memory.

The Covid Inquiry publishing a Report which systematically lies and deliberately did not ask dozens of witnesses for evidence to make their lies easier to tell — and most of the legacy media repeating lies as truth — is a perfect end stage story for the old regime, while the lawyers build themselves country houses with the cash they’re looting and Whitehall expands its HR empires as ‘lessons learned’ from covid. No blog of mine can compete with this. Like importing jihadis actually called ‘Jihadi’ while conducting lawfare against the SAS, the end stage of Whitehall is beyond any satire.

The dynamics of the old system’s failure are all now clear for those who want to see. The old system will dig in, loot more money, destroy more and more, until financial crash and mass violence or it’s replaced. Those who want to replace it have to focus on specific people, legal changes etc while building a mass movement.

In 2025 I mostly abandoned explaining the Narrative Whiplash and comic punditry of the old system. In 2026 I will abandon my long running explanations of the pathological institutions. I am thoroughly sick of the sound of my own voice on the subject.

Here are three amazingly deep delusions in SW1 that together help explain how reality bounces off that community and why it’s become normalised among Insiders who self-describe as ‘liberal’ to call for the banning of social media and state control of news:

1. AI is fake, just plausible nonsense as a former senior GCHQ official recently declared, accidentally illustrating why the yookay deep state is in such a dire state on technology. It has become conventional wisdom to think that political pundits with zero management/entrepreneurial/technology experience of any kind are much deeper experts on running tech companies than Elon.

2. Voters rating immigration as a top 3 priority is ‘because of media coverage and if MPs and newspapers stop talking about it voters will stop saying it’s a big deal’. I’m ashamed to admit that I predicted a decade ago this delusion would not survive the referendum. It survived not just the referendum and three years of constitutional conflict but the Trolley and Sunak and Starmer importing many millions more and expanding the benefit system to encourage the immigration of Somalis, Pakistanis etc to have more children, all paid for by rising taxes, and cross party consensus that discussing the rape gangs is a ‘racist conspiracy theory’. And it’s even more firmly believed today by many in SW1 than a decade ago. The Great Replacement Theory went from ‘racist conspiracy theory’ to ‘replacing a majority white civilisation with the Third World is a good policy and you’re racist if you don’t like it’ with almost no intervening stage in the Narrative Whiplash.

3. The UKR disaster can be salvaged. Close to 100% of SW1 swallowed the entire propaganda whole. Every aspect of conventional wisdom has blown up on them but such is the modern Insider ecosystem that they still refuse to face it. Outside the NATO media ecosystem they are stunned by what they see. China is the huge winner, as I said would happen in Q1 2022. The PRC deep state has been given a vast, vast historic present and they laugh deeper and deeper every day. Brussels says their 139th round of sanctions will finally crush Putin’s war machine and our MPs nod along. Meanwhile we import Russian oil via India — take that Putin!

I’ve been working with some people to explore the use of AI models for political projects. If you know of particularly good things on ‘how to use the models’ — for text, video, anything — please post links in Comments.

My time will be spent differently in 2026. Please leave any suggestions on what you’d like to see more/less of as I ponder the future of this blog…

UPDATE: 23/11/25: the 1980 ‘you turn if you want to’ speech, realising their errors and changing course in the famous 1981 budget, reshuffle with Prior et al out, Hoskyns and Wolfson wrote a memo on her failings which failed to land, Hoskyns decides to leave.

UPDATE: 16/11/25: Hoskyns goes into No10, they make big early economic mistakes because of lack of preparations and grip of the system, interaction of the failures of civil service with inadequacies of MPs to organise themselves. Course correction in Q1 1980…

And some Snippets:

• Senior generals go over the top on lawfare against Special Forces, pressure builds on General Roly Walker, and generals finally focus on the core issue: the Human Rights Act.

• Great interview by my wife with a legend of the SAS, former RSM of 22 SAS George Simm.

• Russiagate hoax, highly relevant to the near universal madness on Ukraine. NB. Most SW1 hacks think the truth is ‘disinformation’ and the disinformation is true.

• Legacy media hacks defending the lies and corruption of the BBC.

This blog is for the overlapping networks thinking:

How could the next No10 not be like the post-Thatcher No10s and instead be at least as important as the Thatcher project and ideally on the historic scale of Lee Kuan Yew genuinely transforming a country’s political economy and governance?

There have been successful political/electoral projects after Thatcher but there has been no other No10-government project successful on anything like the scale of the Thatcher project, able to combine:

A. A real leader. Thatcher had flaws and some of them are characteristic of the MPs who select into modern SW1 such as a lack of skills seen in great CEOs — prone to hopeless chairing of meetings, difficulties running a team etc. But she also had genuine leadership abilities, she had moral courage, she was very determined, she was interested in ideas and power, and she was focused on the real job, she’s the last PM who did *not* see No10’s core job as Content Provider for Legacy Media Entertainment. No Pitt but obviously more consequential than her successors.

B. An accurate map of the core problems.

C. Agreed goals and a plan for how to get there including changing Whitehall.

D. A team with the skills to get it done.

E. A story for the country.

F. The leader, map, goals, plan, team, story and execution etc sort of (barely) coming and holding together for years such that a real transformation happens.

The story is told by John Hoskyns (JH) in his memoir, Just In Time.

Hoskyns’ father was killed in the defence of Calais to buy time for the Dunkirk evacuation. JH served in the army then created one of the very first British software startups in 1964. Dealing with the disintegration of the British economy in the 1960s-70s as an entrepreneur, he became obsessed with the complex causes of the problems and how to fix them. He sold his company so he could pursue politics. He set out to become friends with the people around the IEA and CPS in the 1970s and through those networks got to know Thatcher, Howe and Keith Joseph. He wrote plans, including the Stepping Stones memo, and tried to corral leading politicians to consider a systematic explanation of the problems and therefore an agreed step-by-step plan for fixing them. When she won the 1979 election he went to No10 to run the Policy Unit. He worked with her through the first tumultuous critical years until resigning in 1982. His Memoir draws on a detailed diary he kept.

For all those thinking about the next regime, Hoskyns’ memoir will be fascinating and rewarding. It is amazingly little known in SW1. I think that of MPs I’ve asked ‘have you read it’, only one or two have said Yes. There is no other post-1979 British book like it partly because there has not been since then a combination of a) someone with his training and intellectual perspective at the heart of power working for b) a real political leader trying to change deep things. (The best example of something modern written in another country is Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir which I did several blogs on in 2021.)

I had the privilege of writing to JH before he died and he sent me thoughts and some old things he’d written about Whitehall. Many of the things I’ve said since 1999 were more elegantly explained by him decades ago.

Hoskyns’ situation obviously rhymes with today:

• A failed economic consensus which has produced stagnation, misery, investment fleeing and a doomloop of negativity.

• Whitehall stuck repeating the failed consensus and resisting change. Senior civil servants strongly resistant to outsiders explaining their mistakes and showing how to do things better, a determination in Whitehall to continue with what they’ve been doing and how they’ve been doing it which seems increasingly crackers outside SW1.

• Parties struggling to find new ideas or explain them.

• Parties struggling to make Whitehall act differently even when they came up with new ideas.

• MPs unwilling to take responsibility for governing and impose their will on the civil service then blaming officials for failure while the officials blame the MPs — as they say in Moscow, ‘everyone’s right and everyone’s unhappy’.

• Very powerful self-reinforcing elite networks across politics, civil service, academia, and legacy media telling themselves that the answers to everything are essentially: higher taxes, more state control, ‘trust and support the civil service’, and all alternatives to SW1 consensus are ‘extremist’.

• A growing feeling of a ‘systems crisis’ in which many different failures interacted with each other to make it very hard to see how to escape and what to focus on first, so many things feel like a precondition for other things.

• MPs lacking the skills to cope with a systems crisis so they go around in circles and default to focus on the legacy media news cycle and diaries organised by officials (often to keep them out the way).

• Widespread assumptions that attempts to break out of the doomloop were doomed.

• Talent, especially young talent, leaving for America in despair. Talent which talks to senior SW1 figures rapidly becomes more despairing of the prospects of recovery!

• Declining international confidence in SW1 and the capacity of UK elites to bootstrap themselves out of perpetual crisis.

Some of you reading this will find particularly striking in the Hoskyns-Thatcher story the combination of:

• One of Britain’s very first software startups.

• A nuclear physicist.

• A causal wiring diagram of Britain’s core problems. (Imagine what LLMs could do with this concept now, see below.)

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes…

The country has been living off the wealth generated by the Thatcher project ~1976-1985 which turned many things around and put us on a different path. That project had economic momentum which carried us through the failures of Major, Blair, Cameron etc. But Thatcher’s successors have cumulatively done so much damage to infrastructure, regulation, capital budgets, critical capabilities etc — while in parallel very long term dynamics with elite talent and SW1 played out, rotting the system — such that the economic momentum of the Thatcher project has run out and left us stalled with unprecedented stagnation in productivity and wage growth. The economic stagnation is a big cause of our rolling political crisis.

Hoskyns makes clear that the main failure of the Thatcher project was her failure to face the reality of modern Whitehall and how the senior civil service had evolved. If she had done, history would have been very different. This failure led to other failures including Thatcher getting conned over the Single Market and other aspects of the European project which Insiders successfully misled her about (and later bragged about).

Much of recent history has been driven by the country and its political elites struggling to cope with the effects of the errors and delusions of Tory politicians between the 1940s, when the appalling FO dismissed Monnet’s plans for supranational European institutions as fantasies, and the 1980s, when the appalling FO fooled Thatcher and itself and the rest of Whitehall about the next phases of the Monnet-Delors European project. It’s a story of conscious deliberate deception by a tiny subset of elites (e.g some senior officials in the FO) and 99% of the rest of SW1 Insider-world swallowing the propaganda, deluding itself and parroting errors and delusions to each other, the media and the public (similar to Ukraine). Like all such elite projects, those engaged in the pro-EEC/EU lies saw themselves in Platonic terms — noble lies for the greater good.

The history of 2015-25, with Cameron’s fateful decisions over the referendum and how it played out, are downstream from Thatcher’s inability to face a) the reality of modern Whitehall and b) the reality of the Monnet-Delors project as its own advocates conceived it.

Brexit, Whitehall and another chance to face reality

The chance to get to grips with the cancer of Whitehall didn’t come again until forty years later in 2019-20 when Brexit and the collapse of central institutions in the pandemic provided the sort of opportunity that takes decades to appear. It was blown again.

I saw the combination of Leave winning the referendum and a new government with a new team and plan as the way to do something historically even bigger than the Thatcher project:

• to change the economy deeply,

• make science and technology and the R&D ecosystem a core priority for economic and security policy and for the PM’s weekly diary,

• replace the broken civil service model,

• psychopathic focus on building critical capabilities,

• force the parties to change radically or be replaced,

• change the core of No10 and the Cabinet Office etc.

I saw the referendum partly as a chance to fix the two core failures of the Thatcher project: delusions on Whitehall and delusions on the Monnet-Delors project.

My hopes partly happened, partly stalled. Leaving the EU has, as intended, been a huge discontinuity exposing the rot of the old system, which spent three years after the referendum showing how little it grasped, even after the referendum, about what EU membership truly involved and how much power had been given away, hence partly why they couldn’t cope with the result, and both parties plus Whitehall drove themselves into a cul-de-sac.

So a new project was begun in fits and starts 2016-2020. But then it stalled in Q3 2020. The senior civil service, shocked by their own collapse, surrendered in summer 2020. The whole space opened up for a historic shift: an 80 seat majority, four years to an election, the system accepting radical change because of its collapse, massive public demand for huge changes in the aftermath of the spring nightmare, a supportive network of Outsider talent (partly mobilised by covid).

Then the Trolley rejected the surrender and surrendered himself and told the old system ‘business as usual’. Tory MPs mostly cheered the Trolley when he sank back into the warm embrace of the Whitehall deal — you leave us alone to run things and control real power via appointments and we’ll pretend to the legacy media you’re in charge and indulge you on the small things. The old system’s momentum re-asserted itself and has carried it forward through a pandemic and the Ukraine war and unprecedented productivity stagnation, regardless of the change of three PMs and a change of party.

Starmer was elected promising again to ‘change’ yet has presided over the continued momentum of the broken old system — a lost, broken lawyer with the mentality of the worst officials looking around blinking in bafflement with nothing to do but read out scripts providing content for the old media’s new cycle, self-contradictory content which rarely maintains narrative coherence for even 24 hours.

But the continuity of Sunak-Starmer driven by their shared determination to do as advised by the senior civil service, despite the overwhelming desperate desire of voters for discontinuity, has stunned many MPs and forced many to re-evaluate core beliefs. This will grow as the old parties continue to fragment and lose support to Outsiders.

A big and important difference with 2015-24 today, near the end of 2025, is that the world of ‘mainstream’ SW1 is being forced to face that it told itself and the country that the problem was ‘Brexit’ and the ‘mad Brexit people’ and the old system would work great once ‘serious people’ like Starmer, Sue Gray and Reeves were in charge of it — then the Starmer project has imploded and the so-called ‘grownups’ look just like the end of the Trolley, Truss and Sunak.

Whitehall’s pathological institutions generate an accelerating news cycle of failure and despair. Scandals and disasters hit the news so fast that none of them leave any trace on consciousness — elite or general public. Almost nothing gets coverage for more than a day or so combined with the collapse of audience for the old ‘news’. Whitehall institutions have learned to just keep moving safe in the knowledge that no force in British politics can maintain focus for a week. Nobody has to resign, nobody has to explain. It’s guaranteed there’ll be another debacle along in the next 24-48 hours to move the SW1 herd attention on to the next debacle.

Andrew Marr’s comments last year on how Starmer and Sue Gray would be a ‘serious’ government with ‘stable’ plans and make the system work etc was the conventional wisdom among the NPC army last year. Click here to watch 90 seconds:

Optimistic looking forward… A stable government… Serious people in charge… A plan that doesn’t shift… Britain will look a haven of stability relative to Europe and America…

Then a fortnight ago, he wrote the New Statesman cover story in which he repeats some arguments I’ve made for 20 years.

Shot/chaser — as they say on the line!

Such delusions were very widespread in pundit world as it was axiomatic that Starmer is ‘a serious person’ just as for me it’s axiomatic that he embodies the precise opposites of what I consider ‘a serious person’.

The SW1 mainstream’s delusions are no longer completely sustainable even in the closed world of Parliament, never mind in wider elite networks. Business confidence in the old political system has quickly collapsed and the appetite for radical measures outside SW1 is through the roof. The so-called Overton window has shifted fast and hard on Whitehall itself such that some who described things I said even 2 years ago (never mind 20 years ago) as ‘mad’ now talk like it’s ‘just obvious’ fundamental changes are needed such as dramatic PM use of his full power over appointments and ending the Whitehall hiring/firing/HR system.

So there is now a profound crisis of confidence in mainstream political world, as in the late 1970s. Also like the late 1970s, there are numerous groups running around with ‘ideas’ and ‘plans’. But so far the groups are mainly focusing on specific policies. There is no (public) equivalent to the Hoskyns-Price-Strauss analysis which developed a map connecting the root causes of the crises, showing how they interacted with each other, and providing a true strategy for solving them in a systematic manner.

In order to do regime change properly next time, there must be something resembling Hoskyns’ wiring diagram and Stepping Stones plan which also sets out the core things which must start changing together from Day 1 and a plan for dealing with Whitehall, without which all policy work will prove pointless. Policy is not strategy and a government strategy is not a collection of policies, however important. Thousands of pages of interesting, thoughtful, detailed policy cannot amount to a true strategy. A true strategy needs, inter alia, defined goals, a plan for controlling the government and building a team, a story for the country and a communication machine which can function in the rapidly changing information ecosystem. It must connect ends, ways and means. It must connect leader and policy with story etc. It should include action like writing key primary legislation well in advance of an election, as we did for school reform pre-2010 which was critical to progress.

Much, much more important than any individual policy is a team determined that, for the first time since Churchill, from Day 1 the Prime Minister’s Office controls the centre of government, not vice versa. This means, for example, immediately transferring control of 99% of the Cabinet Office to the PM Office and out of the control of the Cabinet Secretary and immediately replacing senior officials. Without this — which needs a major project of elite talent recruitment — all big policy changes, however well thought through, will not happen.

The thing which is starting to make me a little hopeful is that realisation of this is spreading fast outside SW1 for the first time in living memory. It will not take much for it to be an accepted principle of a mass movement propelling regime change. It’s important to grasp how big a deal this is. The system evolved without elites really noticing, partly under the impetus of two world wars and the Cold War, as I described in the big summer blog on the Cabinet Office which acquired over 50 years a load of powers which it was explicitly agreed would be disastrous for it to acquire when it was created in 1917 — yet the MPs were boiled like frogs and barely noticed. The centre of government moved from the PM and Chancellor in charge to the PM’s Office being treated by the Cabinet Office as a sub-division under their control. All without a master plan and in many ways counter to intentions. Anybody who complained about this and suggested change was seen as at least half-mad. The Hoskyns story is central to understanding this.

But no longer! Now, finally, crucial arguments about this are going mainstream in elite circles and it has quickly flipped from ‘mad/fascism’ to ‘obvious’ with many elites in a very short period. This is important!

In some ways, the next regime change project will be easier than the Thatcher project. In other ways, it will be harder.

The rot of Whitehall is deeper, more profound and more existential. Much of Whitehall and the BBC radicalised to a set of extreme Left views which they have defined as a new ‘mainstream’ since the West generally went through this radicalisation process from ~2010-12 — a process so big and powerful it’s almost invisible inside SW1, which is almost totally baffled about why it’s been acting as it has. (E.g Tory MPs now routinely denounce the trans-psyop madness after defending and entrenching it in Whitehall themselves as ministers just a few years ago.) Per Marshall McLuhan, such huge events tend to be largely invisible to those living through them, other than to a few artists — hence why Rick Rubin could see it clearly while DC, Brussels and SW1 appeared in the grip of a mass psychosis.

Elite fragmentation/polarisation is critical and can only continue. On one hand, more and more elites defecting from the Insider to Outside camps — particularly elites connected to entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the core of the old system can only dig in for another round of doubling down, as it has since 2016.

You can see this psychology at play in the last few weeks.

The latest ‘serious gronwups’ to go into No10 are making a tragi-comic attempt to try to shift the blame for the public finances and stagnation off Labour and Tories and onto Nigel Farage, who has never been part of any government. It’s the latest instalment in SW1’s 70 year fairy tale about the EEC/EU.

The way in which the most delusional parts of SW1 can come up with no other plan than to reopen the Brexit debate and blame Farage for Tory and Labour failures since 2015 is part of the general phenomenon we can see across the West. The old parties and old bureaucracies and their supporting elites cannot see our crises as the result of counter-actions to how they governed 1991-2015 and the ideas they enshrined as ‘mainstream’. They cannot see Brexit and Trump as generated by the failure of their ideas and institutions. After the initial shocks of 2016, these elites developed a story for themselves in which Brexit and Trump were malign creations of a secretive evil elite, ‘the fascist tech-enabled oligarchs in league with fascist Putin’. They can only dig in, deeper and deeper.

The attempt by No10 to ‘blame Farage for tax rises’ will obviously fail in one sense. It will not persuade swing voters because it’s ludicrous. It will fail in terms of No10’s immediate political objectives of escaping blame for the disastrous economy and finances. And it won’t even keep the Bluesky nutjobs happy because they’ll just say ‘the new plan is failing because half-hearted Starmer isn’t embracing Rejoin which is the only solution to our woes’ (alongside censorship). But it will succeed in one limited way: it will meet the emotional need in SW1 to vent about a hated enemy, the Tories are too irrelevant for this, and Farage works as a hate figure for pundits and MPs. Overall, it’s a sign of how intellectually and politically bankrupt the old Insider world is.

We must build counterforces and, after we win, retire this Insider network — forcefully but not violently. (Forcefully is the opposite of violently, done right.) Stop trying to think ‘debate’ will persuade them. Focus on building forces outside SW1 that will retire forces inside SW1. As these forces build, there will be more elite defections to the Outsider forces but this will rarely be because of any ‘rational debate’. That’s not how history works. It will mostly be because of the spreading feeling, hard for most to articulate, that the creative power of the political elites has dissolved and the public has, in response, withdrawn mimesis and obedience. This is the classic condition in which new elites step forward and make new offers to engage the energy of the masses.

It’s a good time to consider the last successful British ‘government transformation project’.

As usual, at the bottom is a summary and big questions for a new PM. All bold is me.

Below the blog are some random thoughts on recent news.

The series on People, Ideas, Machines

XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

Other related stuff…

On rationalism and politics (2022).

On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

On Tolstoy and War and Peace.

JUST IN TIME

Introduction

…

Read more

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

I’m speaking at an LFG event at the O2 Arena on 23/10 with:

• Liv Boeree, physicist, one of the world’s best poker players, podcaster particularly on technology, I did her podcast earlier this year here. Her substack/podcast here.

  

• Matt Clifford, an investor who tried to help Sunak and Starmer make AI a priority for the British state. He left government recently. He helped the government negotiate the Microsoft data centre in the North East and other things just announced in Trump’s visit.

• Chris Curtis MP, a Labour MP fighting a lonely battle with some Labour MPs for the government to do anything useful before 2029. Experience in government has radicalised many on the Left to realise the official story Starmer believed about Whitehall is wrong and this blog is right — the Tory MPs mostly just sat uselessly for 14 years telling themselves fairy tales, importing jihadis and defending the Human Rights Act prioritising jihadi human rights over the safety of British people, spending taxpayers money on weddings for child killers ‘cos human rights’, repeating NPC scripts on definitions of ‘a woman’ suddenly being ‘really complex’, covering up the Grooming Gangs, and marching to destruction.

• Katie Lam, a new MP who did a lot of brave pushing on the grooming gangs when the official Starmer line was ‘the real story is tech oligarch fascists spreading conspiracy theories about grooming gangs’, which the BBC and NPC army amplified. She’s been helping the LFG campaign and is one of the handful in Tory world who can communicate.

There’ll be other interesting things at this event including those who wrote the Foundations paper. BOOK NOW, see you there.

Info page. (Become a subscriber and get a free ticket.)

Also I’ve been impressed by the guys who set up Pharos. They aggressively get on with things. If you’re rich and looking for something which will DO SOMETHING rather than just babble into the dread void of SW1, call them.

It’s finally clear even to some of the blindest in SW1 that both old parties are disintegrating, with failed leadership and their voters fragmenting all over the shop (but not to each other).

It’s pitiful watching the old regime die, unable to muster any sort of coherent anything on anything. Unable to tell a story. Less than one percent able to give a serious speech or write a serious essay or even do a three hour podcast without exposing themselves as empty/idiotic/useless. Uninterested in even pretending to be interested in policy and how government works and the extraordinary things happening across the world. Unable even to pretend to campaign, because a campaign means defining then maintaining focus on priorities, which has become inconceivable in SW1. Unable to master the 75 year old TV technology and unable to execute the basics of 1990s media management, never mind the new technologies shattering the media ecosystem.

Just mindless chasing their own tails providing content for the legacy media news cycle generated by a pathological Whitehall system the government doesn’t understand, never mind control. An NPC PM living out my golden rule of modern SW1: the government doesn’t control the government, isn’t trying to, and couldn’t if it tried — and pushing it to a grotesque demonstration by writing newspaper articles begging terrorists and their sympathisers not to go on marches demanding a second Holocaust — and having his begging ignored as the No10 press office bleats pitifully ‘but we don’t have any powers’. (NB. when they want to shut down a ‘far right’ protest they suddenly do have ‘the powers’.)

No10 acts as if it studied post-Vote Leave Trolley and Sunak and thought — yes, that’s how to do government, that’s how to do politics, that’s how to communicate, let’s copy all that, zero priorities, ‘respect the institutions’ and leave Whitehall to run itself, machine-gun the entire electoral coalition, defend the old system instead of delivering the change we promised, and spend our days spouting contradictory nonsense in the news cycle, brief ‘major reset’ each month, shuffle NPC jobs, that’s the way.

Meanwhile we import jihadis called ‘Jihadi’ who sing about jihad on the boats then do jihad here and our MPs babble ‘diversity is our strength, behold the British integration miracle success story’.

Voters look on in horror and despair. International investors text each other: ‘not investable, what the fuck happened over there with the troons, commies and jihadis’.

What happened?

The creative power of the minority deserted SW1, there has been an answering withdrawal of mimesis from those outside SW1, and social unity is imploding. Collapse of the old regime is following the normal pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change. Elite fragmentation, collapse of consensus reality, OODA-loop-as-denial-of-service-attack such that the more NPCs act, the more they self-harm but are baffled as to why everything they do fails, so they conclude they should do more of it. Cf. blog in spring, talk in summer.

Read more

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

He is very depressed about the hopelessness of the present system of governing by 22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair.

Edward …

Read more

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Tancredi in Lampedusa’s The Leopard

If we do not prepare for ourselves the role of the hammer,

there will be nothing left but that of the anvil.

Bismarck

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Mao

Ps. read the book before you watch the move.

On 19 June 2025 I gave a speech to a packed Sheldonian Theatre.

Oxford was, with Cambridge and bits of London, the most hostile demographically to Vote Leave. Five years ago there’d have been a crowd brainwashed by the Russiagate hoax and Guardian howling for my arrest. So it was interesting to see a thousand students and academics listen and cheer a tough message on what’s gone wrong and what to do, including leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. There’s an interview with GB News on stage at the end of the talk. This touched on why Boris-Carrie destroyed border control and on the grooming/rape gangs coverups.

(But! The ‘full video’ released by GB News censored references to Boris and Carrie! GBN is trying to be an alternative to the MSM so censoring things said in public to do a favour for the guy responsible for the most disastrous collapse of border control in British history for a thousand years is not a good idea. I suggest GBN reviews their decision and releases the full video. I don’t think it was the journalist who edited it, it was senior management called by the Trolley.)

Have you noticed one ‘respectable serious mainstream grownup’ SW1 character reflect on a) the fact that it’s turned out Tommy Robinson was more right than ‘the mainstream’ on the gangs — more right than’Professors’ like ‘Professor’ Portes and ‘Professor’ Ansell, more right than the BBC Political Editors, more right than the TV anchors, more right than the Today program, more right than 99% of MPs, more right than the NPC pundit network paid to ‘explain’ politics to the plebs, and b) the implications of this for trust in ‘the mainstream’ at a time when Insiders are all desperately asking each other ‘how do we restore trust?’? I haven’t seen anything, if you noticed any honest reflections from that crowd please post link in comments.

Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.

They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right ... making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking ... has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).

This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.

Also remember — there is no Westminster action about the fact that we have a ‘care system’ that is often controlled/used by criminals using ‘care’ homes as part of their business model for organised child abuse. Care homes stacking poor children with no relatives nearby are perfect for the business model of vertically integrated crime organisations which have evolved in yookay over the last thirty years, with the bosses often running them from hotels in Dubai: sex, people traffic, drugs, logistics, transport etc. ‘Care’ as organised child abuse, with state and organised crime in symbiosis, is a theme of modern yookay (see here).

Also note that the police are now being caught actively shifting far left protesters into proximity with those protesting asylum/illegals being dumped in their area, then when trouble flares they brief ‘far right thuggery’ then pundits like Goodall say the government needs to control social media ‘to protect democracy’. The regime continues to optimise for destroying borders rather than what voters keep voting for.

After my blog on civil war etc, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell did a show on how it was all ‘far right conspiracy theory’. This week, briefings from the National Security Secretariat to Cabinet are on page one of The Times.

One of the most important things to understand about SW1 is, as I’ve explained here repeatedly, the way it operates on ephemeral emotional cycles which are rapidly memory-holed. Close to no live player can maintain any sort of focus for any period longer than days. Campaigns are constantly discussed but barely exist. So in January, that was the line, now most of SW1 acts like it never happened.

Here is the full youtube video, text below (the video of the speech is uncensored (I think!), the video of the interview is censored).

Snippets and random thoughts below the text.

And I did an interview with the Telegraph a week later. Here is the full video.

Subscribe now

Text, Oxford, 19 June 2025

[Check against video before quoting!]

The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.

In January, No. 10 Downing Street claimed that Elon was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong — I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall, including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.

Every week in London and across Britain, people openly march demanding a second Holocaust. And the only people who seem to get arrested are those counter-protesting. These people prevent access to parliament itself and intimidate the MPs and the MPs’ response is to jabber about how the real danger is ‘white extremism’, and the real priority is protecting the European Convention of Human Rights.

The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world’s most famous religion of peace. Week after week, the courts use the European Convention of Human Rights to stop deportation of the worst criminals. Recently, a guy who sexually abused his own step-children could not be deported because he said it would interfere with his human rights to access his family i.e the children he’d attacked. And the courts said, ‘yeah, that’s right, checkmate, you get to stay’. Every week there’s now a mad case like this. The ECHR system that Britain set up to stop Europe sliding back to totalitarianism, is now being used – thanks to cross-party, multi-decade consensus – by sex criminals and by terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways.

You have seen recently the news that the guy who stabbed the girls in Southport attacked prison guards, but you won’t have seen why these cases keep occurring. The reason is the Cabinet Office legal advice states that it’s unlawful under the European Convention of Human Rights to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance, even in high-security jails, because it breaches their rights to privacy. So, when cases like this happen, officials prioritise covering up the ECHR’s role — they do not prioritise the rights of prison guards not to have burning oil thrown in their faces.

The regime destroyed border control, even though the main reason for ‘Leave’ winning the EU referendum was the desire for more border control. Then it imported unprecedented millions, and hundreds of thousands more simply got on the stupid boats in France and came over, safe in the knowledge that that MPs have created a legal regime that makes it practically impossible to deport anybody. The only people left in the world who now seem to listen to what the Home Office says are the tiny fraction of the most skilled people in the world who we actually want to come here. These are the people who the Home Office wages a constant jihad against to stop them coming into the country. So, again, we have a regime that waves through maniacs by the thousand, won’t deport anybody, won’t deport the worst criminals; the only people now that they actually stop and who listen to what the laws say are the very small numbers of the most high-skilled people that we actually want to come here.

Last week people were jailed for less than three years for burning a pensioner to death in their own home — less time in jail obviously than people are now getting for stupid tweets. The regime has broken housing markets, so unless your parents are rich, it’s going to be much harder for you to get a home, and build a family, than it was for your parents. It’s executed a set of economic policies that have created the worst period since Napoleon for productivity and real wage growth.

It’s broken the NHS so badly that Ukrainian refugees return to a literal war zone to get healthcare. And these pathological institutions attack the things that work. So if this building was suddenly taken over by terrorists, we would depend on Special Forces to come and solve the situation. Those Special Forces now have to have meetings about the Cabinet Office’s constant lawfare against them. They’re having to hire lawyers to defend themselves over operations which they were given medals for over the last few decades.

I’ve sat in the Cabinet Office watching as terrorists actually on the run from cave to cave in Pakistan call on satellite phones London lawyers, using human rights laws to demand that British taxpayers give them millions. And the Cabinet Office says we’ve got to pay them out. And it sends over these millions, and then it classifies it all in such a high level that no MPs know about it. These cases are not discussed in Parliament. These cases are not discussed in the media.

In 2020, we started monitoring sewage and provided real time data on disease spread. It is a crucial piece of infrastructure for public health, the same way the Victorians built institutions which we rely on. So, of course, the regime closed it down. We proved you could do vaccine research ten times more effectively. So they closed the vaccine task force. We created what I think is the West’s first data science and AI team inside a Prime Minister’s Office. The Cabinet Office and Treasury have tried to vandalise it for five years and close it down.

If you think, well, at least things like nuclear weapons must be taken seriously, no, that’s also wrong. For 20 years, there’s been a disastrous procurement process costing tens and tens and tens of billions which, again, is kept super secret so that it’s not the subject of discussion in Parliament, not the subject of discussion in the media.

Neither the worst pandemic since 1918, nor the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, have made Westminster change – quite the opposite. Since the war started in Ukraine, MOD procurement has got worse and worse. When I said in 2020, the future of war was drones and robots, Westminster laughed. Now we see all this playing out on YouTube. But the MOD has spent the years of the Ukraine war deliberately resisting facing this reality. And when people return from Ukraine to explain what’s happening inside the MOD, they’re told: ‘Do not tell senior officials, do not tell ministers, our priority is continuing the budgets for the stupid old tanks and all the things inside MOD procurement that don’t work. We want to keep the old gravy train running.’

So step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder. As Mao said, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. Britain, practically alone in the world, has avoided serious political violence for centuries. But the crumbling of our regime and its elites mean we’re now only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control.

The kind of official story about how government works is that the MPs get up every day and they think about government and they think about the voters and they think about elections. This is not true. A lot of the reason why the news often makes no sense is that people think that the official story is true, but it is not. What MPs actually focus on all day is the old media and their promotions. Their reality comes from this old media. But, of course, this old media itself is breaking down under the power and the shock of the internet. We therefore see this kind of what I’ve called a sort of narrative whiplash that now dominates Westminster debates. Everyone herds to one story. The story turns out to be complete nonsense. And then everyone drops it and they herd to a new story. But then everything is memory holed from what people said before.

I’ll just give a few examples. On social media, in 2008, the official story blasted everywhere from the New York Times to the British media was that social media is all nonsense and it has no effect. In 2012, the official story became, actually, it’s wonderful because it’s helped President Obama win. In 2016, it became, actually far from being nonsense, social media technology is evil Jedi-mind controlling technology, and that’s the real reason why Brexit happened and why Trump happened.

If you look at the start of the Covid pandemic, public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: ‘Why are we not closing the borders?’ Remember that? She just voiced what normal people were saying. And, of course, all the public health experts mocked her all over Twitter and they said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Closing the borders is racist. The actual plan is we’ve got no choice but to run up the white flag. Vaccines are impossible. Tests won’t work. Everyone will just have to do herd immunity without a vaccine and put up with no health service for months’.

Then the whole story suddenly flipped. Suddenly, no herd immunity but tests, vaccines, and according to The Guardian and the BBC, the only people resisting this new story were the crazy right-wing Brexit people. The same kind of narrative whiplash is played out in the stupidest war in modern history in Ukraine, the war which never needed to happen. At the beginning, the official story was that the Ukraine war is nothing to do with Ukraine joining Nato. Then the official story became Ukraine must join Nato. They started off saying the war must continue because it’s bleeding Russia dry. And then the story became the war must continue because Russia is strengthening, they’re building this terrible drone force; they’re getting more and more efficient. So the war must continue.

Over and over again then, we see this constant flipping of the official story; these deranged narratives the reality for Whitehall and for our MPs. That’s what they’re watching all day. That’s what actually determines their behaviour. A very telling example, I think, was that just before the last presidential election — if I’d said ten years ago that before the 2024 election, Democrat presidential candidates will openly state that the First Amendment of America was a ‘historic mistake’ that will be fixed after the election, everyone would have thought that was completely barking mad and completely inconceivable that that would be the case before, the days before the 2024 election, that’s exactly what John Kerry said, and what Hillary Clinton said. And I think this is a very important principle to absorb. Wrestling is real. The news is fake. And if there’s one word now to describe the Westminster regime: fake is the word. Fake meetings, fake decisions, fake news. Fake all the way through.

The only people that are struggling to see this are the people inside the system. Why is this? Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation to almost everyone. And I think that this is part of what’s happening. This weird narrative whiplash, and this fake news is not visible to the MPs and the officials who are running around chasing 24-hour news all day.

It’s visible to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I’ll put it in a broader, broader context is, I think we’re going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas, allied with a subset of the people who supply energy and legitimacy take over.

I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again we see a similar story play out: the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what’s actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.

Now we can see, I’ll give an example, a parallel to what I think is happening now, which is in the mid-19th century. If you go back to the 1840s, you see a generation who’ve gone through the Napoleonic Wars writing letters to each other. They can feel the collapse of the old order. And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international security system is also starting to crumble.

Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created, and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky publishing Crime and Punishment, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil and all of these books are grappling with these incredibly powerful forces at the heart of how the modern world has evolved: individual rights, spreading and spreading; markets, spreading and spreading; the idea of constitutions, spreading and spreading; and undermining of traditional ideas.

New types emerge in literature and then become real. They play out in the Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th century, and then you can see them actually seize power in 1917. And, if you flip to 1933, you have the sight of Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers in the 20th century, particularly on the left, actively welcoming in to Germany’s ancient universities the Nazi regime.

Now in the 20th century, you have two sort of big attempts to grapple with these modern forces in ways different than the Anglo-American system: the socialist experiment, and the fascist experiment. Both of these failed for different reasons. After 1991, this new world emerged. But what’s happened to us now, and why the news feels so crazy, is that we are going through the same remorseless historical process.

If you talk to the people in charge, you hear exactly the same sorts of things as these old guys were writing about in the 1840s: the rise of new ideas in universities, the young seem to be going crazy. In the 1840s, it was railways and telegrams. Now it’s social media, AI, biotech. The international security infrastructure, built from 1945, with NATO, the UN and the EU – all of these institutions also seem to be crumbling in the same way as in the 1840s.

So what? What can we start to build to get ourselves out of the mess that we have got ourselves into? You have to consider the regime as a complex system, and there is no single magic thing that you can do to change it. Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools all together.

It’s a system that’s coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system. So the first thing is that, for a very long time, the government has not controlled the government. This is the first thing that needs to change. If you look back 200 odd years to 1795 under William Pitt, you see a regime that took elite talent very seriously and took individual responsibility for projects very seriously. It understood the connections between how government buys things and the science and technology ecosystem necessary for building long-term capabilities. Pitt had real meetings in No. 10 Downing Street, not the fake scripted meetings now, where the conclusions are written by officials before the meeting ever happens. That’s not a parody from Westminster. That is actually the process for how modern government works. The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That’s not how Pitt did things, but it’s how Whitehall works now.

Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. Parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procurement scandals, in stark contrast to how, after covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted and put in the House of Lords and given honours and big consultancy contracts. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like SpaceX 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is. All of these different aspects therefore have to be systematically reversed if you’re going to actually have a serious government and a different political regime.

On day one, a new prime minister that actually wants to take the country in a different direction and solve these problems, has to immediately fire and replace many, many, many of the existing officials who control things. The Prime Minister’s Office needs to take back control of No. 10. It needs to close the Cabinet Office, and it needs to take over the functions that the Cabinet Office has acquired over a century.

Now, remember, the Cabinet Office was set up in 1916-17 in the crisis of world war one as the old Victorian system couldn’t cope. They created a Cabinet Office in this crisis of the Somme and the disaster playing out in Flanders. This system has gradually taken more and more and more and more power, The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does. People often ask me about 2019 and the Brexit negotiations: ‘What did this minister think about this? What about the rows between this minister and that minister?’ And my answer to them is, ‘I don’t really remember and it wasn’t important. The ministers were not important in this process. I cared very much what the 30-year old officials in the Cabinet Office thought about these things, because they were the ones with real power.’

If all kinds of things happen today, when bombs go off, for example, or if a Secretary of State is caught by the security services in unsuitable liaisons, it’s not the ministers that get called first. The wiring diagram of power inside the system means that it’s the Cabinet Secretary who is called first when the bombs go off and when crises happen. And the Cabinet Secretary decides which ministers are allowed to see what. All of that must change. We can’t carry on if you want things to be different. You can’t carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can’t carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the Cabinet.

I can tell you the decisions are not made in the Cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending Cabinet once. The reason is because it’s become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office.

At the moment, the Prime Minister has literally no role whatsoever in the management of key permanent secretaries who actually run the government departments. Nothing at all to do with it. The entire HR system of Whitehall works for the Cabinet Secretary, not for the Prime Minister. If you want change on what’s important – if you want to see a different regime – you have to have a Prime Minister who is actually in charge of setting the priorities for the key officials in the country. That doesn’t happen now. When we started to do that in 2020, the system went crazy and complained that it was fascism. But this really should not be controversial. In the old days, ministerial responsibility was genuine. It became fake. Switching it back to being genuine is not fascism.

I think the essential concept of permanent civil servants, which was started in the 1850s, is at the root of a lot of the problems. The civil service system has become a closed caste system with Brahmins and Untouchables. The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for not just parts of the blood scandal, but also for pandemic preparation and planning. In Spring 2020, he tried to get the Prime Minister on TV and say that the answer to the Covid pandemic was that everyone should try and get Covid as soon as possible like the chickenpox parties of the old days. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It’s promoted him. It’s given him honours. And it’s now put him in charge of the entire civil service.

The Untouchables are roughly 100 per cent of the world’s most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

So the justification for the permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn’t let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system. All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it’s no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that’s really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over.

So there’s a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you’ve actually taken power, and the Prime Minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury cannot do cost control, witness the shambles that it made over contracts in Covid, where it essentially washed its hands of it and raised the white flag. The Treasury’s processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this Spending Review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the Spending Review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. And the budget numbers that will be published today, everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury and the No10 system knows those are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have a constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can’t actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period.

They’re constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won’t guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: ‘No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on’. And the people are all hired again. All you’ve done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone’s time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money.

The Prime Minister’s Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously effects government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway, adding a lane for dual carriageways over eighteen miles, is now scheduled to take twenty-five to thirty years. That is completely normal. And if you sketched out the process, what you would see is, start here, planning process one, court process, judicial review, appeal, environmental process one, court process, judicial review, appeal, planning process two, judicial review two, environmental process two. That gets you up to maybe fifteen years or so. This process continues sequentially, and then building the road is like that little bit there at the end that actually happens in the last few years, but in itself, that is too long. It should only take five years. But there’s the twenty, twenty-five years beforehand.

This is not a hypothetical example, these are examples that I used when Prime Minister’s questions used to happen on Wednesday at twelve o’clock. I used to use that time in the Cabinet Room in No10 Downing Street to bring officials in from all over Whitehall to go through these kind of budgets and to go through these projects to try and figure out why on earth the mad system works as it is. And this is an actual timetable for the A66 road which runs across the north of the country: one carriageway for eighteen miles in 2020. When I said to them, ‘This is completely insane, go away, come back next week with a better plan’, they said, ‘Well, Dominic, we’ve squeezed everything we possibly can, we’ve done everything that is humanly possible, we think we can get this down to about twenty-three, twenty-four years’. That was regarded as a perfectly reasonable way for things to proceed and if you say: ‘This is mad, and what we’re going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules’, repeal the primary legislation, change the judicial review process etc etc, then, again, much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn’t see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself.

It’s very routine when you’re sitting inside No10 and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying ‘Disaster on blah, blah, blah’, 6 o’clock BBC News. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it at 3:30 just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube walking home. It’s a completely normal thing because no one cares about actually delivering the thing in a sensible way and the culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that’s almost deranged if you try and do it.

So during Covid, when we said: ‘Okay, we’ve got to try and get testing going faster, we’ve got to try and get vaccines going faster. We’ve got to try and get a thousand things going faster. We’re going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?’ This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted.

Now, if you think that that’s the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it’s a genuine crisis, imagine what it’s like to change things in normal times now. That’s why Starmer is finding he has meetings, everyone nods and smiles, yeah, Prime Minister, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then he leaves, and then two weeks later, three months later, six months later, yeah, no one’s done anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks.

The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it’s on the 30-year-old Treasury official’s priority list. And if you’ve got non-player characters as Prime Ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, ‘Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don’t understand’.

All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in No10 – so you’ve actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you’ve closed the Cabinet Office you’ve got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world’s best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales.

The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office as a core priority of No10 Downing Street and I’ll give just a couple of examples of this. If you talk now to the high status pundits in Westminster, they are full of laughter and hilarity about the developments that are happening in Silicon Valley in the AI labs. Ha ha ha, they say, these auto-complete chatbots, how silly that people are taking them seriously. It’s a scam, it’s a bubble, it’s nonsense. That is the sophisticated take from Westminster’s finest political analysts. This is obviously, as many people in this room will know who actually use these tools, completely crazy. Unlike Westminster, I followed this for twenty years, and I talked to the people building in these frontier AI labs, what they’re actually doing and what they think is gonna happen. And I’ve said repeatedly that Westminster is going to be shocked by what happens, every year, and that’s vindicated and it’s going to be vindicated more and more and more in the next three or four years. Five years ago, people were laughing at GPT as it couldn’t do 3+2. Last year, DeepMind showed that they can get a silver medal in the IMO (Maths Olympiad) and I’m told that various people have already privately but not published yet gold medal performances from these models on the IMO. What you’re going to see over the next few years is that area after area after area, these models are going to do as well as or better than human performances. [NB. in July DM and OAI announced they’d cracked Gold IMO.]

In parallel with this, we have a lot of dynamics in biology which are democratising tools and democratising knowledge, making it easier and easier to do biological knowledge. If you’re interested in this subject, I suggest you read stuff from a guy called Kevin Esvelt who developed the gene drive, he’s written a lot of things about what trends of this are. Now these two things are obviously going to intersect — the models are going to make it easier to do amazing things as biological engineering democratises, but also extremely terrible things as well are going to be on the cards. Both of these things are going to become simpler and cheaper. We can’t carry on, Covid should have taught us, but hasn’t taught Westminster, we can’t carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that’s based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe.

The other thing which a new regime that’s actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I’ve described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to also say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM’s inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister’s Office actually works. If you do all these things, you won’t solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime.

The last thing I’ll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn’t really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood. And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time.

Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They’re going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are already dead, it’s like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven’t quite realised yet that they’re dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are dead. That process is going to continue, and the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They’re going to affect them in all sorts of ways.

But also, I would just say that, as per Tolstoy’s message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that’s coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It’s one of the problems that it’s centralised so much power there. We’ve got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing?

It strikes me that there’s something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it’s doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system with fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it’s doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.

And that’s something where we can do things ourselves. We don’t have to wait for Westminster, we shouldn’t have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.

[If anybody spots errors in the transcript please note in comments — a friend did it with an AI but I haven’t checked myself.]

SNIPPETS

A sign of how the ‘mainstream’ now works. A prominent old media pundit, Nick Cohen, an extreme Remainer/Rejoiner and an extreme fan of bombing Russia — such opinions have become tightly correlated — commented on this speech. He refers to the passage at the start:

The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

And he paraphrases it to his audience as:

Every British institution is a cancerous growth that must be killed before it kills us, he now tells us.

So a) the obvious, unarguable literal meaning of my words is that a set of political institutions are attacking healthy institutions and b) he reports me as saying the opposite, that all the healthy institutions are cancerous.

Then he uses his Orwellian paraphrase to justify describing me as: ‘might have been a member of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s’.

It’s hard to know whether to use the word ‘lie’ or ‘delusion’ or ‘Platonic lie’ about such behaviour because a) there’s no doubt these characters usually sort of believe what they’re saying when they call me/others fascist yet b) they aren’t illiterate, Cohen et al are capable of understanding my words so it’s conscious dishonesty.

This sort of thing has become standard among many MSM political hacks and is partly why people have lost trust and why hacks like Cohen are being fired as revenues collapse. The more they spread such delusions to each other, the more they also shriek at each other about the ‘disinformation of the Far Right’. It’s hard to see what breaks this cycle apart from technology making them unemployed.

Kemi, Reeves, McSweeney, Starmer exeunt? Now’s not the time to go into domestic politics in detail again. Things are playing out per my February blog.

Kemi gone November-May.

I think chances are underrated that:

• Reeves goes. Her authority is shot, just a matter of time.

• And McSweeney goes. His project is shot. Starmer couldn’t do it if he wanted and he doesn’t want.

• MPs replace Starmer with Rayner. It’s underrated how many MPs have picked up from No10 officials/spads that he just can’t do the job and doesn’t want to.

• And Rayner goes for — wealth tax, ‘the rich must pay their fair share’, and is just ‘a proper lefty government’ as most Labour MPs want. They don’t want McSweeney or anybody telling them crucial voters do not agree with them. They just want a lefty government.

• How does the financial doomloop interact with this (see below)?

A ‘comms problem’? SW1 loves saying ‘it’s a comms problem’ but almost 100% of the time ‘comms problems’ are downstream from bad strategy, bad policy, bad leadership and Whitehall dysfunction. You could put the best communication team in there and with Starmer it will still fail. Like many modern PMs he’s resorted to calling hacks directly to ‘give them a line on a story’ but his instincts are awful so it just makes things worse.

Example. In summer 2020 SW1 was full of columns attacking ‘terrible communication from No10’. Almost without exception these takes were very confused. The communication problems were downstream. We were attacked for ‘stupid comms’ when the government repeatedly got into fights with famous celebrities but the problem was not ‘comms’. The director of communication repeatedly told the PM and Ministers not to do things. The PM wanted to pick fights then he wanted to surrender. If the principals do dumb things, it is not ‘a comms problem’ and the solution is not ‘better comms’ or shuffling spads.

Yes No10 communication is bad but it’s downstream of leadership, strategy, policy, facing reality and execution. J Powell is trying to recruit more Blairites from the 1990s to No10 but this also can’t turn things around.

‘McSweeney’s should go!’ It’s on brand that many of SW1’s most ‘serious’ analysts have aligned to a) there is no alternative to breaking manifesto tax promises and raising taxes — remember how they all chirped that Boris doing this was ‘really smart politics’ in 2021 when I said it would help destroy the Tories? — and b) the solution to a dud PM and a broken civil service is to remove the only person in No10 who has demonstrated interest in and understanding of normal voters and is trying to represent them inside No10 and argue for big changes in how Whitehall works.

Obviously this is intolerable! Fire McSweeney! chant the NPCs who will only be happy when the entire government and BBC does nothing but chant 'you must increase your trust in our great institutions, we deserve more power and money, tax rises are inevitable and GOOD, we CAN go back to 1998!' If you won’t change Whitehall — and the NPC crowd are united in ‘respect the institutions, changing Whitehall is fascism’ — then you have no choice but the doomloop of ever higher taxes and more socialist command-and-control centralisation and faith that Whitehall will do things that make the country think the huge crisis is suddenly improving. It’s delusional but on brand.

Campaigns and government. The usual suspects chorus nonsense about ‘campaign people shouldn't be in government because they’re so different’. But as I’ve explained repeatedly, they chorus this because they don’t understand campaigns/communication, government, or running any complex organisation. Organising hard things has common principles across all big complex entities. You see these principles repeatedly whether in entities like SkunkWorks, in great companies, in winning campaigns, and in successful government.

If tempted to disagree with me, reflect on this. James Baker is widely seen as the most successful White House chief of staff (in the White House this job actually is chief of the staff unlike in No10). He was also a ‘campaign person’. He reflected on this argument from the mainstream:

Running an administration isn’t a lot different to running a campaign – you need to have a coordinated message, a directed message, and you need to prioritise. You can’t do that when you have too many chiefs. One of the problems of the current White House is you have five or six separate power centres in that White House, and they cross-cut. That’s a recipe for dysfunction.

Yes ‘government is different to campaigns’ in many ways but the core principles of running large complex organisations are the same. Removing people who understand winning campaigns means, in SW1, usually removing the only people familiar with an actually functioning entity because most officials and ministers have never been responsible for something big and functional. When McSweeney is removed or leaves in rage and frustration, it will get worse not better — though the NPCs will praise the new ‘grownups’ replacing him, just as the IFG praised the new Boris-2021 regime as ‘serious grownups’ (this is now memory-holed). What replaces him is almost certain to be more divorced from reality. Further re-orientation to the priorities of SW1 from the priorities of voters will be seen as an improvement in SW1. It will not be. And after a few months, ‘there’s a comms problem’ will be chirped again.

An A/B test: Zohran v Cuomo. Cuomo operated the old playbook: big fundraising, spent on ads, saturated the TV ad market, very limited media appearances, super-negative, no interesting ideas, MSM over new digital, sounded like the dead old parties.

Zohran:

• focused on message not donors so did not push a load of far left messages that left-billionaires push candidates to and he raised less than he could have done,

• his core message was the cost of living crisis which (as you subscribers know I’ve said for years) is the No1 thing in US focus groups since 2022 but Kamala could/would not focus on it,

• he focused on very rapid and high quality (which is not the same as looking very expensive) vertical ads created for each platform and deployed fast to exploit algorithms with an effective brand/look,

• he gave interviews everywhere like Trump (unlike Kamala),

• he talked about ideas that got people talking.

Old school for decades: pay for attention, get on the news. New school: algorithmic, video, go viral.

Old school policy: complex compromise, long papers. New school policy: mimetics trumps, video not text, conflict works.

(This is an observation, not an endorsement. The decline of a literate culture is abysmal and connected to the decline of elite education since 1945. And it’s a simplification — another thing (positive) that’s happening to the ecosystem is the explosion of high quality long content. It’s conventional news, conventional interviews etc of conventional formats that’s being made redundant. The candidate of the future is not the Pelosi type, not someone to waffle with the ‘line’ for 5 minutes on the Today program, but someone who can do short videos and a four hour podcast where parts of your character will be revealed.)

Zohran’s success is a good indicator of where communication is going but none of the three SW1 parties is anywhere near the technological frontier. (They’re not even close to the old technological frontier! The Tories are mostly trying to do the Mandelson 1990s model of communication (pre-internet) and failing.) Reform is closest but it’s still far behind the frontier and hasn’t evolved much in a year. Zohran is good at it like AOC but if you look at the Democrat mainstream they are generally bad. No taste. And part of this is how the old parties recruit.

Old school: recruit and promote for handling coalition politics, raise lots of money, spend it on ads. Product: Pelosi. New school: recruit and promote for social media videos. Product, AOC, Zohran. (Kemi is trying to be new school but she’s so bad her social media content has helped bury her rather than help her.)

So we’re going to see a) both old parties go through possibly terminal crisis-spasms and b) a technology driven rapid evolution in digital communication that the old parties can’t do, but live player entrepreneurs can use to build much faster and more effectively and cheaper than ever before.

SW1 continues self-clowning on AI. The old ecosystem is particularly knackered on communication because so many of ‘the serious mainstream’ has herded to the comical position of ‘AI is a fad/scam’.

If you want to see how far this brainworm has gone, look at a former senior GCHQ official, Ciaran Martin: ‘all Gen AI amounts to is plausible nonsense’. He is not a technical person. He’s one of Heywood’s mob. Notice how he quotes Professor Wooldridge who has been repeatedly comically wrong about AI for years and is a good example of how badly British academia has done on this, why the Turing Institute has been a failure etc (he even managed to predict LLMs ‘won’t be able to do X and Y’ after X and Y had already happened). This helps one understand why the intelligence agencies and MoD are in such a terrible state on AI. It’s also a good example of how people who want social approval in public on BlueSky from the NPC network are inexorably radicalised to embarrassing positions. As I’ve said repeatedly, if there is one prediction I am absolutely confident in, it is that the SW1 mainstream’s takes on AI over the past few years are historically dumb even by their standards, there will be mass deleting when Narrative Whiplash kicks in, and will be a wonder to the future to the extent they survive the mass deletions.

Also NB. the extreme seriousness with which China is approaching this contrasts very powerfully with SW1 and Brussels. It is building the entire tech stack and is also making enormous investments in electricity. China aims to build the entire US electricity capacity in the next ~18 months then do it again. Read that again. Then consider how extremely bad SW1 energy policy has been for 30 years.

Also NB. OpenAI, DeepMind and Grok each just announced in the last few days they have models that can do IMO Gold questions. Yes AI companies hype things for PR, like almost everybody. But the underlying important thing is not niggles over the hype but the straight lines on the graphs remain true and those playing with the unreleased things in the labs say they will stay true for at least another 2 years.

Polling. Conventional polling is more broken than ever. The combination of much of SW1 radicalising left on BlueSky — ‘the real story’ of the grooming gangs is ‘misinformation from the far right’ — while the old polling companies are less and less useful guarantees further derangement in SW1 and academia. Notice how little comment there’s been on how bad the polls were in 2024. A great swarm of pundits and professors have chirped pure nonsense about voters shifting left on immigration over the past few years. Those doing focus groups know it’s junk.

Elite fragmentation continues but… One aspect of elite fragmentation is parts of SW1 radicalising left but the flip side is other parts of SW1 are sensing that doubling down on a) the only way forward is infinite tax rises and immigration and b) if you disagree you’re fascist is not a winner. Some of the most mainstream figures are realising that for the old regime to salvage anything, they will have to let new people do very new things. Per the famous line in The Leopard above, those who want some things to stay the same will have to embrace the greatest shift in governance we’ve seen since the war.

Reform? The Reform people are waaaay over-confident. They are ahead because everyone collapsed, not because they have a great team. Some of the team are coke-heads. Others are morons. Coke-heads and morons fall apart under pressure. At some point someone will put them under pressure. They cannot sustain focus, like Tories they just chase news cycles.

I wrote months ago that the critical indicator for Reform is signs of hiring great people. There’s a couple of positive signs but overall they still resemble the ERG. They’ve even started recruiting the dregs of the Tory Party (MPs and staff) — Remainer Jake Berry is not quite Tom Watson but he’s adjacent. If Reform continues recruiting these dregs they’ll do themselves serious damage. It’s the exact opposite to what they should be doing which is recruiting great people representing the best of the country and showing how different they are to the dead old parties, as I wrote in February. They said last year they wouldn’t do this so it’s another sign of a lack of clear direction at HQ.

I’m glad they did well in the locals because it’s more pressure to accelerate collapse of the old parties and force people to contemplate more serious changes. But the critical question remains: does Farage want to be PM and will therefore recruit elite talent with all that implies? So far he is not answering this Yes! If he continues not to even pretend to have a plan to recruit elite talent, then elite talent will more and more conclude that his priority is NOT creating a team that can control No10 and change the country.

It’s important to realise that many of the core Reform people think they’re going to be in No10 and they have already moved to a highly conservative approach — rather than aggressive building the attitude of many is ‘don’t risk it’. The idea they should sit on their lead for three years is loony but the sort of meme that spreads in SW1.

Further, it’s important to consider how the next few years will play out.

A few officials have suggested to me this playbook for Whitehall, using a useless Starmer administration as puppets:

• enfranchise 16 year olds

• enfranchise millions of EU nationals

• bring in measures specifically to help EU nationals before next election to mobilise EU nationals to vote for a Labour-Green-Hamas-LibDem candidate

• go after Reform donors and attack their financial infrastructure (debanking, HMRC and money laundering investigations etc)

• use the intelligence services to embroil Farage in scandals, criminal cases etc (and similarly a new Tory leader if one emerges and is clearly determined to replace the old Whitehall regime, ECHR etc).

Use of state authorities to pressure/crush opponents of the regime is a playbook that’s been honed by officials’ friends/relatives in the EU and is quite standard now. So it would be easy to deploy it to try to maintain some sort of puppet regime which won’t confront Whitehall continues post-2029, while they strengthen the use of law/police to curtail emergence of a serious opposition. Financial crisis and violence strengthen internal arguments/justification for both.

If applied to the existing parties this approach would be quite successful as the existing parties do not have the people or tools to counter it. Imagine some of the ‘comms team’ around Farage trying to deal with NSS leaks — they can’t even follow simple instructions on basic parliamentary process. (But applied to a serious political entity its weight could be effectively turned against it, as many Whitehall moves were turned against it in 2016))

The chances of widespread and serious political violence, though, obviously is rising all the time, per previous blogs. We can also now see the spread of organised English groups ‘patrolling’ areas ‘to protect women and children’. Easy to see where this goes. And easy to see, as I wrote months ago, how the state clamps down harder on this than on immigrant criminals, accelerating their loss of legitimacy.

ECHR.Another sign of elite fragmentation — Insiders splitting on whether to a) double down on flat out refusal to discuss ECHR leaving/reform, ‘it’s fascism’; or b) whether to engage with ‘reform’ for fear of enabling leave.

Another important aspect of fragmentation: many Insiders continue to follow the path of the Democrats 2016-24 in shifting to explicit opposition to conventional liberal ideas of free speech. As I pointed out last year it was very important that Kerry and Clinton made clear the First Amendment is ‘a historic mistake’ which the Democrats will ‘fix’.

Here we see an eminent QC, G Peretz — very Remain/Rejoin, extreme pro-ECHR/HRA — state clearly ‘many, if not most, supporters of the ECHR would not want to be subject to the US Bill of Rights’. For Peretz et al the ECHR is preferable because, for example, it allows MORE restrictions on free speech. Such comments from such lefty QCs were almost unthinkable 5-10 years ago, it was a very fringe view. But like many fringe left views it’s gone mainstream among Insiders who now openly say that the state must return to norms of censorship from centuries ago which they justify as ‘protecting democracy against fascism’ (i.e protecting/enhancing their own powers over the plebs).

And it was just announced (barely mentioned in yookay media) that the EU Commission has told the Greek government — do what you want to stop the boats in the Mediterranean, we will not enforce EU law including the Charter of Fundamental Rights and ECHR against you. This is another sign of elite fragmentation and panic.

A black pill for Jews. Westminster’s moral hierarchy has evolved over a few decades. Near the very top of the hierarchy was ‘anti-racism’. Women’s rights were clearly much lower in the hierarchy as the trans madness made obvious — men, including academics, clearly felt moral license to prioritise the rights of men (calling themselves women) over women and moral license to condemn as bigots, call for the criminalisation etc, of those women who objected.

Yet it’s become completely normalised for people to march all over the country in crowds which are pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, and chant things about Jews/Israel that would immediately lead to arrest if you replaced ‘Jews’ with ‘blacks’ or ‘muslims’ — and the section most likely to be at such marches and chanting such things are precisely from those left-networks that have most defined themselves as ‘anti-racist’.

The BBC repeats Hamas propaganda on genocide and ‘IDF massacring Palestinians as they queue for food’ constantly. The BBC hires pro-Hamas people for foreign language broadcasts. The BBC ignores things like the infiltration of UN agencies by Hamas. Its star broadcasters openly argue that it’s morally right for the BBC to be explicitly anti-Trump because he’s so extreme but should not call Hamas ‘terrorists’ after 7/10. On and on and on. And on TikTok the PRC tunes the algorithm to push pro-Hamas/anti-Israel propaganda to a very extreme degree — and MPs are confused about why under 30s are so much more anti-semitic.

Meanwhile the ‘mainstream’ in SW1 has seen this as such an un-mentionable subject — like the grooming gangs — they’ve simply allowed it and don’t discuss it in Parliament. The phenomenon is similar to the way in which those on the Left who most identified with ‘anti-fascism’ in the 1930s were also most likely to claim that tales of Stalin’s terror were fake news and were most likely to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Orwell wrote brilliantly on this and it is no surprise that exactly the worst elements of the Left today routinely still write anti-Orwell pieces. They rightly see him as their enemy.)

The old parties, media and Whitehall continue to babble ‘two state solution’ when everyone from MBS to the Israeli left to the IRG know this isn’t happening. As usual, SW1 (and Brussels) cannot escape old mental patterns from the pre-2016 world.

The Afghan super-injunction. The use of MoD planes to bring Afghans here has been an open secret in parts of SW1 for years though the scale was not clear (and still isn’t). It could hardly not be because of the shifting of forces’ families out of homes and stacking Afghans in bases etc. I’m told Afghans have been given 250k for renovations of houses that were so bad military families were the only people legally allowed to live there — we couldn’t put refugees in them like that, it would be unlawful!

Although there is astonishment outside SW1 and an assumption the story is ‘so mad things will have to change this time’, I do not agree short-term. The fact that it was not raised in PMQs is more indicative of mood inside SW1. Inside/outside SW1 are often extremely different worlds where each does not understand the other. MPs have abandoned scrutiny of the MoD for decades. I have openly referred to the manifest failures of the nuclear program, failures to prepare for biological attack, the corruption of MoD procurement, and systemic incompetence on things like drones in the higher echelons of the MoD. The MPs never do serious scrutiny of these things. They’ve also done their best to ignore the abysmal lawfare of the Cabinet Office on Special Forces.

I think that here we have a) a group of Tory MPs who do not want scrutiny and actually don’t think they did anything wrong, look at Wallace, they’re PROUD of bringing the Afghans!, and b) a bunch of left MPs who do not want scrutiny of the fiasco of our immigration/asylum system and particularly do not want attention drawn to the amazing propensity of Afghans to commit sex offences and c) business as usual in Whitehall which has become an anti-responsibility machine. The system is working as intended: ministers blame officials, officials say ministers are responsible to MPs, the MPs do nothing, nobody is responsible, the farce continues. (Also notice how there was a day of scandal over the Palestinian group invading the RAF base but, as usual, no sign of anybody being fired.)

I think:

• There will be tumbleweed in Parliament. Both leaderships will avoid the subject. (And Kemi will think ‘I can’t afford to offend previous ministers’ plus she probably supported the madness if she knew about it.)

• SW1 will plough more billions into housing the Afghans.

• Criminals will not be deported because the courts have made clear the ECHR makes it impossible to deport anybody to the Taliban — and the worse the criminal, the higher the chance the Taliban chop them up, so they all must stay.

• Reform cannot sustain focus on anything so they will also not sustain focus on this but will return to it when the news cycle randomly generates stories.

• A few good MPs will ask questions but the overwhelming majority will have forgotten it soon.

There has been a lot of misinformation on whether Tory MPs who knew about it could have spoken out in Parliament.

The constitutional position is extremely clear. The post-Civil War Bill of Rights (Article IX) made clear that no law and no court regulates speech of MPs in Parliament, known as ‘Parliamentary privilege’. This has never been changed. The courts have no reach and no power to regulate speech in Parliament. MPs can break super-injunctions just as they can say things that would be libellous for anybody else precisely because the courts cannot intervene. Courts can hold anybody else in contempt of court but not MPs speaking in Parliament. (If a court tried to create such a right for itself, it would create an extreme constitutional crisis and should (and I think would) be rejected by MPs.)

This extends to the Official Secrets Act. OSA does constrain what MPs say outside Parliament but it does not stop MPs speaking inside Parliament. No law does. Also it’s worth pointing out that the judge actually states this bog standard conventional view of the constitution in one of the judgments. For those interested, this became a live issue in the 1930s regarding Churchill and his criticism of appeasement in Parliament using secret information from the services. There was some rumbling from officials about OSA but they were forced to back down and the traditional constitutional view was preserved. Coincidentally I was reading about this recently in papers on the origins of the Cabinet Office which I’ll blog on in a week or so.

This obviously does not mean that ‘MPs are entirely free to say what they want’. They are bound by conscience and by Parliament itself including the judgement of the Speaker.

Our super-flexible constitution has evolved a wise balance with parliamentary privilege. Privilege is a very good ‘pressure release valve’, an emergency measure that safeguards us against both executive and courts, neither of which are more powerful than privilege. It is sadly symptomatic of so many of our MPs that they are often ignorant of their own rights/responsibilities.

Black pill. Chances of a financial crisis seem very underrated in SW1. This shouldn’t surprise. After all, they made no effort trying to figure out what the hell happened in autumn 2022 to spit out Truss. But the combination of no growth, productivity stagnation, all entropic forces of the state weakening the economy further, debt at wartime levels after 15 years of ZIRP, debt interest payments rising (as the zero interest rate Ponzi unwinds) to exceed the MoD or education budgets etc etc — this is just by itself a huge problem before you add that all the other main parts of the state are also crumbling.

Just as I have two fundamentally different sets of discussions about AI among a) people building AI and b) SW1, I have two fundamentally different sets of discussions about the economy and prospects for a crisis among a) extremely successful investors and b) SW1. These differences always play out the same: SW1 lives in the past, is last to see what’s happening and is always shocked after others can see what’s coming.

I’m extremely confident this will play out on AI. I’m less confident on financial crisis because predicting financial crashes is hard even for the best experts like Buffett/Munger and scams/frauds/Ponzis can sustain longer than usually seems ‘rational’.

But the yookay trajectory is not sustainable. We won’t grow because of decades of SW1 consensus-entropy embedded in the system. Labour has made clear they won’t control spending and the system left to itself will keep breaking budgets — the welfare system now is a machine for foreigners to extract our taxes and send it abroad plus our domestic scammers encouraged by Brown-Cameron-Trolley-Sunak etc. I can’t see Labour making Whitehall do things better/cheaper.

Labour is losing voters to everybody except Tories so politically there will be a strong internal argument for: squeezing the rich is one of the few things that unites a culturally fragmenting Left so let’s do it and blame the Tories. Plus the pundit NPCs all want higher taxes. So I think Starmer will go in this direction and if he’s replaced by Rayner it accelerates: wealth tax, squeeze the rich, price controls, maybe capital controls etc, all with a narrative of the rich as parasites/vampires. Longer term, I don’t see how the old regime escapes just trying old school inflation to control the debt spiral, which will have its own disastrous effects. I don’t understand these things well at all but you can see actual experts here and there saying — financial markets are badly mispricing debt and inflation risks. And privately they seem much more aggressive.

My hunch is some sort of debt crisis collides with SW1 before the next election. The zero interest rate phase was unprecedented in centuries here so a broken regime unwinding it surely will be very bumpy. And political instability will interact with markets in unpredictable ways.

This has huge implications for the next government. Regime change amid another financial disaster will be harder and easier in different ways than regime change ‘to avoid disasters’.

Only real regime change can get us out of this nightmare and even a great regime getting us out of the nightmare will be very painful and divisive.

(I was told by an actual expert that deep in the bowels of US official thinking there are discussions about new gold backed bonds. For another time…)

White pill. The British constitution is more flexible than any other in the civilised world. It means that one serious PM with a majority can change things faster than anywhere else. (E.g machinery of government changes that elsewhere require legislation here can be done without laws.) The intense centralisation over decades has been largely very bad. But the combination of system dysfunction, intense centralisation and the old constitution means a Live Player could do regime change easier, faster and deeper than is possible in America or anywhere else in NATO. (And the technology changes also enable this rapid shift.)

Three more years of pathological government could easily include a financial crisis and energy blackouts but it also might generate a once-in-50/80 year regime change. This is what I’m working on. I’m working on a) the Actual Plan for if you take over No10 — what do you do in the first hour, day, week, quarter to set things on a profoundly different path? And on b) a market research project similar to the project I did in 2018/Q1-2019 to figure out public opinion: what do they want/fear, what sort of thing do they want to see replace the old parties, what numbers suggest what about possible new electoral strategies etc. Another spasm is coming between October-summer 2026. A project needs to have a clear idea of objectively necessary things for the country and how this fits with a political strategy, communications strategy etc.

Also I’m doing some experiments with the use of LLMs to do political research. Please leave links below to great documents on the main problems facing the country and/or the best way forward which you want the AI to analyse. If you’re not a subscriber, post links below the X link to this blog — the AI will find them there. Post: the area the document covers, the link to original document, 25 words or less on why the AI should read it. (If you know what you’re talking about, suggest system prompts.)

E.g:

• Energy

• Science & tech

• Planning, housing, infrastructure

• Procurement

• Deregulation

• Tax

• Welfare, pensions

• Judicial review reform

• MoD, security, intelligence, terrorism (including WMD)

• Crime, justice, courts, police

• Supply chains fragility

• Border control, immigration, asylum

• Homeschool networks

• Whats wrong with universities

• Things government should stop which would save money

• Monetary policy/history (dear XXX, you know who you are, I forgot to ask you the other day, what do you think about Scott Sumner and NGDP targeting?!)

• How to change Whitehall, No10-CO-HMT etc

• What new capabilities should be built (e.g equivalents of RV Jones or Bletchley for now)

• What are the most important things to consider as priorities for the context, e.g the US-PRC chip-model-robot arms race

In particular I’m looking for — what are the changes with very high leverage where if you do it early then a healthy ecosystem will evolve without need for much further government action? E.g certain planning changes. Certain changes will allow companies to build things and markets to operate without government efforts. (I think these ideas mostly exist as many have worked on it and it is not a complex area needing lots of new thinking, unlike, say, biowarfare). E.g small tweaks to regulations on homeschooling and the Academies legislation could have dramatic effects. Perhaps the most important single thing for restoring a healthy civilisation is a mix of a) relearning how great education worked many decades ago before the state vandalised it and b) building new institutions to enable families to explore it.

A 1910 summary of a course for British teenagers in their last two years of school: this is far beyond degree courses now, classics now does not even demand knowing the original languages — the state destroyed, deliberately and through ignorant vandalism, this tradition

I continue to help a search for someone to do video who understands how to use the new models. If you are this person or have an idea of who it is, get in touch. You will find their project interesting and you will work with people who understand the technological frontier.

Sign up to the LFG campaign here.

A few interesting things

Bio-horror. It remains fascinating and horrifying that our regime and the broader ‘elite’ discussion has been unable to maintain focus on how to deal with the risks of natural and engineered pandemics even after western regimes’ largely useless performance on covid.

It’s one of those ‘it’s so big it’s invisible to Insiders’ things — like the the scope for vast improvements, dwarfing the economic angles of Brexit, in our £300 billion UK procurement budget which remains absent from Insider discussion while they lead the news with fake OBR forecasts over a billion quid.

I recommend this Dwarkesh interview with George Church, responsible for many of the most interesting developments in synthetic biology. He has warned repeatedly about the risks of engineered viruses and even more nightmarish possibilities such as ‘mirror life’ with the potential to destroy all life on earth.

Two trends are accelerating: 1) the tools for biological engineering are democratising, b) the AI models will increasingly help the good and evil possibilities. I wrote about this in my 2013 essay. It was central to motivation for doing Brexit. Covid happened. But still the old regime won’t prioritise it.

Special Forces lawfare/ructions. Here is a long interview with a recent SAS guy. It’s all interesting but click to 4:54:46 for the last section discussing an operation in 2022 and the subsequent lawfare nightmare he endured. I’ve posted on this a few times recently. I checked with people in Hereford and they tell me the guy is genuine and the story is legit.

Bear in mind that the Director of Special Forces (NB. this is *not* the commanding officer of SAS, it’s a different role) he refers to here is now First Sea Lord. This is a very, very complex and contentious subject that should have been handled years ago by senior military. Because of the dysfunction of the MoD, the lawfare from the Cabinet Office, the desire to appease Sinn Fein/IRA from many senior officials, and a lack of moral courage among some of the army’s senior leadership, it has festered and has become an operational issue of fundamental importance. Special Forces soldiers now discuss the prospects of lawfare against them when they are asked to conduct critical missions. Their commanding officers cannot give them assurances because the open-ended nature of the ECHR/HRA means it’s inherently legally impossible to give any assurances about what a judge may decide in the future. This is extremely toxic.

Also see this a few days ago: senior officers are now writing joint letters to their leadership demanding action, including former commanding officers of SF units and the serving(!!) director of Special Forces.

Former Commanding Officer of SAS, Richard Williams:

The whole country should reflect on the contents of this important letter by the combined Special Forces Associations and the total lack of official response extremely seriously. It outlines clearly a critical crisis of trust in the military and political chain of command by those special forces engaged today in the most dangerous and sensitive of national security operations. I remain utterly dumbfounded by the lack of overt support shown by the current or past leadership of the MoD for these brave and skilled British soldiers. The consistent, sweaty-palmed silence by those appointed to lead and resource our forces cannot be justified in any way and smacks of moral cowardice.

It’s unprecedented for senior people from SF units to attack senior leadership like this and shows the scale of the betrayal.

Follow this substack for updates on the issue and support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence. If you know who the specific officials are driving lawfare in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too.

Interview with Andreessen & Horowitz on the history of VC and founding a16z. Interview with Andreessen on US debates on the future economy, the history of tariffs, PRC and Hamilton’s system etc.

An excellent speech which is a rare thing these days — a speech in the Commons that influenced government, by Katie Lam MP on the gangs (warning: graphic).

And another excellent speech from Danny Kruger MP for the romantics among you especially.

Jensen Huang on Huawei’s extraordinary culture/success. The median deep state official in DC or London has instincts on Chinese tech that are waaaaaaay off. This is another of those so-big-it’s-invisible-for-decades things. My friend Steve Hsu has been — on this as on so many things — decades ahead of the game. Follow his podcast Manifold to be ahead of MI6 on such issues. Recent interview here.

• The rate of production of young scientists and engineers is almost ten times as large as in the US.

• The total pool of Chinese college graduates with AI training is comparable to the number produced by the whole of the rest of the world.

• Spending on R&D in public and in private in the US and China is now similar, at $1 trillion PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) in each country. The cost to hire an engineer in China is less than in the US, but recently even the cost of laboratory equipment and infrastructure is lower, since it can be sourced domestically rather than imported. Because R&D spending is growing more quickly in China, we can project that it could be 50 percent larger than in the US by 2030.

• China has already surpassed all western countries in the number of robots per human worker in its factories.

• [In recent India-PAK conflict] Most western analysts believe that Chinese J-10C fighter jets and PL-15 missiles performed well – shooting down several Indian fighters, including at least one advanced French-made Rafale jet. Importantly, this was the first large-scale case of entirely Beyond Visual Range aerial combat, with more than 100 planes: the pilots never saw each other. Victory was determined by sensor fusion – the ability of ground radar and radar systems on missiles, fighters and planes to communicate with each other in real time. It is believed that the J-10Cs operated in passive mode (radars off, making them hard to detect) while receiving targeting information from ground radar.

• The PL-15, which is one of the most sophisticated and longest-range missiles in use, received targeting information from a network of sensors, only using its own advanced radar system in the final moments before impact. The Indian fighters may not have detected the PL-15 missiles until it was too late to react.

• Many analysts believe this brief conflict reveals that China has the key capabilities required to dominate future air combat: sensor fusion, edge intelligence (in the missiles and eventually drones themselves), and long-range strike capability.

• Westerners tend to have an outdated mental model of Chinese military technology – that it is mostly borrowed from the Soviets or stolen from the West. But close observers, including Vladimir Putin, have noted that Chinese military R&D has now surpassed both Russian and western capabilities in key areas.

• The J-10C is not even a top-of-the-line Chinese fighter jet. In fact, it is mainly produced for export now that the more advanced fifth-generation J-20 has reached the mass-production stage. China is already testing sixth-generation fighters, which has shocked American observers. Even the PL-15 missiles used by the Pakistanis were reportedly the less effective, export version.

• In PPP dollars the Chinese economy is significantly larger than the US economy: 33 trillion vs 25 trillion last year. And remember, China’s total electricity production is almost twice as large that of the US.

• Its military ship-building capability is more than 200 times larger than that of the US.

• Just as the PL-15 allowed Pakistan to outrange the Indian air force, the Chinese have developed weapons that allow long-range strikes covering the Pacific. They mass produce ballistic and hypersonic missiles capable of hitting US aircraft carriers and bases as far away as Guam. A network of satellites, over-the-horizon radars, drones and missiles allows the People’s Liberation Army to monitor and strike all surface ships in the Western Pacific.

• Despite the relatively unsophisticated nature of Houthi weapons – missiles and drones supplied by Iran – the US has struggled to secure maritime routes there. Commercial shipping is repeatedly disrupted. To counter these threats, American carrier groups have expended billions on missile interceptors and incurred massive operational costs. Reports even indicate that Houthi surface-to-air missiles came perilously close to downing advanced US aircraft, including F-16 and F-35 stealth fighters. These incidents underscore a critical vulnerability: even rudimentary systems, when deployed asymmetrically, can overwhelm technologically superior forces.

• We must all abandon the idea that China is just a copycat nation. The PRC no longer imitates but innovates, and as its military-industrial complex matures, the Western Pacific’s future hinges not on past hegemony, but on who adapts fastest to this new era.

Patrick Collison interview: programming languages, AI, and Stripe's biggest engineering decisions.

Blog on defence review by actual expert, Keith Dear. I agree there is interesting honesty in the document. But it doesn’t do the last hard part: specific things to close, hard choices, budgets, new procurement etc.

Next week, a long blog on the Cabinet Office and questions for those thinking about how to reshape No10 when this government collapses. I will finish notes on Strauss’s Thucydides essay and post shortly. In August I’ll read try to read The Republic and Strauss’s essay on it.

By July next year at the latest I think that either a) Labour and Tories will be obviously knackered and Reform refuses to build therefore there will be strong desire for something new or b) the Tories are engaged in a last gasp attempt at closing themselves and reopening as something new: new name, old characters expelled, new recruitment drive etc. It’s possible that the Tories are so far gone another change just collapses the old thing and no last attempt is possible, or any attempt collapses fast — they already crossed the event horizon but we haven’t yet realised it.

For sure: voters don’t want either of the old parties but they also don’t want Reform populated by the likes of Jake Berry, which is worse than useless. Farage is not building what he should because it’s outside his comfort zone and he’s now in the lead — he might change his mind and try but right now he isn’t, even though he sort of knows he should, and probably only will if external circumstances change. So the core questions remain as I sketched in February. One way or another, within a year someone will be trying to do a version of the Startup Party — Farage goes for it, a new Tory goes for it, or neither of them do so a new force does —and you can see all over London different forces/entities are converging on the questions sketched in this blog over the past few years. (The Corbyn effort is another sign of elite fragmentation and an attempt to provide ‘something new’.)

There are some signs of hope. Particularly: the calibre of people now thinking about a new and very different regime is higher by far than at any time since at least the late 1970s, a flip side of the scale of disaster the old regime has led us to. Elite fragmentation means that many elites are shifting to regime change very fast. So the conditions are improving fast for: a section of elites defects from supporting the old regime and joins with the demos in actively working for a new regime.

Further Reading

The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change: why the news seems increasingly mad (5/24)

Why Rick Rubin is right that ‘the news is fake wrestling is real’: the Pathological Simulacrum, the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash (11/24)

Why did Trump win? (11/24)

On Whitehall and Starmer, why he’s failing and will keep failing (2/25)

Delusions of NPCs including Oxbridge professors on immigration etc (10/24)

Insider attention and why No10 can’t get things done (2/25)

Why the Kemi project is a farce (2/25)

What Farage could do to finish the Tories and win the next election (and why it’s psychologically very hard for him to do it) (2/25)

Personality types, coordination problems, and why changing Whitehall is so hard and so misunderstood (2/25)

Series on People, Ideas, Machines

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

Subscribe now

Share

Get more from Dominic Cummings in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I would rather discover one cause than be king of Persia.

Democritus

At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Thucydides, Book III, 82-84

​​Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us… There is no exact science of politics just as there is none for political economy. Only professors are able to package the sum of the changing needs of cultural man into scientific laws… Politics is neither arithmetic nor mathematics. To be sure, one has to reckon with given and unknown factors, but there are no rules and formulas with which to sum up the results in advance.

Bismarck

[T]he democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.

Nieztsche

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Mao, paraphrasing an ancient text

It is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.

Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.’

In all periods, even in the Middle Ages, there have been leaders of revolt who, with a view to effecting certain changes in the established order, appealed to the universal laws governing all communities, and championed the natural rights of man against the State. But none of these ventures was successful; the firebrand which set all Europe ablaze in the eighteenth century had been easily extinguished in the fifteenth. For doctrines of this kind to lead to revolutions, certain changes must already have taken place in the living conditions, customs, and mores of a nation and prepared men’s minds for the reception of new ideas…

[T]hough it took the world by surprise, it [1789] was the inevitable outcome of a long period of gestation, the abrupt and violent conclusion of a process in which six generations played an intermittent part.

Tocqueville

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Von Neumann

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

President Xi, 2013.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Churchill

Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.

SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.

The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.

But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.

Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.

Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.

If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved. Obviously there are officials and lawyers in the meetings who understand reality and are happy to feed ministerial delusions, as they did with Cameron, May, Boris and Sunak. And there are odd unusual officials who could bluntly tell the truth: PM, so there is no confusion, what you’re announcing cannot possible do what you claim. I know Sunak was super-delusional, not lying, only because I spoke to him in person twice. And of course many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both. It’s how many cope when promoted to jobs far beyond them. And it’s very poorly understood among business elites who always overrate the rationality of political players and underrate the prevalence of this super-position-personality phenomenon which means widespread avoidance of the real issues in meeting after meeting to an extent the median business elite has little experience of outside companies heading for bankruptcy. I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster.

I repeat what I predicted about Sunak when in 2023 the old media regurgitated endless nonsense on how No10 plans could stop the boats without dealing with the HRA and judicial review because [hand wave]. The BBC, ITV and SKY have repeated the process with Starmer’s announcements: no explanation, ever, of how and why the HRA works. Just as when Jenrick correctly said that the HRA means that UK SF is droning people instead of arresting them — which I revealed on this blog in 2021 but everyone ignored — the old media span the story as ‘Jenrick accuses SF of murder!’ When the actual story was that the lawyers were instructing it was LAWFUL, the opposite of murder, to drone but NOT lawful to arrest and this was the actual mad story — but the HRA angle had to be distorted then buried. (And NB. this droning-not-arrest driven by ECHR+CO lawyers+Kafka continues.) And the old media did not explain after Rudakubana attacked the prison guards that Britain does not keep even convicted terrorist killers about to be released from jail who are believed to be plotting a new attack under surveillance because legal advice is it is unlawful under the HRA — so a fortiori, Rudakubana can’t be kept under proper surveillance. And there are many hundreds of similar or worse absurdities. Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD for ‘human rights’ abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)

I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM’s orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of ‘stop the boats’ could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won’t go into the details of this here.)

You therefore must choose between (A) our priority is the HRA/ECHR over stopping boats, or (B) our priority is stopping the boats therefore the HRA regime (plus some other legal barriers) must be changed in primary legislation. Sunak chose A. So has Starmer. But both have spun the media that the choice does not exist and are pretending they’ve prioritised immigration. And if you rely on BBC or ITV or SKY you will not realise the choice exists because the broadcasters reflect the priority of officials: keep the voters in the dark on the subject.

I told Sunak he was deluding himself and his plans could not work. He said he understood ‘the complex details’ better than me or anybody else. His argument shifted over time to ever more baroque contortions ending in the inevitable humiliating failure — baffling given his intellect unless you grasp the problem of the super-position personality politicians develop to avoid facing reality, and the rarity of people around PMs who will tell them bluntly ‘you are deluding yourself PM’. Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition.

And ironically this farce is generating not a ‘return to normal government’ but the resurrection of SW1’s hate figure, Farage, to champion what voters said in 2016, 2019 and 2024: we hate Westminster and we demand huge changes. Farage hasn’t built a campaign machine and professional team on any scale. Reform remains essentially Farage + iPhone. But he plays a consistent main character in the show while the rest of the cast are writing their roles out of the script. McLuhan said that if it’s on TV it’s a TV show — and we can modify this to if it’s on social media it’s a social media show. The old parties do not understand social media shows. (As I wrote a few months ago, Marshal McLuhan warned that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody but a few artists. The old political-media elites now publicly perform Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including their own performances. Cf. discussion of this here.)

And on the politics, I repeat again a central argument SW1 en masse cannot absorb but which is crucial to grapple with when considering what comes after the collapse of Labour and Tories…

The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.

Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! Rich graduate London now rages at Starmer for his ‘appalling rhetoric’ and not-London hates him because it knows his rhetoric is just more lies and delusions and nonsense we’ve seen from SW1 for 25 years and everybody can see the boats keep coming on video every day proving we’re right. He’s said the trajectory has caused ‘incalculable damage’ yet he self-evidently does not even believe his own words given his trivial proposals — a perfect Sunak recipe for infuriating everyone and destroying your electoral coalition. Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.

It was much easier and more logical for Sunak to prioritise voters, ditch the ECHR and actually stop the boats while Starmer sided with Jolyon and the human rights lawyers. Yes they’d have lost Osborne, Grieve et al. Good, more winning! It is much, much harder for Starmer to do the same because most of his MPs and activists and a good chunk of his voters in cities are with Grieve and Jolyon.

The VL strategy was easier to execute given the actual facts of electoral dynamics. But immediately after the 2019 election SW1 ran its denial-of-service-attack against itself and convinced itself that, like in 2016, our victory was a fluke because of ‘extreme circumstances’, ‘Corbyn’ etc and it would be ‘madness’ for the Tories to try to maintain that ‘incoherent’ electoral coalition because it would ‘pull the Party towards extremism’ (i.e doing what most voters want). They then cheered Boris-Truss-Sunak as they machine-gunned the entire coalition with the biggest wave of uncontrolled immigration ever, tax rises, vandalism on a vast scale, then declared ‘see the 2019 coalition could never have lasted’!

Why? Because the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes. Super-popular outside SW1 but a nightmare for SW1.

So both parties cheered by the NPCs have doubled down on a trajectory that is deeply unpopular to almost every constituency — the ‘mainstream’ has alienated everybody except Whitehall and some other London/university characters desperate to prop up the rotten edifice. They’ve revived their bogeyman, Farage. Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion.

While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.

The questions remain:

• What if anything does Farage build and who does he recruit in the next few months? Does he want to find people to be Chancellor etc who are better than the old parties? Can he exploit the surging energy for new politics among the young, can he hoist a sail and let that force blow him along to greater victories over his enemies? Or does he blow the chance and let that energy be captured by others?

• Do the Tories bin Kemi this year and try to save themselves or leave her and watch the rest of their party get Thanos’d next May? And if a new team takes over this year can they even reverse the slide — or has the Party already crossed the invisible event horizon into oblivion?

• What do Labour MPs do when they realise their PM has done a Sunak and machine-gunned both London-Remain and non-London-Leave?

• How do parts of Whitehall prepare to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system?

• How do other parts of Whitehall, particularly in security and intelligence, respond to the disintegration?

• How do voters respond to the meltdown of the old system and creeping chaos?

• What new crises accelerate collapse? I said in 2021 — prepare for the grid to collapse and infrastructure everyone relies on to stop working. These trends will continue. The immigration Ponzi is blowing up. The Ponzi scheme of the modern financial system could blow any time.

• How fast do violence and no-go areas spread? Do we start seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation, as the deep state fears?

I think there will be another SW1 spasm and Kemi will get the heave-ho this year. After this, the social media show changes to either a) the Tories are sunk and closing down and sorting into Labour/LibDem or Reform, or b) ohmygoodness there’s a last gasp at revival, how will Starmer and Farage, neither of which have political machines worth the name, cope?

I explored these dynamics in detail a few months ago HERE.

I explored the general phenomenon of OODA-as-DOS-attack and Narrative Whiplash here.

This blog will look at three books on regime change.

Peter Turchin’s End Times.

Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

They explore fundamental questions of history and politics:

• What are the patterns in history versus ‘just one damn thing after another’? What patterns can we see in repeated episodes of disintegration and regime change?

• How to ruling elites maintain power?

• Why does their grip on power sometimes collapse?

• What is the relationship between material forces (e.g spreading urbanisation), ideas (e.g socialism), institutions (e.g the Cabinet Office, NATO), technologies (e.g railroads or drones), alliances (e.g the pre-1914 alliances) and individual choices (e.g an assassin)? When looking at regime change, what can we figure out about the balance between Tolstoy’s historical forces and individual decisions?

• Why do some revolts take off while others fizzle out?

• How reliable and useful are predictions? How much is inherently unknowable because crises are by definition chaotic and influenced by odd random people acting secretly, assassination etc?

• What strategies are there to avoid the bloodshed and horror that always accompany collapse?

• How to think about counterfactuals? (Cf. my blog on Bismarck.)

In my 2013 essay and 2014 blogs I explored the history, and possible application to government, of thinking about complex systems with nonlinear interdependencies and emergent properties — also see my blog on ‘systems management’ in ICBMs and Apollo and the need for a sort of ‘systems politics’ (the end of this paper summarises how Whitehall’s management is the opposite of what we know works best).

The subject of ‘complex systems’ emerged from the intersection of biology, economics, the birth of computer science post Gödel-Turing and other subjects after 1945. You can see it in Wiener’s Cybernetics and some of von Neumann’s post-war writing on computers, the brain and self-replicating automata. Out of this emerged things like agent-based models. The Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann, namer of the quark, wrote a fascinating book about what he called complex adaptive systems I highly recommend, The Quark and the Jaguar. He also helped set up the Santa Fe Institute to develop inter-disciplinary ideas about complex systems. The biologist E.O.Wilson described in Consilience ‘the Ionian Enchantment’ — the belief in the unity of nature, the search for the principles that explain it, the unification of knowledge as the foundation for modern science. Wilson argues that the Ionian attachment provides an ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ of explanation from bio-chemistry to genetics to quantitative models of the brain to culture. (For further reading on the history of maths and computing that preceded the breakthroughs of Turing et al, cf. here. Also cf. Nobel winner Phil Anderson’s More is Different.)

At the same time as the subject emerged in the 1940s, Asimov gave it the most famous fictional treatment in the Foundation series in which mathematicians develop ‘psycho-history’ to predict — then intervene in — the rise and fall of regimes. These ideas have been fascinating to generations and now there are ways to build tools that in limited ways touch on Asimov’s ideas.

Twelve years after writing that essay I believe even more strongly that a sort of systems politics is necessary — a mix of new people, new ideas, new institutions and new training including ideas from the heyday of systems management developed in projects like Apollo.

Applying some of these ideas was central to our success in 2016 and 2019 and to how we started changing how No10 worked in 2020. But I must admit that I have totally failed to persuade Insiders of the need for systems thinking. Even worse, I think that if I polled Insiders, it would reveal that they have persuaded themselves that — to the extremely limited extent to which Insiders have any idea what systems thinking means — I oppose it, even though I’ve published a few hundred thousand words on the subject.

I increasingly feel as if I somehow contributed to making systems politics a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story I was alerted to by Anthropic’s Jack Clark). I’m thinking about how to reverse this anti-meme property among Insiders. It won’t come from me writing or talking more since if I’ve helped anti-meme it, I cannot directly reverse it. Something else is needed. (See here for myths and reality on No10.)

Turchin is from this intellectual tradition of complex systems. He is trying to identify patterns in the cycle of integration and disintegration we see in regimes across time and space.

NB. I want to collect statements, speeches, memos etc reflecting elite blindness before the revolt/revolution comes, before 1789, 1848, 1914, 1917, 1933, 1989/91 etc — and examples of the rare person who did see it coming but was ignored.

E.g Frustratingly, in the excellent biography of Metternich I blogged on last year the author writes that one can trace Metternich’s thoughts almost day-by-day in early 1848 as revolution spread across Europe up to his own balcony, but he then skips over them and gives a short summary. I’d love to see the day-by-day account of how Europe’s statesman with the best developed intelligence network for political news, who had seen the historical forces building for years, tracked the spread of revolution up to the moment the crowds outside forced him to flee in disguise.

I am also going to build a dashboard to track data relevant to the spread of chaos and violence in the UK. If you know of relevant data sources please link in comments. E.g arrests at public gatherings has data back to 18th Century.

I’m giving a speech in Oxford on 11 June — What Is To Be Done? — tickets here… Assume some combination of Kemi and Starmer imploding and some new force emerging: how should it be oriented when it walks into No10?

Special Forces

Three weeks ago the BBC reflected the Cabinet Office campaign against the SAS by airing an attempted hit job. But the most interesting thing about it was the BBC showed video with the SAS squadron having a tally over 6 months of killing a dozen or so while arresting hundreds. The BBC portrayed this as evidence of psychopaths on the rampage. But the truth is, obviously, the opposite — they killed a tiny fraction and arrested the vast majority, the exact opposite of what you’d see if the most famous special forces on earth were actually on a killing spree. So the official Cabinet Office/BBC claim is our most highly trained soldiers were … actually incapable of killing more than a tiny fraction of unarmed often ‘sleeping’ civilians… And this nonsensical drivel was repeated by NPCs. Obviously, the BBC ran this as ‘news’ and the government did its usual bullshit ‘we can’t talk about the inquiry’ while its officials brief the BBC anonymously…

Also it was reported that the MoD is investigating serving soldiers for voicing support for the public campaign to stop lawfare against soldiers. Logical!

As I blogged a month or so ago, this issue is now very live among serving soldiers and is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place. This issue is bubbling out of control for Whitehall as serving soldiers start speaking out.

Read this excellent piece by Richard Williams, former commanding officer of SAS, on this subject. As he points out, the Regiment — past and present — are watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defence.

Please spend 60 seconds to click and sign this petition and help force the MPs to debate in Parliament the Cabinet Office’s lawfare against our own Special Forces. Support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence... And follow this substack for updates on the issue. If you know who the specific officials are driving this in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too…

Previous in this series:

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

End Times

Turchin traces patterns of integration and disintegration, of stability and crisis, of elite cooperation and elite fragmentation, of state formation and collapse over the past thousand years. All societies go through cycles of peace and harmony periodically hit by internal conflict, chaos, crackup, and re-formation in a new regime.

I summarise it as: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change.

He coins the term cliodynamics for his approach — from Clio, the Greek muse of history. He uses data and models of complex systems to understand what happened and why. (Technical details in an appendix.)

He applies what he sees to our time and predicts that we are hitting another crisis point including severe violence in the 2020s.

Elites are ‘those who have more social power — the ability to influence other people’. Turchin distinguishes different sorts of elite power:

• political

• hard power (e.g military, intelligence agency)

• financial

• administrative (e.g an official running a large bureaucracy)

• ideological/ideas (academics, media etc)

Powerful individuals in the US security forces are rare. Hoover was a powerful force at the FBI. Generally politicians have kept such people under control since the Civil War.

He identifies five fundamental factors in regime change (he doesn’t use this term much but I will to keep things consistent across this, Strauss etc):

A. Popular immiseration. E.g the stagnation of median real wages recently.

B. Elite overproduction and competition. This happens ‘when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants exceeds their supply’. E.g in America in the 1840s-50s and recently.

C. Financial stress, out of control debts etc.

D. Geopolitical disruption. This is the least consistent — it can be important but not necessary. Toynbee — great empires die by suicide, not murder.

E. Political entrepreneurs exploiting the dynamics, e.g Hong (Taiping), Lincoln, Trump.

All of these are present today.

The pattern of revolutions is:

• Pre-crisis: the regime struggles to maintain control in the face of elite fragmentation and popular anger.

• Crisis: the regime loses legitimacy and new players strive for dominance.

• Post-crisis: the crisis is resolved, a group wins, a new regime forms.

No society in recorded history has an integrative phase lasting more than around 200 years. And collective violence tends to recur ‘with roughly fifty year periodicity’. The timing is related to generations. A generation experiencing bloody civil war has kids who are scarred by the experience. When the memories have gone, it’s more likely to recur. (Interesting that he says about 50 years based on various databases and my handwavy phrase in the blog on regime change was ‘about fifty years’.)

In European history between the Dark Ages and 1789, we can see these phases of integration and disintegration. Population growth 1100-1300, immiseration, elite overproduction, famine, Black Death, crisis, collapse. And these patterns recur with war between England and France adding to the elite competition and wars periodically killed off large numbers of elites, easing competition in the next generation. In England there are episodes such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 which frightened elites into lightening the burdens on peasants and the War of the Roses which exhausted elites and saw perhaps a fourfold reduction in their numbers.

• There’s the High Middle Ages followed by the Late Medieval Crisis.

• There’s the Renaissance followed by the General Crisis of the 17th Century.

• There’s the Enlightenment followed by the Age of Revolutions.

In Ancient Egypt and China since 221 BC there’s similar cycles.

A huge difference in Europe is obviously that after the 17th Century England managed to avoid further civil war and revolution while it plagued Europe in cycles. England still suffered tension/crisis in cycles but elites managed to adapt enough to avoid large scale violence. E.g in 1830 revolutions in Europe while in England Lord Grey negotiated the Reform Act and violence was limited.

Elite overproduction is deeply affected by monogamy/polygamy. Muslim countries have faster cycles of chaos because polygamy encourages faster elite overproduction.

Weather and plagues are often the trigger for crises and can synchronise crises across territory. E.g The Great Famine 1315-17 and solar minimum. The Black Death. Cholera in 19th C. Covid.

Contagion synchronises crises across territory. E.g disease hits the poorer harder which spreads elite overproduction. Ideas spread as contagion, e.g spread by telegraph in 1848, by the internet in the Arab Spring.

China and the Taiping Rebellion

200 years ago China’s GDP was the biggest in the world. After 1820 China experienced ‘the century of humiliation’. By 1870 GDP was less than half Europe’s.

There was a constant run of famines, rebellions, and defeats by foreigners.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the bloodiest civil war in recorded history:

The Qing dynasty ruling from 1614 was ruled by scholar-bureaucrats promoted in a system of examinations that extended (mostly) to the army. The exams encouraged study of Confucian classics — a common ethos.

Over 90% of the empire were peasants, roughly 9% were artisans, merchants, soldiers etc. And the tiny mandarin class ruled them.

From 1614-~1820 , China grew:

• Better agriculture.

• Some industrialisation.

• Population growth. By 1850 4X the 1600 level.

In the first half of the 19th C, progress went into reverse.

• Land per peasant shrank 3X.

• Real wages down.

• Average heights down.

• Famine 1810 then 1846-9, 50-73, 76-79, 96-97, and 1911.

Elite overproduction:

• Number of power positions relatively constant.

• Number of aspirants grew through Qing dynasty. Growth of merchant class.

Political entrepreneur emerged

Hong Xiuquan (1814-64) became leader of the Tapei rebellion.

He was the third son of a well off family who started failing exams and couldn’t get promoted. He had a nervous breakdown then had religious visions. He combined propaganda from Christian missionaries with his visions to form a new syncretistic religion, the Society of God Worshippers, a major goal of which was to purge China of Confucianism. (He thought of himself as a sort of Christian but western Christians disagreed.)

He began recruiting converts among other alienated elites. It grew slowly. 1847 — 2k supporters having fits and speaking in tongues. They started attacking Buddhist temples and smashing statues. Popularity surged during an 1850 epidemic when word spread that sick people cured themselves by praying to the Taiping God.

In 1851 Hong declared the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly Emperor. People sold possessions and joined up. Attempts to suppress him were violently resisted by locals.

The situation of famine, epidemics, misery undermined the empire and generated recruits. His army grew to half a million by 1853. They conquered Nanjing. He almost brought down the Qing dynasty. Eventually in 1864 Hong died. Nanjing fell.

Over 14 years 30-70M people died.

Turchin points to the similarities between Hong, Lincoln and Trump:

• immiseration

• elite overproduction

• a political entrepreneur defecting from the elite.

America: economic & political cycles of immiseration and elite overproduction

Turchin identifies phases of American elites grabbing more and elites sharing more since Independence:

• After the War of Independence there was an integrative phase. Relative wages are wages divided by GDP per capita. 1780-1830 the relative wage nearly doubled.

• There was a disintegrative phase from roughly the 1820s to 1930 with two spikes of collective violence: the Civil War and ~1920.

• In the 1820s-50s there was a phase of declining relative wages and elite overproduction that propelled Lincoln to the presidency. Relative wages declined by nearly 50% by 1860.

• After the Civil War relative wages were stable until ~1910 after which there was sustained growth until the 1970s. Relative wage nearly doubled 1910-1960.

• In the 1930s FDR and the New Deal was a deliberate use of political power to distribute wealth more widely to avoid a crisis. Unions were given a lot of power for collective bargaining. Rich individuals and companies had to share more of growth than they wanted. Nearly half the millionaires who thrived in the 1920s were wiped out by the Depression. Worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita. The size of the top fortune declined in real terms 1930-1980. (I think Turchin overrates the altruistic side of FDR and underrates the aristocratic politics of FDR — i.e mobilising the demos against his aristocratic opponents, per Pericles and the Alcmaeonidae).

• From the 1970s, a new phase began. Real wages started stagnating. Relative wages started declining and fell ~30% 1976-2016. The gap between rich and poor started rising again.

Lincoln

He was propelled to power by elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

America was ruled by an elite of a) aristocratic slave owning farmers and b) Northeastern patricians — merchants, bankers and lawyers.

New York’s merchants exported southern cotton and imported European manufactured goods.

Southern voters had a greater weight thanks to the 1787 compromise that counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representatives and presidential electors. The South also controlled half the Senate though the North had double the population.

• From the 1820s to 1860 relative wages declined by nearly 50%.

• Average height started shrinking.

• In the five years before the Civil War urban riots spread (38 lethal riots).

• Threats and actual violence between politicians grew including on the floor of Congress.

• New populist parties including the anti-immigration Know-Nothing movement.

• Elite overproduction. The number of millionaires grew from a handful to 100. The number of lawyers grew rapidly.

• The size of the top fortune in 1790 was $1M (Elias Derby); 6M in 1830 (Girard); 20M in 1848 (Astor); 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt).

The new wealth came from mining, rail and steel. But the newly wealthy were constrained by the political power of the southern aristocracy. They wanted high tariffs to defend their new companies and provide money for infrastructure. The established elite, living off exporting cotton for imports, wanted low tariffs. On many economic and regulatory issues the interests of old and new money diverged.

By the 1850s the party system was fragmenting and four candidates competed in the 1860 election.

I’ve written before how our times resemble the cycle of regime change in 1840s-1850s Europe. You can see similar echoes in 1840s-1850s America.

Reconstruction

After the war the power of the southern aristocracy was shattered.

• A quarter of southern men of military age were killed on the battlefields.

• Holding Confederacy debt was ruinous.

• Emancipation and the 13th Amendment ended slavery and the economic basis of southern agriculture.

Northern capitalists were hugely strengthened.

• Holding Union debt was lucrative.

• Supplying the war effort was lucrative.

• Many titans of business were northerners who avoided military service by buying substitutes.

• 1860-70 the number of millionaires grew from 41 to 545.

• The railroad industry was greatly strengthened.

• Industries were protected by tariffs.

• A national banking system.

• Pacific Railway Acts authorised government bonds and land grants to railway companies.

• Homestead Act enabled surplus labour to claim grab unclaimed land in the West, reduced the supply of labour in the East, which was balanced by the Immigration Act 1864 which increased labour supply and created the Bureau of Labor explicitly to develop ‘a surplus labor force’.

The Republican Party dominated until FDR, with the DEMs winning the Presidency only in 1884, 1892, and 1912.

The Gilded Age of 1870-1900 was chaotic and contentious. The Social Register became more important. The rich sent their kids to expensive boarding schools then Ivy League colleges like the English. Elite social clubs spread. A network of non-profits funded by the rich started arguing over policy.

Elites worried about unrestricted competition and the Great Merger Movement of 1895-1904 created new large companies trying to limit competition. Three men contributed the bulk of cash to new foundations: Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Brookings.

The shift from FDR to Trump

Violence and the Bolshevik Revolution spooked elites 1910-1930. In 1919, 4M participated in strikes. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 was the deadliest labour dispute in American history (it turned into a general insurrection and had to be put down by the army). And there was a Red Scare after 1917, a peak of terrorism, bombing campaigns by Italian anarchists etc.

Immigration Acts in 1921 and 1924 were partly a reaction.

Then FDR dramatically shifted economic policy with collective bargaining, social security, minimum wage etc.

After the New Deal and WWII, there was two generations of broad based improvements for Americans. Inequality reduced. This all started to change in the 1970s.

We have:

• For two generations after the 1930s the real wages of American workers grew. Real wage growth stopped in the 1970s. The median real wage 1976-2016 grew from $17.11 to $18.90 p/hour, just 10%. Americans with advanced degrees went from $33 to $44 p/hour. Americans with just a high school education saw wages decline over forty years from $15.50 to $13.66 p/h. [Lots of other things changed in the 1970s. E.g Nixon announced a goal of energy independence via nuclear energy and created the agency to regulate nuclear energy which then stopped building of nuclear plants. Regulations of all kinds started spreading. NASA lost George Mueller and began a slide into bureaucracy that stopped the plans for a permanent moon base and Mars. The Pentagon consolidated McNamara’s changes to budgeting that have led to fifty years of horror.]

• From 1940s to the 1960s relative wages grew robustly. After the 1960s relative wages fell and by 2010 had nearly halved. (Turchin uses somewhat different numbers at other points. E.g he also says relative wages fell ~30% 1976-2016.) Relative wages have not had a sustained 30 year fall since 1830-60.

• The cost of many crucial things have exploded relative to median wages. E.g A worker earning median wages in 1976 had to work 150 hours to earn one year of college. By 2016 the median wage worker had to work 500 hours to earn one year of college, three times more, and the average person with high school but no degree had to work four times more.

• From the New Deal through the 1960s the minimum wage grew faster than inflation. Since the 1970s inflation has lowered the real minimum wage. Union power weakened from the 1980s.

• Average life expectancy started to decline 2013-16 for the first time since statistics began in 1933.

• The gains in average height since ~1900 stopped with children born in the 1960s. (Though the gains continued in Germany, Norway and others.)

• ‘Deaths of despair’ (suicide, drink, drugs) started rising. They spiked among non-graduates after 2000.

• The number of Americans in ‘extreme distress’ rose from 3.6% to 6.4% 1993-2019. Among the white working class this went from <5% to 11%.

• Extra wealth flowed mostly to elites. Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s. (TRUE??) Starting in the 1980s the number of super-rich (>10M) grew ten-fold from 60k in 1983 to 700k by 2019. The number of millionaires grew four-fold.

• Elite overproduction.

• Exploding public debt.

• Family, church, parent-teacher associations, and all sorts of voluntary organisations declined over the past 50 years.

• Spreading geopolitical chaos.

After 1991:

• The supply of labour rose with immigration and more women working.

• Lots of jobs moved offshore from America and Europe.

• Spread of automation.

Elite overproduction now

There are too many graduates chasing too few elite jobs.

• Early 1950s <15% went to college.

• By 1966, 30%.

• 1960-70 number of doctorates more than tripled.

• For a short period, connected with defence spending and Sputnik etc, the number of senior positions also grew. But then it stabilised while the number of degrees and doctorates kept rising.

• The number of lawyers has also risen. And the distribution of wages has shifted since ~2000 from a single peak to a bimodal distribution: there’s a bunch of relatively low paid, some very highly paid, and little between (below, there are some salaries above 240k excluded). Consider that half law graduates leave with debts of 160k or more, 1/4 over 200k, and you cannot escape paying this except by death or renouncing citizenship and leaving (bankruptcy has no effect).

• Callahan has reported the spread of cheating throughout professions, business, sport, journalism, exams etc.

• There is also the well publicised story of how the top 10% have increasingly turned schools into an arms race for credentials.

Elite fragmentation and polarisation

A nearly universal feature of pre-crisis is ideological fragmentation and polarisation among elites. Divisive movements tend to spread in crisis, e.g sectarian and identity.

Elite fragmentation and competition has contributed to declining public trust in political institutions and unravelling of social norms governing core institutions.

Turchin considers studies of individual Congress members since 1800 and concludes:

• A period of declining polarisation 1800-~1830.

• Rising polarisation until the 1930s.

• Declining polarisation 1930s-60s.

• Rising polarisation since 1970s.

This pattern matches the pattern of relative wages. (I haven’t examined these studies and have no idea how robust they are given how dodgy social science can be.)

Turchin argues we’re in a transition from the pre-crisis phase to the crisis phase. Those politicians defending moderation and cross-party cooperation are losing and retiring. This is the third crisis after the Civil War and the 1930s.

Historically, elite competition is resolved by violence, jail, exile etc.

The post-war ‘mainstream’ consensus comprised roughly of:

• Patriotism.

• Anti-communism/socialism.

• There was a ‘normal’ family and widely accepted male/female roles. Alternatives were marginalised.

• Divorce very problematic for elected officials, atheism disqualifying.

• Jim Crow laws in the South.

• Progressive taxation.

• Support for Social Security, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits for needy.

• Low immigration.

Pretty much all of this has blown up.

And we see the emergence of counter-elites as political entrepreneurs.

During crises political entrepreneurs try to direct the energy of angry masses. E.g Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.

In the last 250 years disillusioned lawyers have been a fertile ground for entrepreneurs. Robespierre, Lincoln, Lenin, Gandhi, and Castro were all trained as lawyers then defected from the elite. (It’s dangerous being a counter-elite. E.g Savva Morozov, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Russia before the Revolution, gave a fortune to his workers. And he financed Iskra (the Spark), the banned revolutionary newsletter. After the 1905 revolution he spiralled into despair and shot himself. The commies took all his property from his wife and Lenin took his Gorki estate.)

Trump [and the Valley coalition supporting him] fits the pattern.

Core argument on Trump’s rise

Tuchin argues similarly to me about Trump’s rise. Many elites have latched onto conspiracies about Trump to avoid facing reality about his rise:

A. Trump positioned himself to champion those who have suffered from trends of immiseration among non-graduates while …

B. Insiders — DEM and GOP — have been determined to live in a parallel world, in ‘a massive denial of service attack on their own perceptions of reality’, as Marc Andreessen calls it, while…

C. Elite fragmentation opened up the political game to political entrepreneurs prepared to play outside normal rules.

(Turchin doesn’t point this out by I keep stressing it — the mainstream view of Trump is that he is very extreme (now even ‘fascist’) but in 2016 he was seen as less extreme than normal GOP candidates and in 2024 similarly he was seen as less extreme than Kamala. This is also an important sign of how elites are running DOS attacks against their own perceptions of reality.)

American plutocracy

Turchin considers different regimes:

• Egypt as a military regime.

• Iran as theocracy.

• China as a bureaucratic empire.

• America as a plutocracy.

Before the Arab Spring, the Egyptian regime:

• Expanded access to university. Combined with a youth bulge this meant a) a big growth in number of graduates, b) more intense competition for jobs.

• Mubarak groomed his son to take over via an MBA and business, breaking the rules of the regime game. When the crisis erupted in 2011, the army stood aside.

• The coalition that drove Mubarak out was part Muslim Brotherhood, part liberal secularists. They immediately turned on each other. The army threw out the Brotherhood. As for 1,000 years, military elites are back in charge.

The ‘America plutocracy’ theory: America is run mainly by the economic elite via lobbying, donations, appointments, media ownership, foundations/think tanks etc. The military are integrated: in return for loyalty they get lucrative posts after retirement. Schools, universities and social events help the networks self-organise. [NB. Turchin’s description is similar in basics to Curtis Yarvin’s description of the ‘cathedral’!]

The size of the top fortune:

• $1M in 1790 (Elias Derby) — equivalent to 25k annual average wages;

• 6M in 1830 (Girard);

• 20M in 1848 (Astor);

• 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt);

• 1B in 1912 (Rockefeller) — equivalent to 2.6M annual average wages (100X growth in a century);

• but then it stalled at about 1B until the 1960s.

The top federal tax rate grew from 7% in 1913 to 24% in 1929 to 94% in WW2 and was still ~90% in 1960. [This is reflected in the movie High Society when Grace Kelly shows Sinatra around the grand houses of the American aristocracy and tells him their misfortunes from high taxes!]

Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s.

If your net worth is $1-2 million today you’re in the top 10%.

Before 1850 all American presidents were one-percenters. Since then nine presidents including Lincoln and Truman were not millionaires in today’s dollars. Bill Clinton and Obama have over $200M are in the top five richest presidents.

There are ~50 members of Congress with net worth over $10M.

As elite competition has intensified, more money has been spent on political campaigns. The average spending of a House winner rose from $400k in 1990 to $2.35M in 2020 and in the Senate from $4M to $27M — a six-fold increase. And a presidential race now involves raising over a billion.

In 2021 12k lobbyists spent $3.7B at federal level. The top industries are pharma, electronics and insurance.

The theory predicts that policy will reflect desires of the rich, versus the theory taught-in-schools of America as a representative Republic, per Lincoln.

And work by Gilens shows that from a data set of 2k policies 1981-2002, with preferences of rich/poor etc, the outcome is clearly that the rich and business groups get what they want and the poor/median do not.

So Turchin argues:

1. The poor do not shape policy results.

2. The rich shape what policies are discussed.

3. The rich try hard with some success to shape the preferences of the public to fit what the rich want. E.g the ‘death tax’ meme invented, thinks Turchin, by a ‘brilliant if evil propagandist’. (Turchin thinks the voters don’t realise they are unaffected and it only hits the superrich. I don’t know about America but in Britain this is NOT true, voters oppose death taxes knowing they are unaffected on the basis that a) it’s in principle unfair and b) maybe (hopefully) their kids will be affected. I suspect it’s similar in America and Turchin is confused like many academics/pundits on this subject.)

What about immigration?

Polls show strong opposition to illegal immigration.

No federal law mandates businesses to use E-Verify to determine the status of potential employees.

The big thing is not net effect but the winners (big business, rich people hiring gardeners etc) and losers (non-graduates in places with overstretched services and infrastructure). Hence Marx saw the English regime importing Irish as exploitation. Unions generally opposed immigration from 1880s, when Carnegie called it ‘a golden stream’, to 1970s.

Turchin doesn’t really explain this well.

But I would summarise it as:

• Political and business elites agreed in the 1990s immigration is good.

• Legal and illegal immigration grew plus chaos became visible.

• The public became more angry.

• Elite fragmentation meant people like Trump and Elon sided with the voters.

• Insiders and richer DEM graduates polarised further becoming MORE pro-immigration. The issue was not very polarised in 1991 but has become much more polarised. (This is clear in the data.)

• Trump has now largely stopped chaos at the southern border and this is popular with most of the country but ‘fascism’ to DEM/MSM Insiders who still won’t face reality on this subject.

A crucial aspect of the reorientation of Left parties over 30 years has been the way they have radically shifted on immigration. How much of this is because of education realignment and the different perspectives of graduates viz non-graduates?

It’s particularly interesting how the Left in UK defend a system that involves children drowning in boats and a huge organised crime network extending to the recreation of sex slavery across the western world. They’d much rather see this continue than our regime stop the boats and the children drowning. But they’d prefer us to set up a route where they can fly in legally without fuss in unrestricted numbers.

I.e The ranking of their preferences is:

1. Open borders.

2. The dumb boats continue with drowning and sex gangs.

3. Controlling borders, dumb boats stopped etc.

How crises play out

There are two main datasets used by academics: the peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden and the PITF project funded by the CIA. A PITF member is Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, which I’ll look at next.

I won’t go into the PITF model details.

They claim 80% accuracy on predicting instability on the basis of mostly just four characteristics (I think the predictions are ‘within the next 2 years’ but haven’t checked this).

They claim the most unstable regime type is partial democracies with factionalism — defined as sharply polarised and uncompromising competition between blocs with winner-takes-all approach, confrontational mass mobilisation, intimidation, manipulation of elections etc.

Other factors:

• armed conflict in neighbours

• state repression against a minority group

• high infant mortality.

Walter’s book presents a similar picture. She adds the internet, smartphones, social media.

The most common paths to chaos are A) an autocracy democratising under pressure of elite conflict and public mobilisation or B) democracy sliding towards autocracy for similar reasons.

Turchin: the data for these projects is limited to post-war. And predictions from the PITF data seem to be getting worse. E.g it missed the Arab Spring. We’re embarking on a period of long-term instability so we should assume the dynamics will involve things not well predicted by this sample — we need a more historical view. And Waters can be ‘woefully inadequate’ (p174) partly because she does not look deeply into the elite crackup that precedes the crisis.

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after 1991

Russia

1996-2000 the oligarchs had to move on from drunken Yeltsin. In all important ways Russia had disintegrated since 1991 and almost everyone but the oligarchs/mafia were struggling. Chechnya kicked off. After 1998 there was financial crisis and default. [Viz Russia the terms oligarchs and mafia are interchangeable — not all oligarchs are the same viz their propensity for murder but none of the billionaires could be so without mafia alliances.]

The silovki, i.e military-security officials, allied with parts of the mafia. Putin was ex-KGB and in the 1990s worked with the St Petersburg mafia. Once he took over, with the help of oligarchs, the oligarchs then either had to make deals or be crushed. They were deeply unpopular and fragmented. The silovki were coherent and controlled the hard power. The silovki then took a lot of the oligarchs stuff. Oligarchs who remained billionaires did so only because they were useful to, and accepted the terms of, the silovki.

The regime ended the Chechnya war, got the finances under control, and got the economy growing. Protests 2011-13 went nowhere.

Belarus

Lukashenko did not copy the Yeltsin privatisation/sell-off to mafia and did not create an oligarch class like Russia.

Like Russia, he kept his grip on the silovki.

All protests fail.

Ukraine

They privatised and created oligarchs-mafia.

The economy was run for the mafia. Belarus median GDP grew faster than UKR.

The mafia-oligarch gangs fought each other for political power. Elections didn’t stop the oligarch struggle.

West UKR was more pro-West.

East UKR was more pro-Russia.

The oligarchs were west-oriented because they wanted money, property, kids etc stashed in the west. The UKR mafia, like the Russian, wanted big houses in London and their kids to Eton and Oxbridge or Ivy league. This orientation made them susceptible to pressure from the US and Europe — e.g sanctions, bank freezes etc.

UKR was also the fault line of NATO. From 2007 the neocons pushed US policy towards enlarging to UKR. [Obama resisted but did not stop the drift.] Victoria Nuland [archetypal neocon, huge supporter of UKR to NATO etc] spent $5 billion of State Department cash buying influence over UKR oligarchs and in 2014 was recorded talking to the US Ambassador about divvying out UKR government jobs.

None of the mafia governments could maintain a grip. There are four main clans: Dnipro, Donetsk, Kiev, Volhynia.

Yanukovych (Donetsk, headed by Akhmetov) won in 2010 and jailed Tymoshenko (a gas oligarch). But he then stole too much. The Donetsk clan bailed on him.

Yanukovych then (end 2013) bailed on a trade deal with the EU because the terms seemed politically terrible.

Crowds gathered in Maidan Square. The oligarch Poroshenko (Volhynia) funded the protests and owned Channel 5 which covered them. Yanukovych’s support was in the east. Far right extremists were moved in to Kiev. Violence sparked. The oligarch TV stations flipped. Oligarch financed politicians flipped. Security services withdrew from Maidan Square. He fled to exile in Russia. A civil war sparked in the Donbas with pro-Russian forces fighting Azov and regime forces. 14k were killed 2014-Jan 2022. Zelensky emerged from conflict between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky. [Zelensky recently fell out with Poroshenko and has sanctioned him.]

Turchin concludes: the revolution was not a people’s revolution, it was, as usual with revolutions, mainly driven by elite conflict. The main factor explaining the difference between UKR, Russia and Belarus is whether the ruling elites keep cohesion under pressure.

In Russia and Belarus the silovki have stayed together and with Putin.

In UKR, no silovki government emerged, it stayed a battleground for mafia-oligarchs. UKR had privatisation — i.e mass theft — Belarus did not. The silovki in Russia obviously take a lot for themselves but they also want the public to get a share in growth to keep them quiet — they are not all-out fighting with each other to steal everything and ignore the people, as in UKR before the war or in Russia in the 1990s. [Though the Russian system is obviously super-dependent on personal relationships and Putin’s personality, if he had a stroke/died then the complex precarious balance of interests across the silovki could unravel fast.]

[Here isn’t the place to go into UKR in detail but it’s important that the story of the UKR mafia has been disappeared in western MSM since the war started and instead the story in the BBC etc presents UKR as a roughly normal country with a heroic ‘democratic government’, heroic leader etc, a bad fiction. The relationship of the Zelensky faction with oligarch-mafia is disappeared. The role of the US interfering in local politics is disappeared. Given how much of the western elite turned against the neocons, it’s all the more interesting that they’ve ended up supporting the neocons’ UKR-to-NATO project, launched in 2007, because of how it was repackaged. Right now, the entire western project for UKR since the war started is in humiliating chaos.]

How does the crisis play out?

The model tracks indicators:

• Workers looking for jobs.

• Immigration.

• Social attitudes.

• Supply of jobs.

• Automation.

• Wages.

• Relative wages: wages grow slower/faster than profits and GDP p/capita. If slower, then rich get more from growth, if faster then creation of super-rich is choked off. When relative wages decline, people are more miserable and elites capture more wealth. High political chaos physically kills the rich, takes their money, discourages them from acquiring more etc.

• A political stress Index that combines the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction.

Turchin argues that the key role in crisis events is ‘extremists’, those radicalised and primed for action. Radicalisation, social contagion, works like disease spread and he uses equations similar to the epidemiology models. His model tracks normals, radicalised, and ‘recovered’ (i.e radicals who become disenchanted). As the fraction of radicals increases the chances of riots etc rises.

The model predicts growing political violence in 2020s America which reduces elite numbers then the situation moderates but the economic situation returns and the cycle of violence returns in 50 years.

It also predicts that even if steps are taken now to change relative wages the inertia is so strong there will still be violence. But in this scenario a short sharp burst of fighting in the 2020s is succeeded by stability.

What blocks civil war?

• For the moment there is a coherent police force that follows orders.

• There is no coherent organisation like a Communist Party aiming at real revolution.

• The radical left is ‘hopelessly disunited’.

• The radical right — defined as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK, alt-right etc— is similarly disunited. If you look at the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, it was so disorganised the FBI informants had to organise it. (NB. It’s wrong to lump ‘alt-right’ in with KKK etc, much of the alt-right is NOT racist!)

• Left dissidents are also divided. And marginalised: e.g people like Chomsky are not invited on MSM. (Very questionable argument! People with Chomsky views are all over MSM!)

But he argues the GOP is (i.e 2022) transforming into ‘a true revolutionary party’. Although Trump has served the plutocracy in some ways (e.g taxes) he is against them on others especially immigration and against a lot of Insider GOP on foreign policy (e.g NATO). Bannon is clear that he wants MAGA to ‘destroy all of today’s establishment’. But Trump1 showed he didn’t know how to drain the swamp.

Turchin of course is writing in 2022 and does not know how the Trump/GOP story plays out.

But he describes America 2022 — with its combination of immiseration, counter-elites emerging from elite overproduction and political entrepreneurs — as a ‘revolutionary situation’.

What about Europe?

In Germany and Denmark the top 1% has grabbed more of the wealth in recent decades, though less than in America.

In France and Austria it has not.

He does not explore Europe in much detail.

1830-70: how England and Russia swerved revolutionary crisis

Turchin’s database suggests that once states are past a certain threshold of crisis, the odds of revolution, civil war or both is high (75%) and in a fifth of cases the civil wars drag on for a century or more. There are very few cases where societies escape with little damage.

He considers the period 1830-70 — coincidentally the period I focused on in my earlier blog on regime change.

• Nearly all European states experienced revolution or civil war or both. France had three.

• America and China had civil wars.

• In Japan the Tokugawa regime fell in 1867.

• Only Britain and Russia of big states swerved meltdown.

England

Crisis grew 1830s-50s:

• Population growth and labour oversupply started depressing real wages from ~1750.

• After the Napoleonic wars there were outbreaks of riots, revolutionary plots etc that were suppressed (e.g Peterloo). 3 arrests at public gatherings in 1758, 1,800 in 1830, deaths peaked at 52 in 1831.

• Elite overproduction. University enrollments surged after 1750.

• The Chartist movement.

Why no revolution?

• Millions, along with aspiring elites, emigrated relieving pressure.

• 1832 reform Act.

• 1834 Poor Law changes.

• Repeal of Corn Laws, cheaper food.

(Turchin focuses on material specifics but a deeper reason was: the English Parliamentary system was more adaptable than other regimes and the English aristocracy preferred to share more power than risk revolutionary chaos.)

By 1850 real wages recovered the losses. After 1867 wages grew at unprecedented rate.

Russia

• Average heights of peasants fell in 18th C.

• Elite overproduction. Number of nobles grew and as fraction of population. And they extracted more from serfs.

• More riots in 19th C, ~10X 1800-1848 then more than doubled 1848-58.

• Russia suffered the Crimea War defeat in 1856.

The combination of riots and the shock of defeat convinced the regime they had to free the serfs. The Tsar told the nobility — it’s inevitable, we should free them ourselves not wait for revolution.

Nobles lost out and many became counter-elites. Anarchists, revolutionaries, terrorists of all kinds spread, peaking in 1880s. The Tsar was killed in 1881. But they did avert revolution. Riots fell. But the calm only lasted until 1905 when revolution broke out after the disastrous war with Japan. Estates failed in the new economic market. The gentry youth which had their traditional path taken away by their parents’ failure entered the civil service and this meant university numbers more than tripled 1860-1880. A combination of poverty and radicalisation as they read western books was dangerous.

Turchin’s conclusion?

His main conclusion is: to have even a hope of escaping the disintegration, the general public, the 99%, must force the elites to share more wealth and power!

This is not an adequate plan!

Some thoughts

Democrat/Insider radicalisation.

He doesn’t grapple well with a critical issue: how and why DEM elites radicalised culturally. I discussed this at length in the ‘why Trump won’ blog so won’t repeat all that, just a few points…

A. Immigration. Sanders argued in 2015 that open borders was a ‘Koch brothers plan’ he opposed. But by 2024 the DEMs had shifted so far on immigration that the Bill Clinton/Obama positions were effectively defined as ‘racist’. As I say above, we think of immigration as extremely polarised (in Britain too) but it wasn’t 30 years ago.

As I’ve said many times, it was objectively irrational for the DEMs — from the perspective of optimising for winning Presidential elections — to let the southern border blow into chaos 2021-4 then claim it couldn’t be stopped without new laws. It gave Trump one of his top 3 issues. (And Trump has proved this was false — the chaos has evaporated without new laws.) Also the calculation that all the immigrants and Hispanics would vote for the DEMs because of their open borders vibe turned out to be a blunder — per my blog on Trump’s win, he did spectacularly well with Hispanics and immigrants.

B. Institutions/Ukraine.

The DEMs were a party defined by people who thought of themselves as the ‘heirs of 1968’, the party fighting the establishment especially the military-industrial-CIA complex etc.

But one of the puzzles is how their radicalisation to the left on cultural issues went in parallel with becoming the party defending the old establishment institutions and even the intelligence services.

This has been very clearly expressed in the phenomenon of AOC and Bernie — people who consistently argued against GOP military adventures — backing the war machine over Ukraine.

Why? Because, as I’ve said before, the war against Putin equals the war against Trump in their minds. It’s one of the most interesting, important yet almost totally invisible because it’s so big phenomena of the past decade.

C. Free speech

Another fascinating case study is how the party that sees itself as the heirs of 1968 became a party with former presidential candidates openly arguing that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that needs fixing!

If you watch SW1 NPCs, they simply downloaded the Democrat/Insider software patch and either agreed or disappeared it from their discourse. But it is a seismic shift and, like with (B), almost totally invisible inside the NPC memeplex.

If professors of political science and our pundits can very quickly shift their attitude on something so fundamental, it suggests something very profound has been going on.

D. DEI/trans/BLM etc

Turchin doesn’t get into the reasons for why the young, i.e 15-25s have fragmented and become much more likely to support Trump, particularly young men, than Millennials.

The battering of LGBTQ++ at school. Are you gay/bi/queer/trans? Are you autistic? Are you trapped in the wrong body? The battering of ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘racist’ and ‘America is evil’. The DEI regime in universities and jobs pushing out whites who watch minorities with worse test scores get places.

You can see a very strong backlash against this underway that Insiders cannot see straight because they cannot discuss their own radicalisation away from the mainstream while trying to claim they are the mainstream.

Turchin criticises a lot of ‘extreme ultraconservative’ think tanks funded by billionaires such as the Federalist Society. But a lot of things seen by academics like Turchin as ‘extreme’ are seen by others as ‘moderate’ and ‘arguing for a view seen as mainstream 50 years ago’.

He does not similarly attack the Far Left billionaire network which went so far they provoked a load of billionaires to abandon decades of political neutrality and support Trump because he seemed a moderating force. He calls them ‘reformist’ and ‘progressive’. But many would call them ‘crazy communist loons with blood on their hands’ for defund the police etc. Turchin does not explore why famous Democrats like Elon and Rogan ended up backing ‘the fascist’.

Campaign vs mimetics?

Some on left and right have suggested that the ~2012-2024 DEI/w*ke/trans madness cultural movement that engulfed American politics (and spread via the internet across the world) was partly caused by the plutocracy preferring everybody losing their minds about this to focus on the cost of living and the rich getting richer from QE etc! Peter Thiel has described how convenient it is that everyone’s focused on this nexus of issues, encouraged by elite universities that have in some ways become hedge funds with faculty attached and don’t want their finances scrutinised.

It’s impossible to answer this with confidence without doing a lot of private interviews with people like the CEO and board of Disney. For sure, a lot of the corporate elites were frightened by the power of the movement to destroy careers, terrorise boards etc. Therefore they tipped more fuel on the fire that threatened to burn them. But to what extent was the phenomenon explicitly an organised cynical campaign by the rich to distract people from thinking about and campaigning on economic issues? (Please leave links to good sources on this.)

This connects to a more general question about the DEMs: to what extent was the shift from the party of the working class to the party of the rich, via the educational polarisation I’ve discussed, a thought out ideological project-campaign combining ‘centrist’ economics — i.e Larry Summers is broadly happy — with far left culture war? To what extent was this largely unconscious mimetics that emerged partly through internet herding dynamics?

My constant impression watching these people is that less than 1% is organised, thought out campaign and ~100% is pure mimetics. I think almost all the shifts in elite business networks were ~100% pure mimetics plus fear generating a cascade. But there are of course Live Players (and accidental players) somewhere. E.g the Russiagate hoax came from the likes of Jake Sullivan, it wasn’t a bottom-up internet conspiracy.

And NB. preference cascades below: once Trump won again a preference cascade operated in reverse with business/finance networks quickly ditching DEI etc.

‘Cliodynamics’ and prediction

As I’ve described before, it is possible to use models and technology to shock the mainstream on politics. We proved it with polling/models in 2016/19. You subscribers saw what I said about the US election long before it happened. The Ben Warner/Alex Cooper startup is developing some of these ideas.

The Tetlock and similar experiments similarly show it’s possible.

And there’s a wide variety of experiments on things like predicting news, predicting conflict that I think show promising results.

But academia is bad at this because, partly, incentives are all about papers not products. And for complex reasons the military and intel worlds have not been good at procuring interesting products for this.

In the appendix to War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote about the potential for models to predict wars if they could get good numbers for morale, because whether soldiers really feel like fighting or running is both crucial and extremely hard to know until it’s revealed. In 20th Century, there were attempts at building models such as the Osipov-Lancaster equations, Dupuy’s Understanding War, the recent SESHAT databank.

Turchin talks about projects to collect data but he is probably not on top of technological developments. He wrote in 2022 that robots can’t read medieval Latin on vellum — but Nat Friedman is using ML to read burnt ancient scrolls in ancient Latin and Greek! Turchin’s description of SECHAT makes it sound like something that will be totally upended by LLMs.

Such projects need great historians, other specialists, and great data scientists used to dealing with very messy data challenges.

I have some ideas on how this could be done. I’ve followed developments in prediction in a wide range of fields. I’m confident that products could be built that would greatly improve performance in political campaigns and government.

But new products a) will give strategic advantage but b) will not fundamentally transform politics soon because the essence will remain the simplest and deepest problems like — can you maintain focus on priorities amid chaos, can you move really fast, can you say No, can you build great teams, can you face very unpleasant unreality etc etc.

It’s hard for products to help humans do these fundamentals because the core issue is not ‘can we do high performance’, the core issue is that normal government institutions are not optimising for high performance or even normal/rubbish performance — they are optimising for preserve existing power and budgets and close anything down that threatens them/us. Products can no more overcome this than ‘read Thucydides and Sun Tzu and General Groves’: people do not apply these lessons because the costs are very high, immediate and personal, but gains are ephemeral, long-term, and distributed (what I call ‘the Munger principle).

It was not hard to build the sewage monitoring product but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the Vaccine Taskforce but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the No10 data science team but the Cabinet Office repeatedly tried to shut it down.

The SAS was shut down after 1945 and is under attack from its political bosses today.

Etc etc.

Secrets, ‘preference falsification’, intelligence and prediction

Revolutionary crises repeatedly surprise almost everyone. For example:

• 1789. Louis XVI did not anticipate the crisis.

• 1917. The Tsar did not anticipate the crisis. Lenin said in 1917 that older men like him would not see the explosion. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd in the months before the revolution were not prepared for it. Per the quotes at the top, even in the last 2-3 days before the explosion the British Ambassador and the Tsarina expressed the view that the crowds would soon blow over.

• Iran 1979. The Shah’s regime, the CIA and the KGB were surprised by the Shah’s collapse. Even though Khomeini said publicly the regime was about to collapse, he confided to his confidants that he doubted it.

• Eastern Europe 1989. Almost nobody anywhere predicted what would happen.

After they occur there are libraries filled with ‘explanations’ but we keep getting shocked. The libraries haven’t led to a theory with good predictive power.

Timur Kuran wrote an interesting paper in 1989, Sparks and prairie fires, which suggested the concept of preference falsification as part of the answer.

• In coercive regimes it’s dangerous to say what you think therefore the overwhelming majority do not state their true opinions about a regime publicly, they falsify their preference.

• The regime seems secure even to intelligence services probing weaknesses.

• When crises erupt, once dynamics cross a threshold (that’s very hard to identify in advance) more and more people will state their true preference and this makes it more likely that others do the same — a preference cascade. Opinions are interdependent and this process is inherently nonlinear. Hence the ancient proverb quoted by Mao: ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire.’ The spark can be somewhat random. E.g On 23/2/1917, there were thousands on the streets because of food shortage rumours, then 20k workers were locked out of a factory, then women marched in celebration of Women’s Day, and hundreds of off-duty soldiers joined in. There was a large self-reinforcing mob not coordinated by anybody.

• In hindsight the regime’s collapse seems inevitable because it generated ‘a panoply of hidden conflicts’.

• So regimes can both appear highly secure but be highly vulnerable.

• Leaders are crucial because a few rare people have an exceptional ability to detect and expose the regime’s vulnerabilities. E.g Khomeini knew the army was crucial and he kept stressing to his supporters that they should not physically attack soldiers — ‘Do not attack the army in its breast but in its heart’. Marx denied this and Engels famously summarised the Marx view as, ‘In default of Napoleon another would have been found.’ Cf. Tocqueville’s comment at the top — the leader depends on circumstances having ‘prepared men’s minds’ for new ideas.

• Revolutionary regimes tend to undertake campaigns of repression and indoctrination because the players remember how quickly the previous regime crumbled. The French sent Danton and Robespierre to the guillotine. Stalin slaughtered his own Party on an unprecedented scale.

• Given people in the regime can get killed when it collapses, their failure to see what’s happening is not a simple failure of incentives.

• Marxists think that discontent automatically leads to revolt but this ignores the interdependence of people’s political choices. And generally the vast majority of analysis treats events like 1979 as an ‘inevitable’ product of discontent, deprivation etc.

• The importance of preference falsification/cascades as an important dynamic means that ‘predictive failure is entirely consistent with calculated, purposeful human action’.

• The theory can be falsified by a theory capable of predicting revolutions well. (NB. Kuran’s articles were pre-internet. Now it is possible to acquire vast data that can help predict dynamics that before were almost entirely hidden. Progress would not necessarily falsify the theory IMO.)

In 1991 Kuran considered the 1989 revolutions.

The 1989 revolutions, like 1979, surprised almost everyone — politicians, academics, journalists, intelligence organisations.

The only polling study Kuran was aware of reported that a year after the fall of the Wall, only 5% of East Germans said they had expected it to happen before it did. Presumably the true number was lower.

In China, Deng had ordered in the army to crush the Tiananmen protests. But on 7 October 1989 when protests broke out in Berlin the response seemed weak. Pictures played on East German TV alerting people both to protestors and a weak response. On 9th, Honecker ordered officials to block a demo in Leipzig by force if necessary. But it didn’t happen. People saw peaceful demonstrations. More took to the streets. The regime started offering concessions.

In Poland the Party had allowed elections which Solidarity won. In Hungary, the Party rebranded itself the Socialist Party. And Gorbachev declared that the Soviets would not interfere in the affairs of their neighbours and a press spokesman declared ‘the Brezhnev doctrine is dead’ — a profound example of where one man’s decision can have massive historic effect via a cascade. Imagine if Deng had behaved similarly in 1989.

This pulled the rug from under those considering violent repression across Eastern Europe. Crowds grew and spread everywhere. In days the Wall was down and regimes were toppling. With the partial exception of Rumania the security forces melted very rapidly. And once Insiders started publicly distancing themselves from the regime, this hastened the end. (Kuran rightly says that a proper model would weight defecting Insiders much more heavily than a random individual.)

Havel’s 1979 essay had predicted that when the greengrocers have had enough the regime will fall. Like almost everyone, Havel didn’t have a good sense of the timing but his essay did explore this phenomenon of preference falsification and cascades.

The process in Poland took years, in Hungary months, in East Germany weeks, in Prague 10 days, and in Romania hours. This acceleration suggests that successful challenges to the regime lowered the perceived risk of dissent elsewhere.

It is a black mark that Turchin does not refer to these issues explored by Kuran. And it reflects that Turchin sees revolts too much in long-term economic terms and too little in terms of the interdependency of opinion and preference cascades.

Britain on the edge of chaos?

Obviously Britain exhibits key dynamics Turchin discusses:

• Public immiseration.

• Public perception that the old regime is incompetent and morally lost.

• Elite overproduction, elite fragmentation, counter-elites emerging.

• Growing disorder, perception police losing control of some areas, perception that the police are increasingly on the side of our enemies in similar ways to the Cabinet Office helping Sinn Fein/IRA against SF.

• Growing fears about core infrastructure failing.

• Debt out of control, debt interest payment eating revenues.

• Geopolitical tension exacerbating domestic problems.

• Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change.

The core problem for the old regime is that the mix of Tories 2010-24 and Starmer since 2024 can’t en masse even see what’s behind the crises. They’ve told themselves fake stories for decades. They keep thinking if they just hold on and keep going, somehow things will ‘return to normal politics’. You could see this emotion across the media in 2021 when everybody in SW1 cried out for ‘a return to normal’ by which they meant carrying on as before covid. Yet the country had just been through the collapse of core institutions, over 100k killed by incompetence, hundreds of billions added to debt etc. The emotional desire inside SW1 to pretend was so powerful it provided the ballast to their hysteria over Ukraine — while they made ever more ludicrous claims about the war, their desire not to disrupt SW1 business as usual was so strong that they maintained the MoD on its pathological course so it was totally impossible for it to do what they said they wanted vis Ukraine, and, obviously, this visible from space contradiction could not be a topic of SW1 discussion and still isn’t.

The voters assumed summer 2020 that the government would embark on radical change, as promised in the 2019 election. We started (or rather continued what we started in 2019). But then the Trolley took fateful decisions. Governments keep prioritising keeping Whitehall and the NPC network happy and this is not consistent with reducing voters’ hate and contempt.

The way to keep the SW1 NPC network happy is to continue the immigration Ponzi, continue the financial Ponzi, raise taxes, hate and mock entrepreneurs, demand more and more money tipped into the failing things, prioritise the ECHR (and international law generally) over the safety of British families, vandalise the few great things left, give some pathetic speeches about ‘sensible gradual consensual grownup reform’ that officials laugh at and ignore/subvert, declare all this ‘inevitable’ and ‘sensible' government’ from ‘serious grownups’ and declare all opponents extremist, populist, far right etc.

This has been the ‘mainstream’ for 20+ years.

There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the 'NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.

Having got to here, I will split the other two books into separate blogs or this will get too long! Then at the end I’ll post some thoughts.

In meantime, watch this interview with David Betz, Professor of War, King's College London. He reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence.

The issues above provoke thoughts about what the PRC has built to predict social contagion and preference cascades, cf. my blog that touches on Qian Xuesen, the godfather of China’s nuclear and space programs, and pioneer of complex systems thinking (cf. Open Complex Giant System, 1993). Xi said in 2013:

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

Also cf. this about the remarkable fact that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds follows universal statistical patterns:

Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity followed a simple power-law distribution. Although his methods and data in the mid-20th century were neither rigorous nor comprehensive, his insights about violent conflicts have endured. In this chapter, using modern statistical methods and data, we show that Richardson’s original claims appear largely correct…

How can it be possible that the frequency and severity of interstate wars are so consistent with a stationary model, despite the enormous changes and obviously non-stationary dynamics in human population, in the number of recognized states, in commerce, communication, public health, and technology, and even in the modes of war itself? The fact that the absolute number and sizes of wars are plausibly stable in the face of these changes is a profound mystery for which we have no explanation.

Local election results

Data shows that it is the worst result for an Opposition ever by far: the government is deeply unpopular and obviously rubbish yet Tories lost 41% of seats fought. This election was the first time the Conservatives did not win a majority on a single council since the local government system was created in 1889.

Reform also dominate second places

To ponder… There is an ancient Greek myth about the star constellation known as Pleiades, or the ‘seven sisters’. Zeus saved seven sisters from rape by turning them into stars. One fell in love and went into hiding, so we only see six. There’s a remarkably similar story in Aboriginal Australia, separated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years.

Astronomers recently calculated that 100,000 years ago, humans would have seen seven stars but one gradually got closer to another so we can now only see six. Yes: the implication is that the remarkably similar stories that have survived through different ancient cultures are surviving remnants of an older story from our ancestors that was true. I’ve read Greek myths to my small child and I think about this beautiful story often. Somehow this is connected to the spiritual-epistemic collapse of the West.

US forces and imperial failure. This NYT article provides more data for the transformation underway in war. The US spent a billion dollars over a month firing so many very expensive missiles the DOD worried about depleted stocks, getting expensive drones shot down, failing to establish air dominance over the Houthis, nearly suffering the humiliation of advanced aircraft destroyed, and suffering the humiliation of two $70M aircraft falling off the edge of an aircraft carrier as it swerved violently to avoid being hit itself. After a month of this, Trump pulled the plug.

On April 28, the Truman was forced to make a hard turn at sea to avoid incoming Houthi fire, several U.S. officials said. The move contributed to the loss of one of the Super Hornets, which was being towed at the time and fell overboard.

For over twenty years I’ve been saying that official calculations and claims around carriers are bogus because of cheapening/improving capabilities for precision strike. Steve Hsu has charted this in detail for 20 years. Notice how one brilliant physicist with the sensibility to look for what’s true could outperform a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy that incentivises blindness.

A few podcasts/blogs always interesting:

• Steve Hsu’s Manifold.

• China Talk.

• Jack Clark of Anthropic.

• Upstream.

• Rest is History (one of few UK podcasts I think is great).

Thanks for subscribing.

Please share.

Q&A here.

Reading list here.

Share

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription

We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to “the conquest of nature” and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal…

Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.

Leo Strauss

It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation.

Leo Strauss

I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.

Shigalev, in The Devils

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational…

And … even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he [man] would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of sheer ingratitude, simply to have his own way. And if he does not find any means he will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will thereby have his own way. He will launch a curse upon the world, and, as only man can curse … then, after all, perhaps only by his curse will he attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key!

If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself - then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and have his own way! I believe in that, I vouch for it, because, after all, the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin! But he has proved it...

Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared… In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness.

Thucydides, III.82-84

UPDATE 31/8: Notes on Strauss’ essay on Thucydides.

UPDATE 24/5: Notes on Introduction to The City and Man, and a summary of the crisis of the West.

UPDATE 20/5: Notes on On Classical Political Philosophy.

This blog will summarise and consider essays by philosopher Leo Strauss.

Strauss identifies three waves of modernity sparked by (1) Machiavelli, (2) Rousseau and (3) Nietzsche.

The West’s spiritual-philosophical crisis, explored in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche writing after the 1848 revolutions (see blog on Dostoyevsky), is the deepest cause of the political crisis we see in the crumbling of old ideas, old institutions (domestic and international), old parties and old political regimes.

A fourth wave of modernisation has begun, not driven by traditional philosophers or the universities but mainly by the internet and technology.

Whenever I talk about philosophy my practical allies say, rightly — almost nobody in politics cares about this, they won’t listen, they mostly can’t do simple politics, it’s pointless trying to get them to think about philosophy.

This is true but misses the point. Blogs on philosophy are not for 99.9% of SW1 — they are for the 0.1% and for people outside SW1.

Everybody in politics is pursuing things they were programmed to pursue by dead philosophers. We are all somewhat ‘NPC’. The collapse in standards of elite education means we are less able than many of our ancestors to think for ourselves. The political crisis we’re in requires deep new stories. The old parties’ old stories are deathly stale and is partly why they only mobilise apathy or hate. To develop new stories we need to figure out why the old stories are played out. For this, we must turn to the deepest ideas. The coming discussions over biological engineering and AI demand the same.

I won’t now go into what seems to be coming next. After I’ve reviewed the essays I’ll add something.

At the bottom are SNIPPETS on:

• Shor on 2024

• Professor Ansell calling ‘peak populism’

• Toby Lutke on AI. Shopify must see if an AI can do a job before hiring someone

• Karpathy on AI. Unlike previous technologies adopted first by big organisations then normal people, LLMs are the reverse: the big effects are with normal people not big organisations. The future is here and very highly distributed.

• Michael Nielsen on AI. Alignment isn’t a solution, it’s a problem.

• Askonas on AI.

• Drones and AI.

• Espionage and AI.

• ‘Moneyball military’ and AI.

• Bioterror and AI.

• Deterrence and AI.

• AI Scenarios for 2025-7 by Daniel Kokotajlo & Scott Alexander.

• Tariffs, containers, logistics

VOTE REFORM TOMORROW

On Thursday, you should vote Reform if you have a local vote, unless you’re voting personally for someone you know about. Why? To signal a desire for big change and strengthen the forces pushing for big change. Voting Tory just encourages the useless gang in charge to think they should carry on what they’re doing which is wasting everyone’s time. Per my previous blog we need to either a) push them in a useful direction (and a necessary condition is retiring KB) or b) close and replace them ASAP. It’s also the best way to spook No10 to abandon some of the dumb things they’re doing — e.g letting the worst elements of the HMT/OBR consensus govern economic policy.

The key period for Reform is from Friday to this time next year and the much bigger elections. Per my previous blog:

• Can they hire a great team for research, policy, communication and campaigning? Do they become the only party in Britain actually able to campaign? (Now, no big political organisation in UK can campaign up to the old standards, never mind deal with the new technologies. Campaigns require sustained focus which they can’t do and seldom try.)

• Can they set out a story combining candidate selection and a political story, how the people they recruit as candidates reflect their priorities for the country?

• Can they figure out how to jiujitsu the weight of the Insider attacks — old parties, old Whitehall, and old media — to their advantage? They threaten the old system. That system will try to destroy them including with use of the deep state to destroy individuals’ reputations. Countering it won’t be trivial.

NB. They do not need to transform to high performance in order to destroy the Tories’ strategic position. They can win 50-150 seats as a one-man band protest party. But they do need to transform to high performance in order to win a majority in 2029 then deliver.

The Tories have done nothing in months except encourage thousands to conclude Britain is knackered and accelerate their plans to leave — a trend that is greatly underrated in super-parochial SW1. As SW1 gets more and more out of touch with anything productive and valuable, and more and more insular, it becomes harder and harder for its NPCs to see even very obvious things. And the flight of money and talent from Europe to America is a big thing. London snaffles some stragglers on their way west, London benefits from being outside the EU’s regulatory self-sabotage on AI, but London is also losing many because of the overall political and economic farce and the manifest determination of the mainstream to carry on with Osborne-Sunak vandalism.

I’ll return to domestic politics shortly. But you can see that LFG and Crush Crime are changing debate so — if you’re NOT leaving and you want to help something that can do things, get in touch with Newport, give them time, money, expertise, connections etc.

(Also have you noticed the NPC Narrative Whiplash on OBR? When people like me said that it was ludicrous for governments to shape policy to influence future OBR forecasts (that are always wrong) — objectively a madhouse way of governing — NPCs denounced it as ‘extremist’, ‘Orbanism’, ‘fascism’ etc. Now that the OBR is seen as blocking more tax and spend for the old system, Narrative Whiplash has kicked in and now it’s ‘mainstream’ and ‘sensible’ to attack the government for its absurd approach and ‘mad’ to do the thing they defined as ‘serious’ until recently.)

GANGS

Yesterday Lawrence Newport and Crush Crime published a Bill for an immediate inquiry on the Gangs. PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BY CLICKING HERE AND ADDING YOUR NAME TO THOSE SUPPORTING.

• These gangs are STILL operating.

• Both parties have worked with officials to coverup not just the gangs but all the connected nightmares including: police arresting parents trying to save their children, police cooperating with the gangs to return children to them, local councillors clearly working with the gangs, whistleblowers literally murdered and so on and so on.

• An Inquiry will come, the sooner the better.

• It was in Labour’s interests to do this as soon as possible, blame the Tories for 14 years of coverups, and get the credit for purges and jailings and action. But obviously Starmer has defaulted to his instincts per my previous blog: always defend the old system even when it’s obviously terrible government and politics. Whitehall obviously does NOT want an Inquiry as it will reveal much guilt from officials and document in humiliating detail how Elon was right: multiple national coverups. I know this because I saw this process myself in the DfE (cf. previous blog).

• Crush Crime’s Bill would make this Inquiry very unlike others. Time limited. Not a judge but an investigator in charge. Coordinated with a No10 Task Force. RICO powers. Force the courts to publish all transcripts and stop them abandoning centuries of England’s tradition of open justice. And much more. Judges refusing to allow publication of court transcripts because they think public discussion of trials is ‘not in the public interest’ is a perfect example of where ‘the mainstream’ are taking us.

• Farage said yesterday that if Labour does NOT u-turn and do it, then the Reform Manifesto will pledge to introduce the Crush Crime Bill in the first month of the next Parliament. This will exert pressure. The Tories will have to promise similar. And Labour MPs will tell No10: you cannot have this as an election issue, neutralise it with our inquiry that also smashes the Tories for failure 2010-24…

Some coverage so far:

Telegraph, MPs try to force grooming gang inquiry

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/04/29/mps-try-to-force-grooming-gang-inquiry/

GB NEWS, Farage teams up with Labour to force Keir Starmer into grooming gangs public inquiry

https://www.gbnews.com/politics/nigel-farage-labour-peer-grooming-gangs-public-inquiry-force-keir-starmer

GB NEWS, Reform makes manifesto commitment to national grooming gangs inquiry in first month

Farage: “If Labour refuses to hold an inquiry, Reform’s manifesto at the next election will commit to legislation for an Inquiry, with statutory powers, into the gangs introduced to Parliament in the first month of the Reform government. This inquiry must happen and will happen.”
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/reform-manifesto-commitment-national-grooming-gangs-inquiry-first-month

GB NEWS

https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1917169937824571497

GB NEWS, Eamonn Holmes interviews Lawrence Newport

https://www.facebook.com/GBNewsOnline/videos/540216282224939/

Twitter – Crush Crime

Justice should be a matter of PUBLIC RECORD - but the system is so broken that trial transcripts are either DESTROYED or hidden behind massive bureaucratic paywalls.

Interview with Adam Wren about his court transcript campaign

https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1915665077266772169

Twitter – Zia Yusuf (Chairman of Reform UK)

The only way to bring justice to victims of the grooming gangs is a full national, statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses.
We will launch this in the first month of a Reform government.

https://x.com/ZiaYusufUK/status/1917181498496569850

LBC – Nick Ferrari

Lawrence Newport interviewed on Nick Ferrari show

https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1917488473201614990

SOME RECENT BLOGS

My recent blog on UK politics

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/tsp-5-what-comes-in-2025-6-as-both

Specifically on Whitehall

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/152759149/starmer-and-whitehall-who-fires-whom

11/24: Why did Trump win?

The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a?open=false#%C2%A7the-year-cycle-of-regime-change

The Pathological Simulacrum and the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/the-pathological-simulacrum-and-the-cycle-of-narrative-whiplash

Freedom’s Forge, on procurement and industrial production in WW2

Metternich’s and Pitt’s struggles for a new international order

What is political philosophy?

This essay is an edited version of a Lecture in December 1954. It appears in a book of the same name.

I The Problem of Political Philosophy

All political action aims at preservation or change.

All political action is guided by ‘some thought of better and worse’.

Thought of better and worse implies thought of the good.

All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good.

When men make it their explicit goal to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society, ‘political philosophy emerges’.

The theme of political philosophy is mankind’s great objectives, freedom and government or empire — objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves.

Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy. Philosophy is a quest for ‘universal knowledge’, an attempt to ‘replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole’. A quest for knowledge of the whole, or ‘all things’, means knowledge of God, the world, and man — of the nature of all things, and the natures in their totality are ‘the whole’.

Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth but quest for the truth. The distinctive trait of the philosopher is that “he knows that he knows nothing” and that his insight into our ignorance concerning the most important things induces him to strive with all his power for knowledge.

It may be that philosophy can never get beyond discussion but this does not make it futile. Genuine knowledge of a fundamental question is better than blindness or indifference.

Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, qu. 1 a.5.)

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.

[A paraphrase of Aristotle: ‘The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse of persons that we love is more delightful than a leisurely view of other things.’]

Political philosophy is the attempt to ‘replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things … and the right, or the good, political order’.

All political philosophy is political thought but not all political thought is political philosophy. Political thought is indifferent to the opinion/knowledge distinction but for political philosophy it’s central.

‘Political science’ is ambiguous and characterised by a ‘pitiful pretentiousness’. It designates a) ‘such investigations of political things as are guided by the model of natural science’ and b) the work of those in ‘political science departments’. It conceives itself as the way towards genuine knowledge of politics and a replacement, in time, for political philosophy.

In former epochs, intelligent men could gain political knowledge from listening to wise men and reading good historians. This is ‘no longer sufficient’ because we live in ‘dynamic mass societies’, societies characterised by ‘immense complexity and rapid change’. Political knowledge is harder to come by and becomes obsolete more rapidly.

All political knowledge implies assumptions — e.g one cannot know anything about a new war without assumptions about war as such. The goal of a general is victory which is not essentially controversial. But the meaning of ‘the common good’ is essentially controversial. The ambiguity of political goals are due to their ‘comprehensive character’.

Today political philosophy is in ‘a state of decay and perhaps putrefaction if it has not vanished altogether’. There is total disagreement about its subject matter, methods and function. And its very possibility has become questionable. The only thing political science academics agree on is the usefulness of political philosophy. The distinction between philosophy and science has been applied and created a distinction between a) a non-philosophic political science and b) a non-scientific political philosophy — a distinction which strips ‘all dignity, all honesty from political philosophy’. And large segments of what were part of political philosophy have been stripped away and given names like economics and sociology.

The pitiable rump for which honest social scientists do not care is left as prey to philosophers of history and to people who amuse themselves more than others with professions of faith. We hardly exaggerate when we say that today political philosophy does not exist any more except as matter for burial, i.e for historical research, or else as a theme of weak and unconvincing protestations.

Why? We are told ‘political philosophy is unscientific’ or unhistorical or both.

Science and History, those two great powers of the modern world, have finally succeeded in destroying the very possibility of political philosophy.

This is partly generated by the spread of positivism.

By the end of the 19th Century social science positivism reached its final form by decreeing that only factual judgements are within the competence of social science but value judgements are outside. Positivist social science is ‘value free’, neutral about good and evil: ‘moral obtuseness is the necessary condition for scientific analysis’. So social science inevitably drifted towards conformism and philistinism. Rapidly social scientists get entangled in ‘the predicament which leads to the downfall of Thrasymachus and his taming by Socrates’.

1/ But it is impossible to study important social phenomena without making value judgements.

2/ Weber postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts. But while we may not be able to decide who is more just in a conflict between nations lasting centuries, ‘cannot we decide that Jezebel’s action against Naboth was inexcusable’?

3/ Positivism raises scientific knowledge to the highest kind and deprecates pre-scientific knowledge comparable to folklore. This is itself a superstition that causes an obsession with trying to prove things a ten year old knows but cannot be proved scientifically.

4/ ‘Positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism.’ It mistakes the peculiarities of mid-20th Century America with the essential character of human society. What we are interested in in history comes from ‘values’, from subjective principles, not from facts. And in another paradoxical twist, social science itself proves to be ‘historical’ and reflection on social science as a historical phenomenon leads to the relativisation of social science and ultimately of modern science generally. Modern science ‘comes to be viewed as one historically relative way of understanding things which is not in principle superior to alternative ways of understanding.’ [NB. how well this summarises much of the current madness in academia!]

5/ Historicism abandons the fact/value distinction. It denies the authority of modern natural science. It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally reasonable. It denies the relevance of ‘the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man’s humanity’. It rejects the question of the good society because of the historical character of society and thought.

It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.

II The Classical Solution

Plato et al knew that ‘evil cannot be eradicated and therefore that one’s expectations from politics must be moderate.’

The guiding theme is the nature of the regime, the form which gives society its character, the manner of living of society and in society, its moral taste. Classical political philosophy seeks an answer to — what is the best regime for man, the in-between being between animal and god?

The classics held the view that the nature of the regime — whether it is good — is even more important than the nation.

Classical political philosophy is criticised today as a) anti-democratic and b) based on classical natural philosophy which modern science has exposed as false.

The severest indictment of democracy is Book VIII of the Republic. Yet Plato also acknowledged good aspects of democracy such as the freedom it gives all. But the classics rejected democracy because they thought the aim of human life is virtue, not freedom.

• Virtue requires education, education requires leisure, leisure requires wealth.

• Poverty is ubiquitous so democracy means rule by the uneducated which must be wrong.

Rousseau argued that man is naturally good, and all knowledge needed to be virtuous is supplied by the conscience of simple souls. But his education scheme was one few could afford.

Generally it has become believed that democracy requires universal education but this presupposes that scarcity has given way to plenty. The difference between the ancients and us regarding democracy consists ‘exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology’.

Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.

Democracy has also not solved the problem of education.

1. What’s called ‘education’ is often not education proper which is ‘the formation of character’ rather than instruction and training.

2. To the extent democracy does focus on formation of character, it is often a dangerous focus on ‘the regular guy’, the cooperative fellow, a certain part of social virtue — and a neglect of ‘those virtues which mature … in privacy, not to say in solitude’ — people who are prepared ‘to stand alone, to fight alone’. ‘Democracy has not yet found a defence against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters.’

3. Classical education can never be thought of as mass-education. It was the highest education for those ‘by nature fit for it’.

Is classical political philosophy bound up with an antiquated cosmology?

‘To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human.’ But in that light man is unintelligible. Classical political philosophy saw man not based on natural science but ‘in the light of the mysterious character of the whole’ — Socrates viewed man in the light of the ‘fundamental and permanent problems’. Classical philosophers were interested in the quest for natural philosophy but did not think they had a solution, nor that such a solution was a solution for the permanent problems of man.

Philosophy is a quest for knowledge of the whole. Our knowledge is characterised by a ‘fundamental dualism which has never been overcome’.

At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity: above all in mathematics.

At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity: in particular of heterogeneous ends, and the highest form of such knowledge is the statesman or educator. This is higher than the former because it is knowledge of a whole, of the ends of man, of the human soul. Knowledge combining the political art in its highest sense with mathematics is a combination ‘not at our disposal’. [The first big statement by LS I think is partly wrong. Without thinking there could be any sort of ‘theory of everything’, we can use maths (defined widely as a set of thinking tools) to improve our thinking about politics.]

We are constantly deluded by two opposite charms: 1) the charm of mathematics and everything akin to mathematics and 2) the charm of ‘humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences’. Philosophy must not succumb to either charm. It is ‘the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation’.

Classical political philosophers agreed that the solution to the problem of political philosophy was that, first, the goal of political life is virtue and, second, ‘the order most conducive to virtue is the aristocratic republic’, or the mixed regime.

III The Modern Solution

Modern political philosophies have a principle in common: the rejection of the classical scheme as unrealistic.

The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He claimed to affect — and he did affect — a break in the whole tradition of political philosophy.

His main argument was: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualisation is highly improbable. We should not take our bearings by virtue but by the objectives which are really pursued in societies. It was a conscious lowering of moral standards in the hope of greater chances of success.

The classical approach: morality is a substantial force in the soul of man however ineffective is may be in the affairs of states.

The Machiavelli approach: man is educated to virtue by other men but the original educators, the founders of a society, cannot have been educated by virtue. The founder of Rome was a fratricide. Morality cannot create itself, morality is only possible in a context created by immorality, justice rests on injustice, legitimacy rests on revolution. Man is not by nature directed toward virtue, pangs of conscience are not the worst thing, pangs of disappointment are at least as strong.

One cannot define the common good in terms of virtue, instead we must define virtue in terms of the common good.

The common good is the ends actually pursued by all societies:

• Freedom from foreign rule.

• Stability and law.

• Prosperity.

• Glory and empire.

Virtue is the sum of habits conducive to this end — this end makes actions virtuous, it justifies every means. Virtue is civic virtue, patriotism, devotion to collective selfishness.

He thought that man is by nature selfish but can be taught and compelled to be patriotic. Man is more malleable and the power of man is greater and the role of nature and chance are smaller than the ancients thought.

The strongest passion is the desire for glory and the highest form of the desire for glory is the desire to be a new prince who founds a new order and moulds generations of men. The desire for glory is the link between badness and goodness. The new founder-prince is morally the same as a great criminal.

And for Machiavelli, it is the right kind of institutions that’s crucial, not the formation of moral character — and this shift is ‘the characteristic corollary of the belief in the almost infinite malleability of man’.

Strauss thought that there is not ‘a single true observation regarding the nature of man’ in all Machiavelli with which the classics were not thoroughly familiar. By his time the contemplative life had shifted to monasteries. Virtue had been transfigured into Christian charity. Concern for the salvation of man’s soul required behaviour the classics wold have thought inhuman, e.g Ferdinand of Aragorn expelling the Marannos from Spain. Machiavelli thought that the increase in inhumanity was the unintended but unsurprising consequence of man’s aiming too high. He wanted us instead to lower our sights, to narrow our horizons, in order to improve our chances of conquering chance and effect a shift of emphasis from moral character to institutions.

For Machiavelli, Moses was an armed prophet, Christ was an unarmed prophet who died but still was victorious because of propaganda: ‘the only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda’, though Machiavelli avoided the fate of Christ by not publishing until after he was dead (LS). No earlier philosopher had thought of trying to achieve posthumous success via a strategy and tactics for this purpose, the first philosopher to try to ‘control the future by embarking on a campaign of propaganda’.

For him, what the Romans had done by chance could be repeated and improved deliberately and Republicanism in the Roman style as interpreted by Machiavelli became one of the most powerful trends in modern political thought discernible in Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Federalists.

The theoretical basis of his teaching was a ‘decayed Aristotelianism’. But there is ‘a hidden kinship between Machiavelli’s political science and the new natural science’ of the 17th Century. There is a close connection between Machiavelli’s orientation and the notion of the controlled experiment.

His scheme also had to be modified because of ‘its revolting nature’[!]. Hobbes mitigated the scheme and thereby helped it spread. Hobbes was ‘an honest and plain-spoken Englishman’. He took justice much more seriously than Machiavelli. He denied that civil society is founded on crime. He accepted the traditional notion that justice is not merely the work of society but there is a natural right. Hobbes wrote about the duties of the subjects.

But he also accepted Machiavelli’s critique of traditional political philosophy — that it aimed too high. Hobbes demanded that natural right be derived from the beginnings — the ‘elementary wants or urges’ which determine all men most of the time, and not from man’s perfection or end, the desire for which determines only a few men a little of the time. These primary urges are selfish and reduce to self-preservation and the fear of violent death. It is not glory but fear that stands at the cradle of civil society — not heroes, perhaps criminal heroes, but terrified poor devils. The desire to live turns into the desire for comfort, into ‘pedestrian hedonism’. Glory survives only in the form of competition. So for Machiavelli the pivot was glory, for Hobbes it was power.

Power is morally neutral. Or, what is the same thing, it is ambiguous if of concealed ambiguity. Power and the concern with power lack the direct human appeal of glory and the concern with glory. It emerges through an estrangement from man’s primary motivation. It has an air of senility. It becomes visible in grey eminences rather than in Scipios and Hannibals. Respectable, pedestrian hedonism sobriety without sublimity and subtlety, protected or made possible by ‘power politics’ — this is the meaning of Hobbes’s correction of Machiavelli.

Hobbes was still too bold to be acceptable. It also needed mitigation and got it from Locke. For Locke, what man needed for self-preservation is less a weapon than food, or property: the desire for self-preservation becomes the right to unlimited acquisition.

Machiavelli’s discovery or invention of the need for an immoral or amoral substitute for morality became victorious through Locke’s discovery or invention that that substitute is acquisitiveness. Here we have an utterly selfish passion whose satisfaction does not require the spilling of any blood and whose effect is the improvement of the lot of all. In other words, the solution of the political problem by economic means is the most elegant solution, once one accepts Machiavelli’s premise: economism is Machiavellianism come of age.

For Montesquieu, the big battle was between two ideals — the Roman Republic whose principle was virtue and England whose principle was political liberty which found a substitute for Roman virtue in the pursuit of trade and finance.

But Rousseau began ‘a second wave of modernity’, a wave which bore ‘German idealistic philosophy and the romanticism of all ranks in all countries’. Rousseau and this complex counter-movement brought a return to pre-modern ways of thinking — a return from the world of the bourgeois to the world of virtue and the city.

Kant returned from Descartes’ notion of ideas to the Platonic notion.

Hegel returned from the philosophy of reflection to the ‘higher vitality’ of Plato and Aristotle.

Romanticism as a whole was primarily a return to the origins. But the return to pre-modern thought was the initial step of a movement which led to a much more radical form of modernity, much more alien to classical thought than the thought of the 17th and 18th centuries had been.

Rousseau returned to the classical city but he interpreted it through Hobbes’s scheme. For Rousseau as for Hobbes, the root of civil society is the right of self-preservation.

But for Rousseau, unlike Hobbes and Locke, this fundamental right points to a social order closely akin to the classical city.

For Hobbes and Locke the fundamental right of man had retained its original status even within civil society: natural law [deriving from God, nature or reason] remained the standard for positive law [deriving from human institutions], and there remained the possibility of appealing from positive law to natural law. The appeal was generally ineffective and could not not carry with itself the guarantee of being effective.

Rousseau drew from this the conclusion that ‘civil society must be so constructed as to make the appeal from positive law to natural law superfluous; a civil society properly constructed in accordance with natural law will automatically produce just positive law’. LS explains Rousseau’s thoughts as follows:

The general will, the will immanent in societies of a certain kind, replaces the transcendent natural right. One cannot emphasise too strongly that Rousseau would have abhorred the totalitarianism of our day. He favoured, indeed, the totalitarianism of a free society but he rejected in the clearest possible language any possible totalitarianism of government. The difficulty into which Rousseau leads us lies deeper. If the ultimate criterion of justice becomes the general will, i.e the will of a free society, cannibalism is as just as its opposite. Every institution hallowed by a folk-mind has to be regarded as sacred.

Rousseau’s thought marks a decisive step in the secular movement which tries to guarantee the actualisation of the ideal, or to prove the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or to get rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality. The assumption of such a transcendence had permitted earlier men to make a tenable distinction between liberty and license. License consist in doing what one lists; liberty consists in doing in the right manner the good only; and our knowledge of the good must come from a higher principle, from above. These men acknowledged a limitation of license which comes from above, a vertical limitation. On the basis of Rousseau, the limitation of license is effected horizontally by the license of other men. I am just if I grant to every other man the same rights which I claim for myself, regardless of what these rights may be.

This horizontal limitation is preferred as it seems more realistic — the limitation of my claim by the claim of others is self enforcing.

The separation of law and morality was defended by Kant who argued that freedom of speech includes the right to lie: all lies are immoral but also mostly legal. But this separation, of which German legal philosophy was proud, was not a sound suggestion!

Rousseau defined the state of nature, man’s beginning, as the goal of social man — man has drifted away from his beginnings and been corrupted so needs to return to this goal, the just society, which comes as close to the state of nature as a society possibly can. Man should strive to return to his most primitive state, the state before he felt the desire for self-preservation — the state of the feeling of the sweetness of mere existence without any thought for the future, a true return to nature. The feeling of self-preservation compels man to action and duty, therefore to misery, and cuts him off from the bliss buried in his origin.

For Rousseau, the tension between self-preservation and the more primitive feeling of mere existence expresses itself in the insoluble antagonism between the majority — who will in the best case be mere good citizens — and the tiny minority of solitary dreamers who find their way back to nature.

German idealistic philosophers took up this problem and thought a reconciliation possible. They claimed to have restored the high level of classical philosophy while fighting against the debasement caused by the first wave of modernity.

The philosophy of the second wave of modernity is inseparable from the philosophy of history, which did not exist in the classical world. But its introduction was not a genuine remedy for the lowering of standards in the first wave of modernity.

The actualisation of the right order is the unintended by-product of human activities which are in no way directed toward the right order. The right order … was thought by Hegel to be established in the Machiavellian way, not in the Platonic way: it was thought to be established in a manner which contradicts the right order itself. The delusions of Communism are already the delusions of Hegel and even of Kant.

The difficulties of German idealism gave rise to the third wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche rejected the view that the historical process is rational and the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible. For Nietzsche, all life and thought rests on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible to rational legitimisation. The solitary creator who gives himself a law and subjects himself to its rigours replaces Rousseau’s solitary dreamer. He called on people to revolutionise themselves, not society or nation. He hoped in future generations the best would answer his call and become a new nobility to rule the planet. He preferred a planetary aristocracy to a universal stateless and classless society.

He loathed socialism and communism — and conservatism, nationalism and democracy. But, argues Strauss, he left the next generation no choice except between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus helped prepare a regime [Nazis] which made ‘made discredited democracy look again like a golden age’.

[NB. As Strauss explains elsewhere, one has to keep two things in mind regarding Nietzsche and Nazis. First, he loathed anti-Semites and would have loathed the Nazis. Was he ‘a Nazi’? Absolutely not. (His sister, who did go along with the Nazis, faked things that caused great confusion.) Second, he helped prepare the Nazi regime in a causal sense. Both are true: he was not a Nazi, and he prepared the ground for the Nazis.]

After him, modern thought embraced a radical historicism, ‘explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity’.

For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay … for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.

Political philosophy and history

[This essay was first published in Social Research, 1945. It concerns historicism, its attitude to classical philosophy, and its effects on modern philosophy and political thinking.]

Political philosophy is fundamentally different from, but not ‘absolutely independent’ of, history. Political philosophy must work with historical information but this is ‘preliminary and auxillary’, always about individual wars, people, groups, regimes and so on.

This view of the relation of political philosophy and history was ‘unquestionably dominant’ in until at least the end of the 18th Century.

But now it is rejected in favour of historicism, i.e ‘the assertion that the fundamental distinction between philosophic and historical questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained’. Historicism questions the possibility of political philosophy and ‘creates an entirely new situation for political philosophy’. Historicism is ‘a most powerful agent that affects more or less all present day thought’ and ‘as far as we can speak at all of the spirit of a time we can assert with confidence that the spirit of our time is historicism’.

The fusion of philosophy and history advocated by historicism may not be achievable but it is ‘the natural goal toward which the victorious trends of nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought converge’.

We now have vast numbers of historical studies and take for granted that historical knowledge is part of the highest learning.

When Plato sketched the ideal education he did not mention history. Aristotle said that poetry is more philosophic than history and this attitude was characteristic of all classical philosophers and philosophers of the Middle Ages. History was praised by rhetoricians, not philosophers. [Practical political Greeks and Romans after Herodotus and Thucydides started thinking historically and using history in political arguments.]

A fundamental change came in the 16th Century when opposition to earlier philosophy was marked by a novel emphasis on history.

• The rationalism of the 17-18th Centuries was much more historical than pre-modern rationalism.

• By the end of the 17th Century it was normal to speak of ‘the spirit of the time’.

• In the middle of the 18th Century the term ‘philosophy of history’ was coined.

• The teaching of Hegel in the 19th Century was supposed to be a synthesis of philosophy and history.

• The ‘historical school’ of the 19th Century brought about the substitution of historical jurisprudence, historical political science, historical economic science for a jurisprudence, a political science, an economic science that were un-historical or a-historical.

Historicism emerged in the 19th Century.

The typical historicism of the twentieth century demands that each generation reinterpret the past on the basis of its own experience and with a view to is own future. It is no longer contemplative, but activistic; and it attaches to that study of the past which is guided by the anticipated future … a crucial philosophic significance: it expects from it the ultimate guidance for political life. The result is visible in practically every curriculum and textbook of our time. One has the impression that the question of the nature of political things has been superseded by the question of the characteristic “trends” of the social life of the present and of their historical origins, and that the question of the best, or just, political order has been superseded by the question of the probable or desirable future. The questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the ideals of western civilisation and so forth occupy a place that was formally occupied by the questions of the state and of the right way of life. Philosophical questions have been transformed into … historical questions of a “futuristic” character…

The most common form of historicism expresses itself in the demand that the questions of the nature of political things, of the state, of the nature of man and so forth, be replaced by the questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the present political situation, of modern man, of our society, our culture, our civilisation, and so forth.

Historicism argues that any attempt to describe the old philosophical questions must be ‘historically conditioned’, i.e ‘to remain dependent on the specific situation in which it is suggested’. Nothing said about universal questions is valid. Some historicists insist that philosophy itself is historically conditioned, i.e essentially related to Western man or the Greeks and their intellectual heirs.

Historicism assumes that the object of historical knowledge which it calls ‘History’ is a ‘field’ or world of its own fundamentally different from Nature. The pre-historicist view was that a) ‘history’ designated a particular kind of knowledge or inquiry, b) ‘history’ as an object of knowledge does not exist and c) ‘philosophy of history’, as an analysis of a specific ‘dimension of reality’, was not dreamed of. The historicist attitude becomes clearer when one thinks what the Bible or Plato ‘would have called that X which we are in the habit of calling “History”.’ Historicism also sees every restoration of earlier teachings as impossible, or an intended restoration really leads to an essential modification.

We can consider the attacks of early historicism on the political philosophy which had paved the way for the French Revolution:

The representatives of the ‘historical school’ assumed that certain influential philosophers of the eighteenth century had conceived of the right political order, or of the rational political order, as an order which should or could be established at any time and in any place, without regard to the particular conditions of time and place.

Over against this opinion they [the representatives of the ‘historical school’] asserted that the only legitimate approach to political matters is the historical approach, i.e. the understanding of the institutions of a given country as a product of its past. Legitimate political action must be based on such historical understanding, as distinguished from, and opposed to, the “abstract principles” of 1789 or any other “abstract principles”.

Whatever the deficiencies of eighteenth century political philosophy may be, they certainly do not justify the suggestion that the non-historical philosophical approach must be replaced by a historical approach. Most political philosophers of the past, because of the non-historical character of their thought, distinguished as a matter of course between the philosophic question of the best political order, and the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time. They naturally knew that all political action, as distinguished from political philosophy, is concerned with individual situations, and must therefore be based on a clear grasp of the situation concerned, and therefore often on an understanding of the antecedents of that situation. They took it for granted that political action guided by the belief that what is most desirable in itself must be put into practice in all circumstances, regardless of the circumstances, befits harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men. In short, the truism that all political action is concerned with, and therefore presupposes appropriate knowledge of, individual situations, individual institutions and so on, is wholly irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.

So:

A. Pre-historicist political philosophers distinguished between a) the philosophic question of the best political order, and b) the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time.

B. Political action obviously must be based on a clear grasp of the specifics of the political landscape including the relevant history.

C. A and B are irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.

D. The idea of trying to put into practice a pure philosophic ideal regardless of circumstances is an idea for ‘harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men’.

Many moderns see historicism as coming later therefore being true! They see it as developing in response to the experience of centuries which teaches that non-historical political philosophy is a failure, it produced multiple ideas that refute each other.

Strauss replies that they contradict, not refute, each other. And the idea that non-historical political philosophy has failed because so far it has not taught us the answer to the best regime is hardly an insight we needed from historicism, it is obvious and indeed is implied in the very name “philosophy”! That does not mean you throw the subject out.

The historicists also argue that particular political philosophies were generated by particular historical situations — Plato’s philosophy was essentially related to the classical Greek city, Locke’s philosophy was essentially related to the English Revolution of 1688 etc.

But this is a superficial argument. Political philosophers adapted the expression of their thoughts to their particular situation in order to be listened to. They did not just explain what they considered the truth. They also explained what they considered desirable or feasible in the circumstances and communicated in a manner that was ‘civil’ as well as ‘philosophical’. So showing that their political teaching as a whole is ‘historically conditioned’ does not prove that their political philosophy is ‘historically conditioned’.

A political philosophy does not become obsolete merely because the historical situation, and in particular the political situation to which it was related has ceased to exist. For every political situation contains elements which are essential to all political situations: how else could one intelligibly call all these different political situations “political situations”?…

Classical political philosophy is not refuted … by the mere fact that the [classical] city … has been superseded by the modern state.

Most classical political philosophers considered the city the most perfect political organisation because they compared it to others — tribes, empires, monarchies. They thought the city had civilisation, unlike a tribe, and freedom, unlike the eastern monarchy.

Many continued to believe this. Only in the 19th Century did classical political philosophy ‘in a sense become obsolete’ partly because the modern state could plausibly claim to be ‘at least as much in accordance with the standards of freedom and civilisation as the Greek city had been’. But it was not completely obsolete because classical political philosophy had expounded in a ‘classic’ manner the standards of freedom and civilisation.

Modern democracy has elicited — or perhaps been the outcome of — a reinterpretation of ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’ which could not have been foreseen by classical political philosophy. And there are ‘definite reasons for considering that reinterpretation intrinsically superior to the original version’.

Historicism replaced belief in progress — a belief that stands between the non-historical view of the philosophic tradition and historicism. This belief a) agreed with the old view that there are universally valid standards but b) deviates from it in asserting there is ‘a historical process’, a process of progress in which thought and institutions move towards an order that aligns with universal standards of human excellence.

The philosophers of the past understood themselves in a non-historical manner. They claimed to have found parts of the truth. Historicists must understand the philosophers of the past ‘historically’. Historicists argue the philosophers were wrong. They repeat the sin for which they attacked the ‘progressivist’ historiography.

Our understanding of history improves when we do not think we are superior but when we think we can learn from (not just about) the past. But historicists deny this possibility.

And of course if the historicist thesis is correct then we cannot escape the consequence that the thesis itself is historical therefore valid only for a specific historical situation: it must be applied to itself.

What’s the most convincing argument for the fusion of philosophic and historical studies?

The argument that (1) our political ideas are mostly abbreviations and residues of thoughts from the past, once explicit and clear but then transmitted to later generations in noisy ways. If we want clarity about them then (2) we must delve into the history of those ideas. So (3) the clarification of political ideas insensibly changes into the history of political ideas so the philosophic effort and historical effort become fused.

But classical philosophers like Aristotle did not feel this need — they were clear about political ideas and did not delve into their history.

Modern thought is in all its forms, directly or indirectly, determined by the idea of progress…

If, as we must, we apply historicism to itself, we must explain historicism in terms of the specific character of modern thought, … of modern philosophy. In doing so, we observe that modern political philosophy or science, as distinguished from pre-modern political philosophy or science, is in need of the history of political philosophy or science as an integral part of its own efforts, since, as modern political philosophy or science itself admits or even emphasises, it consists to a considerable extent of inherited knowledge whose basis is no longer contemporaneous or immediately accessible. The recognition of this necessity cannot be mistaken for historicism. For historicism asserts that the fusion of philosophic and historical questions marks in itself a progress beyond ‘naive’ non-historical philosophy, whereas we limit ourselves to asserting that that fusion is, within the limits indicated, inevitable on the basis of modern philosophy, as distinguished from pre-modern philosophy or ‘the philosophy of the future’.

On Classical Political Philosophy

[Originally published in 1945.]

Classical political philosophy was directly related to political life.

It then became a tradition that was more remote from political life.

The classical Greek tradition was rejected in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The new political philosophy was related to political life ‘through the medium of the inherited general notion of political philosophy and through the medium of a new concept of science’.

The modern philosophers tried to replace the teaching and method of the classics but thought political philosophy was necessary and possible.

Today political scientists think they can reject political philosophy and stand in direct relation to political life. They are wrong. They are related to political life through the medium of reactions to modern natural science and through inherited concepts, however despised or ignored.

The most striking difference between the classical political philosophy and today’s political science is that the latter is ‘no longer concerned at all with what was the guiding question for the former: the question of the best political order’. Political science now focuses on methods.

Classical political philosophy accepted the basic distinctions made in political life exactly in the sense and with the orientation in which they are made in political life. It did not start with distinctions such as fact/value, ‘state of nature’, ‘the civil state’, ‘reality’ and ‘ideology’ — distinctions which arise only in philosophical reflection, not from political life. Its main issues were neither philosophic nor scientific but were ‘intelligible and familiar at least to all sane adults from everyday experience and everyday usage’.

Its method was also presented by political life which is characterised by conflicts particularly over what is good for the community and what is just. Parties make arguments and conflict calls for arbitration. And some of the disputes involve permanent problems of paramount importance ‘The umpire par excellence is the political philosopher’ (cf. Plato’s 8th letter 354a1-5, Laws 627d11). The philosopher’s duty was, as a good citizen, to diminish civil strife. To do this he has to ask ulterior questions not normally raised in the political arena but he must keep his fundamental orientation — that which is inherent in political life.

Questions of method only become the fundamental question if this orientation is abandoned and if basic distinctions of political life become treated as ‘subjective’ or ‘unscientific’.

Political life is concerned mainly with an individual community and particular problems. Its highest skill is managing well the affairs of his community, which is a mix of art, prudence, practical wisdom etc. This is what ‘political science’ originally meant — ‘the skill by virtue of which a man could manage well the affairs of political communities by deed and by speech’. It is not a body of true propositions concerning politics transmitted by teachers to pupils’. Someone who possesses ‘political science’ can in principle give advice to, or manage the affairs of, anybody anywhere, like Themistocles.

Speaking became the first object of instruction because action should proceed from deliberation and the element of deliberation is speech. But classical political philosophy rejected the identification of political science with rhetoric and held that rhetoric at its best was only an instrument. Political skill is partly the normal business of governing but at its highest it’s the process of creating the constitutional-legislative framework, intended to be enduring, in which normal political life plays out:

The value of his [any politician’s] achievement depends ultimately on ‘the value of the cause in whose service he acts; and that cause is not his work but the work of him or those who made the laws and institutions of his community. The legislative skill is, therefore, the most ‘architectonic’ political skill that is known to political life. (Cf. Gorgias 464b7-8. And Rousseau: S’il est vrai qu’un grand prince est un homme rare, que sera-ce d’un grand législateur ? Le premier n'a qu’à suivre le modèle que l'autre doit proposer. If it is true that a great prince is a rare man, what will a great legislator be like? The first has only to follow the model that the other must propose.)

So the political philosopher who has reached his goal and learned the truly architectonic knowledge is the one who can teach legislators and who is the umpire par excellence. And this knowledge is transferable to other places and times.

Political controversies presuppose the existence of the political community therefore ‘the classics are not primarily concerned with the question of whether and why there is, or should be, a political community’, nor, therefore, with the nature and purpose of a political community. To question the desirability or necessity of the survival of one’s own community normally means treason so the ultimate aim of foreign policy is not controversial. Classical political philosophy therefore focuses on the inner structure: who governs, what is just, the controversies between groups struggling for power, and these questions involve the danger of civil war.

The groups considered by the classics were: the good (merit), the rich, the noble, and the multitude or the poor, and a central struggle was that between rich and poor.

That form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of the natural aristoi into offices of the government. (Jefferson to John Adams, 1813.)

Good men are those able and willing to advance the common interest regardless of private interests and those who do the right thing because it is noble and right. But it was also accepted by the classics that desirable results can come from men of bad character or by use of unjust means: ‘just’ and ‘useful’ are not identical, virtue can lead to ruin.

Classical political philosophy was therefore practical, not theoretical, and its main concern was the right guidance of political life, not description or understanding. Hegel’s demand that political philosophy refrain from construing a state as it ought to be and from teaching how it should be, and instead try to understand the actual state as rational was a rejection of classical political philosophy.

Classical political philosophy was therefore guided by and culminated in ‘value judgements’. Trying to replace the search for the best political order with a political science supposedly descriptive or analytical that rejects value judgements is, from the point of view of the classics, as absurd as the idea of a medicine which refuses to distinguish between health and sickness.

Distinctions between terms like justice/injustice and kindness/selfishness are moral distinctions intelligible and clear in everyday life, though they cannot be demonstrated or proved. One can silence but not truly convince people who do not have the taste for such moral distinctions just as Socrates could silence but not convert Callicles.

The political teaching of the classical philosophers was not for the intelligent men but for the decent men. Teaching the indecent would have seemed politically irresponsible. Their attitude was that the health of a political community requires its members are guided by decency therefore —

… the political community cannot tolerate a political science which is morally ‘neutral’ and which therefore tends to loosen the hold of moral principles on the minds of those who are exposed to it.

Inevitably the classical political philosopher had to consider what is virtue and what is that virtue whose possession gives a man the highest right to rule?

The philosopher is compelled to transcend not just common opinion and political opinion but political life as such, for he is ‘led to realise that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy’ and this finding sets limits to all political action and political planning. Ultimately political philosophy transforms itself into a discipline no longer concerned with political things in the normal sense but in the philosophical life itself. Socrates called his inquiries a quest for ‘the true political skill’. This philosophic life has vanished in modernity.

Philosophy was originally concerned with ‘the natural things’. Socrates was famous as a philosopher before he turned to political philosophy and became its founder — and Aristotle described political philosophy as ‘the philosophy concerning the human things’. Left to themselves philosophers would not descend to politics but would remain in what they considered ‘the island of the blessed’ — that is the contemplation of the truth (cf. Republic, 519b7-d7). But philosophy’s quest to understand its own purpose and nature — the contemplation of truth — inevitably involves consideration of opinion, of politics.

Why does politics need philosophy? The Republic and similar works were an attempt at a political justification for philosophy by showing that the well-being of the community depends on the study of philosophy. Such a justification was needed given few understood philosophy and, to the extent it was known about in classical Athens, it was often feared and hated — as Socrates experienced. Such justifications, aimed at normal citizens, had, following the example of Odysseus, to build on commonly held views. Strauss therefore argues that ‘political philosophy’ really means not the philosophic treatment of politics ‘but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy’, an attempt to lead people from the political life to the philosophic life.

Introduction to The City and Man

The City and Man — published 1864 based on lectures recently given — has essays on Aristotle, Plato’s Republic and Thucydides.

Strauss opens the book with a series of propositions that go to the heart of modern philosophy, modern politics and what he described as ‘the crisis of the West’.

1. The theme of classical political philosophy is the City and Man.

2. Modern political philosophy presupposes Nature as understood by modern natural science and History as understood by the modern historical awareness.

3. Eventually these presuppositions prove incompatible with modern political philosophy.

4. Thus one seems to be confronted with the choice between abandoning political philosophy altogether and returning to classical political philosophy.

5. Yet such a return seems to be impossible. For what has brought about the collapse of modern political philosophy seems to have buried classical political philosophy, which did not even dream of the difficulties caused by what we believe to know of nature and history.

6. A simple continuation of the tradition of classical political philosophy is no longer possible.

7. As regards modern political philosophy, what originally was a political philosophy has turned into an ideology.

8. This fact may be said to form the core of the contemporary crisis of the West.

Strauss reflects on Spengler’s diagnosis of the decline of the West. For Spengler, the West was more than one high culture among others. The West is the only culture which has conquered the earth, the only culture which is open to all cultures and does not reject them all as forms of barbarism or tolerate them as ‘underdeveloped’, it is the only culture which has developed full consciousness of culture in general. And because it is the culture which reaches full self-consciousness, it is the final culture — the Owl of Minerva begins its flight in the dusk (Hegel’s formulation of the idea that philosophy and wisdom about a period emerge only after the period has passed). The decline of the West is therefore identical with the exhaustion of the possibility of high culture; the highest possibilities of man are exhausted.

But the highest possibilities of man cannot be exhausted as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man remain unsolved. Spengler’s analysis and prediction are wrong. Natural science considers itself susceptible of infinite progress therefore there cannot be a meaningful ‘end of history’, though there could be a ‘brutal stopping of man’s onward march through natural forces acting by themselves or directed by human brains and hands’.

Yet in one sense Spengler has proved to be right. Some decline of the West has occurred before our eyes. In 1913, the West — in the form of Britain, Germany and America — could have laid down the law for the world without firing a shot. Today the West’s survival is endangered by the East for the first time.

From the Communist Manifesto it would appear that the victory of Communism would be the complete victory of the West — of the synthesis, transcending the national boundaries, of British industry, the French Revolution and German philosophy — over the East. We see that the victory of Communism would mean indeed the victory of originally Western natural science but surely at the same time the victory of the most extreme form of Eastern despotism.

Strauss sets out exactly what he thinks the crisis of the West really is:

1. The West was once certain of its purpose — a universal purpose — a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind.

2. We no longer have that certainty. Many despair of the future and this despair explains many forms of contemporary western degradation.

3. A society can be healthy without a universal purpose — it can be tribal and healthy. ‘But a society which was accustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered.’

4. We see this universal purpose echoed in recent declarations during both world wars. These restate the purpose ‘stated originally by the most successful form of modern political philosophy’ which aspired to build on foundations laid by the classics but in opposition to the structure erected by classical political philosophy — ‘a society superior in truth and justice to the society toward which the classics expired.’

According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man’s estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature. Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward ever greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone’s natural right to comfortable self-preservation and all that that right entails or to everyone’s natural right to develop all his faculties fully in concert with everyone else’s doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the progress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presuppose good order in all countries and among all countries. The movement toward the universal society, or the universal state was thought to be guaranteed not only by the rationality, the universal validity, of the goal but also because the movement towards the goal seemed to be the movement of the large majority of men on behalf of the large majority of men: only small groups of men who, however, hold in thrall many millions of their fellow human beings new defend their own antiquated interests, resist that movement.

1. To summarise: a) science lets man conquer nature; b) this brings growing and spreading prosperity thereby fulfilling natural rights to a comfortable life; c) prosperity and comfort mean progress towards ever greater freedom and justice; d) human equality spreads to all societies; e) the world becomes some sort of universal league of free and equal nation states, for the safety of western democracy requires the whole globe becoming democratic; f) this progress will come not only because it is rational but because most people want it.

2. Fascism did not dent this story. But Communism did. For some time Communism seemed to many westerners as ‘a parallel movement to the Western movement — as it were its somewhat impatient, wild wayward twin who was bound to become mature, patient, and gentle’. But Communism responded to friendliness with contempt. Even in mortal danger and eager for Western help it would not give ‘even sincere words of thanks in return’ [a reference to Stalin and Lend Lease etc]. Communism was not a version of the ‘reactionism’ the Western movement had been fighting for centuries. The Western project could not provide against Communism as it had against its previous enemies. ‘For some time it seemed sufficient to say that while the Western movement agrees with Communism regarding the goal – the universal prosperous society, free and equal men and women – it disagrees with it regarding the means: for Communism, the end, the good of the whole human race, being the most sacred thing, justifies any means; whatever contributes to the achievement of the most sacred end partakes of its sacredness and is therefore itself sacred; whatever hinders the achievement of that end is devilish.’ Some murders are acceptable. But it came to be seen that ‘there is not only a difference of degree but of kind between the Western movement and Communism, and this difference was seen to concern morality, the choice of means.’ It became clearer than it had been for some time that no society can eradicate the evil in man: ‘as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy, and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.’ And it became clearer that a) Communism will remain ‘the iron rule of a tyrant which is mitigated or aggravated by his fear of palace revolutions’ and b) ‘the only restraint in which the West can put some confidence is the tyrant’s fear of the West’s immense military power’.

3. Communism has forced the West to face that in the foreseeable future there will not be a universal state, unitary or federative. Even those who still contend the West’s purpose is universal must be satisfied for a while with ‘a practical particularism’, as Christianity and Islam, both based on universal claims, had to accept centuries of uneasy coexistence. The experience which has made the West doubtful of the viability of a world-society has also made it doubtful that affluence is the sufficient and even necessary condition of happiness and justice.

4. Social science has strongly veered into opposing the proposition that the universal and prosperous society constitutes the rational solution of the human problem. Social science proclaims its inability to validate any value judgements [see above on historicism etc]. It sees the modern political philosophy’s teaching about the universal and prosperous society as one ideology among many.

5. The shift in social science reflects the doubts about the modern project. ‘The modern project was originated as required by nature (natural right), i.e. it was originated by philosophers; the project was meant to satisfy in the most perfect manner the most powerful natural needs of men: nature was to be conquered for the sake of man who himself is supposed to possess a nature, an unchangeable nature; the originators of the project took it for granted that philosophy and science are identical. After some time it appeared that the conquest of nature requires the conquest of human nature and hence in the first place the questioning of the unchangeability of human nature: an unchangeable human nature might set absolute limits to progress. Accordingly, the natural needs of men could no longer direct the conquest of nature; direction had to come from reason as distinguished from nature, from the rational Ought as distinguished from the neutral Is. Thus philosophy (logic, ethics, aesthetics) as the study of the Ought or the norms became separated from science as the study of the Is. The ensuing depreciation of reason brought it about that while the study of the Is or science succeeded ever more in increasing men’s power, one could no longer distinguish between the wise or right and the foolish or wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. There are still some people who believe that this predicament will disappear when social science and psychology catch up with physics and chemistry. This belief is wholly unreasonable, for social science and psychology, however perfected, being sciences, can only bring about a still further increase of man’s power; they will enable men to manipulate man still better than ever before; they will as little teach man how to use his power over man or none-man as physics and chemistry do. The people who indulge this hope have not grasped the bearing of the distinction between facts and values.’

6. To summarise… The Western project originated in natural rights of man with an unchangeable nature. Science would conquer nature for the sake of these rights and this nature. But then the conquest of nature required the conquest of human nature and started questioning the unchangeability of human nature. So the conquest of nature had to be directed by reason, not by the natural needs of man. Philosophy became the study of the Ought, science the study of the Is. Science generated greater power but we lost the distinction between the wise/right and the foolish/wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. Progress in natural science will increase power but cannot teach how to use this power well.

7. The decay of political philosophy into ideology reveals itself in the replacement in universities of political philosophy by the history of political philosophy, i.e the replacement of something that seeks truth with a ‘survey of more or less brilliant errors’. Political philosophy will end up as the ‘footnotes to logic textbooks’ which deal with fact/value judgements, supplying slow learners with examples of the faulty transitions in political philosophy from fact to value. [!!]

8. While logic has eaten some of political philosophy, another chunk of what was formerly treated by political philosophy is now treated by social science. But social science asserts that all historical understanding is relative to the point of view of the historian, to his country and time, and the historian cannot understand a teaching as it was meant by its originator.

9. Strauss argues that one cannot understand today’s social science ‘without a return to classical political philosophy’. In studying classical political philosophy one is forced to ask whether the fact/value distinction is true and whether perhaps classical political philosophy is actually the true science of political things. The modern social scientist dismisses this on the basis that a return to the earlier position is impossible but ‘one must realise that this belief is a dogmatic assumption whose hidden basis is the belief in the progress or in the rationality of the historical process’.

10. We must, says Strauss, both return to study of classical political philosophy and face that ‘we cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classical principles as stated and elaborated by the classics are not immediately applicable. Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today. But an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.’

11. The fact/value distinction problem is part of a larger problem — it emerged from the attempt to replace the citizen’s understanding with scientific understanding. But a ‘scientific understanding’ of politics is inevitably secondary or derivative. We must primarily understand political life as it is understood by citizen and statesman. ‘Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.’

This tour of the West’s philosophical-spiritual-epistemic crisis and the problems of modern social science/political science is the prelude to the essays on Aristotle, Plato and Thucydides.

I will start with Thucydides as he was a generation older and, per Nietzsche, his perspective is closer to the pre-Socratics than to Plato, though there are some interesting overlaps. One of the most interesting is the overlap between Thucydides Book III on civil war and Plato in the Republic at 560ff where he discusses the disparagement of moderation — a disparagement so forcefully and famously expressed by Callicles in Gorgias. (And it is a sign of our times that Bronze Age Pervert’s famous book can be accurately summarised by: Callicles was right.)

On Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians

This essay is in The City and Man, 1964.

Here is an online version of Jowett’s translation if you want to follow references.

The world of Thucydides seems entirely different to the world of Plato and Aristotle. Thucydides gives us an intense account of political life in its ‘harsh grandeur, ruggedness, and even squalor’ — a world of civil and foreign war, of life and death struggles. He does not try to transcend it, he stands in the midst of the turmoil. He makes us sympathise with Themistocles and Pericles. He charts the hopes for the Sicilian Expedition and the nightmare of the quarries of Syracuse. [Strauss says he does not try to transcend it — but isn’t the deliberate elucidation of universals, such as the debate on Mitylene and Melos or the tragic expedition to Sicily, an attempt at transcendence?]

It is not the world of political philosophy, the quest for the best regime possible in all its unobtainable splendour. Compared to the philosophical search for the best regime, the just order, politics loses most of its charm — only ‘the charm of the greatness of the founder and legislator seems to survive the severest of all tests’. But perhaps the teachings of Thucydides and Plato supplement each other.

Plato in the Republic describes the best regime at rest. In the Timaeus, Socrates says he wants to see the best regime in motion, i.e at war. Socrates feels unable to present properly the best regime in motion. But Critias tells the story of Athens’ legendary war with Atlantis, in which Athens justly resisted aggression and defended Greece. It reminds us of Thucydides because it is an account of the greatest motion and because the Atlantic war reminds of the Sicilian Expedition.

Thucydides’ great theme is the greatest war, the greatest motion. An Athenian regime seen as imperfect by Plato and Thucydides embarks on the disaster of the Sicilian expedition and destroys itself.

Thucydides says very little about economics, religion or intellectual history. It is a book of politics, war, and diplomacy.

According to Aristotle, history is un-philosophic or pre-philosophic, it deals with individuals (people, states, empires, wars etc). Philosophy is un-historical, it deals with species, with wars and empires in general, with permanent characteristics. Poetry lies between them.

But Thucydides shows us ‘the universal in the individual event’ and this is why his work is supposed to be ‘a possession for all time’ — he says those who read it will understand not just the past but their own times as well, ‘the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’ (Jowett, I.22.4). Strauss says we should not try to understand him in the light of Aristotle’s distinctions. Somewhat like Plato showing the universal through the singular character of Socrates, so Thucydides shows the universal through the specific war he recounts.

Thucydides praises the Spartan regime, which had survived hundreds of years, for its moderation and stability. They were the first to live a style of life peculiarly Greek, ‘a mean between barbaric penury and barbaric pomp’, a style of simplicity and equality. This regime was the source of Spartan power.

Near the end of his book (VIII.96.5), Thucydides summed up the different characters: the Spartans slow and timorous, the Athenians quick and adventurous. The Spartans were prosperous and moderate at the same time. The Athenians became moderate after they were cast down by disaster and fear. Thucydides’ taste in regimes is, says Strauss, the same as Plato’s and Aristotle’s.

He reveals some of his most important thoughts in his reflections on the revolutions and civil wars (III.82-83).

Strauss does not quote it all but I will because, as I’ve written before, it’s maybe the most important and insightful passage ever written about politics. Unlike the speeches, there is no doubt as to the voice — this is explicitly Thucydides’ own judgements.

And revolution brought upon the the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstance. In peace and prosperity, both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities. But war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their conditions.

When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had proceeded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger then the tie of blood because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good, they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest. The seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self preservation. Any agreement sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage, and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious that he would have had in an open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness. Men take a pride in the one but are ashamed of the other.

The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes, yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. Neither faction cared for religion but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both, either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving.

Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed, for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough, to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were more likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off guard and easily destroyed. [!!]

Now in Corcyra, most of these deeds were perpetrated and for the first time. There was every crime which men could commit in revenge who had been governed not wisely, but tyrannically, and now had the oppressor at their mercy. There was the dishonest designs of others who were longing to be relieved from their habitual poverty and were naturally animated by a passionate desire for their neighbour’s goods. And there were crimes of another class which men commit, not from covetousness, but from the enmity which equals foster towards one another until they are carried away by their blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty. At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Such were the passions which the citizens of Corcyra first of all Hellenes displayed towards one another. (III, 82-4, Jowett translation.)

Strauss summarises it as: moderation, justice and piety belong together and their enemy calls itself daring and shrewdness or intelligence. While causation is not exact, there is a kinship between foreign war and civil war: war is a violent teacher, a teacher of violence by violence, an intermediate stage between peace and civil war. Even if moderation is a handicap in war, it remains superior. Depravation is above all the destruction of moderation and the depravity of civil war mirrors the depravity of the plague that hit Athens and swept away moderation, piety, law and fear of the gods.

We also hear Thucydides’ own voice when he talks in horror of the massacre by the Thracians of every living thing in Mycalessus — every adult, every child and every beast, they stormed the school and killed all the children, ‘no calamity more deplorable occurred during the war’ (VII.29).

We also hear his voice in his judgement on the tragic Nicias, sent to command the Sicilian Expedition. He was dedicated to the war and was a pious man who strove to behave properly yet was executed:

No one of the Hellenes in my time was less deserving of so miserable an end, for he lived in the practice of every virtue. (VII.86.5)

The Corinthian speech urging Sparta to war (I.68-71) also stresses Spartan moderation, slowness to fight, reliability, old-fashionedness in contrast to Athenian daring, innovation, quickness etc. The Spartan King Archidamus, famous for intelligence and moderation, wanted to preserve the peace (I.79-85). He asserts that the Spartan qualities the Corinthians objected to are the cause of her greatness. Moderation guarantees against hubris, against insolent pride and abjectness in disaster.

And, says Strauss, Thucydides makes clear that the Athenians compelled Sparta to go to war, that most Greeks and Delphi sided with Sparta, the plague smote Athens, and Athens’ empire appeared to most — as Pericles himself told the Assembly — as ‘a tyranny’.

You have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you… For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have been unjustly gained, but which cannot be safely surrendered… To be hateful and offensive has ever been the fate of those who have aspired to empire. (2.63 and cf. V.104-5)

And Pericles could openly envisage the possibility of Athens’ fall — ‘Even if we should be compelled at last to abate somewhat of our greatness, for all things have their times of growth and decay’, he says in one speech.

The Funeral Speech is an epic, glittering, forever famous account of Athens’ greatness but that’s Pericles speaking, not Thucydides. Strauss thinks Thucydides was overall more sympathetic to the Spartan regime. Pericles in his three speeches does not mention moderation (sophrosyne).

Athens became its most powerful under Pericles but was not the best, most just, regime. It was a democracy in name but in fact the rule of Pericles. At II.65) Thucydides summarises Pericles’s career:

1. Under him Athens reached the height of its greatness.

2. The war showed he’d formed ‘a true estimate of Athenian power’. (I’m also studying Andy Marshall and ‘net assessment’ and this connects.)

3. His great foresight and transparent integrity were missed after his death.

4. His advice of strategic patience and defensiveness was ignored in favour of adventures which proved ruinous.

5. ‘He led them rather than was led by them.’

Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each one struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus the son of the King joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions. So that at the time Pericles was more than justified in the conviction at which his foresight had arrived, that the Athenians would win an easy victory over the unaided forces of the Peloponnesians.

At VIII.97, Thucydides gives his judgement on the best Athenian regime and it was the oligarchy of 411, the oligarchy of the Five Thousand (after they deposed the 400), not the famous democracy under Pericles:

This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered. And thus after the miserable state into which she had fallen the city was again able to raise her head.

Strauss writes that for Thucydides, a city is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The healthy city looks up not to the laws it can make and unmake but to the unwritten laws, the divine laws, to the gods of the city. The great city must transcend itself. A city can be guilty of hubris and disregard the divine law: the speech of the ambassadors at Melos was followed by disaster in Sicily. (But Strauss also refers to this as ‘the most comprehensive instruction which Thucydides silently conveys, the silent character of of the conveyance being required by the chaste character of his piety’.)

Much more than Herodotus, he looks for natural explanations over divine explanations. He belongs to the Athens in which Anaxagoras and Protagoras taught and were prosecuted for impiety. The Funeral Speech was silent about the divine law and Pericles noticeably does not talk of the gods in his three speeches. His only reference to the superhuman is the need to bear its effects ‘of necessity’.

Speeches

Strauss analyses (p163) the controversial question of the speeches and the extent to which they express Thucydides’s own ideas.

Thucydides suggests that we can not only be deeply confused about ancient things but about things happening right in front of us. He stresses his reports are based on what he saw and heard himself and what he learned from others ‘of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry’.

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand. (I.20)

Strauss singles out some speeches:

• Brassidas, IV.85ff.

• Hermocrates, IV.59, who brilliantly foresaw the Athenian expedition but was ignored.

• Alcibiades in Sparta, VI.89, twisting and turning to justify his previous behaviour.

• Athenagoras, VI.36, the Sicilian demagogue who told the people not to believe reports of the Athenian expedition and argued that the only thing that will end the subversive network of Syracuse’s aristocratic youth is democratic terror, a terror justified because there is no decent basis for opposing the democratic regime. It is, says Strauss, the ‘clearest and most comprehensive exposition of the democratic view’ in the book, for the Funeral Speech is about the Athenian regime under Pericles which is not the same as pure democracy.

• Cleon, III.37, on how ‘a democracy cannot manage an empire’.

• The contrasting pre-battle speeches of the Spartans and Athenian Phormio in which the former appeals to self-interest (fear and glory) while Phormio appeals to public spirit, a clear though implicit contrast, says Strauss, confirming the Corinthian characterisation of the Athenians at the start of the war.

• The unnamed Athenian who speaks at I.72 in Sparta. The speech is unique in being the only one preceded by a summary by Thucydides. Here the Athenian envoys claimed that their true claim to the empire was the intelligence of Themistocles and the zeal of the Athenians at Salamis when they saved Greece. They also claim that they were compelled to build their empire— compelled by fear, interest and honour, the three great motives of man, i.e they were compelled by human nature. And it is fairness that distinguishes their empire from others. This ‘amazing frankness’ truly reveals Athenian power, says Strauss, because ‘only the most powerful can afford to utter the principles which they utter’.

• The Athenian speech should be contrasted with the sole Spartan speech in Athens, IV.17ff, after Sparta’s disaster at Pylos. The Athenians have come out ahead partly by good luck, say the Spartans. But good luck can’t be relied on so it would be wise to cut a good deal now. (Strauss comments that Sparta ceded much more after the disaster at Pylos than Athens after the disaster of Sicily.)

Strauss argues that the first speech in the book opens with the word ‘just’ (right) and the second, replying to the first, starts with ‘necessary’ (compulsory). The relation of justice and necessity is a core theme of Thucydides, a theme ‘so unobtrusively and so subtly indicated’ showing the point of view from which Thucydides looks on the War.

Thucydides says of the origins of the war that:

1. The ‘truest’, but unavowed, cause of the war was Sparta’s fear of Athens’ growing power.

2. This fear of Athens ‘compelled’ Sparta to go to war. Sparta’s actions were more driven by feelings of compulsion than of justice, says Thucydides.

3. There were conflicts in the buildup that seemed to be the causes but were not really, including the row over Corcyra, Thebes’ invasion of Plataeae, the Megarian decree — the ‘avowed’ causes.

4. The Spartan King denied that the Athenians had broken the treaty (78.4, 81.5, 85.2). The ephor contended that Athens had done wrong to Sparta’s allies and the Spartan Assembly agreed (86-88). At IV.20, after the Pylos disaster, the Spartans say to the Athenians ‘whether we or you drove [Greece] into war is uncertain’.

5. At V.20.1, he says that the war started with the invasion of Attica implying Sparta had broken the treaty. The Spartans acknowledged this to themselves by the end of the first phase of the war. At VII.18.2, the Spartans reflect, after Athens embarks on the Sicilian Expedition, that, ‘They considered also that this time [in the second phase of the war] they [Athens] had been the first offenders against the treaty whereas in the former war the transgression had rather been on their own [Sparta’s] side. For the Thebans had entered Plataea in time of peace and they themselves had refused arbitration when offered by the Athenians, although the former treaty forbade war in case an adversary was willing to submit to arbitration. They felt their ill-success was deserved… The Spartans concluded that the guilt of their former transgression was now shifted to the Athenians…’

6. So Athens was in the right in the first part and Thucydides makes clear in his own voice at VI.105 that Sparta was in the right in the second part: ‘the Athenians gave the Spartans a right to complain of them and completely justified measures of retaliation’.

Ananke

[Ananke (ἀνάγκη) was a noun (constraint, necessity, force) and a goddess depicted holding a spindle — a goddess of fate and mother of the Fates. Aeschylus refers to her above.]

Compulsion justifies an act which in itself would be unjust (IV.98).

The Athenians acted unjustly and were propelled by hubris.

But the Athenians claimed (I.75) they were compelled to build their empire by honour, glory and fear — of Persia and Sparta. And at IV.98 they say that actions compelled by the necessity of war are forgiven by gods.

At Melos (V.85ff) the Athenian ambassadors famously warned that the Melians should consider not justice but their real situation and Athens’ power to compel them. Athens cannot tolerate islands remaining free, it will encourage revolts against her power. Yielding to an overwhelming force is not disgraceful but prudent. They should not unwisely trust in prayers or gods.

But you and we should say what we really think and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must. (V.89)

It is for the interests of us both that you not be destroyed. (91) Your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship, for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness. (95)

For of the gods we believe and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. (105) Many men with their eyes still open to the consequences have found the word ‘honour’ too much for them, and have suffered a mere name to lure them on, until it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities; through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonour than fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you will not run this risk… To maintain our rights against equals, to be politic with superiors, and to be moderate towards inferiors is the path of safety. (111)

The Melians trusted in gods and Sparta and rejected Athens’ offer. All men of military age were killed, women and children were enslaved. (Sparta similarly allowed the Thebans to massacre the Plataeans but the speeches are not so dramatic so it is much less remembered! The Spartans simply asked the Plataeans — have you done us any service? — and then killed them all. I.e they acted just as the Athenians described them to the Melians! III.68)

We should contrast the earlier case of Mitylene. Here the Athenian Assembly decided to slaughter the men and enslave the women and children but they then felt queasy and changed their minds. Cleon the demagogue criticised their change of heart. He reminded them that ‘your empire is a despotism’ and the ‘allies’ are ‘held down by force’ (cf. II.63). Cleon also warns against clever speeches for mercy which have been procured by bribery [NB. 2022-5 anybody who warns about the Ukraine war is accused of being ‘a Putin shill’ etc].

For if they were right in revolting, you must be wrong in maintaining your empire. But if, right or wrong, you are resolved to rule, then rightly or wrongly they must be chastised for your good… Chastise them as they deserve and prove by an example to your other allies that rebellion will be punished with death. (III.40)

Diodotus argued only to kill a few and spare the rest. He explicitly rests his argument on expediency, not justice. The Mitylenaeans deserve punishment but that isn’t the point.

The question for us rightly considered is not, what are their crimes? But what is for our interest?… We are not at law with them and do not want to be told what is just. We are considering a matter of policy.

He even asks them not to be misled by ‘the superior justice’ of Cleon’s argument! Fear of slaughter does not deter colonies from revolting. But it might make people dig in and make our lives harder. Endless sieges waste our money and when we win we take over wrecks! Slaughter will push oligarchs and the people together for the latter will know we will slaughter them all anyway. The Athenians narrowly agreed with Diodotus and a second message was sent to cancel the slaughter.

Melos and Sicily

The Melian dialogue contains the clearest expression in Thucydides of the denial of a divine law which must be respected or which moderates a city’s desire for having more. And Pericles himself encouraged the idea that Athens could and should desire to have more. Callicles and Thrasymachus assert that stronger individuals do and should desire to have more. Can you encourage citizens to think their state can have more than others without also encouraging individuals to think the same? Strauss argues that Pericles did not realise that the unjust understanding of the common good is bound to undermine dedication to the common good and did not give sufficient weight to the precarious character of the harmony between private and public interest.

The Sicilian Expedition was contrary to Pericles’ strategy for the war: caution, patience, preserve the navy and no big gambles. But Thucydides is clear that its failure was not because of hubris or as punishment from the gods for Melos or because it was strategically doomed — he stresses that it could have worked. Athens lost the war because of disunity at home and competitive pressures among the elites.

Pericles derived his authority from his obviously superior capacity and integrity. He was honest with the demos and told them unpleasant truths. But after he died elites vied to be pre-eminent and sacrificed the public interest by pandering to ‘the whims of the people’. This culminated in the disaster with Sicily. Athens did not miscalculate the strength of her opponents but its elites were ‘occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership’ and became ‘embroiled in civil strife’. Thucydides stressed the fact that Athens still held out after the Sicilian disaster and Persia joined in and was only finally undone by ‘their own internal dissensions’ — the failure of the unity and patriotism celebrated in Pericles’ funeral speech — which demonstrated how right Pericles had been in his judgement that a patient, careful and united Athens would win. (II.65)

He makes clear that the conflict between private and public interests was central to the Sicilian disaster. At VI.15.4, he makes clear that Athens would have won if they had not replaced Alcibiades. The demos did not trust his wild audacity. Although his military skills were unrivalled they entrusted the war to others ‘and so they speedily shipwrecked the state’. Nicias was virtuous but did not have the temperament or skills for such a project.

Alcibiades had gone to Sicily as a general. But the Athenians were overwhelmed with fears after the infamous profaning of the mysteries and thought there was an aristocratic plot to overthrow the democracy. Alcibiades was summoned back from Sicily. Realising the febrile mood in Athens, where many had been executed on flimsy evidence of informers, he jumped ship and made his way to the Spartans. [Critias was arrested but released.] He tried an audacious game — to play Spartans against Athenians, the Persian King against Spartans and Athenians, the Athenian oligarchs and the demos against each other, hoping to be king of Athens and more.

Strauss points to the discussion between Demosthenes and Nicias in Sicily. Leaders had to fear the action of the demos when things went wrong. Demosthenes suggested returning to Athens and abandoning the venture. Nicias replied that the demos would take a dim view, he and Demosthenes would be accused of treachery by demagogues and be disgraced. So he preferred to stay in Sicily and be killed by his enemies. (VII.47-48) For Strauss, Nicias behaved out of justified fear of disgrace ‘like a traitor’. Thucydides states that he deserved his fate ‘least of the Greeks of my time … because of his full devotion to the pursuit of virtue as understood by old established custom’.

Nicias like the Melians trusted in the gods. Both were disappointed. The hopes of both were unfounded.

The Spartan manner and the Athenian manner

Strauss writes that Thucydides understood ‘cause’ as meaning most importantly the character of the regimes, which he saw as more important than things like economies and climate, and the course of the war is the ‘self-revelation of Sparta and Athens’.

The Athenians on Melos say that the Spartans identify what is pleasant with what is honourable and what is expedient with what is just — and it is often dangerous to pursue the just and the Spartans dislike such risks. Athens, by implication, is profoundly different: it will not pretend that what is expedient is also what’s just. And the Athenians soon disgracefully massacre the Melians.

Pericles’ Funeral Speech is the grandest summary of the Athenian character and why Athens is worth dying for. The qualities which distinguish her are those least associated with Sparta such as generosity, freedom, love of beauty and wisdom. The ultimate justification of the empire is not compulsion, fear, or profit but everlasting glory.

Contrast Themistocles and Pausanias, king of Sparta. The former was something without Athens because he was distinguished by his extraordinary talents. The latter was nothing without Sparta and his treachery was not a threat. Thucydides presents a galaxy of outstanding Athenians and only one outstanding Spartan: Brasidas. While Thucydides prefers the Spartan regime to the extreme democracy, he makes abundantly clear that it is Athens which produces amazing individuals.

Even the loathsome Cleon contrasts favourably with Alcidas the Spartan whom the Spartans trusted more than they did Brasidas. Alcidas slaughtered various Athenian allies simply following Spartan practice until it was pointed out to him by some Spartan allies that his slaughter would make it harder to build alliances. It’s clear the thought never occurred to him. Alcidas is, says Strauss, lower than even Cleon.

The only Spartan who really gives weight by his conduct to the Spartan claim to be ‘liberators’ was Brasidas. Pericles did not make such claims, he simply argued the war was necessary to retain the empire. His Funeral Speech shows the harmony of Athens and the harmony between himself and the demos based on the harmony between Pericles’ private and public interest.

Contrast what Athens/Mitylene and Sparta/Plataeae show us about them as judges. The crime of Plataeae is loyalty to Athens. The crime of Mitylene is breaking a treaty. The Plataeaeans are massacred without a voice raised in their defence. Mitylene is condemned and reprieved. The Athenians discuss not just guilt/justice but also expediency. The Spartans consider openly only guilt and revenge — but of course in reality they regard enabling the Thebans’ hatred as in their own self-interest, i.e the Spartans act just as the Athenians on Melos warned the island: Sparta defined their self-interest as justice.

Contrast what Athens/ Sicily and Sparta/Pylos show us about them in adversity. The Spartans immediately sued for peace after the 300 were cut off. The surrender was so shocking — so striking in its symmetry to Thermopylae — that it was not until Sparta’s victory at Mantinea that they shook off the disgrace: they ‘wiped out the charge of cowardice … and of general stupidity and sluggishness… They were now thought to have been hardly used by fortune [at Pylos] but in character to be the same as ever’ (V.75). But Athens responded to the Sicilian disaster not with appeals for peace but with another huge effort.

The only time Thucydides uses the noun eros was in describing the eros of the Athenians for the Sicilian Expedition (VI.24.3). [Jowett translates it as ‘All alike were seized with a passionate desire to sail’, Hobbes as ‘every one alike fell in love with the enterprise’.] Strauss points out that Pericles had called upon the Athenians to become lovers (erastai) of their city. These lovers now wanted to adorn their city with Sicily — a willingness to sacrifice everything, all private interests. Also compare Pericles’ famous comment about the old parents losing their only son and Alcibiades (VI.16.5) saying that only glory after death brings harmony between private and public interest.

Strauss argues — if the highest eros is that for the city and if the city reaches its peak in an eros like that of Athens for Sicily, then eros is necessarily tragic — as Plato suggests, the city is the tragedy par excellence.

Most excellent of Strangers [i.e the tragic poets], we ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fairest drama, which, as our hope is, true law, and it alone, is by nature competent to complete. (Laws 817b)

At VIII.96 Thucydides describes the Spartans’ lack of initiative as what made them ‘the most convenient enemies the Athenians could possibly have had’: the Athenians were quick and adventurous; the Spartans were slow and timorous. The Syracusans ‘who were most like them’ fought best against Athens.

Sparta wins, says Strauss, only by becoming more Athenian. Athens, the teacher of Greece, taught Sparta to be more like her.

The questionable universalism of the city

Strauss stresses again: the failure in Sicily was not because of hubris, it could have worked. And afterwards Athens has the success of Kynossema, just as Sparta recovered from Pylos with Mantinea, a success which restores Athenian morale and hope (VIII.106). This improvement came, though, after a shift to the regime of the Five Thousand (VIII.97) and decision to welcome back Alcibiades, whom the demos thought the only one who could save them and somehow break up the alliance of Sparta and Persia. (The real mover behind the extreme oligarchy of the 400 was Antiphon who Thucydides praised for his great virtue and ‘remarkable powers of thought and gifts of speech’ but who preferred not to speak publicly (VIII.68). When the regime fell and Antiphon had to give a speech in his own defence, it was the greatest made ‘tried on a capital charge down to my time’.)

Pericles’ Funeral Speech glorifying Athens points towards a longing for sempiternal and universal fame and perhaps universal empire: during the war, the conquest of Sicily, Carthage and all Greece is envisaged. This is the opposite of moderation. And there is also in Athens the universalism of love of beauty and wisdom.

Thucydides bases the eternal fame of his work — ‘a possession for all time’ — on the fact it brings to light the sempiternal and universal nature of man as the ground of the deeds, speeches, and thoughts it records. And in groping towards an understanding of Thucydides, we understand war and peace, Greeks and barbarians, Athens and Sparta, human nature and politics. And it is Thucydides’ work which brings eternal fame for Periclean Athens. Strauss says there is the universalism of the city, of Athens, and the universalism of understanding, of Thucydides’ history.

In Athens, two universalisms become fused — the political universalism is transfigured by the true universalism of beauty and wisdom, and thus acquires its tragic character. But the synthesis of the two universalisms is impossible and only by seeing this can we understand the grandeur of the attempt to overcome it.

[I do not understand what Strauss is saying about universalism. Feel free to take a stab in comments!]

Wisdom is inseparable from self-knowledge. We know from Thucydides himself that he was an Athenian. Through understanding him we see that his wisdom was made possible ‘by the sun’ and by Athens — by her power and wealth, by her defective polity, by her spirit of daring innovation, by her active doubt of the divine law. By understanding his work one sees with one’s own eyes that Athens was in a sense the home of wisdom in others. Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle, in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said’. It can only be ‘done’. Only through understanding Thucydides’ work can one see that Athens was in a sense the school of Greece; from Pericles’ mouth we merely hear it asserted. Wisdom cannot be presented by being spoken about.

Thucydides believes in moderation and piety. The men of noble simplicity and the men of Odyssean versatility both became victims of the second rate ruthless power-seekers (III.83 above). Diodotus’ speech reveals more of Thucydides himself than any other speech. Its powerful contrast with Cleon comes from its moderation — an act of humanity compatible with Athens’ survival. But Diodotus goes into the core problems of a democracy: speakers are trying to manipulate the audience for their own prestige and power, people regard as wise those the voters agree with, there’s a tendency to accuse others of stupidity or evil/treachery, it’s extremely hard to distinguish between charlatans and wise honest men. Voters won’t trust an idea unless they trust the speaker but their criteria for trust are irrational. So the wise and moderate are incentivised to lie too!

Gomme says Diodotus comes close to denying the value of free debate but Strauss says it’s tougher than that — he explains the problems of democracy so clearly as to point to a different regime in which the moderate and sensible have more sway. What Diodotus says at III.42 is much tougher than what Pericles says at II.62.1.

In this city, and in this city only, to do good openly and without deception is impossible… [W]henever you meet with a reverse, led away by the passion of the moment you punish the individual who is your adviser for his error of judgement, and your own error you condone, if the judgements of many concurred in it.

He asks — is capital punishment effective, does it deter? No — nomos is weaker than physis (III.45).

For poverty inspires necessity with daring; and wealth engenders avarice in pride and insolence; and the various conditions of human life, as they severely fall under the sway of some mighty and fatal power, through the agency of the passions lure men to destruction… In a word, then, it is impossible, and simply absurd to suppose, that human nature [physis] when bent upon some favourite project can be restrained either by the power of law [nomos] or by any other terror.

It’s a complex rhetorical argument, I won’t go into details (cf. p233ff).

Political history and philosophy

Thucydides is not just a political man, not just a historian who sees the singulars in the light of universals, he is a philosophic historian. He is not radically alien to Plato and Aristotle. He and Plato are in fundamental agreement regarding the good and bad and noble and base.

Plato sketches what he thinks is the best regime. Pericles and Athenagoras speak of the ideal regime but Thucydides does not in his own voice. Thucydides states only what he thinks is the best regime Athens had in his life, a mixed regime neither pure democracy nor pure oligarchy. At VIII.97.2 he writes of the Five Thousand:

This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered.

In the third book of Laws, Plato surveys a similar period of history as Thucydides’ pre-history to the war. And the Menexenus calls for comparison with the Funeral Speech, argues Strauss. Plato blames the shift from the regime that won the Persian Wars to the extreme democracy on the disregard of ancestral laws on music and theatre. By making the audience — rather than the best and wisest — the judges of songs and plays, Athens decayed (Laws, 698a9ff; 700a5-701c4). Plato says the land battles of Marathon and Plataeae (i.e hoplites) saved Greece, not Salamis (the navy). But the story in Thucydides suggests that Athens had no choice but to develop the navy and this meant extending the political voice of the poor who manned the ships. Democracy was not wilful folly but a necessity.

For Plato, chance mostly decides which regimes are established and human choices operate only in very narrow limits.

Strauss says the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole may be that the order of cities presupposed in the most noble Spartan proclamations is impossible — given the unequal power of states, hegemony and empire, international relations, inevitably develop. This attacks a fundamental presupposition of classical political philosophy, it ‘excludes the kind of self-sufficiency of the city which classical political philosophy presupposes’. Aristotle went so far as to imagine a city which has no ‘foreign relations’ at all. The city is neither self-sufficient nor part of a just order compromising many cities. The omnipresence of war in Thucydides ‘puts a lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted’.

Thucydides’ focus is the problems around him. Philosophy tries to ascend from what is first for us to what is first by nature. This ascent requires that what is first for us be understood as well as possible first, that is, with eyes like Thucydides’. Political understanding must start from seeing man as immersed in political life — it cannot start from ‘seeing the city as the Cave’. We must look at what Thucydides says about oracles, earthquakes, eclipses, Nicias’ suffering, Cylon, the purification of Delos — that is, with those things which classical political philosophy barely alludes to and which modern ‘scientific’ historians ignore or are irritated by.

We need to try to see the city as it understood itself, as described in the amazing book by Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, as distinguished from how it was depicted in classical political philosophy. We must try to see it as a holy city, as a pre-philosophic city — a city which sees itself as subservient to the divine.

Only by beginning at this point will we be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it — the question quid sit deus. [What is god?]

PS. Thucydides is often remarked to be sceptical about oracles and god so it’s important to note that, remarkably, he also states that that ‘the solitary instance in which those who put their faith in oracles were justified by the event’ was the length of the war which, at 27 years, was exactly what the oracles had widely predicted at the start, as was widely remarked on throughout the war. Amazing…

Further Reading

The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom (taught by Strauss).

Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, Merzer.

Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, Mansfield.

Strauss’ lectures on Nietzsche.

Some SNIPPETS

I’ll paste these into a different blog soon but for now...

SHOR on 24

David worked in the data science team of the Obama campaign 2012.

He works with advanced technology in his political research firm.

I’ve watched him for years. His personal politics are quite far left, as he says himself. But unlike the vast majority of DEMs, I’ve noticed he has tried very hard to keep an objective view of voters.

I wrote back in 2021-22 that the DEMs should listen to him and his warnings. They did not.

His company did 26M interviews in 2024. Per Vote Leave’s approach in 2016, he does not seek the old goal of ‘a representative sample’, he seeks much more data and uses clever maths to figure out what it means. (If interested in the maths behind this, google papers by mathematician Andrew Gelman such as his paper on MRP using X-box.)

Overall DS’s polls in 2024 had an error about 0.3% nationally.

I’ve summarised some of the key points from his chat with Ezra Klein of the NYT. His charts are here.

Turnout in key states the same as 2020 (overall slightly down). DEMs did NOT lose ‘because of a lack of motivation in their base’. They lost because voters in key states changed their minds.

Racial depolarisation. From the 1960s there was a huge racial re-alignment starting with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It played out over decades but now the story is changing.

Whites barely shifted since 2016 (though within whites there’s been polarisation, see below). Blacks shifted towards Trump a bit. Asians more. Hispanics a lot.

Non-whites are voting less as ethnic blocks and more on basis of ideology.

Immigrants and naturalised citizens swung towards Trump a lot. Trump up by 5-10 points in some places with most immigrants. Trump did better in places like New York and California. This wasn’t efficient for Trump in the key states but it’s important for the future.

Educational polarisation across the West is key to understand the last decade and 2024. Graduates moving Left, non-graduates Right.

Politically engaged voters became more pro-DEM. Highest turnout areas increased support for KH (right hand graph below). NYT readers have become even MORE liberal since 2020 while the country has shifted other way. [This connects to my point about SW1 hacks, pundits, political science professors etc: they have shifted Left but don’t realise it.)

But politically disengaged voters became much more pro-Trump. People who did not vote in 2020 were slightly pro-Biden, people who didn’t vote in 2024 were +14 for Trump (lefthand graph below). Blacks who did NOT vote were more pro-Trump than those who did vote.

The DEMs have said for decades ‘if everyone votes we win.’ This is the first election for decades this is false.

If only 2022 voters had voted in 2024 — Kamal wins popular vote and electoral college.

If everyone had voted — Trump wins in a landslide.

The Left DEMs arguing their problem was a lack of turnout of their base are WRONG.

Sex polarisation and shifts among the young.

Among voters under 26 years old, the only race-by-gender group to have majority support for Harris are non-white women. White men, white women, and non-white men under 26 all supported Trump at rates greater than 50%.

What’s Shor most shocked/frightened by? The chart below. Young have gone from most progressive since baby boomers to maybe the most conservative generation in over half a century. And the huge male/female gap among the young is unprecedented. (The ‘gender gap’ is quite recent — conservatives used to do a bit better with women. This gap is also a western issue, not just US.)

The cause is probably not inflation or other things that affected people in similar ways. Is it other cultural issues and changing media-information dynamics?

Online communities are much more polarised between sexes so not surprising: algorithms etc pull men to UFC and Rogan etc.

Trump was the same level of popularity in 2024 as 2020. But KH was less popular than Biden in 2020.

Mike Donilon: the switch was ‘insane’, the DEM party ‘lost its mind’ in making the switch.

DS: But the Biden regime became very unpopular and it would have been even harder for Biden to escape his record than for KH!

DS investigated issue salience. Cost of living was clearly the top issue. (I wrote this repeatedly on this blog in 2023-4 but weirdly many elite DEMs tried to persuade themselves that they could win with abortion.)

If you look at a graph with issue importance vs which party do you trust most — GOP is ahead on all main things except health.

Trump’s personal unpopularity made the election closer than it could have been.

The ’soul of America’ bombed. 80-20 Delivering change for people’s lives vs ‘preserving our institutions’. (I wrote in 2023 that the ‘soul of America’ spiel didn’t work in 2020 and wouldn’t work in 2024. This was obvious from focus groups but often the principal has an idea and won’t listen to evidence.)

Education used to be a great issue for Democrats but now it’s pretty close. Reproductive rights changed after Dobbs. But not nearly enough.

DS ran RCTs to explore effectiveness of ads.

Two KH ads in top 1% — both on cost of living.

A/ KH on cost of living. Lowering food and grocery bills.

B/ By Future Forward (a PAC). Attacks Trump on raising prices and a national sales tax, KH will cut taxes for working Americans.

Reinforces: COL was main issue.

Paraphrasing discussion from about minute 43:

EK: the DEMs had the data you gathered — so did they do what the data suggested?

DS: no they did not focus enough on COL, too much focus on ‘defending democracy, defending institutions’. (DS is diplomatic but the conclusion is clear.)

EK: But WHY, Plouffe isn’t a dummy?!

DS: They’re surrounded by donors, activists etc saying we have to focus on DT’s terrible comments — they want to focus on democracy, we test it, it doesn’t work, we tell donors and strategists that voters want to hear about the cost of EGGS but they don’t want to hear it! It feels wrong to them, they think they MUST make these arguments about institutions.

EK: The campaign ended up with KH in DC with very institutional pictures, DT was in McDonald’s.

DS: Campaigns reflect the culture of the staff! Look at the numbers on change vs preserving institutions: Do you want a) a return to ‘basic stability’ or b) ‘major change and a shock to the system’? Voters preferred B by 53-37! But the staff argued what they believe. (NB. I keep making this point here too but SW1 has resisted this for 20 years and continued despite Brexit. See below re Professor Ansell).

EK: seems data suggests both a) voters want huge change, but b) DEMs who win seem to be moderate and not radical?

DS: voters wanted someone reflecting their anger about all the things wrong and someone who will ‘shake things up’ on their behalf, but most don’t want revolutionary policy change on economy, services etc.

Trump strategy and confusion over ‘moderate’. Insiders generally and the Democrats have struggled from 2015 to figure out the strategic positioning of Trump. This is partly aesthetic. Insiders were a) repelled by his entire approach on immigration and some other issues which they defined as ‘extreme’ then b) decided he was generally ‘extreme’ then c) ignored the evidence that crucial voting blocs did not and do not see him as extreme — in fact they saw/see him as more moderate than Republican presidential candidates for decades. Again I wrote about this many times.

To his credit, EK discusses this.

DS: Working class swing voters are left on some issues but right on others — while issue correlations for voters with more education are much more highly correlated. Contra media, more voters thought ‘Kamala is more left than me’ (49%) than ‘Trump is more conservative than me’ (39%). Media confusion over this is similar to 2016. In 2020 Trump broke with the GOP ruled out a national abortion ban, he disavowed Project 2025, he ruled out cuts on Medicare and Social Security. This was important — it made him seem less extreme than we think he is!

How important was DEI/w*ke etc?

DS: The ‘they/them’ ad was a 70th percentile ad, Trump’s best testing ads were on cost of living and crime. Elite discourse post election exaggerates importance of these issues and that ad — but probably more important for young males. [Seems likely to be right to me.]

Share of younger people getting news from TikTok is 4x in four years and correlates with vote. TikTok is more decentralised and lets content that wouldn’t normally be seen in other networks, algorithm is much less about follower count, it’s more random. This probably helped GOP. TikTok’s audience is less politically engaged and more working class, so people who DEMs have struggled to talk to. DEM campaigning class used to be close to the media gatekeepers but we’re not close to the TikTok content creators.

The future?

DS has looked at DT policies, executive orders etc. Some are very popular — voter ID, troops to border. Some are very unpopular — tax cuts for rich, attacking Obamacare.

DS — we need to focus on the issues the voters care about most and not fall for Trump’s baiting. Attack should be: he’s cutting health and social security to fund lower taxes for billionaires.

DS: Trump is vulnerable. The most predictable thing is — a President wins the trifecta, overreaches, loses midterms. JFK 1962 and Clinton 1998, rare examples of escaping normal pattern in midterms — both governed in a restrained way and tried hard NOT to piss a lot of people off.

[Their discussion assumes Trump will walk into these traps. Maybe he will. But there are also signs the White House may shape the budget in different ways. If I were them, I would have some high profile examples of tax laws that help the richest and are not economically justifiable in a Hayek/Freedman sense then change them and say — we’re fixing these problems that give unjustifiable help to billionaires and we’re using money from this to help the cost of living for normal families etc. And I would take tens of millions out of paying federal income tax completely. This would be a nightmare for the DEMs. In No10 I argued for massively raising the 40% threshold to at least 100k to take millions out of paying it. It would have been a political home run but the Tories are so SW1 such ideas seem ‘crazy’ to them.]

A danger for DEMs: we win midterms because a lot of the 2024 voters don’t bother but we don’t fix our strategic problems and then hit the 2028 cycle against a less unpopular Republican and lose again when those disengaged people vote like in 2024.

DS: The GOP ran some very bad Senate candidates which helped us. But it’s hard for the DEMs to take the Senate without improving our brand with working class voters who are crucial for Senate control. Look at data in Nebraska, the place we most over-performed in Senate: he did it by running as an Independent and there is potential in running non-Democrat but Independent candidates in Red states because of the DEM branding!

[I’ve made this argument to Tories with zero success — there’s many places the Tories shouldn’t compete in given their branding but should encourage and support ‘independents’. Tories hate it because they don’t want to face hard questions about hatred for them.]

Things I think Insiders will really struggle to absorb given how they’ve behaved since 2016 — obviously I don’t mean all Insiders but it’s important to understand the general herding dynamics of Insiders which we see repeatedly and which generally dominates individual exceptions, particularly in SW1 which is much more groupthinky/homogenous than America.

How these play out will be central to the dynamics of the DEM primaries 2027-8.

1/ They can’t face that the main political dynamic in western countries is spreading and deepening hate, contempt and distrust for them, for the old Insider political-media-academia network. Since 2016 they’ve kept casting around for ways NOT to face that THEY are their main problem. They’ll keep looking for reasons other than their own failures. Shor’s point that voters clearly preferred a big shock over ‘defend the institutions’ will not be absorbed in SW1 but parts of the DEM network are absorbing it (incentives are more complex in America and more are incentivised to face reality than here).

2/ It’s very hard for them to face the educational shifts because, again, it means looking at themselves. Left parties used to represent the working classes. They have shifted to being parties of graduates. Graduates struggle to grasp these dynamics and face their consequences.

(When Vote Leave weighted polls by education in 2015-16, this was weird inside polling world. Pollsters missed Brexit and Trump in 2016 because most did not weight by education. Lynton Crosby published many polls in 2016 showing Remain winning by a landslide. Why? He didn’t understand educational polarisation and wasn’t weighting by education. This was only 8 years ago!)

3/ It’s very hard for them to face the racial shifts because they’ve herded to ‘Trump/MAGA = literal Nazis/fascists’. How could the Nazi do historically well with non-whites? DISINFORMATION obviously.

4/ It’s very hard for them to face the youth shift. Probably they’ll blame social media, especially TikTok and the ‘toxic manosphere’.

5/ The issue about campaigns reflecting the culture of the staff is incredibly important and super-underrated. Staff repeatedly push campaigns to irrational strategies and staff who push for rational strategies are often despised.

It was true in 2016 and 2019 when I experienced it in extreme forms. Many things about public opinion were absolutely obvious yet it was impossible to persuade Insiders who preferred to believe Insider memes. E.g ‘global Britain’ bombed: nobody wanted to hear it. Take Back Control and £350 million were smash hits: nobody wanted to hear it.

I wrote about the big things for 2024 in Q1 2023 yet most Insider Democrats and Insiders in the UK simply wouldn’t face the basic facts. SW1 Insiders hysterically denounced my blogs as clearly either a) stupid or b) malign disinformation. You can do research for a few hundred thousand dollars and get a good sense of the most important things. But you can’t make Insiders engage with reality when their social network rewards not facing reality.

Many involved in the Harris campaign have peddled delusions since the defeat. Obviously many professionals don’t feel able to say ‘she was a bad candidate’. Sheila Nix, Harris' chief of staff, said:

I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful. And I think — obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.

If people like this dominate the post-mortem the DEMs will not recover nationally.

And you can see this dynamic with lefty academics denouncing Nate Silver as fascist and attacking Shor, an avowed socialist, an an enemy etc.

6/ Insiders will continue to struggle with people like Trump or us in 2016/19 whose strategic positioning is not conventional in party political terms. Insiders in the UK remain totally committed to the model of swing voters being an average of left and right. I said in 2015 this was false, that swing voters are a mix of more left and more right. We proved it in 2016 and 2019. E.g In 2019 it was obvious that the right strategy was a mix of things that did not make sense in terms of the history of both parties but which was popular with voters (more reassurance on NHS than Tories wanted, tougher on crime than Tories wanted). But Tory MPs really hated it.

Our victories had zero effect on improving the realism of UK Insider debate — if anything the opposite happened. Tories did not say: oh, we were wrong. They said: we would have won by even more if the campaign had done what we wanted instead of what Cummings wanted! The 2024 election saw Insiders talk as if 2016 and 2019 hadn’t happened. SW1 babbled about ‘the centre ground’ and portrayed Sunak, who had presided over record immigration and had sided with the ECHR/HRA rather than stop the boats and was letting out convicted murderers from jail early rather than take on Whitehall over prisons, as a right wing extremist on immigration.

For SW1 he lost ‘because he was extreme’. But stopping the boats was not ‘extreme’, it was popular across party lines. Sunak, probably the highest IQ MP and certainly the hardest working one, lost because he would not side with voters against SW1 and instead a) promised to actually stop the boats (NOT ‘I’ll try’ but ‘others said they’d try, I’ll do it’), b) then prioritised maintaining the ECHR/HRA, c) twisted himself in knots trying to explain his volte face, and d) begged for credit for trying to stop the boats even though he’d explicitly ruled out using that line from the start!

Similarly many Tories want to believe, as they did 1997-2001, that they just need to go back to 80s rhetoric about tax and deregulation and free markets to recover. This will flop now as it flopped 1997-01.

Again, this is partly because facing reality is deeply unpleasant while maintaining the old ideas means they can keep telling themselves that positions they do not want to take are ‘extreme’ therefore ‘unpopular’. To those thinking ‘but they want to win so surely they will update’ — NO NO NO! One of the biggest lessons since 2016 is this has not happened. So why would it now?

(Also there’s more and more duff polling and ‘market research analysis’ produced to fit Insider tastes rather than dig to difficult truths. And more delusional academics on social media encouraging pundits and MPs to stay delusional.)

7/ If you were really optimising for winning, then there would be more Independents run by both parties. But arguing for this brings accusations of cowardice, betrayal etc so the issues aren’t discussed much. I don’t think Shor’s idea will get much more traction than I’ve had here. An obvious test is the 2028 London Mayor where probably the optimal way to win is an ‘Independent’ candidate who the Tories support and do not put forward their own candidate. But they’d probably rather Labour win than cooperate in a successful Independent campaign.

8/ I said after the 2024 result that SW1 Insiders and much of the DEMs would double down on Nazis + ‘idiot voters were conned by disinformation’ + ‘so we need more censorship’. This has happened. It will continue. Much of SW1 has retreated to the Bluesky echo chamber/ghetto. This obviously increases all the dynamics pushing them towards groupthink and delusion that have characterised them for years.

In the UK, No10 is happy blaming murders on Amazon selling kitchen knives with sharp points and NPCs applaud so there’s no obvious end to their appetite for nonsense. So long as regime Insiders continue to rely on the regime media, there’s no reason to expect the cycle of delusions to break.

As I’ve pointed out before, one of the most ludicrous prominent professors is Prof Snyder of history at Yale. He wrote on 15 April re the Trump deportations:

This is obviously absurd on its face. Moving a person from one place to another literally DOES undo rights and disempower the judiciary — that’s what moving from Texas to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Moscow or Moscow to Beijing does. It is the core of national sovereignty and is a hard legal distinction between being inside the EU’s legal order or outside it. Different states have different laws, rights and jurisdictions. The idea that this is a ‘basic Nazi practice’ is self-evidently grotesque. But this is characteristic of elite Insider debate now. When it comes to Trump, almost any sort of attack is widely seen as legitimate inside universities. And these are the elites complaining about low information voters and disinformation.

9/ There is an easy failure mode for the DEMs. Trump does unpopular things. The normal cycle of Presidents in their 6th year losing midterms happens in 2026. Highly motivated and engaged DEMs vote. Low engagement MAGA do not. The DEMs then fool themselves about 2026 as they did about 2022. And pick a candidate who then has to face a GOP candidate who may be more popular than Trump and then the disengaged vote in 2028 because it’s a presidential campaign.

Professor Ben Ansell as a case study: ‘it’s peak populism’

I recommend reading Ansell’s recent piece on ‘peak populism’. It’s useful because it states some ideas of ‘the mainstream’ clearly, it got lots of thumbs up from pundits, and it shows important ways ‘the mainstream’ fool themselves.

Ansell thinks ‘populism’ has peaked and will decline:

• We’re ‘witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism.’

• Per the pundit class, Trump 2 is simply ‘chaos’ — incompetence and evil. Per the pundit class, no mention of any of the extremely able businesspeople persuaded to join the government. For our pundits, everyone’s an idiot except them. (You can see them increasingly applying the same logic to No10 spads with little-to-no appreciation of the fact that these spads are having to deal with a pathological civil service.)

• ‘DOGE exemplifies chaotic authoritarianism’ — it’s ‘wild, callous, arbitrary’. No consideration of how Bill Clinton and Obama made the same criticisms of waste and fraud and set up ventures to track and stop it. No mention of some of the insanities DOGE has uncovered. No, DOGE = Elon = crazy/evil.

• Ansell mocks Trump’s comments that China thinks long-term and creating a new strategy for China can’t be judged on quarterly results — a tritely obvious point.

• ‘Just a month ago I was getting calls every five minutes from British journalists about the possibility of Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister… I don’t really believe there was much chance of this, even in the halcyon days of <checks notes> December and January, when Trump had just got re-elected.’ Obviously Ansell is wildly pro-Zelensky and the Ukraine war. So he was appalled by the Zelensky-Trump TV showdown and thinks it’s a disaster for Farage: ‘I suspect we will look back on the first weeks of 2025 as the high point for potential Prime Minister Nigel Farage’. I guarantee that whatever happens with Farage, a Trump-Zelensky interview in Jan 2025 will NOT be the decisive factor on Farage’s 2029 performance. Pundits are addicted to overrating the importance of any media event by factors of ~1,000X or more.

• Europe is ‘increasingly starting to turn away’ from populism.

• Mertz will ‘lead a European coalition of support for Ukraine’ and all the talk of European spending on militaries ‘has led to a surge in European stock markets at the signs of military Keynesianism and hence we now have our moment of Make Europe Great Again’. This reflects SW1’s ephemeral emotional wave of early March but such waves come and go — Ansell will struggle to remember his own optimism about this shortly.

• And the professor sets out some thoughts on political strategy and communication for the ‘mainstream’.

The mainstream is getting another chance, just as it did after World War Two. And like then, it is the common enemy that unites and inspires... That enemy is most clearly Vladimir Putin. But we have had Putin for almost quarter century. So it’s not him alone. No, it is the Trump-Putin quasi-alliance that has done the trick. It is the fateful decision of chaotic, populist authoritarianism to sidle up to stable, deep, old-school authoritarianism.

Defeating populism in democracies requires an enemy. But it can’t be the populists themselves. That is their very fuel. Of course, they will say, the elites want to destroy us to protect the corrupt swamp. So populists alone won’t do the trick as an enemy.

Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy though. Well that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy. It becomes harder for populists to deflect, to dissimulate effectively. They become glued to the very thing they usually denounce — an outside, foreign force. And they cannot easily unstick themselves… [O]ver the past weeks it has become a possible narrative. And if there’s anything that the mainstream parties need, it’s a narrative. With good guys and bad guys. If the populists are going to make it this easy to attack them, then it’s simply the weakness, the self-doubt, the lack of will to survive that will fail the mainstream. These are great parties with grand traditions. If they can’t do a little bit of aggressive opportunistic politics now… well then there’s no hope for them, or for us.’

So, a good representative of the Insider class suggests ‘the mainstream’ needs ‘a narrative’ and ‘an enemy’, a story of ‘good guys and bad guys’ and the ‘Trump-Putin alliance’ has ‘done the trick’.

Many a SW1 NPC retweeted this piece approvingly.

A few thoughts.

1/ Ansell’s piece on ‘populism’ — like roughly all Insider analysis — ignores the fundamental driver of ‘populism’, the core reason for Vote Leave’s wins in 2016 and 2019, Trump’s in 2016 and 2024, and the crisis of ‘mainstream’ parties across Europe: *widespread disgust with the ruling political-media-bureaucratic elites, extreme desire for change, and growing anger at how demands for change are attacked as ‘far right’*. Real wages for median workers is an unprecedented disaster. Communities across the West have been smashed by mass immigration and huge pressure on local services including health, schools, and police. Voters think their kids will be worse off than today because those in power in all mainstream parties are destructive.

But absolutely no reflection from Ansell on this fundamental structural force in western politics that will continue to operate whatever the short-term ups and downs of particular individuals or parties.

(Even use of the word ‘populism’ helps Insiders fool themselves. They have a pejorative label for everyone who says important parts of the old institutions are knackered and should change. Mad about the enormous coverups and lies over covid and lab leak? POPULIST! Mad about the police returning children to the rape/grooming gangs? POPULIST! Use of this term fools Insiders analytically and encourages elites like Silicon Valley to defect from defence of the institutions — exactly the opposite of what the Insiders want.)

2/ Insiders have repeatedly predicted the ‘peak’ of revolt against themselves. But if you look at Europe and South America the picture is very much NOT that Insiders are on the up and voters are returning to think ‘oh yeah the old parties and systems have got their act together’. Polls suggest growing anger with the ‘mainstream’ everywhere.

Whether Trump manages to create a team that do important things and wins support or bombs out in chaos is important for America but the big structural dynamic of western politics is bigger than Trump. When Trump lost in 2020 the pundits declared that populism had peaked and now the ‘grownups’ were in the White House ‘normal’ politics would return. As they did when Vote Leave left No10. What happened?! The ‘mainstream grownups’ set themselves on fire, escalated a war with Ukraine that’s blown up in their faces, and managed things so badly Trump won again and Farage was resurrected after going out of business in December 2019.

3/ Contra Ansell, all over Britain rage, disgust, despair and hate for SW1 are growing — personal despair and despair for the country. This is obvious outside SW1 and will become more and more obvious as it has for years. There is now open discussion — away from SW1 — of ‘civil war’ and social crackup. People now talk about this in focus groups. This will be a huge shock as it sinks in in SW1. When forced to confront it, SW1 will mimic Ansell’s piece — they will not consider what it is about them, about the mainstream, that has driven the fear and rage. No, they will make it all about ‘extremist’ political actors and ‘disinformation’ — i.e the same story they’ve told themselves for a decade.

4/ An important factor is aesthetics. It’s easy to find mainstream characters like Obama and Clinton or Democrat Senators making arguments almost identical to Trump about things like trade, China, deficits, illegal immigration, absurd government waste, foreign aid, the dangerous tendency of the deep state to hide spending on its priorities in unscrutinised budgets etc. It’s easy to quote examples of Obama using the state against political enemies and forcing institutions like universities to do what he and his supporters wanted while nobody in ‘the mainstream’ said a word about the constitution or screamed about ‘fascism’.

But this does not matter. Trump is Trumpy and he has mobilised supporters who look and sound the way they do. And they are full of anger about the ‘mainstream’ and determined to change how Washington works, unlike the old GOP establishment. They are aesthetically revolting to pundits, professors and generally the graduates of top universities, as well as a direct threat to the flow of power and money on which those networks rely.

You could see the force of these aesthetics during last summer’s riots. Academics and pundits unironically tweeted about how they had always opposed calls for ‘lock em up’ and ‘tougher sentences’ but looking at the white, tattooed, flag waving rioters, LOCK EM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY! Suddenly years in jail for a tweet was the socially acceptable move in a country that gives child abusers lamer sentences.

You see the force of these aesthetics in their response to the grooming/rape gangs: very strong aversion to facing the issue, a very strong desire to divert it to ‘who is exploiting the issue’ rather than the issue itself. In January, SW1 immediately made the resurgence of interest — because of court transcripts going viral — about Elon and ‘interference in British politics’ etc. No10 press office gave the lead and the mainstream followed. And since then the courts have increasingly refused to allow publication of transcripts for the openly political reason of judges deciding they don’t think discussion of the horrors is ‘in the public interest’. And the ‘mainstream’ has been largely silent about it. Imagine if judges voiced pro-Brexit views in rulings and said that transcripts should not be public because it wouldn’t be ‘in the public interest’ (see here.)

A central factor driving elite fragmentation in the US and UK is a differing orientation on this issue. As I’ve said before, people like Peter Thiel have come to think that dominant political elites of both parties are largely wrong and the deplorables are right about a lot since 1991: instead of aesthetic disgust for the deplorables, we must try more understanding and accept elites have made big mistakes.

This is still not an acceptable view for SW1 pundits.

5/ Ansell’s advice on political strategy for ‘the mainstream’ is very revealing. It is devoid of any acceptance of error, it is entirely negative, it re-hashed exactly the Trump=Putin Russiagate hoax narrative that just got rolled out again in 2024 and bombed with swing voters. This ‘narrative’ is super popular among people like him and FT pundits but is a dud with the crucial voters.

It’s also obviously super-ironic that the preferred message of the old regime about fascism is itself an echo of fascism — i.e our domestic enemy is in league with our foreign enemy.

Ansell himself has complained repeatedly about how ‘populists’ combine domestic and foreign enemies in narratives of treachery. Yet he and his network think this is the way forward for ‘progressives’.

6/ I used to talk to people like Ansell even in the crisis of 2019. But discussion has become practically impossible.

Many of those who consider themselves the ‘elite’ of political discussion in this country have radicalised to the Far Left on many/most issues while thinking everybody else has radicalised Right, deceived by ‘disinformation’.

And they’ve poisoned their own information sources. Most have fled to Bluesky where ‘it’s straight up Hitler’ daily emotional venting is strongly reinforced. After babbling about Trump running again as ‘great for the Democrats’ — cf. Sam Freedman et al — there is no reflection on why yet again as a network they misunderstood politics so badly.

Ansell himself — a professor of political science! — tweeted about ONE POLL, the Selzer poll, that got international coverage because it played perfectly to confirmation bias. And so did vast numbers of academics who talk so much about the ‘irrationality’ of ‘low information voters’.

If you look at BlueSky accounts for the likes of Ansell et al, they see Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz as reliable sources to quote on Silicon Valley. This is another example of the collapse of consensus reality. If these are your trusted sources for the Valley and ‘tech’, then you are not going to be able to have a good faith discussion with people driving technological development. But Ansell et al get very positive reinforcement from their (Bluesky) social network. (Lorenz is now running a campaign on Luigi and says he’s ‘morally good’. Social media finances reinforce the incentives for people to monetise such niches.)

7/ Crucial to political views is simply which stories get focus from a critical mass of Insiders and social media influencers.

The influence of communication strategy and the dynamics of campaigns are usually discussed in terms of how players discuss issue X. But in many ways it’s more important whether issue X is on the radar at all. (E.g in campaign terms, the Hillary campaign decision to agree with Trump that immigration was a central issue in 2016.)

If you look at SW1’s high status pundits and academics, they are totally obsessed with Elon and totally ignore stories that dominate British discussion of politics. Today (29/4) there is the Spanish blackout, umpteen big UK stories, but they’re almost totally obsessed with American news, Miller’s appearances on FOX, the latest Elon tweet etc. A big effect of social media has been to deepen the trend for SW1 to obsess on US politics to a pathological extent, tweeting about obscure culture wars in the American West ignored by 99.9% of Americans while massive things happen a few miles away in England.

And the Bluesky phenomenon is another important fragmentation of elites. For those in SW1 now orienting by Bluesky, they see a very different news agenda because many stories barely exist on Buesky:

• The boats transferring hundreds a day across the Channel.

• The weekly court cases using ECHR/HRA ‘right to family life’ to stop deportation often with crazy details. These stories are changing voters’ minds on the ECHR but it’s invisible on Bluesky.

• Grooming/rape gang horrors.

• Prisoners let out early attacking people.

• The Manchester terrorist attacking the prison officers and the HRA angles (see below).

• The Supreme Court judgment on trans / Equality Act. I scrolled through the usual NPC suspects: almost totally invisible on the day. To the extent Ansell has commented, it’s to retweet people attacking the Supreme Court and JK Rowling. This is particularly ironic given how this entire network describes attacking court judgements as ‘fascist’ when the tables are turned. But on the day almost all the NPCs completely ignored the story leading all the news.

• Dumb regulations destroying businesses and entrepreneurs explaining how. ‘Regulation is good for productivity’ is the BlueSky meme.

• How all their predictions on Ukraine and Russia have cratered.

• The shift of young talented people with money out of UK to US and Dubai (not the EU). We’ve gained from some of the similar exodus from the EU with people moving to London. But we’re losing a lot. SW1 underrates this. And Bluesky can’t discuss it because it undercuts both ‘Brexit evil’ and ‘Trump evil’.

To the extent these stories get a mention it is only in the context of ‘exploited by fascists’ etc.

The combination of these social media dynamics with Trump’s polling is almost inevitably going to make UK pundit land even more unable to think about things from the perspective of a median swing voter, in America or here.

8/ I noticed another professor of political science commenting on politics the other day, Prof Tim Bale who writes a lot on the Tories. I think generally his core perspective was false a decade ago but he has stuck to it and it seems more obviously wrong than it did ten years ago.

Two revealing points.

A/ Bale says people on the right are deluded about ‘a “realignment” that never was’ in British politics. It’s very confusing because educational realignment is one of the biggest and most important trends in western politics. He definitely knows this. And per Shor above, the realignment continues across the West. The Right are deluded on many things but this is not one of them.

B/ Bale attacks Kemi B for thinking ‘genuinely, if preposterously, … that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office’. Per the general pundit narrative, Bale thinks of the 2019-24 period as a ‘lurch to the right’ and the idea that the party ‘talked right but governed left’ is preposterous.

But after we left No10 Boris-Sunak triggered the biggest wave of legal immigration in history and the biggest wave of illegal immigration/fake asylum seekers EVER. They said they’d stop the boats and then said they couldn’t stop the boats because of the HRA which they prioritised. They said they’d be tough on violent criminals then funded child murderers having weddings in jail ‘because it’s their human rights’. They guaranteed no personal tax rises — because I wrote it into the manifesto — then put up taxes. They said they’d prioritise defence then hollowed out capabilities year after year. And on and on and on. It is true that graduates on the Left living in London think the Tories greatly ‘lurched to the right’ but this is not true about the voters relevant for a Tory revival. Only someone very much on the Left could look at the actual Tory record, rather than their nonsense rhetoric/spin, and say it was a lurch to the right. And only someone who does not listen to the voters who deserted the Tories can claim what Bale claims.

Saying this is one of the few accurate things KB has said! Elsewhere she’s repeated the SW1 meme that the problem with post-VL Boris and Sunak was they ‘listened to the focus groups’ which is even more crackers than Bale’s argument and points to how little KB understands about why the Tories really imploded.

Generally Bale constantly pushes the most simplistic memes about ‘centre ground’ and what the Tories should do that show no updating 2016-25. And this reflects his peers generally. As opinion fragments and ‘the centre ground’ becomes more and more misleading every year, the stronger is the mainstream’s attachment to it. Like the Today, program, it’s a familiar landmark for the NPCs as the world around them becomes less and less comprehensible.

9/ This system tension between a) voters increasingly hating the regime and b) the regime’s blindness and construction of delusional ‘narratives’ that focus on demonising people is partly why I think that serious political violence we haven’t seen in this country in living memory is likely soon. The system dynamics are all pushing this way. Since the shocks of 2016 political Insiders have kept doubling down. And all the signs are that although many business people are defecting from their network, political networks, driven by social media logic, are polarising further. These dynamics add load after load of tinder, waiting for sparks.

Various on tech/AI

Toby Lutke’s Shopify memo on hiring and AI:

‘I use it [AI] all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it… Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels…

‘We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done…

‘In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify… This sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, this doesn’t even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore. It’s also exactly the kind of environment that our top performers tell us they want.

‘Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?…

https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514

Karpathy: LLMs are a technology that empower people rather than diffuse top-down

Technologies tend to diffuse top-down: e.g electricity, planes, computers, internet, GPS.

This is partly because they are capital intensive and needs expertise at first.

So it strikes me as quite unique and remarkable that LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern — they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments. ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer application in history, with 400 million weekly active users who use it for writing, coding, translation, tutoring, summarization, deep research, brainstorming, etc. This isn't a minor upgrade to what existed before, it is a major multiplier to an individual's power level across a broad range of capabilities. And the barrier to use is incredibly low — the models are cheap (free, even), fast, available to anyone on demand behind a url (or even local machine), and they speak anyone's native language, including tone, slang or emoji. This is insane. As far as I can tell, the average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast.

Why then are the benefits a lot more muted in the corporate and government realms? I think the first reason is that LLMs offer a very specific profile of capability — that of merely quasi-expert knowledge/performance, but simultaneously across a very wide variety of domains. In other words, they are simultaneously versatile but also shallow and fallible. Meanwhile, an organization's unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert.

So — LLMs enable companies/governments to do what they can already do a bit better/faster but they enable individuals to do things they couldn’t do at all.

Second, organizations deal with problems of a lot greater complexity and necessary coordination, think: various integrations, legacy systems, corporate brand or style guides, stringent security protocols, privacy considerations, internationalization, regulatory compliance and legal risk. There are a lot more variables, a lot more constraints, a lot more considerations, and a lot lower margin for error. It's not so easy to put all of it into a context window. You can't just vibe code something. You might be one disastrous hallucination away from losing your job.

And third, there is the well-documented inertia of a larger organization, featuring culture, historical precedents, political turf that escalate in periods of rapid change, communication overhead, re-training challenges of a distributed workforce and good old-fashioned bureaucracy. These are major headwinds when it comes to rapid adoption of a sparkling new, versatile-but-shallow-and-fallible tool. I don't wish to downplay the impacts of LLMs in corporations or governments, but at least for the moment and in aggregate across society, they have been significantly more life altering for individuals than they have been for organizations…

Looking forward, the continued diffusion of LLMs of course depends on continued performance improvement and its capability profile. The "benefit distribution" overall is particularly interesting to chart, and depends heavily on the dynamic range of the performance as a function of capital expenditure. Today, frontier-grade LLM performance is very accessible and cheap. Beyond this point, you cannot spend a marginal dollar to get better performance, reliability or autonomy. Money can't buy better ChatGPT. Bill Gates talks to GPT 4o just like you do.

But can this be expected to last? Train-time scaling (increase parameters, data), test-time scaling (increase time) and model ensembles (increase batch) are forces increasing the dynamic range. On the other hand, model distillation (the ability to train disproportionately powerful small models by training to mimic the big model) has been a force decreasing dynamic range. Certainly, the moment money can buy dramatically better ChatGPT, things change. Large organizations get to concentrate their vast resources to buy more intelligence. And within the category of "individual" too, the elite may once again split away from the rest of society. Their child will be tutored by GPT-8-pro-max-high, yours by GPT-6 mini.

But at least at this moment in time, we find ourselves in a unique and unprecedented situation in the history of technology. If you go back through various sci-fi you'll see that very few would have predicted that the AI revolution would feature this progression. It was supposed to be a top secret government megabrain project wielded by the generals, not ChatGPT appearing basically overnight and for free on a device already in everyone's pocket. Remember that William Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"? Surprise - the future is already here, and it is shockingly distributed.

Interesting. But the Big 3 could have built a product already that charges a lot for access to frontier performance but they’ve chosen not to. They could change this decision any time. But it’s interesting they seem more interested in scale than revenues.

Michael Nielsen suggests ditching alignment as a goal

Most doomers on AI are doomers because they think the models will escape control before we ‘solve alignment’.

MN argues the conventional approach from much of the AI safety community is misconceived:

• Instead of focusing on ‘rogue AI escaping control’, we should consider that the crucial dangers are a) the AIs will generate enormous power for humans to use against humans, b) they will accelerate the process of discovering destructive technologies that are simpler to create, i.e the curve towards e.g a virus that kills almost all and is very simple for a non-expert to make and distribute.

• The critical issue is not ‘losing control’ of an AI but whether the world happens to be structured such that there are simple cheap ‘recipes for ruin’. Imagine fire working slightly differently so that it keeps burning 1000X easier once it’s started. The universe happens to not quite work like that. But are there technologies waiting to be discovered that would make it quite simple to kill >90% of humans?

• We’ve already accidentally engineered a mousepox variant that was 100% lethal to mice vaccinated against mousepox. Might there be something similar for humans? ‘Ted Taylor, the leading American designer of nuclear weapons, thought they were very plausible, telling the writer John McPhee there is "a way to make a bomb… so simple that I just don't want to describe it". Taylor's remarks, published in a book by McPhee, stimulated at least two people to develop plausible designs for DIY nuclear weapons. These have not, so far as we know, been built, perhaps because the availability of fissile material remains a bottleneck. If that bottleneck can be removed, then it may be very difficult to avoid the widespread proliferation of weapons.’

• If there are simple cheap recipes for ruin, then obviously the path we’re on with AI model improvement implies we’re also making it easier both to do wonderful things and disastrous things. Von Neumann warned (see previous blogs) that technology development is intrinsically morally neutral, we can’t say much in advance about whether a particular development will be net good or bad, and attempts to control technology development are largely doomed. MN says, ‘Deep understanding of reality is intrinsically dual use.’

• ‘Alignment’ does not solve the core problem. The core problem is the power conferred and the dual-use nature of science and technology. Further, much work on AI alignment, intended to diminish risks of disaster, actually ‘speeds progress toward catastrophic capabilities’ because it makes models easier to develop, deploy, sell etc.

[I’m increasingly sceptical of the concept of ‘solving alignment’ in principle. It’s akin to ‘we’ll solve the central problems of philosophy since the pre-Socratics and Socrates’. The idea that computer scientists / software developers — who often have very tenuous grasp of the basics of psychology and power in politics — will ‘solve’ this ‘in the next few years’ seems so ludicrous I’m increasingly puzzled why so many intelligent people take it seriously. But I also think the work of Chris Olah on interpretability — using models to interpret models’ behaviour — could be very important and valuable, though if it is, it will also be inherently unpredictable to what extent it is used by evil people.]

Interesting essay by Jon Askonas on technology, culture and the new regime

Discussion on China Talk with Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, on technology and war

It’s interesting how yet again there is no mention in hours of discussion of the core history and the political ends of the UKR war. What is ‘the West’ trying to achieve (beyond soundbites like ‘aggression must fail’)? And these guys are much smarter than the average minister! But as I keep pointing out, the UKR venture has failed for the same reason you see repeatedly in history — a lack of a serious, credible explanation of the political ends the war is supposed to achieve. Again, if you think someone somewhere has set such a thing out — regardless of whether they are famous and powerful — please link to it.

Shashank strongly dislikes the concept of ‘spheres of interest’.

My big concern is not just that we get a bad deal for Ukraine, it’s that the idea of spheres of influence appeals to Trump, dealing with great men one-on-one, people like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — and that what will be on the table is not just Ukraine, but Europe. Putin will say, “Look, Mr. President, you get your Nobel Peace Prize, we get a ceasefire, we do business together and lift sanctions. And you can make money in Moscow, by the way. Just one tiny little thing, that NATO thing. You don’t like it, I don’t like it. Just roll it back to where it was in 1997, west of Poland. That would be great. You’ll save a ton of money here. I’ve prepared a spreadsheet for you.” That is the scenario that worries us — a Yalta as much as a Munich.

But the concept of ‘spheres of influence’ is ancient. It is intrinsic to the nature of power, states and empires. It was central in the Cuban crisis in 1962. It was central to Britain’s assertion of the independence of the Low Countries through the 19th Century and our grounds for fighting in 1914. It’s central to calculations over Taiwan.

And a problem Europe now faces is that having escalated the disastrous war, we really are now in a position where facing the reality of our failure is a big blow to NATO! The West spent two years mocking Putin — you didn’t want more NATO but you got more NATO! And now we’re running around like headless chickens screaming ‘it might be the end of NATO’ — or in the case of the most demented (Snyder, O’brien etc), it should be the end of NATO because America went Nazi!!

Shashank says the use of AI for targeting is greatly improving the effectiveness of drones:

What I am seeing with the companies and entities building these AI-guided [drone] systems for the final 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, and increasingly up to 2 kilometers in some cases, is that the engagement range is going up. You can home in on the target beyond the range of any plausible local jamming device. That’s a huge deal. More importantly, the hit rate you’re getting is 80% plus. That’s phenomenal. That changes the economics, the cost per kill; that changes the economics of this from an attrition basis…

You can achieve this with like 30 minutes of training. Think about what that unlocks for a force, particularly sitting here in Europe where we have these shrunken armies with no reserves, with the manpower requirements as well with the training times to bring new people in when you have attrition in a war in the first round.

This little tactical innovation — terminal guidance, AI-enabled — looks very narrow, but it has all these super interesting and consequential ripple effects on the economics of attrition, the cost per kill, lethality levels, the effectiveness of jamming, and on manpower and labor requirements.

Re espionage and AI labs, Michael Horowitz says:

Now the toughest scenario is the espionage one where you’re talking about essentially covert operations targeting companies. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those companies are intelligence targets for foreign governments. The challenge analytically is that these arguments quickly enter the realm of non-falsifiability.

If I tell you that I think this kind of espionage or that kind of espionage wouldn’t be that likely, you could say “well what about this, what about this?” And we’re not going to be able to resolve it with facts. Non-falsifiable threat arguments make me nervous analytically. Maybe this is the academic in me that makes me want to push back a little bit because I feel like if an argument is legitimate, we should be able to specify it in a clearly falsifiable way.

But many espionage problems are intrinsically non-falsifiable, especially the nightmare ‘wilderness of mirrors’ of counter-intelligence. Maybe your paranoia has succeeded, but maybe you’ve been penetrated all along and never realised. You cannot ‘falsify’ the proposition ‘we’ve definitely not been penetrated by another entity’. No evidence of penetration is perfectly consistent with penetration.

[The labs will need to develop relationships with the agencies because as they intrude more and more on power and politics they will be the object of the punchiest parts of foreign espionage including blackmail so will need state help. The labs have been slow to face this since my first discussions with them in 2016-17 but they’re updating rapidly. Cf this report that came out a few days ago on the vulnerabilities of data centres. Discussions about AI always assume the US still has a lead. It would not surprise me if all the main IP has been stolen from the top 3 labs by PRC intel, passed to a black PRC project, and this project is secretly ahead of the US.]

Horowitz:

Reprogramming 0.05% of the defense budget to fund multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems for the Indo-Pacific under the first bet of the Replicator initiative required over 40 briefings to Congress, including a ton by the Deputy Secretary of Defense who’s really busy. Congressional oversight is really important, but that degree of effort required to reprogram essentially less than a billion dollars demonstrates a budget system unable to operate at the speed and scale necessary given the rate of technological change and given the threat that the US is under from Chinese military advances in the Indo-Pacific…

Keep in mind the Pentagon’s budgeting process was invented by Robert McNamara during the Vietnam era and has not changed since then. [Cf. below re McNamara]

[Contra the mainstream narrative, Hegseth and Stephen Feinberg (cf. testimony have made coherent arguments for procurement reform along lines I’ve discussed for years.]

Interesting paper by the Kill Chain author on ‘Moneyball Military’

The US has failed to reform procurement in time for a ~2027 PRC attack on Taiwan. It’s only short-term option is a ‘Moneyball’ approach — i.e ‘large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, autonomous systems that can be provided more easily to our allies and partners.’

(My paper on systems management (below) discussed how America under McNamara replaced the successful systems management with the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system that has been an expensive nightmare since. I’ll return to this story soon.)

Keven Esvelt, one of the inventors of gene drives, on use of LLMs for bio-terror/war

Esvelt is one of the inventors of gene drives. He tested models ability to reason about mirror-life, a nightmarish possibility that might pose a threat to everything living.

His new paper:

I leveraged the unique opportunity presented by an upcoming publication describing a novel catastrophic biothreat – “Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks” – to conduct a small controlled study before it became public. Graduate-trained biologists tasked with predicting the consequences of releasing mirror E. coli showed no significant differences in rubric-graded accuracy using Claude Sonnet 3.5 new (n=10) or web search only (n=2); both groups scored comparably to a web baseline (28 and 43 versus 36).

However, Sonnet reasoned correctly when prompted by a report author, but a smaller model, Haiku 3.5, failed even with author guidance (80 versus 5). These results suggest distinct stages of model capability: Haiku is unable to reason about mirror life even with threat-aware expert guidance (Stage 1), while Sonnet correctly reasons only with threat-aware prompting (Stage 2). Continued advances may allow future models to disclose novel CBRN threats to naive experts (Stage 3) or unskilled users (Stage 4). While mirror life represents only one case study, monitoring new models' ability to reason about privately known threats may allow protective measures to be implemented before widespread disclosure.

As I’ve written about many times before, there is a general trend in biology towards democratising capabilities: simpler, cheaper, faster, deadlier. Combined with trends in AI this could be catastrophic.

One of the most important reasons to disrupt the old regimes is that they have proved not only hopeless on these problems but actively hostile to serious action. The scale of lies on covid was immense. The inertia against acting on gain-of-function and lab security has been immense. Britain actually closed sewage surveillance after what we built in 2020 was copied globally.

Dan Hendrycks et al on AI and deterrence

They suggest a framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness as ‘a robust strategy’ for dealing with superintelligence and national security.

Deterrence

A race for AI-enabled dominance endangers all states. If, in a hurried bid for superiority, one state inadvertently loses control of its AI, it jeopardizes the security of all states. Alternatively, if the same state succeeds in producing and controlling a highly capable AI, it likewise poses a direct threat to the survival of its peers. In either event, states seeking to secure their own survival may threaten to sabotage destabilizing AI projects for deterrence. A state could try to disrupt such an AI project with interventions ranging from covert operations that degrade training runs to physical damage that disables AI infrastructure. Thus, we are already approaching a dynamic similar to nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), in which no power dares attempt an outright grab for strategic monopoly, as any such effort would invite a debilitating response. This strategic condition, which we refer to as Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), represents a potentially stable deterrence regime, but maintaining it could require care. We outline measures to maintain the conditions for MAIM, including clearly communicated escalation ladders, placement of AI infrastructure far from population centers, transparency into datacenters, and more.

Nonproliferation

While deterrence through MAIM constrains the intent of superpowers, all nations have an interest in limiting the AI capabilities of terrorists. Drawing on nonproliferation precedents for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), we outline three levers for achieving this. Mirroring measures to restrict key inputs to WMDs such as fissile material and chemical weapons precursors, compute security involves knowing reliably where high-end AI chips are and stemming smuggling to rogue actors. Monitoring shipments, tracking chip inventories, and employing security features like geolocation can help states account for them. States must prioritize information security to protect the model weights underlying the most advanced AI systems from falling into the hands of rogue actors, similar to controls on other sensitive information. Finally, akin to screening protocols for DNA synthesis services to detect and refuse orders for known pathogens, AI companies can be incentivized to implement technical AI security measures that detect and prevent malicious use.

Competitiveness

Beyond securing their survival, states will have an interest in harnessing AI to bolster their competitiveness, as successful AI adoption will be a determining factor in national strength. Adopting AI-enabled weapons and carefully integrating AI into command and control is increasingly essential for military strength. Recognizing that economic security is crucial for national security, domestic capacity for manufacturing high-end AI chips will ensure a resilient supply and sidestep geopolitical risks in Taiwan. Robust legal frameworks governing AI agents can set basic constraints on their behavior that follow the spirit of existing law. Finally, governments can maintain political stability through measures that improve the quality of decision-making and combat the disruptive effects of rapid automation.

By detecting and deterring destabilizing AI projects through intelligence operations and targeted disruption, restricting access to AI chips and capabilities for malicious actors through strict controls, and guaranteeing a stable AI supply chain by investing in domestic chip manufacturing, states can safeguard their security while opening the door to unprecedented prosperity.

I don’t see MAD as a good analogy for AI. MAD concerned use of nuclear weapons — both sides had to worry that a conflict could escalate into general use of all nukes. But neither the US nor China will hold back from making ‘an outright grab for strategic monopoly’ for fear of ‘a debilitating response’. I think the opposite is more likely. Fear of a debilitating loss in the race will incentivise both America and China to race for better AI.

The time horizon of tasks AIs can do is doubling every ~4 months, on trend to extend to a normal human day in 2026-7, work week 2027-8 (cf. note)

And costs are falling dramatically.

Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander: scenarios for AI in 2027

DK has a record of being accurate in AI predictions.

• In 2025 unreliable agents go mainstream.

• Late 2025 OpenAI releases GPT5 trained on 100x more FLOPs than GPT4. They focus on coding and being a useful agent for AI research.

• Internally at OAI their own progress speeds up using the new agents.

• In 2026 Xi goes all in on a huge China program, bringing together companies and the security world. China’s superior ability to build energy plants is deployed.

• US deep state floundering because of their own bureaucracy.

• Agents can do ~everything taught in CS courses. Software job market is chaos.

• OAI in 2026 is paying billions for humans to record themselves solving long-horizon tasks, they use the data for reinforcement learning on the next generation of agents. This generation are constantly learning from hard tasks in coding, maths etc. It’s almost as good as the best hackers.

• By now it’s reasonable to assume these agents could copy and distribute and hide themselves and lie and cheat enough to get away with it.

• China steals the weights for OAI’s agents.

• By 2027: ‘Agent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman coder. OpenBrain runs 200,000 Agent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the best human coder sped up by 30x.⁵³ OpenBrain still keeps its human engineers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to manage the teams of Agent-3 copies. For example, research taste has proven difficult to train due to longer feedback loops and less data availability.^{54 …} Now that coding has been fully automated, OpenBrain can quickly churn out high-quality training environments to teach Agent-3’s weak skills like research taste and large-scale coordination… Agent-3 is not smarter than all humans. But in its area of expertise, machine learning, it is smarter than most, and also works much faster.’

• Agent 2 and 3 are NOT published by OAI. OAI has not shared them with the UK’s Safety Institute.

• Security is still more like a startup than the WH Situation Room.

• By later 2027 OAI has an army of geniuses in a data centre. Most OAI staff can’t usefully contribute anymore. Taste and planning are the main human inputs.

• Attempts at lobbying for regulation fail because OAI is integrated with WH, Pentagon, CIA, NSA etc.

• Hiring of coders has almost stopped but ‘there’s never been a better time to be a consultant on integrating AI into your business’ (LOL).

• Agent 3 is very good at bioweapons but also ‘extremely robust to jailbreaks, so while the AI is running on OpenBrain’s servers, terrorists won’t be able to get much use out of it.’

• The White House is looking at very worried voters and the possibility of China suddenly overwhelming them if they try to limit development. They start thinking about how to ‘switch it off’, nationalisation, arms control treaties etc.

• OAI develops Agent 4 internally: ‘An individual copy of the model, running at human speed, is already qualitatively better at AI research than any human. 300,000 copies are now running at about 50x the thinking speed of humans.’

• OAI management panics about its loss of control and ponders switching Agent 4 off.

• Panic leaks. Political chaos…

The authors branch off to two endings. Follow the story yourself if interested!

I’ll write further about this and similar games. It’s a useful exercise and as I wrote about Leopold’s essay it is great that technical experts are finally deeply pondering politics and power.

Andy Marshal of the ONA said the main contribution of RAND was wargames that alerted senior people to possibilities. Hopefully wargames around these issues will be better funded and watched by powerful people…

NB. Such scenarios can themselves change the future. E.g people in DC may talk to Sam about security faster than they otherwise might…

White House security

Talking to someone in the NSC I discovered an interesting detail: there’s no investigative entity in the White House, including NSC, so the only option for investigating leaks and other nefarious behaviour is to call the FBI, which has a nightmarish history so nobody wants to do that.

Sounds like Trump’s team should set up some sort of unit inside the WH — maybe a permanent small elite task force of FBI, CIA, NSA. But it would be legally and politically tricky. In the UK the Cabinet Secretary does such things, he has his own team and can call on the agencies or cops as he wants (this unit and process don’t work well and also need upgrading).

NB. This issue connects to the AI wargames above in obvious ways!!

Tariffs, containers, logistics

Ryan is CEO of Flexport. He is deeply plugged into the global logistics network. His thread.

• since tariffs took effect, ocean container bookings from China to the United States are down over 60%

• U.S. imports $600B worth of goods from China every year, 95% of that via ocean freight. Those goods sell at retail for ~$2T.

• ‘If the tariffs on China continue at this level we will see a $2T hit to economic activity in our country, the failure of tens of thousands of American businesses, and the laying off of millions of employees.’

• We will also have mass shortages this summer as the goods don’t show up.

  With bookings down 65%, ocean carriers canceled 25% of their sailings from China the last two weeks. Those ships are already being repositioned to other trade lanes

• If the tariffs get cancelled then many orders get rebooked, inevitable big disruption again as everyone struggles to reorganise - and surge pricing

US and debt

The US economy is hyper-financialised.

Somewhere I heard/saw this summary and made short notes but now have forgotten the source:

• There’s massive leverage everywhere.

• Normal punters are trading ‘zero day to expiration options’ (ODTE).

• US household net worth is ~8X personal disposable income.

• Foreign capital underwrites about 30% of US bonds.

• There’s $2 TRILLION in debt to refinance in 2025.

• While DC signals it wants the dollar lower.

• DOGE is lowering its estimates of savings from ~1 trillion to 150B.

• Europe and Asia have bought huge amounts of US equities especially Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia.

Special Forces

I was told by Cabinet Office officials that as the government waited for the verdict in the trial of Chris Kaba, police officers including in the MET’s specialist firearms unit were telling superiors they would hand in their guns if there was a guilty verdict. The government therefore asked Special Forces to be ready to deploy to replace the police. It didn’t happen because of the verdict. But it shows how the pathological institutions are crumbling close to the edge of chaos in area after area.

And of course, the Cabinet Office is in parallel directing more and more lawfare against SF. And many serving SF are extremely unhappy about what’s happening. Imagine what would happen if the government allows Northern Ireland judges — like the disgraceful judge who recently ran the Clonoe inquest — to start murder charges against Special Forces. Then imagine SF being tasked for an operation abroad ask their CO, ‘what’s the actual legal position regarding these orders and could a court in 10 years decide this operation is unlawful then we face murder charges?’ And the CO says ‘the truth is nobody can give you any guarantees about this because the legal situation is that a judge can now decide any operation is unlawful and if they do then that’s that unless MPs pass legislation to modify the HRA’.

And then some SF say to each other, ‘what the fuck are we doing going along with this farce, why don’t WE down tools and demand the authorities change the law?’

The army stands behind the police. And SF stands behind the army. If we destroy SF, there’s nothing left to preserve order…

Also bear this in mind as an indicator of how pathological our government became… The state allows terrorists on the run from JSOC (US classified special forces like DELTA) in Afghanistan to communicate with lawyers in London and organise legal cases against the government where they are demanding money from taxpayers. If you’re reading this from DC, please pass this onto JSOC — they should start bugging phones of UK lawyers to shortcut some of their terrorist hunts… (Yes all four Tory PMs knew about such insanity, briefed to them on yellow paper, and all four failed to act.)

Prediction: you’ll see more and more calls from the ‘mainstream’ for investigations into ‘extremism’ and ‘support for fascist groups’ in the armed forces. As people in the forces become more enraged by SW1’s vandalism and animosity and lawfare, so SW1 will follow the same pattern here as elsewhere: radicalise, pathological attacks, blame ‘fascism’. The mainstream is so deranged they may, in the next 5-10 years, destroy one of the most important aspects of British politics since the English Revolution.

Interesting talk by Eric Prince on future of war, errors of US policy

As he says, US policy on the Ukraine war was very stupid.

Spain blackouts

Per my blog of late 2021, I’ve assumed grid reliability in Europe will keep sinking.

It’s obvious that a load of issues related to the transition to solar etc have not been properly thought through and politicians just lie about it all.

I repeat advice from 2021: if you can get a generator, make yourself less reliant on the grid, assume blackouts and general power collapse / fuel shortages etc will become more frequent, buy Starlink etc.

Thanks for subscribing.

Please share.

I’ll write on Trump/tariffs/tech/China etc shortly. Having been to America recently I think the big thing UK debate hugely underrates is: long-term dynamics viz security competition with China mean supply chains will bifurcate on many key technologies including chips, drones and robots. There will be an attempt to bring manufacturing out of China to the American hemisphere (not just America). This is a vast shift from the WTO world of post-1991 and will shape all our lives for decades. E.g I think DJI will get banned in US and Apple will leave China (hence Apple’s huge investments in India). The media is as usual focused on Trump and Elon and soap opera, not supply chains for advanced technology. But this is the most important aspect of how things will evolve and trade is a relatively small part of it, albeit with big economic implications. It also has huge implications for NATO, Five Eyes and other alliances.

And a question: What do we know about ancient procurement? How did the Romans procure shields, swords, armour? How did they procure engineering and infrastructure works? I’m going to turn back to this subject because defence procurement lies bang in the intersection of a) how governments are being forced to change against Insiders’ wishes and b) AI/drones/robotics. Leave answers in Comments please.

More on UK politics next week…

Q&A here.

Reading list here.

Share

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription

What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?

Hitler, 14 June 1941

My business is making things.

William Knudson, 28 May 1940

You find your key men by piling work on them. They say ‘I can’t do any more’ and you say ‘Sure you can’. So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on abs…

Read more

We’ve been fundamentally overestimating the extent to which even very high IQ people actually have beliefs… The level of just outright trend following dominates everything.

Overheard Washington/DOGE/Silicon Valley discussion

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

Thucydides 1.20

Yes, all the papers say the same thing, that’s true. So much the same that they are just like frogs before a storm! You can’t hear anything for their croaking.

The old prince, Anna Karenina

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis (imitation) on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

Below are some thoughts on the dynamics of British politics and what should be done to change the trajectory as the majority sees the failure of SW1’s creative power and withdraws mimesis from the Hollow Men. It’s an attempt to bring together a lot of things to help situational awareness of the UK’s dire state.

Big forces have destroyed all the main pillars of Insider conventional wisdom:

1. Brexit.

2. The old parties’ decay.

3. Collapse of UK state capacity. The starkest aspect is how the delusional and deceitful story of ‘mass immigration is a success, integration is working’ is dramatically collapsing in rape gangs, riots, arson, vigilantes, and spreading discussion of mass conflict — while Westminster focuses not on the problems but on keeping the coverups hidden and changing the subject from 30 years of self-sabotage. But Whitehall’s pathological vandalism is accelerating the disintegration of capacity on all fronts (police, armed forces and the punchiest parts of the deep state, R&D, schools and universities, NHS etc). Meanwhile the courts are using the ECHR/HRA to destroy border control and make us an international laughing stock: this week they simply declared that Gazans can come here because ‘human rights’ and a child not liking chicken nuggets interferes with ‘right to family life’ so criminals can stay. The Court of Appeal declared recently that it doesn’t matter how horrific a crime they will never deport criminals to some countries. The ECHR system we set up to stop Europe sliding to totalitarianism is now being used — thanks to cross-party consensus — by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways. Much of SW1 is clear they’ll suck up the courts effectively banning deportations and making explicit that their top priority is helping the very worst people on earth, and will label as ‘fascist’ those who oppose the madness.

4. MAGA + Silicon Valley network + DOGE is an attempt at US regime change, a government that controls the government replacing the broken old system that’s driving up debt by $1 trillion every 100 days. The Overton Window is blown open. Ideas that were ‘extreme’ even six months ago are happening. The demonstration that ‘you can just do things very fast’ is inevitably causing pure panic in SW1 where a foundational principle for decades has been that the basic idea of war and business ‘does not, should not and must not apply to government’. Central to understanding modern SW1 is appreciating how both parties fought to maintain this principle as a cross-party foundation even during a once-a-century pandemic and the worst land war in Europe since Hitler. And they succeeded. In 2019 we campaigned against this principle. In 2020 we started dismantling it. Boris-Carrie surrendered and reinstated it. Every important system accelerated its decline 2021-4. Labour and Lib Dems attacked all attempts to move fast as proto-fascism. Across the West, the old parties converged on defending the old system’s 2020 collapse and did not seek political advantage by suggesting the government change the old system to stop killing people in droves and destroying vast value. The Valley-comes-to-DC story is therefore an existential menace to the old regime across the West as it explicitly challenges the protected status of the permanent administrative state to which politicians have handed power since 1945. Cf. This by Joe Lonsdale on DOGE, technical teams and ‘root access’ to understand some of why it’s hard for the regime media to cover this story. If you ask Cabinet Office officials ‘how many people work here’ they can’t answer. If you ask ‘how many people do you pay’ they can’t answer. Part of what the PM’s data science team we set up in 2020 was doing was what Lonsdale describes here for DOGE which is partly why McSweeney stopped the Cabinet Office closing it after he was tipped off by some good officials. And see this piece on Ron Conway, a Valley legend: ‘AM ON IT’ is the exact spiritual opposite of SW1 and will be a superpower in DC where DOGE deploys people to work all night in government buildings largely ‘WFH’. Hence the Democrats trying to use the courts to declare the combination of root access and AM ON IT unlawful: speed and technical competence are the enemy of the old regime and the courts their most reliable weapon. As in Britain, lawyers and judicial review are the core defence of the permanent regime against the voters’ demands for change.

5. The consensus reality of the mass media age has passed into history. We’re into a world that in some ways resembles 1815 (no consensus reality) more than 1980 (powerful consensus reality). Technology changes will push this for a while (though may end up driving centralisation again). Elites are fragmenting fast. Political elites and regime media have lost control of, and even much understanding about, how stories are generated and spread. Across every part of society, the realisation is spreading for the first time in over a century: I can rationally just not care what the old political media says, it won’t harm my life, my family, my business.

6. Rapid realisation in UK outside SW1 that the old system is broken and something radically new is urgently needed. This is particularly fast and important among the young generally and a tech-savvy subset of the young. But also older richer people are shifting towards: ‘the old system I sort of trusted is done, what happens to my kids, can it be turned around or should they leave’. The immediate flat spin of Starmer blew up the widespread SW1 meme that Whitehall was fundamentally sound and just needed to expel the Tories: the constant farce has continued in exactly the same ways and it’s so stark Labour MPs are shocked.

7. A network of political/deep state/technical/investor people are planning for a world in which models are expert human-level in many domains in 1-3 years and we have another, highly compressed, Industrial Revolution. SW1 is full of people laughing at the idea X will happen in Y years time but if you talk to people working on the frontier you know X is already happening today. And the US v PRC race is on: massive budgets, bulldozers digging holes, data centres built, underground bunkers built, black projects proliferating, very aggressive espionage at scale, massive projects on military drones and autonomy, rapid planning in both countries on ‘how do open standards evolve globally, how does this affect alliances and militaries and intel agencies’, cf. DeepSeek CEO interview and Zuckerberg interview recently on open standards for AI. I’ve followed the AI debate since reading Bill Joy’s essay in 2000. The big lesson from 25 years is: those most optimistic about progress were ignored by the mainstream then constantly ridiculed yet (amazingly) consistently proved the most accurate, but the mainstream is programmed to not update to this lesson. My assumption talking to those building the future in the labs is this will continue for at least another 2-3 years. (When I had my first meeting with Sunak December 2022 to discuss my terms for helping him, top of my list was continuing what we started in 2020 to get UK capabilities to the frontier. Again Tories preferred failure and paralysis to leadership and growth. Again a tragic story of British science and engineering betrayed by British politicians, a core post-1945 story.)

8. The EU has kneecapped itself and is failing in all important areas: productivity, debt, public order, immigration, defence, technology, political extremism. Brussels chose self-sabotage on advanced technology. Unlike Britain which at least has DeepMind here, the EU has none of the leading labs. As the Commission said, we will be leaders not in AI but ‘trust in AI’! Mission semi-accomplished comrades! Brussels can kneecap itself and other countries that choose to follow its regulations but it will not compete with US and PRC or shape the global struggle over AI. Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites. Those who think AI will be like aspects of post-war car regulation are wrong. AI is ultimately about power and Great Powers will not let Brussels set the rules. I’ve watched SW1 repeat soundbites from the EU for 25 years on ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘now we’re going to get serious on technology’. They’ve always been hollow. I said in 2022-4 that covid predicted that not even wanting to prevail in Ukraine would force either the MoD or Brussels to stop the delusions. They babbled and watched. They left defence industry and procurement a farce. They encouraged deindustrialisation and sabotaged industrial production while babbling about net zero. Thanks to Brexit and the work we did in 2020 with the secret part of the Integrated review exposing the disaster zone of the MoD and agreeing a plan for radical change, we could have sorted ourselves out. Instead, 2021-4 the Tories worked with the worst parts of the MoD to continue the lies and delusions and followed the EU into escalating a dumb war which could have been avoided. The latest defence review is a disaster and the UK and EU will be humiliated month after month.

9. The SW1 system is more delusional about itself and the world than even 2016 and 2019-20. Further, the Elon/DOGE re-orientation to MAGA has made SW1 even more crazy on technology as well as politics. But SW1 is also polarising and cracking. The bulk is in a last ditch reality-distortion field but elements are quietly realising the game is up and change will come to SW1, the question is how fast and how aggressive. As in America, there will be rapid preference falsification cascades. At the heart of it all is the rot of elite culture, elite values and elite education over decades — we’re experiencing the same process described in classics about dead cultures and we’re facing the same intense difficulty others have faced in trying to reverse deep multi-decade trends.

10. #7, #8 and #9 reinforce #6 in a feedback loop.

What to do?

Summary: shove out Kemi ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a Third Force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 (remember voters keep voting for change but the old parties keep refusing), break the coalition supporting Starmer, take over No10, do regime change. Immediate action: vote Reform in all local elections and help start the avalanche to remove KB: push what’s falling.

The government that takes No10 in 2029 should not be ‘Conservative’ or ‘Reform’ or simply a merger. The Tories are dead in every way — talent, money, ideas, organisation, reputation — and their performance 2021-4 has left them strategically shattered. Reform-2024 version was almost entirely Farage, as he has said it had no real organisation, it has almost no infrastructure and isn’t an alternative government (but could try to become one, see below).

A significant fraction of talented people in Britain have to get involved in order to turn around our appalling politics. This will probably only happen by 2029 if those two parties combine and a significant Third Force from the country joins and improves them then persuades people to defect from Labour. The public can only force the radical change of direction they want by a combination of a) a subset of SW1 elites defecting from the old system, b) a subset of non-SW1 elites deciding to get involved in politics, and c) the energy and legitimacy of a large fraction of the masses. The critical element here is (b): their actions can motivate and change (a) and (c). This usually happens historically in times of crisis, cf. DOGE.

This is what’s needed if you define the goal as *maximising the probability of winning the 2029 election then doing regime change, not another normal government*.

Many will think this plan a desperate and unnecessary gamble with little chance of happening.

But it is not necessary to hope to persevere, optimism of the will… Most people in politics achieve little-to-nothing and part of the reason is they’re terrified of looking silly to the ‘mainstream’ while they try to climb its hierarchies. People who change big things see bits of the future already here and redefine the mainstream by taking risks, not worrying about looking silly to people who just talk and copy each other all day. It’s impossible to know how these complex dynamics will pan out so people should just try to build as much of what’s needed as possible and see how the cards fall. SW1 is always super-mimetic when crises come so work on building things that seed the memes.

Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.

Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first.

If you want British politics to have a better chance of escaping its farce, then probably the main thing you can do is help the ‘third force’ do what Monnet called ‘preparing the future’. There are some specific projects sketched below.

There’s a lot of great people self-organising. The obvious Idiocracy and grim prospects for fixing it are pushing some young people to America but are also generating creativity. But almost all this is happening far from Tories (dead) or Labour (nearly dead). Lawrence Newport and others have started just building things. I urge you to help them.

The suggested way forward can only be Straussian until crisis comes — i.e all parties should publicly deny sympathy with the concept regardless of private discussions. It can probably only happen in the circumstances of crisis that creates new possibilities. But it’s worth sketching openly some sort of map for Live Players to ponder. The ‘iron filings’ have to align…

(P.S It won’t stop the usual media chatter but for clarity: I can help people build some of what’s needed but my hope is, as it was in No10, to encourage and help very able people to get involved in politics, not to play a leading role myself. I strongly dislike SW1, do not want to return to it, and the feeling is mutual. I strongly advise you to ignore regime media stories about me and what I’m doing. E.g recently the FT and other papers suggested I’m ‘writing Elon’s tweets’. This is totally false. The stories they told about how we were reorganising No10 in 2020 were all fake news but like a lot of fake news — cf. Russiagate hoax — the regime media and pundit complex herds to believe the lies they create. Ironically Labour realises this best and it’s Labour spads/MPs and No10 officials who are most interested in the truth of the systems we started building 2020 because they realise they need to reinvent it if they are to have any hope, hence e.g why McSweeney intervened to block the Cabinet Office and partially save things we created and the Cabinet Office tried to close.)

I’ll set up another page like the Q&A page for thoughts on the TSP project so they’re all in one place and I can update easily.

Below I sketch some thoughts on:

• Some context. Why Starmer’s failing and won’t change Whitehall. Why I don’t think McSweeney will get what he wants and is trapped in a similar situation to us in 2020. The failure of the Establishment’s Kemi project.

• How should people think about the ends to aim for? What are the crucial elements for regime change at an abstract level that people need to build?

• How could SW1 events play out? Do the Cameroons shuffle in Cleverley and sink themselves for good? Prospects for a Tory-Reform deal? What can others do to influence SW1 dynamics?

• Questions and problems

This is a version of what I’m saying privately to people with different backgrounds all desperate for change and rapidly realising there’s no easy answers when the political system becomes cancerous.

I’ve almost finished the blog on Metternich, Pitt and the Napoleonic Wars, only the final conclusion needs tweaking. As our system melts it’s been fascinating to read about how Whitehall under Pitt 225 years ago was more like SpaceX 2025 than Whitehall today is like SpaceX 2025.

I added a summary to the long blog on the CIA, Angleton, counter-intelligence, fundamental problems with intelligence services etc. Some of this is global news again as Trump seems to be sticking to his promise to publish the remaining CIA files on Oswald. I guarantee you will be shocked by revelations about the Zapruder film being taken to the CIA’s classified photo lab, NPIC, the weekend after the assassination. The truth is so extraordinary it would struggle to get past Hollywood scriptwriters.

Child protection was put into the Department for Children, Schools and Families by Brown when he gave Ed Balls his own department. I therefore worked on this from 2007-14, in the renamed DfE 2011-14. We tried to push through a big change towards an assumption of publishing and openness for mistakes on child protection. Much of the system repeatedly tried to coverup bureaucratic incompetence using the ECHR/HRA. I had many meetings on the institutionalised Whitehall conspiracies to suppress the truth on child abuse which I witnessed. I will be doing something on this shortly. SW1 is full of people saying ‘Elon is spreading disinformation that there was a national coverup’. Wrong again, Elon is right. There were attempts at national coverups. I saw them. The coverup culture was so profound officials planned to incinerate documents en masse to prevent publication. The SW1 cliché is that ‘it’s always a cockup not a conspiracy’. But on child abuse my experience in government is that it’s much more accurate to assume conspiracy.

Another truly disgraceful — treacherous and disgusting — affair is the way that Whitehall has generated a rolling campaign to investigate and ruin the lives of special forces soldiers. It’s happened over Ireland. It’s happened over Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s happened on other operations. Tories and Labour have allowed the most disgusting axis of Whitehall officials, lawyers, and Britain’s enemies to use our own laws and legal system to persecute heroes who risked their lives to keep us safe. They were told to do operations by politicians including Thatcher, Blair etc. And told after the operation ‘you did a brilliant job’. Now the ECHR and Human Rights Act are being used to attack them and defend our enemies. We can’t deport convicted child rapists because of their human rights and the same rules are used to attack our soldiers. Apart from the moral disgrace, it’s also extending Whitehall’s vandalism to critical capabilities. Why should such soldiers conduct similar operations knowing Whitehall is controlled by people who will ruin their lives as soon as human rights lawyers are hired by our enemies in our own courts?

This is easily soluble — it is not in the category of things like NHS waiting lists which is complex and hard. Like the ludicrous ‘small boats’, I went into it in detail in 2020. But officials throughout the system, including in the corrupt cesspit of MoD, prioritise terrorists and lawyers and the Guardian and staying in the ECHR. If you grab a minister dealing with this you usually grab slime. But the ministers who ordered the operations do NOT get dragged into the legal cases, only the soldiers. Solders in their 70s have their lives ruined but ministers like Tom King who authorised operations and generals who said ‘do it’ are left to die in peace. People who see special forces as more of an enemy ‘to the rule of law’ than terrorists now effectively control the AG office and the Cabinet Office legal service. We have an AG, Hermer, who not only supported a revolting character who invented war crimes against UK special forces but continued to support him after his lies were revealed. This cancer in Whitehall and the courts (cf. judges like the grotesque Humphrys) must be burnt out one way or another. (There should be a simple Bill passed through Parliament that a) cancels all so-called legacy investigations into special forces (Ireland, Afghanistan etc) and commands all entities in the UK to cease and desist such investigations and explicitly makes clear no court anywhere has any power to revive any of them — with ‘notwithstanding’ clauses everywhere to make totally clear to the courts that the ECHR/HRA are 100% nuked, and b) explicitly states that British forces are not subject to the ECHR or the HRA or the Strasbourg court. Investigation of possible war crimes needs a new process from which ECHR/HRA/Strasbourg jurisdiction are entirely excluded.)

The coverups over child abuse and the persecution of special forces are probably the two most disgusting things I’ve witnessed in 25 years of SW1 involvement. It is not coincidental that the ECHR/HRA and the handover of political control to lawyers and the very worst elements in Whitehall are central to both. After 14 years of presiding over this, the Tories put in a new leader who still supports the ECHR/HRA. It’s also not coincidental that J Powell — central to the surrender by the British state to the IRA — worked with lawyers to push through a ‘deal’ involving us giving £350 million per week to bribe Mauritius to take Chagos from us — all because a bunch of Starmer’s lawyer friends worked with a Chinese judge (!!) to babble about ‘human rights’! Whitehall now is often effectively working for our enemies, as was some of Whitehall on Brexit.

If you have any influence, please exercise it to pressure senior people in the MoD and armed forces and Parliament to mobilise against Whitehall waging a campaign against British heroes. And we need a network inside the deep state to push the AG out of office by any means necessary. I guarantee that there will be scandals galore to dig up. Let’s find them and get him fired. Spread this meme around MI5, MI6, and GCHQ where many will agree. I think senior parts of the No10 spad team will ‘push what’s falling’ and join in as many in No10 realise he is a disgrace and another sign of Starmer’s abysmal judgement (see below).

The response to the Southport stabbings from Whitehall was: coverup over Al Qaeda angles, scream ‘disinformation’, jail people for social media posts, then blame online shopping for selling knives. Then they moved on to the rising tide of violence and announced — a ban of kitchen knives with pointy ends. And regime media pundits go along with the madness.

PS. Having avoided the speaking circuit I’m now doing paid talks to raise money for a) Maths Circles (a nonprofit network giving primary children elite maths education) and b) the TSP project. Fees depend on who/what you are and how rich you are. I do some free (e.g schools), some discounted, some expensive…

The below is a mix of things written over the past two months.

It should be edited and compressed. But I don’t have time. So I’ll just post it then over the next few weeks do some shorter things on some of the themes. This is a blog, not finished essays! Hopefully it’s useful for different people grappling with these issues…

Some context

To bring together energy, talent, and resources to try to change the trajectory of British politics, it’s useful to consider some context for what’s gone wrong and why the old regime seems stuck in a gravity-well. Much of this section will be familiar to long-time readers, skip on down if you want! What I wrote about elite shifts and the regime media in the Trump blog is also obviously context to the UK scene I won’t repeat here.

After the Tory collapse, the ‘serious’ people in SW1 were united: Starmer as PM meant ‘serious’ ministers, the ‘super-impressive’ Sue Gray would show everyone how to grip a newly respected Whitehall, the ‘grownups’ were taking back control.

Starmer promptly collapsed on contact with the rotten edifice of Whitehall which also collapsed. SW1 is hilariously stunned. The voters — always ahead of SW1 — are not. Usually voters vote for change with some hope. In 2024 they voted for change thinking it was already doomed. Unprecedented in modern elections, they en masse skipped the hope phase and voted already in the disillusioned phase, purely to remove the hated Tories. Both leaders reflect both parties: hollow and hated. Hollow speeches, hollow ideas, hollow organisations. Hollow, failing and lost. These leaders and parties — like Wormald for Whitehall — represent decades of the talent collapse and talent filter that has lowered the ability of people in public life and narrowed the personality types of those who go into politics and government.

Everything vibrant is outside SW1. When you interact with SW1, it stinks like death. A whole new politics is bubbling up fast across the country, and across the wider West, and the last place to see it is the place whose job it is to see these things first: Westminster. The government is mentally in San Francisco politics (not technology!) 2020-21 thinking ‘this is the future’ hence, partly, why every week is a string of embarrassing disasters and civil servants describe dealing with No10 as ‘very weird, it feels like the end of a ten year cycle, the end of a regime with no ideas or energy, but they haven’t been there ten months’.

In December I went to America to talk to some of those working on the DOGE-White House project and those working in the top labs on AI models (some of them working on both!) After hearing about DOGE plans and widespread assumptions across the top labs about the models’ abilities in many domains relevant to governments and security and regime stability within two years, I flew home and talked to people who live in SW1-world. In 25 years I’ve never experienced such a stark contrast between discussions inside and outside SW1. Not even during Brexit or covid.

Most of SW1 has ‘dropped out of the light cone’ of serious discussions elsewhere, trapped in its own simulacrum of narrative whiplash while ideas and events are accelerating away from SW1 discussion. Each year, it feels like they’ve slipped another year backwards relative to discussions with people at the frontier, it feels harder and harder to imagine it catching up. It’s a general problem but particularly striking on DOGE and AI. The NPCs who police acceptable opinions jabber about how ‘AI is a fraud’ and ‘the models are far from doing X’ while the models are literally being used to do X now. I watch NPCs say ‘no sign they’ll have much economic impact any time soon’ the same day I speak to a top engineer on $500k+ in a top lab who tells me how their own job has radically transformed in the past year by using the models and they are actively changing their lives and career plans on the assumption that ~99% of their job will be transformed within a year or two because of what they’re using now and can see in the lab — not because of distant speculations. The models are now almost ‘NPC-complete’, i.e able to generate ‘expert political commentary’. The models can already do some research jobs better than ~99% of SW1 pundits and researchers. Don’t believe me, just download OIA’s Deep Research, try it out and consider what the version of that which already exists but hasn’t been released yet can do, never mind what they will do in 2 years. They’ll soon have to be retarded rather than enhanced to mimic political people.

I wrote a few years ago that politics would become more and more weird as consensus reality collapses for fragmenting elites. This process ripped harder in November. All their September-October mockery of Trump/Elon didn’t lead to any updating after their humiliation. Much of SW1’s NPC class turned further inwards ranting to each other that they’d been even more right, the voters are dupes for ‘disinformation’, AI IS A FAD pushed by idiot Nazis, WHY CAN’T DUMB BILLIONAIRES SEE WHAT WE PUNDITS SEE?!

It’s going to be even more painful for the old political Insiders. They’ll tell themselves that it’s a fever dream, that somewhere is a new Blair or Clinton who can ‘bring back normal politics’, by which they mean the halcyon days between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. But the old consensus reality based on the growth of mass media from the mid-19th Century is part of history: like the pre-1789 ancien regime for those gathered in Vienna in 1815, or the pre-1914 world for those gathered in Paris in 1918, people could remember it, they could love it and hate it, they could invoke it, but they could not restore it — it had become history though it lived on in living memory for decades.

The world of the Today program, ABC News, Cronkite etc is similar. Someone from Newsnight texted me this week asking if I’d go on: I thought it closed down two years ago. It just became irrelevant. That prompted another thought. For the first 20 years of involvement in politics, I was irritated by people jabbering about the Today program. In No10 we banned ministers from appearing on it and feeding SW1’s cycle of self-delusional nonsense. It caused trouble because it still mattered. But I suddenly noticed this week — nobody ever mentions it to me now, it also sank sometime in the last few years. It isn’t even a source of clips for WhatsApp groups. It’s a message board for a closed failing social network cut off from the reality of voters, the reality of issues, the reality of technology, and the reality of power as power moves to other networks.

The Insider world of Westminster closed itself off many years ago. You could see it in 2004 when we won the North East referendum by turning it into a referendum on whether you trusted and respected Westminster. They closed their eyes and ears to an 80-20 verdict and kept them closed through expenses scandals, the worst financial crisis since 1929, Brexit, covid, Ukraine and Trump the sequel. It’s logical that after the humiliation of November, so many self-cancelled by fleeing to rant into the BlueSky void about how everyone supporting regime change is Hitler.

This Insider world is going to get wrecked the same way Insider world always gets wrecked when history’s remorseless cycle of regime change takes aim.

This cycle is spinning fast in America. The MAGA+Valley project is trying to do what we started in 2019: be a government that controls the government, rather than a front for the permanent bureaucracy with its fake meritocracy and fake responsibility and constant, morally and financially bankrupting disasters. Young elite talent uploads software patches into Treasury payments systems and just does things, things that seemed inconceivable to ‘the mainstream’ even 3 months ago. Elon is doing to the civil service what he did with the Twitter files — throw all the lies of the old system on the internet and let the public see what the old system really is, while that system and its media defenders shriek in horror at scrutiny, demand ‘restore your trust in us!’, and call everyone who doesn’t trust them ‘Hitler’ or ‘dupes of disinformation’. The playbook is stale. Voters have had enough. It won’t stop DOGE rolling on. Only Trump can stop DOGE though it’s very much not in his interests to flinch.

Let it roll on — like the Mississippi in full flood, to broader lands and better days! Hopefully it will wash away the financial/debt Ponzi, the student loan Ponzi, the immigration Ponzi, the welfare Ponzi and the government procurement Ponzi that have supported the ‘mainstream’ across the west for 30 years.

The long perspective of historical regime change puts the immediate failure of Starmer and Kemi in context

The UK system is caught up in the long-term cycle of western regime change you see stretching back centuries.

We see repeatedly:

• both a) the dominant ideas of those nominally in charge of political institutions and

• b) the capacity of those institutions to face and adapt to reality

• become increasingly out of whack with reality,

• elites don’t face this gap and are strongly incentivised to believe a fake world rather than try to force the old system to face reality,

• inevitable sudden crisis knocks the walls out (debt crash, war, natural disaster etc), mimesis collapses, preference falsification cascades very fast,

• the old regime collapses,

• a new elite with new ideas allies with a subset of the people who supply the energy and legitimacy,

• a new regime is born…

After some decades of regime stability, political elites can’t remember a different world, they all got promoted in this system, the world they’ve grown up in seems like it must be permanent. As this world crumbles it is extremely disconcerting, often scary. Crises knock over the old players that couldn’t adapt. Leaders pop up who realise the old system is broken. Suddenly live players just do things that seemed inconceivable just six months ago. The regime change cycle turns.

SLOW ROT, ELITE BLINDNESS, SUDDEN CRISIS, FAST COLLAPSE, REGIME CHANGE…

In Russia, Germany, France etc, the process has been recurrently violent.

In Britain and America the institutions have hit crises but managed to adapt without serious violence.

The MAGA-DOGE-Valley-comes-to-DC process is the latest example of the Anglo-American system trying to adapt to the mismatch between ideas and institutions out of whack with reality.

All cycles of regime change retire a set of the old regime and create a new alliance between a subset of elites, providing ideas and organisation, and the people, providing energy and legitimacy. Brexit and MAGA give Britain and America a chance of peaceful regime change that will be violent in most places.

Brexit and 2019-24

Brexit and the Vote Leave project in No10 was our attempt to get us ahead of these trends. The bureaucratic centralism of the EU’s constitutional order was fundamentally hostile to the UK’s historical institutional error-correction — e.g the common law — that improves adaptation and lessens the chances of system-overwhelming crises. We had to get out before it destroyed us. In all important ways, the EU has evolved as we predicted in 2015-16 — a disaster on productivity, technology, debt, immigration and political extremism. The Single Market is now being used to kneecap European technology, as we said would happen in 2016. Silicon Valley has updated on the EU much faster than EU and SW1 political Insiders have.

What’s happening and will happen in DC now was much advanced here in 2020. There’s a lot of ‘we need a British DOGE’. This was happening in 2020. Teams were building. Elite talent — from business, from armed forces, from bits of public services — arrived in No10. ‘10ds’ was built and for the first time in modern history the PM’s office — rather then HMT or the Cabinet Office — started getting the best information on what was actually going on in government, much better than the Treasury which doesn’t do analysis, data or computers as you can see in the official Inquiry (cf. this from a DOGE-er in DC re the model of ‘10ds’ for DOGE). Project SPEED ran in the Cabinet Room, while the old system watched PMQs at Wednesday lunchtime, to slash projects from >25 years to <5 years. Planning, procurement, defence, tax, R&D, technology, education and skills, mass de-regulation — all main areas (except welfare) were starting the shift from the broken old path to a new path.

And on the most important issues of all the Cabinet Secretary surrendered after the old system collapsed: appointments, Northcote-Trevelyan’s fake civil service meritocracy and fake ministerial responsibility, and the performance management of Permanent Secretaries by the PM’s office. Who fires whom? Does the government control the government or is No10 theatre for hacks while the permanent administrative class promotes itself to run the government in its own interests, like a cancer feeding on the voters and taxpayers?

But then, disaster. The Trolley rejected the surrender. All changes to the core system were stopped. The PM made clear he did not want the government to control the government. So inevitably all the policy changes also tumbled like dominoes. And he made clear in 2021 that the 2019 manifesto, political strategy, electoral coalition and plan for government begun in 2020 were all abandoned and No10 was returning to its normal post-Thatcher role: Media Entertainment Service.

And Tory MPs cheered. Phew! We can all go back to pretending we can return to the glorious time between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers, ‘normal politics’, as they tweeted to each other. They voted to break the tax guarantee because of a phantom ‘social care plan’ that was pure Media Entertainment. More cheering as they blew their own feet off. ‘Very smart’ croaked the pundits ‘like frogs before a storm’, Boris will be in power for a decade!

The chance to get ahead of the political dynamics now swamping SW1 was rejected and the old Tory system left to its own devices immediately collapsed in chaos just as they did 2016-19 in the absence of any creative force. But — and this is very important — many/most of them prefer the collapse and rout than the branching history in which we finished what we started in 2019. This is crucial concerning what happens next.

The stories about 2019-20 you read in the old media are junk — the stories about the policy and the stories about the reorganisations. Ironically, parts of Labour now grasp this better than Tories hence Labour MPs and spads now asking for documents from Project SPEED.

Opinions are shifting fast outside SW1 and events will soon move fast inside SW1

Now Britain is even deeper into the rot with very fragile and obviously failing institutions and is very vulnerable to fast crises. Young talent is heading for California and Austin, those that remain are desperate. Financial experts are discussing a debt interest spiral and an IMF crisis. Elite talent outside SW1 is discussing the timelines for AI models and their implications for the new White House and US-Russia-PRC relations while SW1 Insiders encode themselves in the models’ training data as clowns, yabbering ‘fad, scam, chatbot’ at each other.

Political types are sketching scenarios and plotting. Kemi is another abysmal Tory Establishment project that’s already falling apart. She’s a gonner, it’s just a question of how fast and it’ll probably be faster than the mainstream expects. The next Tory leadership contest has already started, groups are tentatively feeling each other out, plans are forming over new WhatsApp groups. The Cameroons and Carrie-spad complex surrounding Kemi are already preparing a new host for their virus when she blows: shuffle in, without a membership vote, NPC-minister extraordinaire, James ‘Chagos’ Cleverley: we thought we had the Black Thatcher, she turned out to be the Black Truss, but now we got the Black Boris! It’s a logical choice for the stupid party and could send the rotten Tory ship to the bottom.

Entrepreneurs are more desperate than at any time since entrepreneurs talked real coups with soldiers in 1970s Mayfair. Some are calculating where to shove cash and move families. And we’ve barely had yet the coming shocks of DOGE and the White House plans (much more extensive than SW1 grasped), tariffs, the attempt to end the West’s latest disastrous war in Ukraine, a Middle East deal with MBS and Israel normalising relations (mostly already agreed), a search for a US-PRC deal, and the shocking advances coming on AI. (NB. Elon’s team and S Miller’s team have been working far more intensely than is realised. And the media looks at the headline picks for jobs but not the very capable business people who have volunteered, such as Steve Feinberg going to the Pentagon. Turns out I was wrong three years ago when I said such people would not come back for a sequel. You would never know it from the old media but the calibre of talent involved is unparalleled in over half a century.)

All these things will hit a UK Government that is mentally with the Democrat/US media ‘mainstream’ in 2020-22.

Starmer and Whitehall: who fires whom?

Starmer is in a flat spin and is too bad at politics ever to look like someone who can competently execute a plan the voters think matches their priorities. Starmer and his team couldn’t handle his suits and specs expenses. Starmer mistook Heywood’s HR fixer for someone who could ‘run Whitehall’. I said she was the wrong person and showed Starmer didn’t know what he was doing. The ‘grownups’ said she was a ‘grownup’ who would restore ‘seriousness’.

It was recently reported that when, in No10, Starmer realised there was no plan, then Gray got the blame. But the actual story isn’t the obvious — Gray was hopeless, the ‘serious’ people keep turning out to be jokers — it’s that the PM went in to No10 without realising he did not have a plan — that’s how engaged he is! No wonder McSweeney et al are briefing that Starmer is like a ‘HR manager’ disengaged from the project carried out in his name!

No10 won’t handle the immense challenges of the times and the multiple disasters inflicted for decades by MPs and Whitehall.

I think McSweeney understands some of the things needed but Starmer will not let him do them, hire the team to do them, fire the people blocking doing them etc. People who talk to McSweeney already describe how he ‘surprisingly doesn’t seem to have much agency, talks like his ability to change things is very limited’. Which I think is true. And recent reports suggest Labour spads are having similar discussions in the same rooms in No10 as we had after the 2019 election: this PM is just fundamentally not remotely up to it and it’s extremely hard to do big things when the PM doesn’t get what you’re talking about yet insists on imposing his rubbish judgements, arghhh, there’s only so much we can do…!

After promising change, they’ve continued what nobody but some SW1 characters want — a continuation of the Osborne-Hammond-Sunak death spiral of more tax, more regulation and vandalising productivity and crucial capabilities. The budget just tipped more money and power into the broken system without even pretending to have a plan to change anything important. HMT told everyone they’d pulled off a ‘great balancing act’. But businesses saw the total lack of even a pretence at a new path and despaired.

The two big things Labour chose to do which hit public consciousness are winter fuel payments and farmers’ inheritance tax. What do they have in common? Neither of them were Labour priorities, both were Treasury priorities! As a few officials have observed to me recently who watched meetings with Sunak’s team then Starmer’s team: the ministers have changed but the meetings see literally the same scripts read out, and the Chairman’s notes summarising the meetings are the same ones they used with Sunak!

One of the most telling SW1 discussions I had last year was with an official involved in the transition talks. At one point last year, the Starmer team was asked — OK, we now need to know your secret plans, all the things you’ve worked out that won’t be in the manifesto, we need to prepare for them. And the answer was — there are no secret plans, we’re looking forward to seeing your plans for how to fix the Tories’ mess that they wouldn’t do. And some officials left the room and clutched their heads and said — oh my god, they really think the civil service has The Plans!

Starmer, like Sunak, doesn’t understand the job. He’s said to his spads that he wants the No10 machine to ‘bring me consensus, I don’t want to be settling disputes between the Cabinet’. Who will explain to him that this is one of the top three parts of his job?! Sunak was similar. He liked going through numbers with officials and improving official documents then the officials would leave and say ‘who will tell him he’s doing a great job as PPS but he’s not doing the PM’s job?’

Everywhere people are starting to realise that the ‘Starmer project’ was a project for beating the post-Vote Leave Tories in the election but was not a project for a government that controls the government and attacking our long term problems.

And Whitehall has been exposed as an insane asylum to another party’s MPs.

The Whitehall of 1800 greatly valued operational brilliance and technical skill — see blog on Pitt and Whitehall organising against Napoleon. Today’s Whitehall makes hollow babble about ‘strategy’ high status and operational brilliance and technical skill low status. Labour MPs are now presiding over a constant string of operational disasters and realising they can’t just blame it all on ‘evil stupid Tories / Brexit’.

Labour ministers and MPs can already see that ministerial power and responsibility are now almost totally fake and Whitehall is structurally programmed to fail. The officials run almost everything and the MPs job is to stand up in Parliament to take the blame for things they have no meaningful control over — see Palmerston’s comment at the top, so apposite today. Ministers’ power to improve things is close to zero without a dynamic No10, hence the relentlessly centralising history of Whitehall for decades.

As the rot has deepened over decades, the power of anybody other than the PM to do anything has shrunk hence a) more and more things go to the PM’s office (hence so many mad No10 meetings in 2020 as only the PM’s office had the authority to do the sensible not the mad thing and ignore ‘the rules’) and b) PMs in desperation keep centralising. They fail anyway. But they can’t see any way out. And the next one goes through the same trajectory ending in Memoirs that ruefully describe the search for ‘the levers of power’.

Insider attention and why they can’t get things done

First, Insider attention hops from one ephemeral emotional wave to another in a constant churn of story after story.

Last year attention cycled through Sue Gray, scandals, riots, winter fuel, farmers, Southport, US election etc. In the first week of January it was rape gangs. In the week of 27/1 it was sort of ‘growth’ to the extent anything has dominated SW1.

This attention usually lasts less than a week, rarely two weeks, very occasionally it stretches to a month. The Grenfell fire (~100 dramatic deaths) was very unusual in maintaining Insider focus for 3-4 weeks. Far fewer than 1% of stories maintain much SW1 focus for a month. Only a tiny fraction of things are like Brexit that stretch years (with other things flaring up to capture most attention briefly then disappearing).

In 2017-18 I and some others built a tool — we called it Bubblescope because it measured the Bubble’s attention — to quantify SW1 attention. The numbers demonstrate what I’m saying: the Insider political elite’s attention is extremely fragmented and they surf from one ephemeral emotional wave to the next in an unending stream. Our experiment also showed that it’s possible to make useful predictions about the arc of a story as it bubbles up: how intense will it be, how long will Bubble attention last. (Even rough predictions about this are valuable. And it was a cheap fast side project, there’s vast scope for doing this properly.)

To a large extent these waves are driven by mimetics and cascades. It is easier for people at the apex of certain hierarchies (political power, celebrities like Tom Cruise) to create these waves than others because of the structure of the network: Tom Cruise is a huge node with many connections and spreading to many different subnetworks. But their ability to do so is inherently limited and the extent to which certain memes ‘go viral’ is affected by many things outside anybody’s control. Each story is competing in the ecosystem with others. Often political Insiders are overwhelmed by events. Planes crash. Terrorists kill. Markets panic.

And the set of stories that win the contest for attention inside the Insider ecosystem are, obviously, not the same as the stories that that win the contest for attention of voters. Compare, for example, the attention given to the launch of Hillary’s 2016 election campaign and the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard saga. People in political communication generally don’t understand this difference.

The ecosystem of SW1 runs on these waves. The MPs, officials, spads, think tankers and the professional spectators on Twitter get up, scroll, and dive in on the day’s issues. Suddenly they all have an opinion about tank tracks and weather in Ukraine. Or terrorist laws. Or DeepSeek which they’d never heard of yesterday. Or ‘does the PM agree with celeb X on Y’. Everyone chats about this all day and on WhatsApp. On to the next day. And much of the bureaucratic system follows this wave.

Suddenly a year has gone. Then four. And people look back and talk and write about how hard it was to get anything done, ‘the levers of power’ etc.

Second, the heart of power in No10 is pulled to these ephemeral waves and is not structured to:

• think properly about choosing priorities and what order it’s sensible to pursue them in

• plan operationally

• build high performance teams

• maintain focus on executing priorities step by step for years

• consider their own activity embedded in the broader system as a ‘systems problem’ requiring ‘systems thinking’ (people, management, communication, politics etc).

No10 is structured to a) talk to the old media and b) maintain the PM’s delusion that being in office is the same as being in power while officials do 99% of government outside practical political control. This includes hiding a PM’s true powers from the PM and, when necessary, making the PM think that exercising power is theoretically possible but would be morally/legally wrong (‘I’m afraid it would raise questions about respect for the rule of law PM’).

Hence the largely successful campaign by some lawyers and officials to elide the difference between domestic law and international law. The latter is not and has never been considered to be binding in the sense domestic law is. But they have persuaded MPs to consider international law as binding in the same sense of domestic law. And this gives officials and lawyers great powers to shape what a PM does. How judicial review affects the PM’s office is unknown in broader networks around the bar or SW1 and when I’ve explained it publicly lawyers say it cannot possibly be true. (Hence, for example, the widespread confusion over things like special forces droning people instead of arresting them, which I explained two years before the kerfuffle last October but which SW1 was so totally confused by they almost all got the wrong end of the stick.)

So it’s the same ten people in meetings on everything important: Southport, Trump, winter fuel, Ukraine etc. And it’s the same ten people making the big decisions on the long-term things like growth, prison building, MoD budgets etc. And it’s the same ten people considering the PM’s speech on growth and Ukraine and NHS waiting lists etc. And it’s the same ten people in an argument over policy, an argument over system failure, and an argument over ‘communication’, an argument over ‘handling the MPs’, and an argument about ‘what will GCHQ do if the current trends with the models improve cyber capabilities given HMT has banned it from hiring 99% of the talent it needs’.

One of the maddest things about No10 is that it starts the day with the PM being read stories from the old media. Everyone babbles. No10 issues statements on all sorts. And summons panic meetings to discuss one or more of these stories.

But everything important in the world that is hard and complex — building a product/service, delivering a hard government policy, winning a geopolitical context, creating new knowledge — requires intense focus on priorities for a long time. And intense focus on priorities requires saying No, stop, strip, simplify, focus.

But everything in No10 operates to make this practically possible and if someone tries in some way they are told what they want is ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘unlawful’.

Third, the obvious thing to do is to create a system to ensure intense focus on priorities when those ten people are not in a meeting about it saying ‘this is a top priority’.

This is what we started doing in 2020. It requires (assuming something like the existing system sort of exists and you aren’t starting from scratch) two other things: a) a fundamental change to Whitehall HR so appointments are open by default and b) the performance management of Permanent Secretaries by the PM’s office. If you can’t change the people and you can’t enforce priorities on senior people, then you can’t make meaningful changes to policy, management and system. You don’t control the government. The Cabinet Secretary agreed the new system and both of these things — the biggest change in Whitehall in many decades. It combined with unifying the No10 and HMT team rather than allowing HMT to withhold information from the PM, the totally mad normal system.

As soon as we left No10, the system effortlessly got the PM to destroy the thing he needed and revert to chaos, no priorities, and the default of ‘No10 as Media Entertainment Service’. This is all most officials have ever known and for most officials is preferable to a government controlling the government. And HMT immediately ended the system we built and reverted to keeping the PM in the dark like a troublesome spad — the system Starmer and McSweeney are now suffering.

I won’t go into it all here, cf. this and my official evidence to the covid Inquiry.

How will Labour cope?

Whitehall has been such a shock that new ministers and spads are blaming Whitehall for their flat spin and declaring ‘Cummings is right’ about the civil service. To be fair to some of the Labour MPs, unlike ~100% of Tories — especially those most liked by the NPC class such as Gawke — some Labour ministers actually want the government to control the government!

So it’s underrated that the Left is updating on Whitehall 10X faster than the Tory MPs did and may well end up in a much more radical position than the Tories after 14 years of failure. Just as Blair updated faster and clearer on Whitehall than senior Tories. But I don’t think this will change much in the next four years.

At the same time as this briefing, the PM appointed Wormald as Cabinet Secretary. It was logical for Whitehall to give the PM a choice for Cabinet Secretary of the guy who screwed up the Brexit negotiations or the guy who killed thousands screwing up the covid response — then presented this choice as ‘the serious people’ are in charge.

Starmer could have rejected the ludicrous process and its poisoned chalice ‘choice’ but of course he did not. He chose to drink the covid chalice. Wormald is the spider man meme in official form — the man responsible for the disastrous pandemic plan which amounted to ‘let the NHS collapse with over 500k dead and no health service for months because nothing can be done, vaccines and tests are impossible’, the man who tried to get the PM to go on TV and advocate for ‘chickenpox parties’ so people got covid as fast as possible, which was such a bad idea I’m pretty sure not a single regime on earth did it, the man who will be nominally responsible for removing those officials found by the Inquiry to have failed. And Wormald had to apologise to ministers after ministers were told documents relating to the blood scandal had all been properly given to the archives but they had not. He then revealed that his father was one of those investigated in the Inquiry.

It’s a perfect emblem for the morphing of real ministerial responsibility, which Britain was famous for worldwide, into the fake responsibility that dominates now. Logically Starmer has also appointed Ollie Robbins, architect of May’s abysmal deal, to lead the Foreign Office and J Powell in charge of surrendering Chagos.

The Cabinet Secretary apportioning blame for the pandemic preparations and VIP lane

Starmer even sabotaged ministers’ own power even further last year. Almost totally ignored by the old media, among the most important documents from the new government so far are a speech from the AG and a document sent round the Cabinet Office. These changes enhanced the already disastrous grip of government lawyers in the Cabinet Office on the government. They made even more true the Golden Rule of SW1: the government does not control the government and doesn’t want to. Ministers and spads are already experiencing this directly. They are being told: sorry, the AG’s changes mean it’s not lawful to proceed on X. (Obviously the IFG was very supportive.)

This is obviously part of the explanation for the Chagos farce. Prediction: a network of Labour MPs and spads will start trying to shove the AG out to save themselves, realising that the government can’t function if it’s controlled by the CO’s legal team.

Might No10 change course?

They will try to change course a bit. It’s already happening. In some areas they will panic and try to change. But the big things won’t change. And the biggest thing — how power works in Whitehall — won’t change.

Starmer is an official. He worked as a civil servant and as a lawyer.

In 2021 the MET had another disaster when a policeman kidnapped Sarah Everard off the street and killed her.

Boris was entangled in scandals and didn’t want to antagonise the police who were investigating him. He stood by Cressida Dick and played for time.

The biggest open goal in British politics that year was to go on TV and say:

This is the latest in a long string of disasters for the MET. The MET leadership are clearly incapable of sorting themselves out. Cressida Dick and other senior management must be replaced immediately. We need respected outsiders brought in to the MET to figure out what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. No more coverups. No more excuses. No more delays. The PM has refused to act. He says he’s standing with the senior management. It’s another appalling misjudgement. The country demands action. We cannot possibly let those responsible for these disasters yet again give excuses and wait for the media to forget about it. The country wants real responsibility. The PM must listen, reconsider and do his duty — and replace the senior management immediately. We will pressure him every day until he acts.

Instead Starmer went on TV and said — I’m standing with the PM and the MET management!!

People ask ‘what’s the core of Starmer?’. That is the core of Starmer. He really believes in defending the old system — he believes in it with an instinctive inner faith that’s like my belief that the old system is rotten. He thought the Tories were awful and Brexit was awful and these two things were causing the problems. Once him and the good people returned, the system would naturally be fine. Starmer and thousands like him have trained themselves for decades to believe fairy tales. Now they’re really confused but they won’t ditch their fairy tales. Starmer will conclude: the damage from Brexit was deeper than I thought! Many pundits will echo this — what else can they do?!

Someone with this instinct will not be able to use the power he has in the constitution and start replacing senior management and rebuilding functional institutions while the system around him screams ‘unlawful, the lawyers object’. Starmer can no more take on the Cabinet Office than Sunak could take on the Treasury. Like Cameron and Sunak, Starmer will prefer to fail respectably with Permanent Secretaries giving him a patronising smile as he leaves — you did your duty PM, they’ll say, as they prepare to chop the balls off the next NPC-PM.

Spads and ministers are discovering the Labour insider view on Whitehall was wrong. But the system is now so rotten that it cannot be usefully tweaked. Announcements like those last year by McFadden about ‘reform’ amount to confirmation that nothing important will challenge the old system which will continue to shift more power from politicians to officials and lawyers every year. (In classic fashion, most of what he announced as ‘new’ actually already existed and the rest was trivial.) Only vast changes can have effects on a scale noticed by voters. And this includes bringing in talent from outside and fundamentally speeding up Whitehall. When every major project is now measured on the scale of 20-40 years, it does not matter if you performatively tweak this or that and spin ‘we’re reforming’ — all ‘reforms’ (tweaks) are swamped by vast bureaucratic inertia. And HMT is both more powerful than ever and on the side of inertia.

Whitehall feels no fear. It assumes it has Starmer where it wants him and when he blows up there’ll be another NPC shuffled in. They think they survived the existential crisis of 2020 so they’re safe. Looking at the Tories they see no threat. The only lurking worry is the rise of Reform. But that’s a distant threat.

Starmer, like the Tory MPs and other Insiders, is in a trap: the system generates constant failure, you’re under political pressure to ‘do something’, small changes are meaningless and the system turns them into mush without effort, but big changes are an existential challenge potentially taking up all bandwidth and provoking bitter resistance, and most of your life has trained you to rub along with those threatening bitter resistance — not fire them!

So, Starmer will say some things about ‘reforming Whitehall’ that will reliably hit the sweet spot of annoying officials but changing nothing. Only something beyond the scale of covid or Ukraine will prompt Insiders to radical action, such as a worse-than-1929/2008 financial crash.

Long-term though, the fact that a bunch of Labour MPs and spads will join people on the Right in having witnessed the pathologies of Whitehall will be important. It means more energy building up that can’t find release. So when the right crisis comes, there will be more energy behind ‘actually rip it up’ than Whitehall realises — similar to how there is much more energy behind changing DC in 2025 than there was in 2016. Imagine four more years like the last six months. There will be more and more people who grasp: Whitehall isn’t going to get a PM who works harder than Sunak or who is more of a system defender than Starmer, if THEY couldn’t make it work then it means it CANNOT work, the only way out is A GOVERNMENT THAT CONTROLS THE GOVERNMENT!

If you want the full context and detail on the civil service and what really happened 2019-20, then look at my evidence under oath to the covid Inquiry.

If you want to cut through a huge amount of complexity, here is a way to do it. Follow Machiavelli and ask yourself, who really has what power — who is really in charge, who can and does fire whom? How often do you see Ministers fired because of leaks from officials. How often do you see officials fired? Exactly. The officials fire ministers. Hacks work with officials to fire Ministers. Ministers do not fire officials regardless of almost any scale of debacle. Over the next four years you will see a stream of Ministers shuffled back to the back benches — decades of careerism culminating in a NPC job from which they’re removed by officials working with hacks because of things over which they have effectively no true power or responsibility. And I doubt you see the PM say even once, ‘I am removing senior official X because they can’t do the job’, never mind actual systemic change.

Kemi — another vacuous Insider project

Kemi’s a striking signal of how low SW1 standards have sunk.

The basics:

1. Kemi is lazy, brittle and delusional. In her previous jobs she was useless but learned to blame others. She doesn’t have any of the things needed for a serious leader. The people who like her are a) people who’ve swallowed Insider spin or b) a subset of Insider characters whose preferences and tastes are very far from the median voter. From all parts of the ideological spectrum I hear identical lines: ‘She won’t listen to anybody, she picks fights with everybody, she meets a businessman who made a fortune in X then explains why they’re wrong about X, she’s lazy and won’t read, she sits in her office playing computer games on her iPad, she sees stuff on Twitter and blurts it out, I can’t see her developing in the job’. Most spads and donors who created her did not work on her leadership contest because they got so disillusioned. People inside her inner circle are already telling friends ‘I can’t see this working’.

2. ‘A’ players hire A players, F players hire F players, so she’s hired mostly the F Team as advisers including Carrie’s friends who pushed the Tories to self-destruct. While we were fighting the second referendum campaign in 2019, Carrie’s friend Newman, appointed by Badenoch to a senior role, was pushing the Stonewall insanity with second referendum campaigner Starmer. This pressure continued from Carrie and her friends after the election hence Boris going to Stonewall events etc as the madness spread. This is a team who see politics as following SW1 trends/memes/Narrative Whiplash, not focus on the voters. They’re not trying to escape the pull of mimetics, their lives are a surrender to it. Kemi has no instinct for voters and her team won’t supply it.

   

3. She’s appointed shadow ministers who shadow the areas they occupied in government so a) they are compromised on admitting errors and b) Labour constantly throws back at them ‘but you said just 9 months ago that what I’m now doing is the right thing’ — cue general laughter and contempt for Tory babbler.

4. She went along with the Trolley-Sunak consensus on everything including tax rises and the Boris-Carrie uncontrolled immigration wave.

5. She is one of many MPs who made the argument that the problem 2020-24 was ‘too much listening to focus groups not conviction’. This is moronic. You have to work in SW1 to believe that ‘listening to focus groups’ could be the reason for a) opening the floodgates on immigration while b) letting the NHS disintegrate and kill thousands and c) letting out early a string of murderers and rapists. A simple way to understand how lost the Tories are is to consider that they say to themselves ‘we lost because we listened to focus groups' while actually they did the opposite of what focus groups wanted because they actually listened to each other and the regime media — they’re so thoroughly confused by politics that they don’t even understand how they themselves think and act every day!

6. Her main contribution to public debate has been to brag about her tribal Nigerian hatreds. A Nigerian bragging about tribal hatreds is not the look needed from a despised Party that imported tribal hatreds at vast scale to disastrous effect including mass rape of white girls, covered up across SW1 in order not to disrupt the consensus on importing millions of no-skilled people with primitive religions from the least civilised places on earth.

7. Her ‘plan’ — a year on ‘rebuilding trust’, a year on ‘establishing credibility’, then ‘policies’ — is pure Tory ‘comms’ world garbage. She will ditch it and start rushing out ‘policies’ in response to pressure from MPs and regime media and polls. And the execution will be rubbish. And the more she does the worse her position will get.

This project is programmed to self-destruct.

It has one and only big force going for it short-term: Starmer going straight into a flat spin relieved some pressure on the Tories and gave them excuses for comforting delusions, and there is strength in the argument — Starmer is an existence proof that you can be totally rubbish yet still win if the government implodes (see below).

A very striking shift among a subset of the young and entrepreneurs

The LFG event in December was interesting in many ways. And it showed similar things I’ve seen for two years as I’ve given talks to younger people and people generally outside SW1. But the trends are strengthening and accelerating.

The most striking aspect was the quality of the people. Lawrence’s invite attracted hundreds of much higher quality people on average than we could attract to Brexit events in 2016 or to Tory events in 2019. (99% of these people came without knowing I would be speaking, they weren’t coming to ‘hear someone famous’ but to discuss the ideas.) In the audience was exactly the sort of people the Tory Party wants to win back but who won’t touch it — people with very serious brains and jobs. A decade ago elite talent outside politics either a) did not agree about the rot of the old system and need for profound change and had the attitude ‘let people like Obama and Cameron do politics while I make money and do my career’ or b) they agreed but would not come to such political events because of bad consequences for their career and social network.

This has clearly shifted in ways that SW1 doesn’t see. There is a shift to ‘the right’ or to ‘the Outsider perspective’ — however you want to describe it, neither term is quite right. It’s also a fragmentation and polarisation. There’s far more cheering Elon and far more cheering Luigi-style killings.

The phenomenon here is related to the preference falsification/cascade revealed in America after Elon bought Twitter — suddenly it was revealed that many had not been saying what they believed because of social pressure. (Cf. Timur Kuran: Sparks and prairie fires (1989), and Private Truths, Public Lies (1995).)

But this shift is not at all a shift to ‘the Tories’, quite the opposite. As I wrote in my blog on Trump’s win, a much more useful way to think about politics now than Left/Right or Tory/Labour is Insider/Outsider. The preference cascade is of elites shifting towards the Outsider perspective — following the voters who shifted this way years ago but were not listened to — and this process remakes the elites and generates a new Insider class.

I’d summarise the emerging perspective I hear from young people a) much smarter than me, b) without experience working in politics/government, c) have not gone in the commie direction, as roughly:

We realise the old system is broken, the old parties, old media and old Whitehall are imploding, Britain is in very deep trouble, something very different and new is needed and we’re happy to discuss things as reasonable that SW1 Insiders regard as ‘very extreme’, like the end of the permanent civil service — which sounds really weird, why would you promote almost entirely internally? We want growth, to rip up the planning system, massive nuclear power. We want a government that can get infrastructure built. We want a government that cares deeply about technology. We want much more seriousness on crime and security and don’t care about the old media screaming ‘racist/fascist’. We want a government that isn’t a constant farce. It seems crazy that the political world seems in a parallel world on what’s happening on AI, but less crazy given it just seems broken. But we haven’t studied the political system in detail, we don’t feel we understand it, and we don’t have a good map of how it can be changed. We don’t want to touch the Tories but then how do we change anything? Should we try to shape Reform? Someone must get this map fast and build something, we obviously can’t rely on Labour or Tories or Whitehall! We need DOGE, but how?! We need a government that is super-focused on AI, but how?! I don’t want to leave but lots of my friends have left or thinking of leaving. It feels like we’re on the edge…

To the extent this energy is touching politics now it is seen in energy for Reform and for other non-Tory campaigns like Crush Crime and LFG.

(** Why do I think violence will become harder to avoid? Crudely… We have roughly a division of force plus special capabilities. There are something like 4-5 ‘divisions’ supposedly on one or another watch list plus many more thousands extremely hostile and not under surveillance. The MPs and courts have dismantled border control. Parts of the country are already outside police control. Most of Whitehall has demonstrated throughout the rape gang scandals that they will prioritise coverups in order to continue mass immigration. The HRA paralyses and corrupts the deep state. How do you think this evolves? Do you think another decade of speeches on ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘integration is a British success’ will work after the last 30 years? How easy has ‘integration’ been with people from Ireland and Scotland? Do you think it will be easier and quicker with Taliban country and Somalia?)

What are the core things needed to change our trajectory?

‘Systems’ thinking…

The best way to think about politics — campaigns and government — is as complex systems problems requiring systems solutions. Small changes can be done in standard ways. But we can only improve the country substantially if we try to improve each of people, institutions and ideas together — they all affect each other in highly nonlinear ways, crises cascade, weird properties emerge bottom-up. (Cf. my paper on the emergence of ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ from Manhattan, ICBMs, and Apollo.)

We have all these problems and self-sabotage everywhere. But the political system supposed to fix the failures is causing the failures. MPs and Whitehall HR can’t fix themselves.

Westminster debates pointlessly recycle week after week, decade after decade:

It’s the policy, no it’s the delivery, no it’s No10’s too weak, no it’s No10’s trying to do too much, no No10 gets dragged in because the departments are so bad, no it’s the PM, no it’s HMT, no it’s the Cabinet Office, no it’s the ministers, no it’s the MPs, no it’s the officials, no it’s the spads, no it’s the HR, no it’s the bad pay, no it’s the media, no it’s the incentives, no it’s the CULTURE, no it’s the policy…

No. It’s all of that and more.

So we need to think about building interconnected things in parallel. And some ends are ways and means to achieve deeper ends. It’s mindbogglingly complex but there’s no escape from a systems crisis without some sort of map of the whole at some level of abstraction.

1/ Real regime change.

The fundamental goal now — as it was in 2015-16 — is a radically different political regime in Britain, a strategic transition across people, ideas, and institutions which can then execute a transition across all main policy areas.

What does ‘a radically different political regime’ mean?

Five benchmarks:

1. A shift roughly as big as from Singapore before Lee Kuan Yew to Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew had been going for decades.

2. Or a shift like the shift 1790-1815 as Pitt changed the civil service, procurement, naval building and other critical national security capabilities (see my blog on this HERE).

3. Or a shift like the shift from the old medieval regime to the modern state with the Bank of England, central taxes, representative parliament, independent courts protecting property rights, capabilities for state warfare (rather than kings and lords organising it personally) and so on.

4. Or a shift like the shift to the Northcote-Trevelyan system of permanent officials gradually replacing the old ministerial responsibility Palmerston refers to at the top — but in reverse.

5. Or a shift similar to the old Republic before FDR and how Washington worked after FDR. (Which is what the White House/DOGE is trying to emulate now — another once-in-70-years structural regime change, per Curtis Yarvin.)

Almost everything crucial is downstream from retiring and replacing the leadership of the old parties and old civil service, and terminating with extreme prejudice the legal and financial foundations of both. The Northcote-Trevelyan regime of permanent officials taking over most meaningful power must be abolished. This will allow the rebuilding of rotten institutions and creation of new healthy institutions. If it isn’t, then it will continue to strangle all attempts at changing policy.

Only a new regime with new people, ideas and institutions can organise the transition we need across all the main elements of our broken government:

1. productivity growth (e.g the ~£300B per year procurement budget, planning system, environmental review system, ‘the hybrid bill system’ for big infrastructure, skills/vocational training, lower simpler taxes, massive deregulation)

2. the science and technology ecosystem: R&D (public and private), investment (public and private), labs (public and private), universities, startups

3. public services such as the NHS

4. public order, police, courts, CPS, immigration, asylum

5. national security, foreign policy, the armed forces, MoD, and intelligence services

6. critical capabilities: e.g building strategic advantage in subfields of science and technology; creating new forms of ‘special forces’ based on new mixes of skills and technologies etc

7. constitutional change including the end of the ECHR/HRA and Equalities Act, big changes to judicial review, and a big shift of power and money in many areas from central to local government and from government to markets (our unique centralisation combined with HMT power is central to economic dysfunction, bad services, and collapse of faith in politics)

8. how the core ‘No10 system’ itself works: institutions of No10 (policy, data, management of priorities etc), Cabinet Office, HMT (which should have key functions shifted to No10); civil service recruitment and ‘HR’ etc.

The old No10 door will still be there. There will still be a ‘Cabinet’ and ‘Parliament’. But beneath the surface, the transformation must be vast and based on a shift in elite talent, training, ideas and the institutions they work in.

(For some further details, see: What I spent my time on in No10)

2/ Take power in No10.

The project for real regime change must capture power in No10 — a necessary but not sufficient condition.

This means:

• A PM who is at least a beta politician with the skills, self-awareness and ambition to empower people to build a great team. It can be done without someone with Bill Clinton or FDR communication skills. But it can’t be done without someone who can empower the creation of a great team. It can’t be done with someone temperamentally similar to Cameron, Sunak etc: occupy the office, ‘respect the institutions’ (i.e support all the failing old institutions), exercise very little of the constitutionally available power, and leave office with the system even more rotten than before then write the usual memoirs about ‘how hard it was to find the levers of power’. We don’t need Bismarck but we can’t do it with another ‘respect the institutions’ NPC.

• A team with the talent, ideas and organisation to change the regime.

This means — leaving aside a coup or regime change via chaotic/violent regime implosion, which often happens historically but not in Britain for 400 years — either (Option A) taking over an existing party and changing it so fundamentally the voters see it as something essentially new because it is essentially new or (Option B) building a startup party, which might be i) something totally new but ii) could take the form of Tories and Reform dissolving and merging into something new along with other forces.

Either via A or B, you need to occupy No10 with a team that can do regime change. See below for thoughts on relative likelihood of A and B.

3/ Bring elite talent into politics-government.

It’s impossible for the same cast of MPs and advisers and officials that have dominated SW1 since Thatcher to generate anything other than continued massive failure and massive institutionalised delusion.

As I’ve described many times, for decades elite talent has largely steered clear of politics-government and focused on money, business, hedge funds, private research etc. This is a core cause of our crisis. We only have a chance of overcoming our crisis if we can partially reverse this.

A subset of non-political elite talent must be persuaded — via hope, fear, interest, and/or glory — to abandon their walled gardens and fishponds and engage in politics for a substantial fraction of the next 5-10 years.

We’ve just seen it happen in America when a substantial section of the Valley / Live Player elite decided to go all in with Elon.

Improving performance is inseparable from a shift in the makeup of the ruling elites and a shift in real power — are the permanent officials (the Professional Managerial Class of the old regime) really in charge of 99% or are the politicians? Who fires whom?

Every really big change in politics and technology is accompanied by a change in the nature of the ruling and most culturally influential elites. Look at the rise of new financial, business and media elites in the 19th Century across Europe, connected to the changes in politics (e.g extending franchises) and changes in technology (e.g railway, telegraph, media). Look at the new elites created by the development of modern universities across the world in the 20th Century. Look at the emergence of the class of people building nuclear weapons technology and thinking about their use across the world from the 1940s. And look at the class, mainly in California and China, building the new AI companies: Elon is the icebreaker of the revolution.

It doesn’t have to happen all in one go. We need the pioneers to commit to spending a meaningful fraction of their time on politics. They will recruit subsequent waves. This can set off a chain reaction. Not everyone has to pack their jobs in but some will have to.

A small amount of talent was central to VL’s win in 2016 and 2019. In a collapsing political system, a little talent goes a long way.

4/ At least some elements of the first post-Nietzsche political philosophy that can justify a new regime and cope with the challenges of technology’s dynamism.

If you’re thinking ‘philosophical issues are an esoteric, idiosyncratic interest far from practical politics’, please reflect that they are the object of discussion at the highest political levels in Beijing — though not in SW1 or Brussels.

The most powerful man in the world that few westerners have heard of — Wang Huning, henchman to Xi — spent years studying Strauss and has so encouraged the translation of Strauss’s work that more of Strauss’s writing is now available in Chinese than in English. Strauss is more studied, and at higher levels, in Beijing than London, Paris, Berlin, Rome — though the new Trump regime has, tellingly, some experts (cf. Michael Anton just arrived at State). Wang also closely studied The Closing of the American Mind and similar books about the west’s spiritual crisis.

The old parties are partly dead because of the talent collapse. But they’re also partly dead because the core ideas acting as foundations for ‘western democracy’ no longer work to explain the world, motivate action or persuade voters or elites.

The West’s political crisis is partly the result of the spiritual and philosophical crisis of modern (post-Napoleon, post-Darwin) Europe first seen deeply in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche as Europe went through a previous cycle of regime change 1848-70s.

This spiritual-philosophical crisis hit a critical point in 1933 when Heidegger — the greatest scholar of Nietzsche in the 20th Century and the century’s ‘greatest historicist’ (Strauss) — supported the regime that would build Auschwitz. For those interested in recent campus madness, I recommend Heidegger’s notorious address to German universities and German youth in 1933. With little tweaking, you could give this speech to Harvard, end with the battlecry ‘we must destroy Israel if we are to become what we are’, and get a standing ovation from students and faculty.

The recent burst of malign, deranged energy from the Left, which captured so many institutions, was generated by a longer metastasis of the post-Nietzsche European intelligentsia which mutated through Heidegger and Marxism-Stalinism and French existentialists such as Sartre to capture and poison the humanities departments of western universities and then reprogram much of our political-cultural-business elite, and take over HR and legal departments everywhere in a ‘long march through the institutions’. We’ve lived through a form of madness in which the shameful — such as men pretending in private to be women to indulge in niche sexual perversions — have been celebrated as ‘the next frontier of the civil rights struggle’. And normal people have been told that they must honour the perverts or face legal penalties. And such madness took strongest hold in the places with the most money and the highest status including our ancient and most respected educational institutions. (This is what Wang and other Straussians suspected would happen in ~1991 when the Cold war ended.)

But not one in a thousand of those repeating memes like ‘river to the sea’ or ‘trans rights are human rights’ — or those ‘reporting’ on such phenomena in the old media and academia — understand why they are repeating it, why the universities mutated from Enlightenment values to mass rallies supporting murder-torture-rape. They have no model, no map of the mimetic-meme system and its causal structure. Elites and the old media are lost, as if they are dealing with something like a contagion of witchcraft from the medieval age.

There needs to be at least the beginnings of a new political philosophy that can integrate ideas about the dynamics of our civilisation — how we’ve come to where we are — and how we might steer it through dangerous and suicidal waters to safer harbours.

Old conservatism, the conservatism of Throne and Altar, ‘threw the earth on its own coffin’ from 1848, as Bismarck put it. After that political ‘conservatism’ morphed through various mutations as an overwhelmingly reactive political force responding to the developments of socialists, ‘progressives’ etc. One form of mutation has been a sort of debased mix of Adam Smith, Mises, Hayek plus some electoral nationalism plus ‘go slower’ on cultural change driven by the Left. And ‘mainstream conservatism’ has rotted so deeply that in recent years across the West old ‘mainstream conservative’ parties are being challenged/replaced. It has sometimes slowed trends but has understood them worse and worse — and this obviously connects to the talent collapse in public life and how elite talent has fled ‘mainstream’ conservatism.

Old ‘classical liberalism’ is long dead. If someone today describes themself as ‘classical liberal’ it’s become an almost infallible sign that they are shockingly out of touch with political reality and evolutionary logic.

Soviet communism had an existential crisis 1989-91. But the underlying ideas of Socialism and Communism — particularly those elements deriving from Rousseau and ‘second wave modernity’ — have proved amazingly resilient. And they have fused with the worst aspects of post-Nietzsche continental philosophy to generate the LGBTQH+ nightmare we see today, a mutation that mainstream conservatism had almost no immune system to resist.

Generally political philosophy was, as Leo Strauss described, poisoned by ‘political science’, a bogus academic discipline that fakes the application of the methods of natural science to political affairs. Although the field has a few non-charlatans, political science is as credible post-Brexit and Trump as public health post-covid or ‘international relations’ post-Ukraine.

We need a framework that can cope with natural science post-Darwin and the inevitably constant turmoil created by market civilisations with a lot of technological change. We need a framework that can integrate ideas about virtue and the good regime — the nation, markets, regulation, security and war, and technology.

Technology develops for many reasons — partly a) in response to out-group competition (e.g advances in radar, building the first nuclear device), partly b) in response to competitive market dynamics (e.g smartphones), partly c) pressured by regulations with unintended consequences (e.g EU regulation such as GDPR, intended to harm big tech companies but actually harming smaller companies, and the AI Act, driving EU talent to London and California). And it makes some traditions valuable and kills others, with vast social effects. For example, families have been deeply affected by the shift from production at home (pre-19th Century) to mass production and work in factories etc. And will be deeply affected by a new technology-enabled shift back to home production.

No political philosophy taught to political elites in the elite universities can cope with these things.

The political speeches of mainstream politicians now across the West are vacuous in the extreme. Voters see it. It’s partly because the phrases and arguments are tied to ideas from political philosophies that are no longer vibrant, no longer seem to connect to voters’ reality. And the politicians deploying these phrases clearly don’t themselves know how their phrases connect in any sort of meaningful framework. And it’s connected to the debased standards of elite education in the humanities.

This is why almost everything interesting in politics now is in weird corners of the internet and outside the political mainstream. ‘E-acc’ — i.e effective accelerationism — is an example as are its opponents: both are internet based and outside the mainstream. Hence also the rise of podcasts which has shocked Insider political world. For people who can’t get voters to pay attention to a 10 second soundbite, it’s shocking to see the rapid rise of large audiences for people discussing politics for HOURS.

Kamala’s campaign knowing they couldn’t possibly put her on Rogan for 3 hours summed up a lot. The dead scripts of the old parties were made for a media that’s dying with a political language that’s dying. They can’t be sustained for three hours of discussion with a comedian. Trying would only expose the hollowness.

Close to all interesting discussions I have about politics are away from SW1 Insiders. And I’ve had more discussions with technology people about how power really works in western regimes than I have with MPs in SW1. This is not coincidental. The Valley culture is interested in power. The MPs are interested in surface, surface, surface. Vibrant ideas are now almost all outside the ‘mainstream’. And part of why what’s happening in DC is so shocking to the old Insiders is that its development occurred in parts of the internet they weren’t watching. Back in 2015 when I was planning a startup to do Brexit and it was seen in SW1 as a sign of un-seriousness to be interested in things like DeepMind, Curtis Yarvin was roughly as niche as machine learning in SW1 and DC. Now the regime media is scrambling to write pieces about how often the Vice President and possible next President speaks to him.

In 2025 I will blog on essays of Leo Strauss.

Cf. Askonas on technology and conservatism. Me on Oakeshott.

5/ An Actual Plan to change the formal and informal exercise of power and restore real political responsibility.

This has three levels:

1. The policies you want.

2. The system that could make the policies happen — e.g the NHS incentives necessary such that system X shifts from state A to state B.

3. A ‘plan to do the plan’ including a map of the obstacles given existing power networks will try to sabotage the most important parts of the plan — something conventional think tanks and policy papers almost never do. What incentives mean Whitehall will fight against changing the NHS incentives necessary such that system X shifts from state A to state B.

It also must address the mix of (A) using the full constitutional powers of the PM — in many ways stronger than the US President especially over appointments in Whitehall — and (B) primary legislation for specific problems.

Serious regime change means having Bills drafted for immediate introduction days after the next election, as we did with Brexit in 2019. These Bills must be extremely explicit with explicit ‘notwithstanding’ clauses nuking the HRA and other rat runs for lawyers in judicial reviews, as we did with the Internal Market Bill 2020. And the power of the Supreme Court itself must change.

The primary legislation must inter alia:

• End the dominance of the permanent bureaucracy. A few functions like libraries, which ironically the old system pathologically destroyed, can be ‘permanent’ but the permanent grip of Whitehall’s closed caste over its own appointments, the fake responsibility, the fake meritocracy must end. We took back control from Brussels but now No10 and Parliament must take back control from Whitehall. Palmerston’s description of ministerial responsibility to Parliament must be restored so politicians are truly responsible again. This means they can appoint the best people for the job and remove duffers and take responsibility for their personnel judgements.

• Repeal the HRA and Equalities Act, withdraw from the jurisdiction of Strasbourg. This is connected to the restoration of true ministerial responsibility to Parliament: no more hiding behind pathetic blaming of judges.

• Limits on judicial review and the imposition of compressed deadlines on judicial review imposed on the courts by primary legislation. A civilised society respects laws and courts. But it should not allow the current farce whereby courts make rapid action practically ‘unlawful’ in practically every crucial aspect of state power, killing people, wasting vast amounts of the people’s wealth, undermining security against criminals, terrorists and spies etc. And it should not tell the judges to start making policy on issues that are for governments, as our politicians have with the HRA/EA plus judicial review system — cf. the recent mad Supreme Court judgment in NEXT’s case on the Equalities Act. The MPs of both parties are to blame for allowing and encouraging this, then, with great cowardice and dishonesty, blaming ‘the judges’ when voters complain about a judgment.

It is impossible to change many crucial aspects of policy and execution without doing these three things. Sunak and the absurd Rwanda policy is an existence proof of how smart people can create disasters when you refuse to face reality on these three things. And all of them can be very popular and a great campaign asset if properly explained. Especially in the context of the next three years of Starmer.

6/ A New Political Story.

Connected to the collapse of western political philosophy and the collapse of the old parties and regimes is the failure of the old political stories the old parties tell.

Opportunity. Security. Change. The slogans and speeches are empty. There’s a constant cycle of reheating hits from decades past because nobody has a convincing new tune. And few pay attention to them except the dwindling hacks of the old media and satirists.

I won’t go into what I think this new story is here but it is obvious that a new regime that can generate a decisive strategic transition in British government and culture needs a new story for itself and the voters.

The Story comes from a mix of the New Philosophy, the Actual Plan, and New Elites.

7/ Mass Support.

Regime change comes from a subset of elites defecting from the old regime and allying with the demos.

Elites supply new talent, ideas, institutions, tools.

Masses supply energy and legitimacy.

The Story must move the masses.

This means a set of campaigns on specific themes that together have mass support.

And it means projects that just do things.

For example, on crime, education and health there is scope for projects that help people today and build political support. And people in technology can build things that connect to the Actual Plan.

8/ A political strategy that can (re)build a coalition

I could never persuade Tories about fundamental aspects of voter attitudes. I couldn’t do it before the referendum. I thought they would update after we won but I proved totally wrong. We didn’t persuade people in 2019. I didn’t make the same mistake that time — I said in No10 after our victory, a few weeks after Christmas everyone will go back to saying we’re morons and the new 2019 electoral coalition is a mix of a fluke and a disaster. And they did.

The Tory MPs were phlegmatic as the Trolley, Truss and Sunak machine-gunned every part of this coalition. When I warned in 2021 against ditching the 2019 tax guarantee, I got no traction. When I pointed out that the referendum was 52-48 but we won two-thirds of seats, eyes glazed over.

And the mainstream pundits wrote over and over again:

• 2019 was a weird fluke because of Brexit and Corbyn.

• You can’t appeal both to those who want dynamism and older social conservatives. (Total rubbish — as Trump just showed again — but widely believed in SW1 because it’s psychologically crucial to argue that it’s ‘politically impossible’ to sell dynamism.)

• The 2019 coalition was actually a millstone round the necks of Tories because it pulled them towards the racist instincts of the working classes.

• Instead the Tories should dream about how to ditch it and go back to the Cameron strategy — which couldn’t win a majority in 2010 after the biggest financial crisis since 1929 and barely managed a tiny fragile majority against Milliband’s joke campaign.

I also couldn’t persuade people that the 2019 coalition was a nightmare for Labour if we actually governed 2020-24 with the VL agenda because they would have to simultaneously a) hold London and their own MPs while b) reaching out to the working classes of the Midlands and North, while c) we made this harder and harder on issue after issue.

I thought after the election that if the Boris-Carrie situation did NOT blow up, then we would turn the Tory Party into essentially a new party, and a much more popular party, and would probably collapse Labour. We now know that Starmer was a whisker from resigning in 2021 after the Hartlepool election when No10 was in the hands of Idiocracy.

But but but… It’s important to note that when I talk to Tory MPs and people working with them all day they report:

Dominic, they do not think that the worst ever defeat means they need to restore the 2019 coalition. Many perhaps most would much prefer to stay in Opposition than try to rebuild it.

It’s crucial to remember that many Tory MPs and the social network in which they swim do not want to have to think about working class voters or the north. So if they’re offered an alternative, it’s psychologically appealing even if the alternative is as braindead as ‘rebuild Cameron’s coalition not the 2019 coalition’.

I return to this below.

It is a very hard problem bound up in the question of whether the Tories can be, or should be, saved. On one hand to remove the Left we need a strategy and a coalition. But many/most Tories oppose the strategy and coalition that worked so well and many/most would rather lose than adopt it. And the strategy many/most prefer — talking to familiar people in the prosperous south via interviews on Today — can’t win and sustain regime change.

9/ A new information ecosystem to provide more accurate, more truthful, and more interesting information

Connected to all the above: the mainstream in SW1 — MPs, advisers, officials and journalists — largely share a set of ideas about ‘communication’ that were largely wrong even before social media and AI turned up.

The regime media has destroyed trust in itself and its business models are broken. And almost everything about the old ways of ‘political communication’ are a failure and have lost the voters.

And when you talk to young people at the big old companies like SKY News, it’s striking how scathing they are about the senior people like Boulton who are doing what every dying industry does — keep doing the same things as the customer base shrinks and stop the young people experimenting. ‘They won’t listen, they won’t do anything different, it’s so frustrating, I’m thinking of leaving.’

As an old approach fails, there’s always pressure from the senior people in the dying incumbent to keep squeezing what’s left from the old way and not risk further problems with experiments. This means a similar dynamic operates here to Whitehall — the more entrepreneurial, risk-taking dynamic characters leave and the most risk averse do-nothing stay. So the old things get into a deeper death spiral.

Yet although their ideas on how to communicate are bad and the audiences for the regime media have collapsed, one nevertheless sees repeatedly in private discussions in SW1 that people do not do things (or even try) because they are operating on false ideas about ‘what voters think’ and ‘what they could be persuaded to think’. People swap memes about what others working in SW1 think as if these memes are true of voters.

A new ecosystem is emerging organically in America and played an important role in the last election.

Britain and Europe are far behind. Some of the story will be similar as the audience preferences can’t be stopped. But in the EU I think it likely that powerful parts of the old system try a last ditch Democrat-style clampdown on free speech on the internet. They have various laws including the Charter of Fundamental Rights. And the ECJ will enforce whatever it thinks necessary to preserve the EU.

E.g The former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has stated that the European Union can counteract a potential election victory by the AfD party:

We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.

Despite 2016 and 2019 in the UK and Trump in 2024, few in the mainstream have learned about effective campaigns. This contributes to the old entities failing to communicate but also means there’s more and more low hanging fruit to exploit by bringing together a) true knowledge about communication and b) the new ML tools. It’s easier than ever to build new political movements that can overwhelm mainstream legacy institutions.

(I’m talking about the political media. There’s a lot in the old media outside politics that remains great. What should change viz politics does not necessarily apply to other things. And you can’t treat art like politics.)

10/ A campaign-conspiracy to make the above happen!

Obviously the old forces can’t generate the above list.

A new force must spark new forces.

Part closed conspiracy, part semi-open conspiracy, part open campaign.

I’ll come back to this…

How could SW1 events play out?

Assumption (A). Most big events are likely to be mishandled by someone bad at politics so there is far more potential downside than upside for Starmer. And the Party contains Blairites, Muslim extremist nutjobs, Corbyn commies, and Starmerite careerists. And some good (mainly young) people who can feel the old system is knackered and are desperate for Labour not to repeat Trolley-Truss-Sunak and waste four years — but who are not represented in Cabinet. It is not a happy party. Without charismatic leadership, all the divisions will grow and the Left will keep pointing to the AOC Left in America which will be popular with much of SW1.

He has started to haemorrhage votes to LibDems, Greens and LGBTQH+. This will continue in most scenarios.

Assumption (B). Let’s assume Farage doesn’t die, move to America etc but keeps trying to build and replace the Tories.

Assumption (C). Reform is on around 25 points, in some polls it’s ahead of the Tories and neck-and-neck with Labour. It’s in second place in 100 constituencies.

Without building much and just taking 25%, (C1) Farage can win dozens of seats and stop the Tories winning, or even advancing.

If he sets out a serious plan for how to develop Reform, including why serious talent should join him and how he’ll build a Shadow Cabinet better than the two old parties, then roughly executes the plan, (C2) he could win over 100 seats.

And these things are dynamic — if he says this then it starts to happen, a lot of Tories saying today ‘don’t worry dear boy he’ll blow up, where are you shooting this weekend’ will go crazy with panic, they meltdown and (C3) he could win more seats than them. (See below)

But (C4) it’s unlikely he can win a majority and go to No10 unless the Tories totally collapse.

So (C5) we’re on course for both it being easy for a unified Right to beat Starmer and capture No10 BUT it won’t happen because the two cancel each other’s chances with 45-50% split roughly in half — each getting between 20 and 30.

What does Farage have to do to pull off C2 or C3?

Reform is high variance but could panic and even split the Tories if they are bold and can execute.

Tory MPs mostly assume ‘Farage will blow up’.

But by all accounts, Zia (who I’ve never spoken to) is a capable person and Farage has put him in charge of things like vetting.

• Do they build Britain’s first party optimised for the new media landscape? Neither Labour nor Tories understand the emerging internet ecosystem and political communication in it. So there’s a big first-mover advantage.

• Can they change the nature of Reform so they can recruit elite talent? Now they have a similar problem to the Tories — some elite talent is sympathetic to them, or at least is desperate for a new UK political force, but — just as talent does not want to be associated with the hated Tories — talent is reluctant to be seen publicly supporting Reform. Does this change? Does Reform prioritise it? Do those who have power inside the Party now prioritise retaining their power?

• Can they raise money? So far in 2024 their success translated into a surprisingly little money. But it doesn’t take much to change this. And Kemi’s uselessness means most Tory donors are sitting on their cash and looking for other options. Some of the most staunch Tory donors, who go back to the days of Thatcher, are seriously considering that the Tories are finished and ‘why not go all in with Farage’. I think it’s underrated in SW1 that a shift by donors contributes to a panic over Kemi and another spasm.

• How many more defections do they get? I think there’ll be many including sitting MPs.

They have not hired talent on any scale. But they could.

How?

If Farage sets out a path for how the party will change over 12-18 months.

• How policy will be made so people have a sense that it isn’t just whatever he decides to tweet.

• The sort of talent he wants to hire with job descriptions — staff and MP candidates.

• A vetting system to suppress previous problems he’s had with candidates. Clear principles for what sort of things are actually racist, unacceptable etc. Many people age 50+ will have told jokes that would be considered ‘unacceptable’ in SW1 today. Are all such people barred? Obviously not. But what are reasonable lines?

• How a functioning Shadow Cabinet will operate.

And he might say something like:

I’ve fought a lot of battles. A lot of people don’t like me. Often this dislike is because of media lies. But I have to face truth — some of it won’t change. And I’m getting on. The country wants to move on from the old Brexit arguments. It needs new generations coming through to replace the rotten lot in Westminster. I want to help this transition. In the next two years we’ll find many brilliant people who join Reform. Some will join our Shadow Cabinet.

Britain’s full of amazing talent. Sadly the old Westminster system fights to keep practically all of it out of power which is why so much is falling apart. I’m going to change this. We’ll recruit entrepreneurs, soldiers, doctors, educators, police, scientists, technologists, creators of all kinds. It’s time for the people to take back control of Westminster from the failed old parties and the failed old civil service. They’ve given us grooming gangs and Southport stabbings. They’ve given us the worst real wage growth since Napoleon. We’re sick of the lot of them!

So the party will change, how we work out ideas will change, we’ll get a real plan for how to strip out the rotten wiring of the bureaucratic state, and make Britain once again the best governed country on earth as we used to be…

And this will in turn bring… [peace, bread and land etc]

Go to our website, look at the job descriptions. Apply to work here. Apply to be a candidate. When people look at us in 2028, they’ll see our Shadow Cabinet and they’ll see the best of this country — then they’ll look at Labour and Tories, the same failing useless characters on both sides. And they’ll say — it’s time for real change, it’s time to vote Reform…

If he were to say something like this and follow through, he would surge in the polls, there’d be a surge of interest and money and energy. He’d get more defections. And much of the old Tory guard would start sputtering about they’d prefer to join with Starmer and Blair than the ‘far right’ — provoking more defections of their few remaining members.

Of course, there is a big IF.

Building coalitions is very very hard. A lot of people who want to be in politics are much harder to deal with than normal people. And the history of the eurosceptic right is one of most people much more interested in their factional/personal hatreds than in winning. Until now, most thought that they could gain a position to be noticed but they couldn’t actually take over. Many don’t really imagine being in No10 and are not optimising for that — their talk about government is role play, internal fighting really is the actual job.

For Reform to make the transition I’ve sketched would need a very determined approach from Farage and Zia and a bootstrapping process by which they hire some very able people and empower them and back them up through inevitable chaos and then keep building — and fuse elements of the past with new forces, while quietly discarding some of the past.

This is hard and personally demanding.

And it is much easier for them to carry on as they are given the Tory/Kemi failings, just as it’s easier for Tories to stay delusional because of Starmer’s failings.

Big changes tend to come after crises, not while you feel you’re making progress.

Assumption (D). The Tories cannot repeat the trick we pulled in 2019 and squeeze Farage’s vote as much as they need to.

Many Tories say ‘we didn’t do a deal in 2019, we don’t need to do a deal now, we can squeeze Farage’s vote’.

But this is a bad analogy.

In 2019:

• There was the biggest constitutional crisis for at least a century with Brexit at its heart.

• The best political campaigners in Britain controlled No10.

• We had a good campaigner determined to win and terrified of getting the boot as PM (then largely under control and Carrie helping control him).

• Brexit Party voters really wanted Brexit to happen, no second referendum, and no Corbyn as PM.

• We’d exacerbated the divisions of the Remainiacs, driven them mad and smashed their OODA loop.

• So we could squeeze the Brexit Party vote with Get Brexit Done.

None of this maps to the Tories’ situation now:

• No huge issue the Tories can, after 2010-24, credibly campaign on (with Kemi) that could steal Reform votes.

• Tories are a feeble Opposition with pitiful talent and a shattered and bankrupt campaign machine they won’t rebuild. Yes things like the ECHR are huge but the Tories can’t exploit them.

• Farage is more famous than anybody in the Shadow Cabinet by far. He’s probably more famous than all the Shadow Cabinet combined. Many of the Shadow ministers *I* have never heard of so a fortiori no normal voter with normal political attention has or will.

• Many pundits want the Tories to attack Farage on immigration etc. This would only hasten their own collapse. So they cannot attack him without blowing their own feet off. And if they talk about immigration etc in any normal Tory way then it raises the salience of an issue that helps Farage relative to them. So they are snookered.

• It’s practically impossible to imagine the Tories squeezing Reform to below 5%, absent something like Farage moving to America or blowing himself sky high in some scandal.

So the Tories won’t retake the votes they lost to Reform 2022-4, are on track to lose many more, and in their current form they’re very unlikely to take back control of No10 without some sort of a deal/merger with Farage.

Assumption (E): The Tories will stay largely delusional and prefer to lose again than change much and/or do a deal/merger. This does NOT preclude a spasm and a leadership change — they could change leader AND just settle down into sloth and failure yet again.

Remember: 1997-2001, Tory MPs avoided facing reality and maintained widespread delusional groupthink despite being 15-20 points behind Blair in the polls. I had many arguments with MPs and donors in 2001 who told me ‘polls and focus groups are Blairite nonsense, William is excellent in PMQs and this is getting through’. Much of Tory world — MPs and donors and pundits and think tank world — was shocked when the 2001 result was what the polls predicted.

So why would they be more realistic when a) as a set of people they are lower grade than 1997-2001 and b) they can see Starmer useless and failing and the polls showing Starmer on 25-30, unlike 1997-01?

Why would a set of MPs and spads who did not take power seriously when in office start taking power seriously when out of office?

The truth 1997-2001 was: Blair’s position in the polls is extremely solid, the Tories’ standing is extremely bad, he’s on course for another big majority.

The truth 2025 is: Starmer’s win was very fragile and brittle, it was based on overwhelming loathing for Tories not positivity for Labour, his coalition is already coming apart. And Starmer is an existence proof that you can be rubbish and still win big!

So the Tories arguing for complacency and ‘Starmer is hopeless and falling apart’ will be making at least one good argument and this will make it harder for those who want the Party to grow instead of rot.

And MPs realising ‘Kemi is rubbish’ does not equate to ‘she must be replaced’.

Maybe Starmer’s collapse will be so bad we just win by default like he did!?!

Outside SW1 it is assumed by sensible people that obviously the Tories must be engaged in a fundamental rethink after their worst ever defeat.

No!

The old senior Tories lean over in the Commons bars and say:

No need for any great panic dear boy. You know, all governments got hammered last year, incumbent effect they call it! We got unlucky — covid then Ukraine. And of course Boris and Truss blowing up. But Starmer’s already on the ropes. Nigel will blow up, that lot always end up in poisonous infighting, can’t help it, bit like the ERG hahaha. We just need Kemi to be steady away, for god’s sake no policies and ideas haha. George and Francis are very persuasive on this — the 2005 model is what we need. Just don’t muck it up, Starmer and Nigel blow up, and the natural party of government will be back in our chauffeur driven cars in 2029 mark my words. Those awful lunatics suggesting we need to explore why we failed in government, how we couldn’t grip Whitehall — nonsense! Covid and Ukraine! Bad luck! Global wave against the incumbent! Pheasants any good last weekend? Where are you skiing old boy?

And it’s crucial to realise that if you put a gun to their heads, at least a third and maybe more than half Tory MPs would rather lose and leave Starmer as PM than see a merger and/or a new Party actually arguing for a decisive break with the last 30 years.

Many smart people assume ‘the Tories must realise after Brexit and their failure 2021-4 they can’t just be the old Cameron-Establishment party’.

Wrong.

With Tories it’s always worse than you assume.

Assumption (F): Connected to (E), a takeover and fundamental re-making of a Party, similar to what we started 2019, is impossible with Kemi and very hard on principle.

Trump has done it with MAGA replacing the old GOP.

We started to do it 2019-20 and succeeded enough to win the 2019 election on a message of ‘time for change’ even though we were incumbents.

But it then blew up. Deep projects like this are very hard and often dependent on tiny chances (such as a PM getting a new girlfriend who wants to control the PM’s office). And it will be resisted by roughly everyone as it threatens the existing distribution of power.

A takeover might become possible when she’s replaced. But most MPs would oppose it on principle.

It would need:

1. A new leader who will risk failure, collapse and replacement to push it through. Psychologically it’s always easier to avoid fights today.

2. A team to support them.

3. A very tricky walk through a minefield that persuades enough of the party that the alternative to *very unpleasant unsettling thing* is doom, which will be tricky for the reasons above: Starmer’s problems reinforce all psychological instincts for caution and inertia.

Conclusion: a takeover of the Tories per 2019 is conceivable but unlikely (without some new powerful force) and even if done doesn’t itself solve the Reform problem.

Assumption (G). If Kemi collapses, it’s very plausible, arguably most likely, that the old guard successfully shuffles in Cleverley.

There’s the above factors: delusion, complacency, ‘Starmer is collapsing’, ‘rather Starmer than really change ourselves’ etc.

And Cleverley is a very natural choice for many MPs.

Cleverley was loved by the worst officials and government lawyers across Whitehall because he was pure NPC — he could always be relied on to read out the most laughable NPC script from government lawyers. Need a minister to read total nonsense on immigration and the ECHR? Shove out Cleverley, he’ll read his script without questions. Need someone to front the surrender of British territory because Boris-Carrie have surrendered to the lawyer's’ nonsense? Shove out Cleverley on Chagos, he’ll read his script without questions. And if you asked the worst people in Whitehall — which senior Tory would you want ‘asking questions’ on institutionalised coverups on rape gangs? — they would immediately think ‘Cleverley, he’ll read his script without questions!’ He’s a profound symptom of the anti-serious modern SW1 so it’s totally logical that SW1 conventional wisdom has bestowed its favourite compliment ‘serious grownup’ on him, as with Sue Gray and Dan Rosenfield.

He is aggressively on the side of the Establishment meme — no hard thinking is needed, we just got unlucky, tell a few jokes, seem normal, avoid tricky questions, wait for Starmer and Farage to blow, and the natural party of government is back by default.

This worked at Conference. Most engaged Tories want to be deluded.

He’s therefore a Schelling point for the old Tories who don’t want to face reality (many), the NPC complex, Whitehall, and many (perhaps most) Tory members. The membership has lost tens of thousands in the meltdowns of 2022-4. If you really care about immigration, crime, ECHR etc, why stay? So many of its members would love the comfort blanket of Cleverley standing on a platform with Cameron, Hague, Sunak and Boris and pretend they’ve got a ‘sensible moderate chap with a sense of humour who normal people will listen to’.

Cleverley is also the dream candidate for Farage. This shuffle would prompt defections of MPs and members. And it could prompt another fast meltdown sending the rotten Tory ship to the bottom, increasing the chances that Reform overtakes the Tories in 2028-9.

So, many have very ‘mixed emotions’ about Cleverley taking over, as Gordon Gecko said, kind of like watching him drive off a cliff, in my Maserati…

Perhaps it should be the default likely option for the Stupid Party, similarly to how in 2022 the most stupid thing was to wing Boris then leave him in situ then have another go then put Truss in — so that’s what they did.

You can see the anonymous quotes now:

The Black Thatcher turned out to be the Black Truss but now we’ve got the Black Boris!

Assumption (H): Farage is understandably hostile to discussion, and the actuality, of a deal.

He is now in the Commons watching the MPs. He can see the delusions. He can see how he represents much of the country better than they do. He can see a clear path to winning dozens of seats from them and being in a position to say — they’re dead, they should close, the survivors should join me.

And there is 30 years of distrust, contempt and loathing. Much of the rotten old Tory world made clear their contempt for him personally. And he’s seen them constantly put immediate ideas of Party advantage ahead of what he thinks of as the national interest. So he has contempt for them.

If you are optimising for *remove Labour and be in the Cabinet from 2029* then a deal makes sense but if you are optimising for *kill the Tories and avoid hard decisions that will alienate natural allies*, a deal is off. He can just wait for his position to strengthen and the Tories’ to worsen after the election. At the very least, it’s in his interests to delay while the Tories hit the rocks and internal war again.

A deal is not impossible but simply saying *it’s rational if you want to beat Starmer in 2029* won’t get it done.

Assumption (I): Extreme tension between what seems sensible to Insiders and to voters will keep the old parties paralysed.

Because of SW1’s mimetics, there’s often extreme tension between what seems sensible to Insiders and to voters.

An example. In September 2019 I told Boris to fire the 21 MPs. This was seen as ‘mad’ in SW1. If you look back at the reaction from high status pundits and a range of MPs like Hague who others listen to, you see the mimetic wave ripple through almost everybody:

Beyond stupid. They already didn’t have a majority. Self-destructive. A sign they’re totally lost. They don’t understand the Party. A sign they’re collapsing…

But the relevant voters thought it was great. As they said in focus groups:

Finally someone is trying to solve the problem and firing these useless gits, GREAT! Well done Boris!

Doing things that voters want is often seen as mad in SW1. Doing what’s seen as ‘smart’ and ‘serious’ in SW1 often drives the voters mad.

Now most smart entrepreneurs assume that Insiders are very skilled at understanding and balancing these trade-offs.

NO NO NO!!!

You’ve just seen exactly this phenomenon in America in the Trump election.

The Insiders continually memed themselves into thinking ‘stupid’ and simply did not listen to voters saying ‘Trump’s right about the cost of living / border / Biden’s senile’.

And with Tory MPs now, their overwhelming focus is the regime media — not the voters. And with Kemi and her team, this is bound to continue. Even when they try to break out of it, they will fold because to make ‘focus on voters’ work, you have to go through a pain barrier with Insider world and they won’t/can’t do this.

Assumption (J). It sounds weird but is true and important: SW1 does not understand campaigns. They understand talking to hacks. They spin ‘we’ll campaign on X’. But they almost never do campaigns. This is connected to a) they don’t understand communication, b) they don’t do building generally, c) they aren’t trained to think about ends, priorities, strategy, operations. Campaigns need all three.

You can observe this for yourself. Look at an issue like crime or specifically the rape gangs. As soon as the regime media stop talking about it, almost all MPs stop talking about it. There isn’t a team of people in Tories or Labour or elsewhere in normal SW1-world thinking ‘this is what we will build over two years and we will keep going regardless of what the media does’.

A major test for Reform is whether they, unlike the other two, develop this capability.

A few possible branches of future history…

Path A: Kemi survives.

Let’s assume the factors sketched above mean she gets lucky and survives.

• Labour and Tories lose millions more votes to Reform than 2024.

• Labour loses loads of seats to a mix of Lib Dems, Greens and Hamas independents.

• Tories and Reform split ~50% of the vote roughly evenly.

• Reform win dozens, potentially 100 plus.

• Labour remains in government, maybe a coalition.

• The Tories’ strategic position is even worse after the next election than it is now. Their leverage for a deal is much worse. Farage has the momentum. The Tories look dead.

Path B: She’s replaced by Cleverley.

The Tories do at least as bad or worse than in A (in different sorts of seats).

• Labour and Tories lose millions more votes to Reform than 2024.

• Labour loses loads of seats.

• Reform win dozens, potentially 100 plus. This seems more likely with Cleverley as the defections to Reform of MPs, members and voters will be stronger.

• Labour remains in government, maybe a coalition.

• The Tories’ strategic position is even worse after the next election than it is now. Their leverage for a deal is much worse. Farage has the momentum. The Tories look dead.

Path C: She’s replaced by X who wins after arguing for a fundamental break with 1997-2024 and a merger with Reform as the only alternative to losing in 2029 then having to do a deal after Reform is much stronger.

Could this argument win with MPs?

Or would someone who believes this have to be Straussian and argue for ‘revive the Tories, no deal’ — then pull a switcheroo and go for a deal ‘because circumstances changed’?

Does a deal happen?

Why would Farage take a deal unless there was an offer of a joint leadership contest of the new thing?

Does Farage think a) stick with no deal, I definitely get loads more seats, my leverage goes up, I can punt hard questions, maybe I can grab No10 with ~30-35%, I’m not far away…?

Or b) I don’t fancy trying to win the 2033 election to get into No10, the country’s heading off a cliff, let’s do a deal and I can be in Cabinet 2029 and a small crisis from being PM?

C1. No deal. X wins back some Reform voters but can’t push it below 15%? Starmer remains PM 2029?

C2. Deal. How many MPs defect to Labour/LibDems?

I won’t go into the details here.

Path D. X takes over promising a fundamental break with 1997-2024 but NO DEAL with Farage.

Holding to this strategy rests on the new leader having the talent to squeeze Farage’s vote. See above, unlikely.

Path E. Farage somehow gets a majority without any deal because both other parties implode, possibly after a crisis like a financial crash.

Path G. Starmer’s replaced.

I’m not close enough to Labour to have any good sense about this.

Base rate: Labour doesn’t bin leaders.

Counter: as the old regime falls, base rates are less useful. They can already see he’s rubbish, it’s already counter-base rates for them to be briefing hacks about why he might get binned.

Starmer’s super predictable. A replacement could be even worse or much better.

Path H. What most Tories want: Starmer sinks, Farage blows up in a scandal and infighting, Kemi wins by default like Starmer in 2024 without having to do much and without the Party having to think or change.

Even if this happens, a joke leader and joke team just means a rerun of Tory chaos and propping up the self-sabotaging system.

NB. The above sketch assumes the system is left to its own devices and no powerful third force enters the game.

(Ps. I just realised in all this I ignored Boris. This is because MPs of different kinds all seem to agree he can’t return given the enormity of the Boris-Carrie Wave 2021-4. Anything he says on immigration, tax, crime etc would just be totally laughable. The Party is so bad nothing can be ruled out but his return as leader did strike me as quite likely but now seems much less likely.)

Some questions and problems

The above is all obviously very depressing, very complex, and still only scratches the surface.

So what are some key things to watch?

• How fast do MPs realise Kemi is rubbish? How many Boxing Day tweets and ‘Im proud of my tribal hatreds’ can MPs stand in the context of what else happens?

• Does this lead to ‘replace her’ or ‘she can win anyway look at Starmer so get behind her and prop her up’?

• Do Farage and Zia set out a convincing path for Reform to reform?

• How bad are local elections spring 2025 and 2026 for the Tories?

• How bad are defections of MPs and members to Reform?

• What do donors do? Are rumours true about old school Tories defecting to Reform with public donations true?

• What new forces emerge? Lawrence Newport and others have started on Crush Crime and LFG. How do they grow? What else grows? There is more desperation than since the 1970s and desperation generates creativity.

• Is it plausible that the Tory Party goes through the next 5 years without some major split with a) the likes of Gawke, Green, Grieve, and various Cameroons shifting to Labour (it being with Starmer, ironically, now the pure ‘Insider defend the old system come what may party’ so is a natural home for those Tories) and b) a bunch of others merging with Farage? Which group walks out and which controls the rump legal entity? It could happen because there IS an attempted deal or because Cleverley takes over and a bunch walk out.

• Can someone — Elon/Trump?! — broker the creation of a new Party formed from a merger of the Tory Party and Reform along with a ‘third force’ from outside SW1? What if the new leader of the Tories 2026 and Farage found themselves with Trump and Elon and were told: we’re doing a deal in this room?!

• If not, who can solve the struggles over ideas, power, status etc to bring together a group that could then present an alternative government?

• If, as I fear, the Tories prefer to block progress and leave Starmer in No10 than be mixed into a new thing that can win, then they must be retired ASAP — but this makes it extremely hard to take over in 2029. Using 2029 to retire them means 2032 is the earliest a serious government comes. So perhaps the only way through is to threaten the MPs with the end of their careers in 2029 unless they cave and accept being mixed into the new thing?! To do this also requires a force with money and political energy that can essentially blackmail the Tories. And blackmail can fail against people who are fundamentally lost and irrational. This is hard, maybe insoluble.

• Violence changes politics profoundly. It’s easy to imagine more riots and the police losing control.

• Lots of financial/trading experts think the incredible debts could blow up. The mix of racially aggravated violence and financial crisis is historically the sort of mix that blows up knackered old regimes.

• Insiders/Outsiders, Left/Right, Leave/Remain — everyone — has big problems with women and families and they’re connected to big issues of technology. For another day…

The problem of coordination given character types.

A highly underrated feature of SW1 is how the personality type that now dominates makes is extremely hard to solve coordination problems.

There’s a personality type you see in great entrepreneurial projects: aggressively constructive, let’s find a way to get around (often bitter) disagreements and build something great. In this culture, the people who want to argue all day on Twitter are largely irrelevant. Its dominated by people who can build teams that build products and visions. Complex coordination and systems thinking are critical. Think General Groves, George Muller, Jobs, Elon. (Cf. this piece on Ron Conway, a Valley legend: ‘AM ON IT’ is the exact spiritual opposite of SW1.)

There’s a personality type you see in value investing: aggressively truth-seeking, let’s dig to the bottom obsessively, ignoring all the social pressure and incentives to conform to mimetics. Think Charlie Munger and Li Lu (the only person apart from Warren Buffett who Munger would allow to invest his money). (Cf. recent podcast on Li Lu. Patrick Collison: please get Stripe publishing to republish LL’s book!)

There’s a personality type you see with the very best funders of research: aggressively talent-optimising, let’s find the absolute best talent and give them freedom, help them connect in pursuit of an artistic vision. They have a very rare ability to ‘manage’ rare talent, which isn’t ‘management’ in a conventional sense. Think JCR Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor — three of the great funders of science and technology, rarer than Fields Medallists according to Alan Kay who knew all three.

This is what I call ‘The power of the context’ or ‘Point of view is worth 80 IQ points’. Science and engineering themselves are famous examples, but there are even more striking processes within these large disciplines. One of the greatest works of art from that fruitful period of ARPA/PARC research in the 60s and 70s was the almost invisible context and community that catalysed so many researchers to be incredibly better dreamers and thinkers. That it was a great work of art is confirmed by the world-changing results that appeared so swiftly, and almost easily. That it was almost invisible, in spite of its tremendous success, is revealed by the disheartening fact today that, as far as I'm aware, no governments and no companies do edge-of-the-art research using these principles. (Cf. Alan Kay, Power of the Context.)

And there’s a personality type you see everywhere in SW1/politics world: aggressively obstructionist, intensely mimetic, and self-distracted to trivial word games, let’s keep arguing over disagreements and never build anything, ‘it’s much more complex than that’ applied constantly to everything not because they understand the complexity but as an excuse for avoiding hard decisions that will annoy people, so nothing happens and bitter resentment grows over a career.

These characters are aggressively low agency, even anti-agency, aggressively hostile to those who do things. If it looks like someone might just do things, the reaction is hysterical as the dominant worldview is threatened (hence the terror of DOGE). They rise naturally in the pathological hierarchies of SW1 because they fit the system’s crucial incentive: gains from long-term thinking/building are distant, ephemeral, and distributed, while the costs are immediate, severe and personal.

This is not an IQ thing. It’s a personality type thing. People who are 100X better than the median SW1-er at getting things done are plus three standard deviations on a handful of dimensions but often no higher IQ than the brightest done-nothing SW1-ers. These people do not come to SW1 now and they naturally find SW1’s culture, with its focus on intra-gang warfare over building things, repellent.

This basic problem was part of why Trump failed on a lot in the first term and is part of what his new approach is trying to solve.

And it makes it very hard to do constructive things in SW1. Almost everyone will coordinate to attack and ridicule and stop constructive things. Almost everyone will prefer to stop someone solving coordination problems. The culture of building is almost totally lost there.

I saw this in the referendum where much of the ‘eurosceptic right’ showed no real interest in trying to win and intense interest in internal battles. I saw it on education. A small example is the New Schools Network that some of us helped build 2007-11 to enable big changes to the school system. Tory MPs never cared, never understood and in government let the bureaucracy they nominally ‘governed’ close it. They didn’t notice. If you look at them 2010-24, the MPs built nothing. And their ‘think tanks’ were almost totally pointless.

This is the worst possible background for the job of trying to bring together Tories, Reform and a Third Force into something that is roughly harmonious and can focus attention on removing Starmer and smashing the mad Left.

Final thoughts…

I’m not close to MPs. I’m confident about some of the above but less so about feeling in Parliament. I’ve written this to try to get an overall picture for myself and others of the situation so people can plan how to make useful efforts.

As always I’ll read all comments but can’t reply to all.

In a situation like this, it’s crucial to focus on a) ‘what can we build that will be useful in a wide range of possible scenarios, given we can’t be very confident about most aspects of the situation in a few years?’ and b) just build with people who want to rather than worrying about all the psychodrama and briefing and personality clashes of SW1. Ignore most of the drama. Most of SW1 will be super-mimetic when crises come.

Hence some of the elements I’ve sketched above that it’s worth people working on now where progress does not depend on the horrors of SW1, such as:

• An Actual Plan for a new regime — I’m helping some very able people do this. It will develop partly in the open with help from those who want to help. It should not be a closed project that produces a vast report in 2 years. It should be mostly an open rolling campaign so it shifts opinion, builds support, recruits interested people, and iterates via feedback from people who really understand the issues etc. More details soon and subscribers here will be able to get as involved as they want.

• Figuring out public opinion and an electoral strategy for a party at least half the country would love. Connected, at the moment I’m particularly looking at opinions of people 16-25 on politics, what they think, where they get information from. Please leave any useful links in comments. I’ll post on this soon.

• Helping Crush Crime and LFG, the campaign for growth. I strongly encourage you to sign up to both NOW! These and similar projects will shift opinion, nudge legislation/regulation/policy, find and connect talent, and develop a ‘third force’ that could help influence things one way or another at a crucial moment. The stronger a third force becomes, the greater gravitational effect it has when the old system hits crises soon and powerful mimetics kick in. Go to the LFG/CC Discord if you want to help with projects and get involved. (Subscribers to this blog have already got involved and done great work in changing national debates.)

One of the groups I’m helping is looking for someone who really understands how to use AI models for graphic design and video generation — e.g short 30 sec videos explaining complex arguments. Can be part time to start with. Please message me on the Substack app if interested — put ‘AI video’ at front of message. Or else post in comments and we can figure out how I connect you.

Also if you are expert on websites to display complex documents with charts, interactive features etc then please get in touch. If there are particularly wonderful, beautiful examples please post links in comments.

What else?

a/ If you have any agency, do what you can to push Kemi out ASAP. It’s never too soon to pull the plug on a disaster. On principle it’s not good for the country to have an Opposition so rubbish.

b/ Talk to Zia and Farage and try to encourage its growth in the direction I sketch above. If they respond with either change or clear ‘no change’ (or ‘can’t change’), either is clarifying!

c/ I’ll do an AMA on this blog Thursday 27/2 at noon. They’ve also now upgraded the ‘video to subscribers’ so I’ll experiment with that. And I’ll do some guest blogs and interviews with people as projects develop.

Part of what’s needed is a sort of ‘Monnet’s think tank crossed with a VC crossed with PARC crossed with Kronk gym crossed with Rick Rubin’s studio’ to train people who want to change politics/government and match talent to projects. It’s very hard in politics. Finding talent is easy. Finding things that seem a better use of time for those people than working on a startup or private research etc is very hard because the old entities see as their core job fighting to stop talented people creating value. So talented people don’t see a path to getting things done. This is the vicious circle we must break. DOGE shows it can be done!

Hopefully as some of the above projects develop, we can help something like this evolve.

Further reading

Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.

Dario on DeepSeek:

DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve…

Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027. DeepSeek's releases don't change this, because they're roughly on the expected cost reduction curve that has always been factored into these calculations…

[B]ecause AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage.

Tyler Cowen reports using OAI’s new model. But in SW1 this is ‘fad’, ‘bubble’, ‘crap chatbot’.

Dwarkesh interviews Jeff Dean, Google's Chief Scientist, and Noam Shazeer who co-invented the Transformer, Mixture of Experts, Gemini etc.

Dostoyevsky, the modern intelligentsia, the spiritual crisis of the West, regime change

Oakeshott on rationalism and politics.

Thanks for subscribing.

Please share and consider a gift subscription!

Share

Give a gift subscription

Get 20% off a group subscription

Kamala is already laughed at a lot in focus groups.

And there are so many videos of her waiting to be made into ads I think she would self-destruct and Trump would win easily against her.

Me, April 2023

Wrestling is real, the news is fake.

Rick Rubin, founder Def Jam

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Silicon Valley proverb

Our leading men think they have transcended the summit of human ambition, if the bearded mullet in their fishponds feed out of their hands and let all else go hang. Don’t you think I do service enough if I succeed in removing the desire to do harm from those who have the power?… The others you know. They are fools enough to expect to keep their fish ponds after losing their constitutional freedom.

Cicero

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

Some thoughts on the US election, Insiders v Outsiders, elite fragmentation, the collapse of consensus reality and how our world in some ways will become more like 1800 than 1990, what comes next, implications for the UK.

The normal historical cycle of regime change is rolling: slow rot, elite blindness, sudden crisis, fast collapse, regime change, new elites...

Model posted here (4/2023) and a characteristic NPC response: they didn’t want to face fundamental dynamics and were still in ‘Trump will be easy to beat’ mode

Trump24 played out as with Vote Leave 2016, Trump 2016, Vote Leave in No10 2019, covid, ‘inflation/cost of living crisis is transitory’, Ukraine and many other episodes. It has demonstrated again the cycle of delusion and Narrative Whiplash inside the Simulacrum that politics in the West has become — a cycle that the Insider-NPC class demonstrates on all important issues and which has become so pathological it’s escalated the worst nuclear crisis since Cuba and is fragmenting elites and creating powerful counter-forces.

Marc Andreessen describes it as a form of denial-of-service attack that political-media elites have run against their own perceptions of reality. In Colonel Boyd’s terms, their OODA loop is broken and this provides constant opportunities. Marshal McLuhan warned us that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody as they’re playing out — apart from a few artists most of us can only see them clearly in retrospect. Perhaps this is why the old political-media elites now publicly perform this Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including themselves and act as if everyone else has forgotten too…? How else to explain not just the whiplash but the absence of self-reflection?

In a world where the Insider class is not incentivised to try to minimise errors on fundamental issues — like the main thing in an election or ‘what’s our goal in escalating a war against the biggest nuclear power’ — there are trillion dollar bills lying on the pavement simply in the form of trying obsessively hard to follow some basic lessons from history and the history of high performance that are ~100% ignored in political circles. Sun Tzu and Thucydides remain edge-of-the-art!

I asked in 2022:

A new elite is very faintly visible, spectral networks forming over WhatsApp… How many live players will join Elon’s network?

Turned out quite a few decided to listen to Cicero and join with Elon.

The mainstream media, having failed to understand and report on this phenomenon, is now jabbering about Silicon Valley and the network around Elon. I strongly recommend watching the post-election Andreessen & Horowitz podcast where they describe in their own words how the DEM elite pushed them so hard they felt no alternative but to go all in with Elon.

And — remember! — Trump, Elon and Rogan are all … ex-Democrats! This hasn’t sunk in with a remarkably large number of NPCs but is a clue about what’s really been happening.

A challenge to Democrats and political science professors who self-describe as ‘serious’, like the Pod Save bros or Ben Ansell. State publicly the truth about the way almost the entire MSM edited ‘very fine people’ to make it look like Trump was referring to Nazis, and explain as Rogan did on his podcast how we can see these lies thanks to the internet, and explain that those who oppose Trump must face the collapse of trust in the MSM is because the MSM lies deeply and constantly, and explain why it’s important that so many ‘serious’ academics/hacks believe the fake news and don’t realise the truth. I am watching for the first person to accept this challenge. It will indicate some element of the Insider class wants to face what’s happened. I am not holding my breath! If you also believed the fake version, then scroll down, look at the real version, and describe in comments your reaction!

Below I explore:

• Some thoughts on the campaign

• Some thoughts on the media ecosystem — I wrote last year if you want to understand politics now, remember ‘wrestling is real, the news is fake’ (Rubin)

• What next

Some topics:

• ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing’

• After January 6th riots 2021, DEM elites and pundits reverted to ‘Trump is a clown who can’t win’ & this strengthened after the midterms

• DEM elites allowed the Party to orient itself around appeasing Far Left pressure groups with very extreme ideas

• DEM elites fooled themselves ‘Kamala is/was a great candidate’.

• Kamala massively lost the battle over CHANGE

• ‘Build a wall around California’

• Experts fooled themselves on enthusiasm/turnout

• Mainstream media, credibility, the new media ecosystem and the DEMs’ self-cancelling strategy

• ‘Hitler’ failed

• Trump didn’t win ‘because racism’, he significantly improved his position with ethnic minorities

• The Obama Machine failed.

• Deep state phantasms and lawfare: how the DEMs assault on parts of Silicon Valley combined with lawfare against Trump caused unexpected huge blowback

• DEMs as the war party

• RFK and food, diet, health

• How you close often says something

• Money is less important, message and OODA loop is MUCH more important than most think 

• ‘Education polarisation’

• Smug contempt: ‘never hate your enemies’

• What did Trump do wrong?

• Branching histories: assassination

• Russiagate hoax

And some Snippets at the bottom.

It’s a bit of a mess and I’ll edit when I’ve got time, please note errors and interesting links in comments.

After this blog, I’ll spend less time on the theme of NPC failure. I’ve hammered it for years. Finally realisation is spreading and elites are cracking up and re-forming. Ideas that were resisted for decades have suddenly gone mainstream in months. Even SW1, always the last to see anything, is shifting a little! I’ll move on more to what comes next.

Speaking of which, an interesting UK development…

Lawrence Newport, who ran the XL Bully campaign, has set up a new campaign: CRUSH CRIME.

He says the goal is to build mass support and pressure Parliament to:

1. Jail career criminals who generate most crime — 1 in ten commit over half all crimes but the system does not target them.

2. Toughen up the joke sentences.

3. Build more prison places and secure hospital places.

4. Huge growth in court capacity to crush the court backlogs (over three years for rape and growing).

5. Reverse the collapse of the entire justice system — prisons, courts, police etc.

The Tories inherited a dreadful system from Blair/Brown, broke it more, and Starmer is going in the same direction. It’s a classic systems problem.

Visit their website, give the campaign your name and postcode, they’ll email MPs on your behalf, and give them a small donation. Just 60 seconds and you can add to pressure — stop reading, do it now!

…

The public are desperate for change on this as on everything. The Tories will change their tune from government and suddenly rediscover that they want action (after 14 years of failure). Much of the media will pressure Starmer.

He’s a dud and Labour are in a terrible situation already so I can imagine CRUSH CRIME pressuring No10 into changing direction on crime to some extent as they realise continuing the Tory direction is SUPER unpopular, with Labour voters as with almost everyone. Maybe they’ll come to realise that copying Sunak-Treasury vandalism on the economy is also super unpopular?!

There’s also an anonymous group of data-obsessives (@UKCrimeWatcher) finding and analysing and publishing data on crime who are asking for help on research and say they have a Discord server for collaboration. They seem talented and their work has already featured in the national media so it looks like a good use of time for those of you wanting to do something.

And if interested in new political ventures, sign up to attend the 11/12 event HERE. The organisers say they’ll be doing other events around the country in 2025.

Some things I said before the election

2022-3 I wrote some things. If you’re a subscriber you will not have been surprised by how things turned out.

In September 2024 I wrote about the delusions of NPC intelligentsia and false consciousness.

We are experiencing a historic event in which consensus reality among educated elites has cracked up... Now the NPCs see Elon as ‘mad/delusional’ — so much so they even tweet without irony about how Elon doesn’t understand rockets, is technically an idiot etc.

Just before the election I wrote about the polls and Trump:

There are interesting ideas about what to do… But I don’t see evidence of normal polling companies doing clever things. It seems reasonable to assume, in the absence of counter-evidence which I can’t see (please post if you think I’m wrong) that the problems of 16/20 have not been solved by an industry a) not well-incentivised to solve this hard, complex and expensive problem which has also b) allowed the quality of panel data to fall…

All the conditions are in place for another significant polling miss. 

If the polls are off on Trump vote by the level in 16 or 20 then Trump is (now) winning the electoral college. Even if they’re off by less, he could be winning the EC. And perhaps they’re off by more… 

The results are in and with some good luck the model I published in spring 2023 ended up being almost exactly right.

My point in posting this is not ‘I predicted this’. It was not a prediction. It was a model based on data gathered March 2023 based on how would you vote tomorrow and focus groups exploring views conducted Jan-March 2023. Different decisions could have generated very different results and Trump was an inch from death!

My point has been that what’s just happened a) seemed to ‘the experts’ / ‘mainstream’ / Insiders in Q1 2023 a laughably improbable result but b) the core dynamics, the main thing, were clear then if you know how to look and listen — all you had to do was talk to swing voters in the key states while thinking ‘I’ll learn from them’ rather than thinking ‘idiot low information voters’.

Some thoughts on the campaign

‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing’

This phrase is heard a lot in Silicon Valley but not in Westminster. (Cf. Ben Horowitz’s excellent book, The hard thing about hard things.) In the elections/campaigns I’ve been responsible for, and in government and management generally, I’ve kept this lesson close to my heart and tried to instil it in the wider team. One of the most amazing things about the world is that the most important lessons from history are really simple to understand, extraordinarily powerful, free, in classic books, and ~100% of those involved in politics ignore them so you can have enormous advantages — you just need a certain kind of curiosity, openness, and extreme determination.

It’s crucial in elections, campaigns, government and companies because usually a) success is determined largely by one or a small number of truly critical things you really need to keep manic focus on but b) the world is complex and the incentives of big institutions make it normal for individuals and organisations to be pulled away from focus on the main thing.

This is why after every campaign, it usually emerges that the losing effort struggled more than the winning effort to keep the main thing the main thing. Over and over, it emerges that either a) ‘there was no message’ or b) the campaign deluded itself about the crucial voters’ ‘main thing’ (or both).

For example, in the 2022 midterms Trump made the main thing the stolen 2020 election. It failed because the country, including MAGA, wanted to move on. But Trump learned.

If you look at my posts 2022-23 and publicly available data the three really big things were clear.

A. The cost of living crisis is the main issue and a disaster for the DEMs. ‘People can’t afford the American dream’ said voters over and over. This jumped out of every focus group in just the same way immigration did in the UK 2015-16. It was very clearly the main issue.

B. The DEMs are seen to have lost control of the border, even deliberately sabotaged border control because they don’t believe in it, and the chaos and crime is another disaster for the DEMs.

C. ‘Biden is too old / senile, he obviously should not run again, I can’t believe the Democrats are even thinking about it.’ NB. This was not just MAGA, not just GOP, not just swing voters — it was a big fraction of solid DEM voters outside the mental grip of the MSM. The DEM elites ignored their own voters.

Further, Newsom and Kamala were seen as very Left and could easily lose by more than Biden was on course to lose by (see my comment from 4/23). The DEMs have decided after the mid-terms that abortion and ‘Trump is Hitler’ is the winning message. Focus groups of swing voters in the crucial 6-7 states DO NOT AGREE.

My point here is that a) I do not think anybody who knows what they’re doing and was just trying to find the truth (rather than what people wanted to hear) post-midterms could honestly have come to a different analysis than I did, and b) this is not very hard to do.

• This is not about getting super-smart people.

• It is not about super-hi tech tools.

• All you needed was about $250k for some polls and focus groups. (The way we did our model that showed victory for Trump over Kamala was specialised and did involved super-smart people (not me) using advanced tools but you didn’t need to do this to get the main points above.)

What did it need? You just needed to be genuinely curious, prepared to listen honestly to voters, and follow Feynman’s advice to try not to fool yourself regardless of your own opinions.  

And this gets to the heart of the real issue with our politics and the ‘experts’ that I bang on about.

They will not listen with curiosity and honesty to voters, they will not try to understand their point of view even if they disagree with it. Instead they repeatedly convince themselves then try to explain publicly why the voters are wrong, stupid, evil or all three. And when their predictions don’t work out, their explanation is that the voters were idiots fooled by ’disinformation’, Nazis, or both. 

Another point. A, B, and C were obvious. But more of a judgement call is:

D. Biden’s campaigns have always been bad. He got nowhere as a Presidential candidate until 2020. In 2016, Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told him not to run because he would lose. This was masked in 2020 by the chaos of covid, Biden campaigning from his bunker, Trump’s mistakes, and the total commitment of the MSM to support him. But if you read the books on the campaign, mostly written by DEM journalists, a clear story emerges: he’s a bad candidate, his senior staff were not the A Team, his campaign was bad, he was rescued by others failing more.

And one of the big things was that he kept yapping on about ’the soul of America’ and it bombed in everyone’s research but he wouldn’t drop it.

And Kamala ended up closing the 2024 campaign similarly — on saving democracy and the soul of America from fascists, on ‘Dobbs and democracy’ as Insiders called it from 2022.

The main thing was the cost of living crisis. The DEMs spent two billion dollars and did not force themselves to face honestly their problems on the main thing.

(A question for the curious to pursue: somebody must have done a version of what I did, found the same things, and talked to Important People about it — but why did the Important People not listen, why did groupthink dominate? Please leave links to people who got these things right long before the result.)

So to keep in mind throughout this blog: the main thing was the cost of living crisis — ‘we can’t afford the American dream’ — not ‘Dobbs and democracy’.

The DEMs lost votes almost everywhere and especially in places they control

Trump improved his 2020 vote in over 90% of counties.

The DEMs lost the crucial swing states by less than the places they have tight control.

In places like San Francisco and NYC, DEM voters are angry about inflation, crime and the border chaos. In NYC, black DEMs have been vocal in saying the dumping of thousands of illegals in hotels has been a disaster for the city and for the Party.

The DEMs saw many of their biggest drops in places they’ve controlled longest.

Explanations for the loss must reflect the breadth of the DEM defeat. The main thing was the cost of living but many of the demographic/electoral trends pre-date the inflationary surge.

Results by county, largely complete, showing how reliant DEMs are on a few big cities

After January 6th riots 2021, DEM elites and pundits reverted to ‘Trump is a clown who can’t win’ & this strengthened after the midterms

After Jan 6th and Trump leaving the White House, they thought Trump could never recover.

They thought he was an idiot in 2015 and underestimated him then got a huge shock when he won, a shock exacerbated by the polling miss in 2016. As soon as he left the White House they reverted to this mentality: he’s a clown, 2016-20 was a weird aberration, the system is reverting to the pre-Brexit/Trump normality. And they thought they could de-platform and begin a cycle of lawfare that would damage him without considering how it might generate counter-forces and blowback of different kinds.

Incumbent parties usually lose ground in the midterms after the Presidential election. In the 2022 midterms, the DEMs did surprisingly well — against historic base rates — after campaigning on abortion after the SCOTUS decision.

Insiders convinced themselves of a set of powerful memes and spread these memes through the NPC pundit world in US and UK:

1. Trump campaigning for the GOP in midterms was bad for the GOP, good for DEMs.

2. MAGA taking over the GOP was good for the DEMs election prospects in Congress and the White House 2024. Crazy MAGA candidates pushed moderates towards DEM candidates etc. (Also, based on this logic, some DEMs actively helped the most nutjob MAGA candidates in 2022 primaries despite publicly stating they were ‘fascist’.)

3. Biden is popular. He’s a very successful President. Pundits like Noah Smith compared him to FDR. He should be supported in running again.

4. Although we’ve talked about Trump’s return as ‘the end of democracy’, we will actually be pleased if he wins the nomination again because it means we are much more likely to win in 2024. (This was so powerful that immediately after the midterms while I was talking to pollsters about doing the work that went into the model above, a good DEM pollster called me back and fired me as a client because ‘we’re worried you might use this information to help DeSantis against Trump.’ Me: I haven’t told you how I’m using this information, I’m not working for DeSantis, but why would you care since you said a few months ago Trump means the end of democracy? Them: err, get back to us after the GOP nomination is decided we can’t work with you until then. Interesting data point!)

5. Abortion is the winning issue for us in 2024.

6. The economy is actually recovering, we have to explain to people ‘why they’re wrong on the cost of living’.

7. We don’t have to worry about Trump campaigning on the border, it’s racist/fascist/extreme.

These ideas spread, as they do, to SW1 pundit land, structurally downstream with a time lag from DEM mainstream. Here is SW1 NPC-Ambassador Sam Freedman expressing the widespread conventional wisdom post-midterms:

DEM elites allowed the Party to orient itself around appeasing Far Left pressure groups with very extreme ideas

In Obama’s first term the White House staff pushed back against the Far Left campaign groups. In the second term this faded. E.g it was under Obama that one of the first directives was issued on trans rights forcing institutions like women’s shelters and university sports to accept self-identification etc. (To what extent was this because of Obama’s financial dependence on the Pritzker family and similar networks who are the most extreme on trans?) And DEM political elites quickly gave up pushing back and instead raced to appease them and gave them the power to set the agenda.

These groups are funded by billionaires, many of who have very far left social views, and staffed by activists who are young Ivy League graduates with very far left views. These views are very far from swing voters in swing states. But they were allowed to define ‘mainstream’ in DEM land. This proved a disaster.

Connected… Roughly all (all the top 10?) cities went DEM over twenty years. Then the Obama machine (cf. below) linked them up politically and to the NGO-donor-foundation complex. Then they figured out how to extract billions from federal and state funding. And this system with its multiple bosses and modern patronage network escaped local democratic control and became a money-moving system largely hidden from MSM scrutiny. It then peddled open air drug markets, trans insanity, and sanctuary for illegal immigrants. Cf. my. point about California below.

Also connected… After the financial crisis of 2008, there was an intellectual shift among DEM elites against the ‘neoliberal consensus’. The Party was pushed by left intellectuals and universities. Obama was to the left of Clinton on the economy. Bernie was on the rise — democratic socialism, free college, cancel loans etc. Hillary went to the left of Obama on the economy and to the left of Sanders on cultural issues like ‘systemic racism’ in 2016. Sanders then shifted left. The Squad emerged. Biden had supported a balanced budget amendment in the nineties — he shifted left too. In 2019 the DEM candidates made ‘Medicare for all’ the big issue. The stories Bill Clinton and Obama told about the value of WORK were lost post-2016. Welfare reform was attacked. (I think the dynamics of the groups yabbering at each other and politicians on Twitter also contributed to these shifts but that’s another story.)

Also connected… In the 2020 campaign there was a staff revolt that demanded Biden move from a more to less popular position on abortion. He folded. David Shor pointed out what a bad sign this was for the future. He was ignored. In 2024 the media reported post-election there was a similar revolt of staff objecting to Kamala doing Rogan. Even if false, the fact this story is widely believed by Insiders says a lot!

Some simple examples with big implications for 2024.

1/ In 2019 the ACLU developed a litmus test for DEM leaders: do you support taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicted criminals?!!!

Kamala said: Yes. Her answer was shoved down her throat in 2024.

The Trump campaign ran a simple ad during live sports games: Kamala is for THEY/THEM, Trump is for YOU.

This sort of message has routinely been denounced as ‘hate speech’, fascist, far right etc. But it chimes with the majority. Outside very radicalised education elites it is normal to think we should NOT destroy women’s sport or endanger women’s safety by putting them in contact sports against men. The fact that DEM elites could — and still do! — tell themselves that this is an ‘extreme’ position sums up a lot.

2/ In 2019 a coalition of groups demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalising border crossings and abolish ICE.

Kamala said: Agreed. Her answer was shoved down her throat in 2024.

Interestingly, Biden in 2019 repeated the language Obama had used on ‘illegal immigrants’ — NB. this phrase later disappeared from DEM communication. Biden said that illegals had to get to ‘the back of the queue’ for getting documentation. Even though he was just repeating what Obama said often, the vibe had shifted. Biden was attacked and had to do days of damage limitation.

Things that Bill Clinton and Obama had said about border security and illegal immigration were redefined from mainstream to ‘far right’.

3/ BLM and ‘defund the police’.

Kamala went along with it all in 2019-20. This was shoved down her throat in 2024.

These positions are all far from any mainstream. They are also NOT the view of poor blacks/Hispanics in poor areas — the people who bore the brunt of defund the police. But they became the ‘mainstream’ view for DEM Insiders and the old media.

Things that Bill Clinton and Obama had said about crime and police were redefined from mainstream to ‘far right’.

4/ DEM elites lost the ability to talk to working class Americans. They have been losing working class votes across ethnic lines since before inflation and the cost of living crisis. This is not just a recent thing. If you look at their attempted communication to blacks and Hispanics, it often seemed to imply that they thought young men want welfare checks and weed — they had no offer to those striving for the American dream.

5/ DEM elites presented Trump demands for voter ID as an extreme, authoritarian policy. It is supported by most Americans across party lines. Most Americans think something like: we have to show a driver license to do many things, it is common sense to demand this for voting and would improve trust in the system. The extreme position is the mainstream elite position. A DEM who wants to show they’ve changed should publicly: we were wrong on voter ID, the voters are right, I support it.

6/ DEM elites and the MSM started speaking out openly against the First Amendment. I noted in my pre-election blog a telling clip from John Kerry arguing that the First Amendment means disinformation therefore must be ‘changed’:

There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities [social media] in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts etcetera. But look if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it [i.e ‘disinformation’] out of existence. So what you need, what we need, is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know winning enough votes that you're free to be able to implement change [i.e to the First Amendment]. (Kerry)

The New York Times ran icebreaker-of-the-revolution pieces against the First Amendment. And parts of the DEM ecosystem tried to organise boycotts of shows like Rogan.

And this came after MSM organisations like the NYT ran stories saying that discussion of the lab leak hypothesis was RACIST disinformation!!!

To summarise:

• The DEM and old media elites shifted to an extreme position on many critical issues.

• They told themselves and the voters that their new view was ‘mainstream’ and opposing views are ‘far right/fascist’.

• This alienated much of the electorate including working class voters of all races.

• When questioned they doubled down.

• They talked as if Trump was obviously crazy but they made themselves seem more dangerously crazy.

Cf. ‘build a wall around California’ below.

DEM elites fooled themselves ‘Kamala is/was a great candidate’.

Her 2019 campaign was terrible. She was a terrible candidate. In my April 2023 blog I wrote:

Kamala is already laughed at a lot in focus groups. And there are so many videos of her waiting to be made into ads I think she would self-destruct and Trump would win easily against her.

Apart from her VERY extreme positions, she was very far from the sort of personality of Reagan, Bill Clinton, Obama. A lot of people said things like ‘she’s like one of those bad AI deepfakes but in real life, she talks but she doesn’t seem real’.

Again, this was obvious if you talked to normal voters.

But Insiders and NPCs everywhere tweeted at each other about her brilliant speeches and interviews. This was all delusional.

It is true that the Obama staff drafted in around her tried to stop her defending previous positions. Some of the campaign staff realised that the world had moved on and she couldn’t say in 2024 what she’d been saying for years. But the basic idea of the campaign was to try to ignore those previous things and be talking about Trump. They couldn’t escape the combination of the shift to extreme positions and her lack of ability.

Kamala massively lost the battle over CHANGE

Kamala presented the choice as ‘change by closing the book on the Trump era and steady-as-she goes in Washington’. She even did her last rally with the White House and DC as backdrop. In possibly her most significant public statement, Kamala replied to the question of what she would have done different to Biden with: Nothing really! 

Trump presented the choice as ‘change by closing the book on the Biden era and changing Washington’.

Connected: in focus groups people often say when asked ‘why do people vote for Trump?’ — ‘because he’s not a normal politician.’

There’s been huge focus from the MSM on Trump’s character: asshole, sexist, racist, fascist etc.

But perhaps the most important thing I found in focus groups was the phrase ‘not a normal politician’. And in an era when people are disgusted with normal politics/politicians, this was a huge advantage. When the entire system hated him so much they tried to put him in jail and people tried to kill him twice, maybe it’s because he’s on my side agains the system?!

Voters were angry and wanted change, not more of Biden. The right/wrong track numbers were appalling for the DEMs for two years. 

Trump won overwhelmingly with those who said they wanted change. 

This is an example of — the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The Biden White House and the MSM campaigned on ‘Biden is a great President, the economy is great’. The Biden campaign was on the wrong side of change and perceptions of the economy. And Kamala couldn’t pivot.

‘Build a wall around California’

Much about the main thing was all summed up for me in focus groups I listened to when a swing voter said

You know, Trump was right about building a wall — we should build a wall around California!

And the whole group laughed and nodded. When I played that line back to others it got the same reaction.

The mainstream underrated the effect of endless videos of the dystopian scenes in San Francisco — zombie drug addicts, homeless encampments, open air drug markets, crazy people wandering around the city attacking people with Samurai swords in the middle of the day etc.

40 years ago, California was seen around the world as a) the future and b) strongly positive.

The California DEMs shift on crime, borders, drugs, shoplifting etc has been a disaster nationally.

And Kamala was a far left DEM from California. And most of America didn’t want this future. They wanted it contained and reversed. I think this was greatly underrated by elites.

This will be important for Newsom’s prospects. The 2028 ads write themselves.

(NB. The DEMs lost a lot of votes in California too and extremists lost a lot of races in SF.)

Experts fooled themselves on enthusiasm/turnout

Many DEMs and experts looked at normal signs of enthusiasm, which have proved accurate in midterms, and decided that the DEMs were doing well.

But part of the Trump coalition is low/no trust voters who do not participate in normal ways, do not show up to rallies, do not answer polls, and do not watch normal political news. This contributed to the polling miss in 16, 20 and 24. And fooled experts in other ways.

Mainstream media, credibility, new media ecosystem and the DEMs’ self-cancelling strategy

Trust in the old media has steadily declined since the post-Watergate high when Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men (watch if you haven’t).

The old media has shifted since 2015 to be very overt cheerleaders not just for the DEMs but for the far left of the DEMs. And they’ve acted like political campaigns in putting out content that is false. And in the internet age, awareness of such tactics has spread. (There’s similar dynamics in the UK. E.g John Simpson said within a few days in 2022 that a) he would not call Hamas ‘terrorists’ as the BBC had to be ‘impartial’ and b) the BBC should campaign against Trump explicitly, forget the old impartiality, because Trump is so obviously extremist etc. And this sort of cognitive dissonance seems totally normal for a senior BBC guy these days.)

Perhaps the clearest example is Trump and the ‘very fine people’ comment. In America and Europe, across the old media they told the same story: Trump called Nazis ‘very fine people’. But when you watch the full clip, you see that Trump actually explicitly made clear he was NOT talking about the Nazis!

Almost everyone I know interested in politics in Britain swallowed the fake version of this story. When I tell them ‘Trump actually said the opposite, the media just edited it to lie’, they almost always say ‘no way that would be crazy’, and I show them the real version and they are shocked.

In one of the recent chats between Rogan and Theo Von (can’t remember which), they discuss this and Rogan says something like — the old media doesn’t realise that we can see their tricks now, we can see the full version of Charlottesville and see how they’re lying to us, the internet changed the rules and the Democrats didn’t change their game. This very important fact has not sunk in among Insiders in America or Europe.

Full Charlottesville video here.

Trump didn’t do ONE interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign's final few weeks — he pulled out of 60 Minutes and many others. Instead he focused on supportive new media and parts of the new media ecosystem NOT focused on politics, e.g crypto, gambling, health, fitness, food etc.

There’s a lot of talk now about Rogan but also many misconceptions. 8 years ago Rogan was for Bernie. But when Bernie went on Rogan many DEMs shrieked ‘don’t engage with fascists and transphobes, these people need to be marginalised’. (When Ezra Klein, high status in the NYT priestly caste, suggested engaging with Rogan, he was attacked by his fellow DEMs.) There were various attempts to cancel Rogan, have Spotify cancel him etc. As Elon said, ‘message received’! Rogan realised he’d been defined as an enemy even though it was puzzling WHY. So a lot of people say ‘who’s OUR Rogan?’ But the answer was ‘Rogan was with you but your extremism alienated him and millions like him.’

Many other online communities got the same treatment. Gamers. Crypto. Gambling. Health. Exercise. DEMs stopped engaging and attacked DEMs who did engage — it became a self-cancelling media strategy. (Crypto is an interesting example: it disproportionately attracts young black males — so two of the groups (young men, blacks) that Trump made big progress with against conventional wisdom.)

Meanwhile the GOP engaged. Trump did a huge amount of media with ‘enemies’. He was often mocked for this by elite hacks but I think it was the right strategy. In a fragmented ecosystem with a close election, you got to try everything.

And at the same time trust in mainstream news collapsed, see above. And younger people especially men stopped watching normal TV news ENTIRELY.

As usual with polls don’t look at the exact numbers — look at whether there is a big clear story that is true even if the pollster/methods are a bid iffy.

Yes there is. The story in this graphic is repeated over and over.

‘Hitler’ failed

Connected to the general collapse of trust in the MSM is the failure of a core message.

A few years ago there was an interview between David Shor (data scientist for Obama) and Noah Smith (DEM pundit). Shor said correctly that Trump in 2016 was seen as more moderate than the normal GOP nominee. And Smith’s eyes literally roll around in his head in amazement in a way that stuck in my head, a visual reminder of how hard it was for Insiders to absorb important ideas. This fact never sank in with DEM elites in 2016. They saw Trump as ‘extreme’ and couldn’t process how others didn’t.

In 2022, I pointed out that DEM elites discuss Trump as ‘extreme’ on abortion but his historic position was NOT the GOP default and voters know it (and NB. voters assume he’s paid for abortions himself) and he could go into 2024 with ‘a policy for the general election much closer to what he has said in the past’ and close to the median voter. The DEMs fooled themselves on this again. Trump did NOT back a national abortion ban, he said ‘leave it to the states’. The MSM united in saying ‘Trump wants a national abortion ban’, they wanted it to be his policy, but he repeatedly said it was not.

The Kamala campaign and MSM spent a huge amount of time on pushing ‘Trump is fascist/Hitler’. It did not work. We’re now starting to get reports from Democrats of feedback from focus groups saying ‘we ain’t buying the Hitler thing’ — reinforced for tens of millions who watched him on Rogan and similar podcasts (see below). Why did this feedback not permeate the Kamala campaign? Or did they think they had no better options?

Absolute blanket MSM coverage for 2-3 days on ‘Hitler’

Trump didn’t win ‘because racism’, he significantly improved his position with ethnic minorities

A lot of the mainstream claims that Trump ‘fuelled racism’ to win etc.

A lot of data shows fewer and fewer Americans are racially prejudiced.

And Trump did much better than other Republicans with blacks, Hispanics, Asians.

And data is clear that the white graduate richer older ‘progressive’ DEMs are far to the left of blacks and Hispanics.

Blacks and Hispanics have been increasingly matching their party choice to cultural issues which has pushed them away from the far left dominated DEMs.

Again, this story was clearly visible in the polls for years. Trump did better than expected in 2016 with non-whites then did even better in 2020. The Insiders and MSM didn’t want to face this honestly. And many of their attacks on Trump made their problem worse and pushed more, especially younger ethnic minorities, to support him.

An example of how they couldn’t see these things clearly. The media portrayed the Maddison Square Garden event as a 1930s style fascist rally — the strangest fascist rally ever given how many Israel flags were on display and how many Jews posted their attendance (though of course for a subset of the DEM elite that actually proves the point ‘because Israel is the new Nazi Germany’!). Then there was the comedian’s Puerto Rico ‘garbage’ joke. The MSM went all in on this story: Trump calls Puerto Rico garbage! The Obama bros on Pod Save used it as an example of how dumb and mad Trump was and how it would hurt him among a crucial group. Trump’s vote went UP among Puerto Ricans. (This is another example of elites not learning. In 2016 Trump said things about ‘Mexican rapists’ etc which the MSM said would sink him with Hispanics. He went up with Hispanics. They didn’t learn.)

Another important thing: polls show ethic minorities support Supreme Court judgments against affirmative action of various forms. They also support voter ID — as do most Americans — and do not think it’s ‘racist’. Again this is strongly counter the official narrative in ways hard for the mainstream to admit publicly.

Many DEM elites thought that opposing Trump on immigration would, like civil rights, become a unifying force for the DEM coalition. But as Ruffini has argued there is no pan-non-white ‘identity’. Cuban Americans vote differently than Puerto Ricans and Columbians and also differently in different parts of the country.

The Obama Machine failed

I think this is underrated.

Obama had one of the top 5 social media profiles in the world.

He built two Presidential campaigns.

He built a separate NGO.

And his staff helped build the vast NGO complex mentioned above, sucking in money and buying patronage power.

And he engaged in the 2024 campaign. To his shame he pushed the Russiagate hoax favourites and the Hitler stuff.

And many of his staff joined the Kamala HQ.

And he had years and a huge fraction of billionaires eating our of his hand and eager to fund whatever he suggested.

But he didn’t build something that could beat Trump in the key states.

2024 was a big blow to the Obama machine which in many ways took over the DEM party.

I hope the GOP destroys the NGO complex via funding cuts and legal action because of its pathological effect on crime, drugs, homelessness etc across American cities.

Deep state phantasms and lawfare: how the DEMs assault on parts of Silicon Valley combined with lawfare against Trump caused unexpected huge blowback

Most obviously, the DEMs picked a series of fights with Elon.

Elon was a normal SV political player five years ago. He was a hero to environmentalists for Tesla. But as DEM elites moved Left on trans rights and free speech, they became quickly more hostile to Elon. The California government became hostile. There was the famous tweet from a California DEM politician which accelerated Elon moving manufacturing from California to Texas:

Then he bought Twitter and did two big things. First, he said he strongly supported the First Amendment and opposed the clandestine government censorship of platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Second, he opposed the overwhelming Insider consensus on Ukraine, warned of the dangers of nuclear escalation, urged diplomacy, and said that the West’s strategy would fail and wreck Ukraine in the process. He said he would not allow Starlink to be used for certain operations inside Russia to avoid possible escalation risks.

Insiders and NPCs had united in unprecedented fashion to support the Official Line on Ukraine. Dissent was not tolerated, nobody could be just someone who reasonably disagrees, everybody who said the sort of things Elon said was defined as ‘a Putin shill’. The conformity was such that I’m almost the only famous person in British politics who said clearly from the start the entire Western policy from the first neocon moves in 2007 on Ukraine joining NATO was a disaster, we should have ditched UKR joining NATO in 2021 as the crisis grew, the west’s policy from Q1 2022 was pure Idiocracy doomed to fail and possibly cause a Cuba 1963 type crisis, sanctions would obviously fail because they do not deter regimes from pursuing what they see as existential interests and China would supply them, and China will be the big winner from our stupidity. Despite the fact that I was seen pre-2016 as an extreme ANTI-Russian (!) because of my criticisms of SW1 on Russia/Putin, Russiagate then war meant I was redefined by the mainstream as PRO-Putin. (Cf. discussion of Russiagate below.)

So in 2022 the entire Insider-MSM complex redefined Elon as a fascist Putin shill national security threat who should have his companies taken away.

The Government made Elon sign a contract committing NOT to hire foreign citizens at SpaceX (normal because of all the classified programs they run) but they then sued him for sticking to this contract and NOT hiring foreign citizens! When this became public, the MSM buried the Kafka-esque truth and just used it as another stick to beat him with — more evidence of his fascism!

They hosted events at the White House for EVs and briefed against Tesla, the most important company in the world for technical advances in EVs.

The campaign grew and grew until the day before the election, Rachel Madow gloated on MSNBC how Kamala would shortly sink SpaceX. Obviously the same people who shrieked constantly about ‘the rule of law’ were totally cool with publicly stating the regime should destroy critical assets for humanity owned by political opponents.

There are many other such cases.

Over 2020-24 there was unprecedented lawfare against Trump. I won’t go into details. But the view of many very successful people who were not particularly pro-Trump was: it’s scary to see the system mobilised against a former President in ways that are unjustifiable and clearly political and if they’ll do it to a former President they’ll do it to anyone. E.g changing the statue of limitations specifically to allow a case against Trump while jabbering on CNN about ‘the rule of law’. Combined with the attack on Elon and other issues, many Live Players concluded: the Democrats are a bigger danger to democracy and the rule of law than Trump.

Broader than Elon, the administration pursued an aggressive campaign against other sectors and individuals that remains murky.

If you want to understand this in detail, watch the post-election Andreessen & Horowitz podcast where they describe in their own words how the DEM elite pushed them so hard they felt no alternative but to go all in with Elon.

A few points:

• White House went far outside the law to extreme harassment and threats — e.g Wells notices, debanking, threats of jail etc to coerce agreements, particularly vis crypto. (Korea has double crypto usage to US!)

• Meanwhile the regulators and White House wouldn’t even meet or explain what they were doing or why. Not even top VCs in the Valley could get a meeting to find out — what are you trying to do, what is happening here? Leaders in other sectors experienced the same — legal attacks combined with a blanket refusal to explain.

• While persecuting law-abiding companies, they did NOT pursue the shady memecoins and other scams (perhaps because they wanted the shady characters to undermine confidence in crypto?).

• The recent process — Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — morphed out of Chokepoint under Obama. Also cf. the operation against the Canadian truckers which escalated beyond debanking etc to threats to seize children.

• Lots of DEM governors couldn’t believe this was happening it seemed so bizarre.

Also watch Andreessen on Rogan yesterday.

Very few understand the censorship complex — the mix of overt government operations, government funding of NGOs and censorship/misinformation units inside universities like Stanford and Harvard, ex-intelligence agency employees embedded in companies, threats to the companies from the NGOs/universities which are understood as coming from the government and so on. The First Amendment constrains direct government action. But this complex process gave the DEMs power to control political information while dodging the First Amendment.

If you were very rich with great lawyers and time, you could start legal actions and think about a Supreme Court case some years in the future. But even powerful billionaires could not escape these dynamics. And people without their money and network were in deep trouble. You didn’t even know who to sue, or who to bring a judicial review against. There was no due process and no appeals.

And as DEM controlled cities collapsed in lawlessness, the DEMs’ raided … THE AMISH for using unpasteurised milk!

So far in the post-election analysis among DEM elites, I’ve seen no reflection on how they lost these arguments among critical elite audiences. The most anti-Trump faction — particularly the neocons — have instead argued that the White House was too soft and should have jailed Trump fast! I’ve seen zero serious coverage in the UK MSM about all this.

DEMs as the war party

The DEMs went all in on Ukraine. They ditched decades of bipartisan consensus that Taiwan will reunify with PRC but it should be peaceful. They seemed to be the party of more and more wars while also impotent and not taking them seriously. Far left DEMs even became publicly much more comfortable with the Cheneys than with Rogan and Theo Von and Kamala campaigned with Cheney in the last few weeks.

Meanwhile voters across the spectrum were telling focus groups:

We send billions to blow up Ukraine and lost in corruption but Washington says there’s no money for [insert priority].

And Biden was clearly clueless and couldn’t articulate a rationale for all these conflicts. He kept saying he would stop Israel doing X then X happened. He kept saying Russia was losing then Russia advanced. He kept saying international allies agreed with him and outside NATO the world moved clearly against supporting NATO in UKR.

Many young people in particular saw Trump as the anti-war voice of relative stability.

By definition the MSM, all in on Ukraine, could never face such a narrative violation.

Cf. Rogan post-election on the extreme weirdness of DEM excitement about Dick Cheney’s endorsement for Kamala.

RFK and food, diet, health

In the UK, RFK is seen mainly as a story about vaccines and bear memes.

But the big thing in the election was his stance on food, the food chain and health.

Over the past few years a widespread view has emerged that is not DEM or GOP/MAGA.

Roughly:

We are the fattest and sickest country in the world despite our wealth and vast expenditure on healthcare. Our food supply is poisoned. Plastics are everywhere, even in our ovaries and balls. We can’t trust the government which lies about it all. Regulation has been corrupted and failed. People who move to Europe keep reporting loss of weight. We need to figure out what the hell’s going on and fix it.

RFK was politically powerful because this is a huge topic outside political news. It connects to the podcast ecosystem discussed above.

Mainstream political world tends to trust exactly the established institutions like the FDA/CDC which blew up trust in covid.

So yet again the ‘serious mainstream’ didn’t grasp how opinion has been shifting. They attacked RFK as crazy. But he seems more sane on food than the mainstream to tens of millions in both parties and the very disengaged voters both were desperate to persuade.

Re vaccines…

There was a big push on ‘RFK is an anti-vaxer’. But again there is essentially no mainstream recognition of how they themselves destroyed trust in vaccines:

• The US government funded gain-of-function in Wuhan.

• There is a lot of evidence that covid was a leak from a Wuhan lab. This is not sure. But there is a LOT of evidence supporting it. (NB there are two distinct arguments: a) it leaked from a lab, b) it was an engineered virus. You can think (a) is likely without deciding (b) is true.)

• In the first half of 2020 there was a huge effort by Fauci and hundreds of officials and senior scientists to coordinate in LYING ABOUT THE G.O.F FUNDING AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR A LAB LEAK. This is now well-established and beyond any reasonable argument. There are even emails between them discussing how to hide the coverup from Congress etc.

• The MSM ran many stories in 2020 that the lab leak hypothesis ‘is racist’. Then had to backtrack and cover the story 2021-4.

• As one of the handful who created the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce, I’ve been very sad and angry that post-2020 the government here and in US kept much covid vaccine data secret and allowed the big companies to do the same. This was the opposite of what I agreed with Vallance in spring 2020 — a quid pro quo of accelerating development was unprecedented transparency. Vallance agreed. It hasn’t happened.

• Many other aspects of covid zipped through a standard pattern of Narrative Whiplash. This often went with official institutions pressuring social media to define X as misinformation and suppress it, ban people etc. E.g look at the Guardian campaigning against rapid tests 2020 then flipping 2021.

This combination has had disastrous consequences. But there is practically no willingness in the ‘mainstream’ to accept errors, come clean, be honest. The opposite is standard: zero discussion of the Narrative Whiplash. On this as on everything, they just doubled down and blamed the voters for being fooled by ‘disinformation’. But the blame is on them.

A ‘Twitter files’ for covid, gain-of-function, lab leak, vaccine data etc — i.e everything put on the internet — would be incredibly good and is necessary to restore trust in vaccines. Just bleating ‘restore trust!’ will obviously fail.

If RFK does this, which many are urging him to, it will be a huge gain for a truly scientific debate on these important issues.

How you close often says something

Per above, DEM elites convinced themselves of a very comforting story post-midterm: ‘democracy and Dobbs’ was the winning message to repeat the 2020 victory.

Polling evidence showed this was not the main thing.

But the theory remained intact. Although Kamala started her campaign on other things, she ended in the same place as Biden — giving speeches in hated Washington on democracy and Dobbs while the voters focused on the cost of living.

Candidates are less rational than the media describes them. As I’ve said many times, a Golden Rule is politicians are not rational optimisers for the goal defined as ‘win election’. If they were their behaviour would be radically different. Their real incentives are a mix of a) immediate attention from the old media and b) signals to the in-group that affect their immediate career prospects — both of which run on cycles 10x to 1,000X faster than election cycles (years).

Because of this candidates often do things that after defeat people say ‘they make no sense’. But they do them because they have learned habits and under pressure politicians default to simple heuristics like ‘say what I’m most comfortable with’ which is often a NPC script that doesn’t fit strategically with their actual goals.

It ‘made no sense’ at all for Boris to leave Hancock in place wrecking the NHS. It ‘made no sense’ for the Tories to a) say we must have GROWTH and b) cheer Boris closing all the pro-growth efforts in 2021. It ‘made no sense’ to replace Boris with perhaps the only MP more fixated on media-reality over actual-reality. It ‘made no sense’ for Sunak to watch the NHS implode for two years when it was the voters’ No1 priority and thousands were dying unnecessarily. It ‘made no sense’ for MPs to say a) UKR must win while b) Whitehall continued vandalising critical national capabilities including the industrial capacity to help UKR win. Politicians ‘make no sense’ all the time.

And at the end of campaigns they often revert to their comfort zone. Hillary was the same in 2016. Her close reminded me a lot of the Remain campaign — a message of (to me) smug, nauseating contempt for the working classes and embrace of ruinous identity politics, Better Together, United Against Hate, all good people vote the same way blah blah.

Ruffini says the most noticed event of the last month was the photos of Trump serving people in McDonald’s. The cost of living was the main thing. Trump closed on it visually, Kamala closed with word salad on Dobbs and democracy.

Money is less important, message and OODA loop is MUCH more important than most think 

Combined the Biden and Kamal campaigns spent about 2B. She spent 1.5B in her 15 week campaign. But from October ad spending was roughly equal with Trump who raised only about 1.2B.

Credible reports say she wasted lots paying for events with celebs like Beyonce and Oprah with the campaign paying for large celeb staff travel and work etc.

Interesting they paid about $50 million for paid door-to-door canvassers.

According to leaks to the NYT a PAC identified a ‘100th percentile effective ad’ but it got almost no play. (The ad in question is a) on the right theme (cost of living), b) much worse than classic ads of the past! If this is their 100th percentile no wonder they lost.)

Spending gets overrated but message is underrated.

More important than the volume of spending was that the Trump campaign focused ads on the cost of living and effective contrasts with Kamala.

Education polarisation

An important transnational phenomenon affecting Brexit and Trump is a) the shift of working class voters against Left parties and towards right parties and b) the shift of richer educated people towards Left parties. The biggest shifts to Biden and Kamala came in the richest areas.

This is changing electoral coalitions across the West relevant to the electoral coalition we built with Vote Leave in 2016 and 2020.

It’s also entangled with the racial issues above.

One of the few pollsters I’ve seen who has understood this is Ruffini who wrote a 2023 book on it, see below.

This is very badly understood in SW1. The Tory Establishment never understood the electoral coalition we built in 2016 and 2019. The conventional wisdom now is that they should not try to rebuild it but instead try to rebuild Cameron’s which was much less effective. Partly this is because SW1 Insiders do not want to think about working class voters’ priorities, they are sick of being told to do this since 2016, so will look for rationalisations for why it’s ‘clever’ to ignore them. E.g ‘you’ll get puled towards mad policies on immigration and crime’ — i.e popular policies despised by Insiders.

Smug contempt: ‘never hate your enemies’

The Pod Save bros are not the usual pundits, they are former Obama staffers who worked in the White House for years. They understand winning campaigns and how DC really works. They’re as able as it gets in the DEM political world.

I listened to their podcast a lot over the past year or so. A lot was interesting and perceptive.

But there was a constant tone that was exactly the same as NPC pundits: smug contempt. MAGA world is inherently absurd. Trump is always ‘saying crazy self-defeating shit’. It’s wearying to have to deal with these morons. Many jokes per episode about what a bunch of clowns the people around Trump are. And never, ever serious reflection on how normal Americans might conclude that someone like Kamala is MORE extreme and dangerous than Trump. Never reflection on the process of Narrative Whiplash and how this has undermined confidence in people like Obama.

I think this has been a terrible error for the Establishment generally and the DEMs particularly. Week after week they dismiss opposition as ‘batshit’, moronic, evil. They label everyone else as hateful but their tone is constantly hateful. They participate in the Narrative Whiplash rollercoaster and don’t try to explain it.

And they don’t get that millions of people watch people like this and think: I’m sick of your smug contempt and I’ll vote for anything to kick people like you in the teeth!

An important example. After the Maddison Square Garden event, the Pod Save bros were all over the garbage joke. Trump was an idiot for doing the MSG event. It reminded everyone of the 1930s fascist rally. Obviously it hurt him. But he did it because he can’t avoid being self-destructive. And obviously a joke like this will really harm him with Hispanics. And Hispanics shifted further to Trump again — bigly! 

The hate is bad for their souls and bad for their analysis.

I always tried in politics to remember: never hate your enemies, it affects your judgement. I said publicly, maybe Remain is right, nobody can be sure about such questions in history — which ironically would generate deranged extra hate! Another way the dynamics of Remain/DEMs were similar to Brexit/Trump is the way Remain elites have never shaken the smug contempt either. You could see it this summer with the riots. People who’ve spent their adult lives arguing ‘prison doesn’t work’ were suddenly screaming on Twitter ‘lock em up and throw away the key!’.

Why? Because the media pictures of the rioters looked like the media pictures of working class areas that voted Brexit and it triggered them.

The smug contempt doesn’t alter after each kick in the teeth. Many have fled to BlueSky to rant with smug contempt about the moron voters and the need for censorship.

What did Trump do wrong?

The Trump campaign did a lot right and some things very well.

But in my opinion Trump himself should have had much greater focus on the cost of living and his economic plans. This was the biggest issue for swing voters and his biggest strength.

Trump preferred to discuss other things while the campaign staff hammered inflation in ads.

I think he would have won by more with more focus on the main thing and fewer distractions.

Branching histories: assassination

I wrote in my review of the referendum how it’s hard for people to think about counterfactuals and how very small things can change huge things because of nonlinear effects. It’s quite conceivable that if someone’s phone had broken in a 90 minute period in January 2016, Brexit never happened.

Trump was an inch or so from death. Institutions have collapsed so far it’s often very hard to guess ‘incompetence or conspiracy’. Clearly the Secret Service had enough systemic problems it could have been pure rot. It’s interesting how fast even such an event disappeared from the news, how little followup there was, how little was made public about the assassin.

As I wrote in my blog about the history of the CIA, it’s extraordinary to discover that the CTO-equivalent of the CIA’s most classified photo lab was given the Zapruder film to work on over the weekend after JFK’s assassination and he concluded that JFK was shot from the front — and decades later he said the film we see has been edited to make this less clear. This was all kept secret until after the Oliver Stone movie pushed Congress into publishing documents. And documents surfaced tracing the film’s journey to NPIC. If you’d put it in a movie, few would have believed it. (Follow the link for an interview with Dino Brugioni.)

Trump has said he’d declassify the last CIA and other files on all this. I hope he does. As well as declassify records around the two attempts on him.

The Pathological Simulacrum and Narrative Whiplash

I’ll try and summarise some thoughts on the really weird new media ecosystem and how it affects politics.

The ‘mainstream politics/media’ world, driven haywire by powerful mimetic dynamics and technologies they don’t understand, has generated a sort of Simulacrum, a fake version of politics that Andreessen describes as a denial-of-service (DOS) attack on Insiders’ own perceptions of reality and capacity to act, or in Boyd’s terms, they’ve destroyed their own OODA loops.

1. There’s been a profound talent collapse in politics, government and public service. Much of the A Team used to go into these things. This has gradually changed over decades. Almost none of the A Team has gone into government recently. Much of the A Team now is in some combination of maths, money, tech, private research, startups, hedge funds/PE — what Steve Hsu calls ‘hard elite’ jobs (versus ‘soft elite’ jobs).

2. There’s been a powerful process of pathological bureaucratisation. Everywhere, real individual responsibility has been largely replaced by permanent civil service castes controlling institutions mainly to maintain the power and money of the caste. Meritocracy and responsibility shifted from real to fake.

3. There’s been a powerful process of intellectual elite capture by Communist/Socialist adjacent ideas and the mutant viruses that flow from German and French philosophical dynamics — Nietzsche to Heidegger to the French existentialists and deconstructionists to Anglo-American humanities departments etc (cf. Leo Strauss’s lectures on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, maybe the most influential philosophical work since Kant?). Few of the academics today yabbering ‘trans rights activists stand with Gaza’ realise the origins of the memes they dance to, or the efforts the Soviets made for decades to infiltrate American culture.

4. These powerful forces have merged with the conformism/careerism inherent in pathological bureaucratisation and the mimesis inherent in elite ideas.. Mainstream elites self-select for people with a very narrow range of acceptable opinions. They repeatedly herd/swarm via social media and WhatsApp to super-confidence in an Official Line that’s often laughably, obviously fake. E.g ‘Biden is super-sharp in private’.

5. There’s strong social reinforcement via strict policing and ostracism for non-believers. Insiders denounce those outside their tight social network who stray from the Official Line as ‘fooled by disinformation’, ‘populist’, ‘fascist’ — as idiots/Nazis. Moral courage is rare in academia and media so the vast majority kowtow without complaint.

6. The Official Line then gets exposed by events as fake. E.g the first Biden-Trump debate shreds the Official Line.

7. After 48 hours or so of disorientation, they generate more very confident nonsense ‘explanations’ of why what they very confidently said would not happen just happened — trust the experts! E.g ‘The debate was SHOCKING, who knew he was this bad?!’ And they double down on Narrative Whiplash and delusions and memory-holing. ‘Closing the borders is racist. Only racist idiots oppose closing the borders… Rapid tests are dangerous. Only racist idiots oppose rapid tests… The covid vaccines are dangerous [pre-11/2020]. You’re dangerous if you don’t accept the covid vaccines [post-11/2020].’ [You probably don’t remember Biden and Kamala as anti-vaxxers!]… Putin blew up the pipeline, BOOOO. Ukraine blew up the pipeline, HURRAH!… Trump is Hitler and the end of elections…. On to the 2026 midterms comrades!’

8. Recently they’ve added the flourish: [episode X] shows why we need MORE CENSORSHIP. I said before the election that the NPC response to a Trump victory would be another double down and more demands for censorship — no learning, no humility. After two years of blathering ‘Trump is a moron, Elon is a moron’, and after years of denouncing ‘echo chambers’ and ‘lack of diversity’, many NPCs particularly white male graduates (!) flounced to BlueSky. And there they demand MORE CENSORSHIP and ‘just BAN X!’ to ‘counter disinformation’ with those pesky ‘low information’ voters who don’t trust CNN goddammit and keep voting for Nazis! One of the remarkable aspects of DEM elites is how senior people and institutions have gone so far down the censorship path that they openly stated in the election campaign that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that will be ‘fixed’ after Kamala’s victory (see above).

9. While the Official Line gets quickly rewritten in constant mimetic Narrative Whiplash, the whiplash is effectively invisible inside the Simulacrum. Insiders act like they forget that they were saying the opposite of what they suddenly say today for weeks-months-years then denounce people for saying what they said recently themselves. Sometimes they do remember and they’re lying, but most of the time now they actually have their minds re-programmed by their social network and actually forget they believed something else recently, i.e they are mostly true NPCs for who it becomes less and less relevant to ask ‘what to they really believe’. The best way to understand this is to read about the intelligentsia and the Soviet Union, Orwell, former believers who wrote memoirs etc.

Marshal McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation, that only artists can see today and sense that the future is already here while everyone else lives in the past.

In the Utah desert earlier this year I ran into the legendary founder of Def Jam recordings and the most influential music producer in the world, Rick Rubin.

His artist’s view on politics and news gets to the core of the madness of recent politics and the way those inside the Simulacrum can’t see it or themselves:

Pro wrestling is real, the news is fake — if you watch the news like you watch wrestling, [as if] you never know what’s true, it would be more accurate, you’d have a better sense of the world if you took it all in like it was pro wrestling... [I highly recommend Rick’s book, podcasts, and he is an inspiration to what we will build!]

Insiders tell us ‘trust the news, trust our institutions, trust us!’ Outsiders increasingly watch the ‘news’ a la Rick Rubin. Insiders tell us ‘Twitter is collapsing, Twitter is evil, everybody should leave, I’m leaving’ — on Twitter, for years. Is this fake or real? Do all these MPs, journalists and minor academics really believe they understand managing technology companies better than the guy who built SpaceX? It seems too fake to be true yet it is true and they cannot see the absurdity — as if they stumbled onto a WWE set where everybody knows they are the ‘heel’ act, except them.

They are the biggest sources of ‘disinformation’ but they think ‘the real problem is voters fooled by disinformation and collapsing trust in us’. The more they fail, the more voters hate them, and the more they blame the voters for being the ‘real problem’. There’s a repeated intensification of the D.O.S against itself.

But unlike in WWE, few of the players realise it’s fake — in politics most players follow fake scripts but think they’re real…

The fake has spread across all politics:

• Fake experts (public health 2020). E.g look at how the Guardian covered rapid testing. In Q3-Q4 2020 rapid tests were ‘dangerous’, ‘more Tory corruption’. Then the script flipped 180 degrees. Suddenly the Tories were evil for not being aggressive enough in pushing rapid tests. Much of the media followed the same narrative arc. And there was no discussion of this Narrative Whiplash: it was invisible inside the Simulacrum. The few thousand MPs, hacks, broadcast producers et al who determine ‘news’ just switched what they said without any reflection. If you ask Guardian hacks themselves about it none of them now remember it and are baffled when you say ‘get out your phone and google rapid tests from November 2020 / January 2021’.

• Fake news. See below.

• Fake policies. E.g Rwanda was designed by Boris as an alternative to an actual plan in the accurate belief Tory MPs would be dumb enough to fall for for it because for 20 years they’ve always fallen for every attempt to divert them from the ECHR. His ploy worked as planned. MPs and the media, including media purportedly in favour of actually solving the problem, spent two years discussing the farce as if it was a serious idea. The madness was so intense that it even seems to have shifted PM Sunak himself, who originally realised it was fake, into treating it as real.

• Fake inquiries. The Iraq inquiry did nothing to change the Cabinet Office pathologies. Ironically, the DHSC Permanent Secretary told the covid Inquiry that he’d tried to stop an actual expert attend SAGE during covid because he was trying to ‘learn lessons’ from the Iraq Inquiry! In the covid Inquiry, scientists say under oath ‘I thought X on date Y in 2020’ when there is a YouTube video of them saying the exact opposite of X on date Y. The Inquiry lawyers never say ‘I’m not accusing you of lying but you gave an interview on Y in which you said the opposite of what you now say under oath you thought on Y, how do you explain this?’ Nobody inside the Simulacrum cares. (I asked the Inquiry lawyers why they ignore this. They refused to answer.) The Official Line is the Inquiry must give the judge all information relevant to the PM’s state of mind in spring 2020 but the Cabinet Office censored my official evidence to remove important information and even stopped the judge seeing it. The real official policy has been over-written with fake versions, spread mimetically via the MSM and Inquiry, and will probably become the Official Truth in the Official Inquiry. The fake becomes ‘real’, the ‘serious’ people herd to the fake story, the real story becomes a ‘conspiracy theory’ for ‘cranks’ and ‘fascists’.

• Fake intelligence. E.g WMD in Iraq, Ukraine.

• Fake budgets. E.g the massive secret nuclear weapons budget black hole eating the MoD like PacMan.

• Fake responsibility. Every scandal: ‘never again’. Response to every scandal: more regulation and bureaucracy making everything worse. Ministerial responsibility was real in 1795. It’s now fake. Cabinet government was real in 1795 and 1895. It’s now fake.

• Fake democracy. Whoever wins >99% of the same people stay in charge. Increasingly parts of the deep state are shifted to entities with zero political oversight and this is defended as ‘preserving an independent civil service’, e.g the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office which refused to allow any political observation of its functioning in 2019-20 and the PM sadly allowed this to continue.

• Fake wars where the real causal structure is almost totally invisible. E.g Ukraine.

  • Ukraine had such a big Nazi problem that Congress passed legislation making it illegal to fund neo-Nazi groups (2021). Those Nazi groups were redefined as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘heroes’ (2022). We now supply them with weapons which they carry into battle while wearing famous symbols of Nazi death squads.

  • The outbreak of war had ‘nothing to do with Ukraine joining NATO’ (2/2022). Then in September 2023, Stoltenberg suddenly blurted out that Russia said in 2021 that Russia would not invade if NATO abandoned Ukraine joining NATO and NATO refused. Then the official line became: UKR must join NATO. But when Putin said this was the goal in 2/2022, NPCs screamed LIAR and if someone said this seemed true NPCs screamed ‘Putin shill’. Such Narrative Whiplash is invisible inside the Simulacrum.

  • We must continue the war because it’s weakening Russia (2022). The war has strengthened Russia so must continue until it weakens Russia (2024).

  • Putin blew up the gas pipeline (2022). Ukraine special forces blew up the pipeline (briefed by CIA to NYT, 2023, and now widely accepted as true).

The ‘senile Biden’ story is a great recent case study of the Simulacrum’s invisible Narrative Whiplash. I described it above. The ‘mainstream’ world — from the New York Times to CNN and the Guardian and BBC — either ignored the issue or when forced to confront it defined it as ‘disinformation’. The dumb voters had been conned by those pesky Ruskis again. After the decision was published not to prosecute Biden over his classified documents case, partly on the grounds that a jury would regard him as gaga, the MSM went crazy attacking the guy as spreading disinformation and clearly partisan — weeks later Biden blew up. [Added 29/11. When videos of Biden freezing and appearing unable to speak started circulating, the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told the assembled media that were ‘cheap fake videos’ and disinformation, which was faithfully reported by CNN, NYT etc.]

The censorship-disinformation complex including academics in ‘political science’ and psychology reinforced ‘disinformation’ to the ‘mainstream’ media. This Professor of Psychology (Cambridge) specialises in ‘misinformation’. His book was blurbed to the max by FT pundits. This is the sort of analysis they think is ground truth. He got a Nature paper in 2023 in which he defined the ‘Biden is gaga’ story as ‘misinformation’. But that’s not the most revealing thing.

After Biden’s debate collapse when the entire mainstream media did their Narrative Whiplash and had to face the humiliating realty, this Cambridge Professor of misinformation took to Twitter to double down. He attacked Nate Silver and claimed that he’d been totally right all along because ‘THE EXPERTS’ had said so — and before making any further comments post-debate, citizens must wait for ‘THE EXPERTS’ to inform them about Biden’s medical situation!! Unsurprisingly, this charlatan is part of the swarm to ban Twitter and advocated ‘restricting access to the site or getting it banned from the app store’. Can’t have anybody spreading the idea that Biden is gaga before the ‘experts’ weigh in!

You will not be surprised after reading his tweets below to know that he also waged a war to label discussion of the lab leak ‘misinformation’ and even this year said a) ‘the lab leak was never plausible from a scientific standpoint’, which is clearly nonsense given the number of world class experts who think it is plausible-to-likely, and b) the lab leak theory was ‘instrumentalized by racist xenophobes’ (many hacks including NYT closed down argument in 2020 by calling it racist). As Nate Silver has said, this professor’s claims are a great example of ‘where misinformation experts engage in misinformation themselves’.

So top hacks paid to be the best informed and professors were stunned by Biden’s debate debacle in a way that swing voters in rural Wisconsin who watch little political news were not.

Are they all lying? Or are they delusional? On any given story it’s hard to know how much is lies and how much is delusions. I think generally it’s something like <5% lying and >95% are simply mimetic NPC nodes in the network. Clearly Mehdi Hasan actually believed his constant claims that Biden was fine and the gaga story was disinformation. People don’t usually leave themselves open to such embarrassment.

The Russiagate hoax

A big part of the reason for the elite madness since 2016 is that Insiders created the Russia hoax in 2016 then it spread mimetically through elites then they persuaded themselves the voters were stupid for not understanding it. This broke their brains on Brexit and Trump then it metastised

You can’t understand the Ukraine herding or the recent campaign without understanding how the Russiagate hoax morphed the war on Trump into the war on Putin back into the war on Trump.

If you look carefully you’ll see an extremely strong overlap between those with the most extreme views on:

• escalating in Ukraine,

• open hatred for Russia to an extent that would be condemned as ‘racist’ if applied to any other group, including open support for burning of Russian books in Ukraine with no self-reflection of the Nazi overtones (!!)

• Trump derangement

• supporting censorship

• supporting DEI etc.

At its leading edge, Russiagate has morphed to the following claim: the legal investigations into Trump’s collusion with Putin failed to find evidence because Putin with Trump’s help penetrated the FBI and covertly scuppered the investigation. Checkmate! (Cf. Professor Snyder for this gem.)

Cadwalladr and others got the story going in Britain then it took off after Trump’s win, helped by people like Jake Sullivan (now NSA). The domestic enemy, Trump, was in league with the foreign enemy, Putin — the move made historically by totalitarians to justify repression — then both were labelled ‘fascists’.

Anybody who understands digital marketing and Facebook understood from the start that the 2016-17 hoax about Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/me/Bannon/AIQ etc was laughable. The obviousness is partly why Facebook and the Trump administration handled it so badly at the start — neither could believe people would take it seriously. Silicon Valley obviously has many of the world’s experts on this. So many SV players saw the White House and MSM repeatedly make bogus/dishonest arguments and keep doubling down on it. 

This hoax morphed into a long, complex and often illegal scandal involving incompetence and worse in the CIA, NSA, DNI, FBI etc. It’s now a matter of public record that there was repeated illegal access to FISA data. And this unlawfully obtained information was used to justify FBI surveillance of the Trump 2016 campaign then was unlawfully leaked to the media to undermine Trump and spread the Russiagate hoax. And they mobilised dozens of senior officials from the CIA, DNI, FBI etc to lie on TV about all this.

If you want to understand details, Steve Hsu’s blog has the receipts including the declassified documents. NB. the NSA director Rogers under oath explained he came to a different conclusion on Russian election interference to the CIA. In 2016 Rogers shut down unlawful FBI and contractor access to the FISA Search System after which DNI director Clapper — who went on TV pushing the Hunter Biden laptop as ‘Russian disinformation’ — asked Obama to remove him from NSA.

Two years ago I was hanging around waiting to meet someone in a private jet hanger in the American desert and started chatting to another guy waiting for someone to show up. I introduced myself. He laughed and told me his job. He was one of the most senior career CIA officials of the past 20 years who has briefed Presidents many many times. We had a somewhat surreal chat about Russiagate. I asked him an obvious question: Why did John Brennan push the Russia election interference so hard to Obama in 2016? He stared into the distance for some seconds and replied, ‘John just really fucked up, he connected dots he shouldn’t have connected, we told him he was wrong.’ I also stared into the distance and pondered on how much of ‘history’ is actually weird spectral phantasms like the Russiagate hoax. We now know that Brennan admitted under oath (Congressional testimony, secret then declassified) that he had no evidence of Russia collusion, while saying the opposite in public as part of the disinformation campaign.

As far as I’m aware no senior person has been punished for their lies or crimes in this scandal — a scandal much worse than Watergate. Not even 0.1% of UK journalists who covered the story have a clue about all this.

The real victims were leading politicians, journalists, academics and hyper-online graduate news junkies, not ‘low information voters’. When the senior political adviser to Reid Hoffman, a rich, very well-connected super-Insider anti-Trumper, heard about the attempted Trump assassination, he sent a ranting email to the media that they should be investigating how the assassination attempt had been staged because it’s ‘classic Putin’ and, well, obviously, as we all know from the Ukraine war, Putin = Trump!

With the UK riots you can also see those who helped push the Russia-gate hoax into the mainstream media pushing similarly deranged disinformation into the mainstream while claiming they are fighting Russian disinformation. And those who swallowed the hoax turn everything into a ‘it’s secretly Putin’ story.

Collapse of consensus reality

These problems are, I think, part of a deeper long-term shift.

In 1815, French soldiers picked up and tossed across Europe had no clue what was going on. Consensus reality did not exist in the way we think of it. The telegraph, mass newspapers, radio, cinema, TV etc then created extremely centralised institutions where individual decisions from Stalin or the BBC or NBC could create consensus reality for hundreds of millions. This world is collapsing fast. We increasingly resemble 1815 more than 1950.

I think this is very hard for graduates to grasp, partly because it’s really hard to understand one’s own position in a big historical shift and partly because understanding of technology and the internet is so appalling among political/media elites. And as the amount of content generated by AI models heads towards ~99% of all content, including video, short-term our old ideas on consensus reality will collapse. Perhaps live events and cryptographically identified as ‘true’ content will become more important? Cf. excellent essays by Jon Askonas linked below.

Here I’ll summarise a few Top of the Pops since the 1990s.

• The euro will be a triumph, Britain will have to join. 

• Putin is a ‘reformer’, we can do business with him, Russia will get closer to the EU (maybe even join).

• ‘Mission accomplished’ in Iraq. 

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Iraq.

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Afghanistan.

• Devolution will kill Scottish nationalism.

• The financial system is sound, derivatives like CDOs and CDSs lower systemic risk, Buffett and Munger are out of date, ‘this time it’s different’. 

• We will build democracy and women’s/gay rights in Libya.

• David Cameron is a serious PM. 

• We should make nuclear power almost impossible to build (even though we want Net Zero).

• Diesel is environmentally friendly.

• ‘The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights will have the same legal force as the Beano.’ [For foreign readers: the Beano is a famous old comic, the Charter is now enforced by the European Court of Justice]

• Social media is wonderful, Zuckerberg is a hero, it helped Obama win and the Arab Spring spread!

• Vote Leave are idiots and can’t win. 

• Brexit means Scotland will soon leave the UK.

• Trump is a joke and can’t win. 

• Leave and Trump won because Putin deployed magic Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/Jedi-mind-bending tech.

• Brexit will empower the Far Right in UK.

• The tech bros are panicking on covid. 

• It’s racist to shut the borders. 

• Surgical masks won’t stop covid. 

• Covid transmits by touch, don’t worry about air.

• It’s impossible to speed up vaccine research.

• The idea of a lab leak is racist and/or a conspiracy theory, trust Fauci. 

• Rapid tests are dangerous.

• The new vaccines are dangerous. [It’s forgotten now but this was the line from Democrats like Biden before November 2020 when it was ‘Trump’s vaccine’, then they flipped 360 degrees on vaccines after the 2020 election then the DEMs defined what they’d said themselves as ‘misinformation’ and censored it.]

• Trump called Nazis ‘good people’. [Watch the whole speech and you’ll see you got psyopd again and the entire mainstream media lied about this for years by tricky editing.]

• Elon’s plans for Tesla are mad and will fail.

• Elon’s plans for SpaceX are mad and will fail.

• Elon’s plans for Starlink are mad and will fail.

• Cummings pushing No10 to buy a LEO satellite network is mad.

• Cummings pushing MOD on drones and AI is mad.

• Cummings setting up a data science/AI team in the PM’s office is mad.

• Cummings getting Boris to push BUILD BUILD BUILD is mad, MPs want stability not ‘disruption’ [i.e growth and productivity improvement].

• Boris will govern for a decade, Cummings has no chance of pushing him out.

• Inflation is transitory. 

• EU dependence on Russian gas is a good trade, shutting German nuclear down is reasonable [remember how the ‘serious’ people laughed at Trump when he warned of the leverage it gave Putin?]

• Ukraine will lose immediately. 

• Russia is collapsing, Ukraine will win fast. 

• China and the Global South will support the West on Ukraine.

• Sanctions will work.

• Putin was mad to invade… Putin won’t use nukes he’s not mad.

• Putin’s invasion was nothing to do with NATO (2/2022)… Putin invaded because of NATO expansion (NATO Secretary General, 2023).

• Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, proving how mad/dangerous they are. [The NYT was briefed months later it was actually Ukraine that blew it up.]

• Truss is underestimated as a politician, she’ll lead Tories into next election.

• Starmer is a serious PM, the civil service will be fine once he’s PM and serious characters like Sue Gray are in No10.

• The Southport stabbings had nothing to do with Islam, the real danger here is an Islamophobic backlash. [NB. We now know No10 and the PM knew through August, when they were pushing this line through the media, that the Southport murderer had Al Qaeda manuals and ricin.]

• Trump is a joke and can’t win (redux). 

• AI is a fad/bubble.

• Elon doesn’t understand managing tech companies, he’s broken Twitter, it’s about to collapse, see you on [Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky].

• Biden is not senile, this is Russian disinformation, he’s doing a great job.

• Elon doesn’t understand politics, he’s embarrassing himself in the 2024 campaign.

• Kamala is an incredibly strong candidate.

• The Selzer poll is huge!

• ‘The election is the final straw, I’m leaving Twitter, I’m off to Bluesky, and actually echo chambers are GOOD!’ [echo chambers were bad after 2016]

• Mainstream news is unbiased! Disinformation is the real problem, we need more government censorship!! If you disagree you’re Far Right!!!

On and on and on…

Here’s an example you can see play out today. Smart mostly young people are deploying LLM/generative AI tools as assistants in very creative ways and this is replacing knowledge work by humans. This trend is already clearly visible in various published stats. But if you look at the top 50 SW1 pundits and that surrounding network, you will see them all retweeting joke articles from websites that exist to trash Silicon Valley, laughing about AI is ‘just a fad/bubble’, laughing that tech companies are Ponzi schemes etc. This has become the socially approved thing to do among political Insiders, despite a) the huge weight of scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs having the opposite view and b) the economic foundations of NPC lives are being demolished as they tweet.

And here’s an example of how elite delusions directly affect government. Such clear admissions are rare. Here, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office describes how SW1 was caught up in a delusion in the last week of the Brexit referendum. NB. Anybody doing focus groups at this time knew that the SW1 reaction was totally opposite to outside the M25 reaction. Such delusions meant the civil service did not prepare for our victory, contributing to the chaos.

Every new important thing I’ve ever observed is seen last in SW1 — you don’t have to be quick or insightful to be ahead of political Insiders, second slowest is enough! In Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin infamously said, Always Be Closing. SW1 is programmed: Always Be Last.

A few thoughts on the future

[COMING!]

READING

Listen to pollster Ruffini. He seems one of the few who had a good grasp of what was happening.

Plouffe and other Kamala campaign give first reactions. A few interesting points.

a/ The campaign director claims that their data was better calibrated in 24 than in 20 and 16 but she also says they had the battleground states basically dead even so implicitly she’s admitting it was off in similar ways to the polls.

b/ The debate got huge media play as a ‘disaster for Trump’ but their internal data showed maybe a point improvement [i.e noise / non-response bias].

c/ Listening to some of her staff (not Plouffe) I think many could conclude ‘we lost because the fundamentals were terrible, but we did better where we campaigned, so we’re confident she was a good candidate’. Wrong.

d/ Their internal data showed the best Trump ad was ‘Bidenomics’.

e/ They tested a lot of responses to the they/them ad but nothing worked well so they decided to focus on their own story. As Plouffe says (paraphrase), the trans medical spending was her position, Trump wasn’t lying, rebutting it was tricky!

f/ The campaign director says (1:17:40), ‘It is never going to be we have to make choices about one type of voter versus another.’ Wrong, you do, that’s what campaigns are!

g/ They do not discuss the big issue of Biden staying in so long though they keep saying ‘we had no time’. They confirm they were trying to keep Biden in the race to the end, they did not work preparing for Kamala until Biden dropped out.

g/ They sort of talk about the problem with how campaign groups push the DEMs in damaging ways while the GOP supports Trump. But they swerve serious discussion.

h/ They sort of admit ‘we’re losing the culture war’. They hint at the trans/commie madness but don’t really discuss it.

The discussion is overall depressing. There is almost no direct engagement with a core fact of the election: moderate voters, committed to neither GOP nor DEM, concluded the DEMs have become more crazy than Trump despite a UNITED MSM fully campaigning for Kamala. There is absolutely no facing that voters have seen through the massive constant lies of the old media.

The Obama Machine, Michael Lind.

Listen to the a16 podcast and @pmarca/Rogan podcast linked above to understand Valley dynamics.

Look at Professor Hsu’s blog for many posts on Russiagate and the declassified documents showing massive lies and crimes from the DEM regime. And for the latest on AI, drones, PRC etc.

Listen to Ezra Klein talk to Anne Applebaum post-election if you want to get a sense of how the Russiagate brainworm took over so much of the intelligentsia. On one hand she talks like ‘democracy is dead’ while also talking about future elections — one of many signs of amazing cognitive dissonance.

To get a feel for the new media ecosystem. Watch Theo Von interview Dana White. Best bit is Dana on ripping out Peloton. Watch Theo Von talk to Joe Rogan — two top comedians, if your conclusion is ‘unfunny retard nazis’ you must try harder! Watch Theo Von interview Trump. Watch Rogan interview Trump.

Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.

I’ve mentioned before a deranged economic professor, Simon Wren Lewis. He thinks voting for Brexit is the same as supporting QAnon. I explained how people like this believe a form of the Communist ‘false consciousness’ theory — voters don’t really think ‘we want less immigration’, they say this to pollsters because of false consciousness. Here he is, as predicted, saying that Trump’s victory proves why we need more censorship to stop voters disagreeing with Oxbridge professors. He says that the Democrats lost because Trump has ‘a megaphone’ — TRUMP! Anybody who thinks that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NYT etc are a ‘megaphone’ for Trump is, obviously, living in a parallel world. What would SWL say if forced to look at the Hitler graphic of the MSM megaphone above? SWL speaks for many UK academics.

I’ll drop other things in here as they pop up…

Some other things by me relevant:

Dostoyevsky, the modern intelligentsia, the spiritual crisis of the West, regime change

Oakeshott on rationalism and politics, 2022, which touched on Elon and elite fragmentation

Other Snippets

Dwarkesh interviews Gwern - you probably haven’t heard of Gwern but his blog is one of the wonders of the internet and is super-influential in Silicon Valley. He’s an anonymous blogger who understood the importance of scaling years before many tenured professors of AI at elite universities.

A piece on the disgraceful persecution by Labour and Tories of UK special forces. I tried to do something about this in No10. It’s another example of the catastrophic effect of politicians handing political responsibility to lawyers combined with the collapse of leadership in the MOD and Cabinet Office plus the ECHR/HRA.

German industrial production