Beginning Of The End Of UK Liberal Democracy

And: Houellebecq At 70; AI & Future Jobs; Old Constantinople; American Crime & Chaos

Still from the Urdu language campaign ad by Hannah Spencer, who will now be the MP for Gorton & Denton (source)

Normally local by-elections in Britain are nothing for non-British people to care about. But I want you readers, most of whom are not Britons, to understand what just happened in the UK. It signals nothing less than perhaps the beginning of the end of British democracy, and the germination of the seeds of civil war. This is a sign.

Yesterday, the Gorton and Denton constituency held an election. It was a total catastrophe for the Labour Party, for which this had been previously a completely safe seat. The far-left Greens party crushed them:

The Daily Mail said:

Despite flooding the area with ministers and 1,000 activists, Labour did not even have the consolation of second place with its candidate trailing in behind Reform's Matt Goodwin. Nigel Farage complained of 'cheating' after reports of so-called 'family voting' from independent observers.

What is “family voting”? Glad you asked. From an independent election observer group, which sent accredited poll watchers to half the polling stations:

The team assessed two significant aspects of electoral integrity – family voting (where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting) which breaches the secret ballot. The team also assessed the impact of the requirement for voters to show ID before they are issued with a ballot paper.

2023 saw the enactment of the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made the practice of family voting more clearly a breach of the secret ballot, making it more enforceable by staff in polling stations. Signage is now available to discourage the practice. Signage was only seen in 45% of the polling stations observed.

The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their vote – meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting.

Commenting John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers said;

‘Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.’

In a first-ever in UK history, a political party — the Greens — released a campaign ad in Urdu, the language of Pakistani voters. Raw ethno-sectarianism won the day.

Why does all this matter? The Greens are an Islamo-socialist party, representing the political union of Muslims and the far left (= farther left than Labour). Mothin Ali, deputy party leader, defended the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israeli Jews, and said that if you oppose it, you are guilty of white supremacy. This is not some fringe nut; this is the party’s second in command!

Daniel Hannan sounds the alarm:

We are Balkanising our country, moving beyond citizenship as our primary political identifier and instead relating to one another as members of antagonistic tribes whose territories happen to overlap.

The Green Party’s behaviour in the run-up to yesterday’s by-election should place that party beyond the parameters of democratic decency.

Divisive, sectarian and ready to stoke Muslim grievances against Israel and India, the former eco-activists have dropped any pretence of appealing to voters as British citizens.

At one point, their candidate, Hannah Spencer, told her Reform opponent, Matt Goodwin, that the Manchester Arena bomb had happened ‘because people like you are dividing people’.

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Does this really need spelling out? No democracy can flourish if its people lack common identity and shared allegiance.

… We have moved from being a cohesive nation, in which almost everyone accepted certain norms – equality before the courts, parliamentary democracy, religious pluralism, free speech – to one in which we ourselves are teaching groups of our own citizens to be separate and resentful.

We might have handled immigration differently, with more manageable numbers. But our real error was to turn our backs on British patriotism.

During the 20th century, most settlers arrived in Britain in positive spirits. People don’t abandon their family and language to go to places they despise.

But we taught their children that Britain was rapacious, reprehensible and racist. No wonder some of them turned against the country of their birth.

The Greens campaigned on two issues: opening the borders, and hating Israel. And they romped to victory. Look at this short clip:

UnHerd’s Jonny Ball explains why this election signals Labour’s collapse and the end of Britain’s traditional politics:

Gorton and Denton is a sign of things to come — the realignment of our politics around new poles. What we’re witnessing isn’t just the shattering of our two-party system, but a seismic chapter in the strange death of Labour Britain. The former voter blocs of the governing party, already in an unhappy marriage, living under the same roof but barely speaking for many loveless years, finally have splintered and gone their separate ways.

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Labour’s fractured base is represented perfectly across this Mancunian constituency. In Denton, to the east, the old, post-industrial white working-class; and to the west, in Gorton, the Muslim and ethnic-minority vote, living cheek-by-jowl with the declassé elements of Britain’s urban liberals. Here was the tripartite alliance of the contemporary Left in all its glory, fused together awkwardly just like the constituency itself, with a motorway in the middle. Labour has not lost an election here since 1931. Yet today, each of its tribes has found its own reasons to despise Starmer’s Labour: a project that was never comfortable in its own skin.

Ethnic bloc voting is, of course, not uncommon in the United States, though we hate to admit it. But it was unknown in Britain until now. The Greens are far left on social issues, but also radically pro-Muslim. This is what the French call “Islamo-gauchisme” — a tactical alliance between Muslims and far-leftists, who are allied only in their hatred for the West and what it traditionally stands for. Everybody with a brain in their heads knows that Muslim voters for the party have no interest in the party’s pro-LGBT agenda, or its radical environmentalism. The leftists are useful idiots. The Muslims are cunningly biding their time.

It’s about gender and generation too. According to a YouGov poll published last month, 44 percent of British women aged 18-24 would vote Green. That’s almost half the youngest voting-age cohort in the country! Almost one out of three young men in that age cohort also prefer the Greens, meaning that overall, 37 percent of Britons between the ages of 18 and 30 support this radical de facto Islamist party.

Pressure will be overwhelming for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign, but that only means Labour will choose his replacement. They don’t have to call a general election until 2029. One can only hope that Starmer will call a general election now, while the country still has a chance of being saved by Reform UK. Labour and the Tories, who between them governed Britain for the 20th century until today, are fading; the future belongs to Reform and the Greens, battling it out. The center is disintegrating. Both Tories and Labourites euthanized themselves.

Meanwhile, I saw this chart yesterday for the United States, which does not bode well:

This is what you get when, as in Britain, the ruling class in academia and the media train a whole generation to hate their country. Where do you think this is going to go? There were far more Republicans who were proud to be American even under the Biden administration than there were Democrats under Biden!

I remind you that these are Weimar conditions.

Houellebecq At 70

This is a good time, alas, to take note that French novelist Michel Houllebecq turned 70 yesterday. David Engels considers the achievement of the miserable giant of contemporary French literature, whose unhappy novels are peerless in their diagnosis of our time. Excerpts:

Houellebecq is one of the most important writers of our time, precisely because he is also one of its most merciless chroniclers: an author whose work constitutes both a diagnosis and a symptom of a civilisational condition of exhaustion that he describes with clinical precision, yet never fully transcends himself.

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Since his breakthrough with Whatever and especially The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq has relentlessly described a world in which humanity, after the collapse of its traditional structures of meaning, is left in a condition of emotional, sexual, and spiritual atomisation and alienation.

Liberalism—understood not merely as an economic system but as an anthropological principle—has penetrated every sphere of life, as gaining the love of another becomes a competitive sport, sexuality is commodified, and self-realisation becomes a stressful obligation. Thus, the modern individual, far from being liberated, appears in Houellebecq’s novels as a lonely consumer whose freedom consists mainly in choosing between different forms of emptiness.

This diagnosis runs with almost monomaniacal consistency throughout his entire work. Platform portrays the attempt to compensate Western spiritual barrenness through commodified sexuality; an experiment which culminates in a violent collapse.

The Possibility of an Island takes our modern-day avoidance of suffering to its logical conclusion by imagining a posthuman future in which humans replace themselves with their technically optimised successors to escape their suffering, only to discover that, along with their pain, any meaning disappears also.

You don’t read Houellebecq for spiritual uplift. On the other hand, I have experienced some spiritual uplift from reading him, simply because it is encouraging to read a novelist who tells the damn truth about the world we have created without God. Houellebecq longs for God, but he simply cannot find faith.

The key moment in his best-known novel, 2015’s Submission, where his stand-in, the dissolute professor François, stands before the medieval statue of the Virgin inside the cave church at Rocamadour, and has a mystical experience while young Catholics around him are praying. Yet lacking courage, François convinces himself that he must have just eaten something that didn’t sit right with him. He returns to Paris, and by the end of the novel, converts cynically to Islam, to guarantee himself a permanent job and three wives under the new Islamist order. He is not really a Muslim, not in his heart; he just lacks the wherewithal to resist, and besides, wants nothing more than job security and regular sex. The soft-Islamists now in control of the country, by democratic means (!), don’t care; they just want power.

The book to read is Without God: Michel Houllebecq and Materialist Horror, by the American academic Louis Betty. It’s a compelling analysis of the novelist’s work, which, according to Prof. Betty, is all about what happens when a civilization loses God. I interviewed Betty in this video clip from The European Conservative. If you haven’t the time or the interest in watching a video, here’s a print interview I did with Betty at The American Conservative back in 2019. Excerpts:

Ultimately, Houellebecq’s fiction points to a fundamental incoherence in modern, liberal political thought. You don’t get sexual freedom without the sort of economic emancipation free markets allow (it’s hard to multiply sexual partners when, say, you’re totally beholden economically to a spouse. That is, at least not without significant danger to yourself—just read some 19th-century social novels and you’ll see what I mean!). At the same time, you don’t get economic freedom and self-determination without a loosening of the moral constraints that material necessity used to hold in place. In any case, whatever side you’re on politically, the most important thing to understand as far as reading MH is concerned is that both of these visions—human flourishing understood either as economic or moral-sexual liberation—are materialistic and reductive.

And, rather obviously, they also fail adequately to address human beings’ metaphysical needs, which liberalism is content to leave up to the individual. Religion’s purpose, as I see it, is to order collective life sub specie aeternitatis, but you don’t get that when the hard work of metaphysical consolation becomes a private affair. In the vacuum, alternatives inevitably arise, some of the most pernicious of which we see today: ethnic and racial identitarianism, religious extremism and terrorism, and a tolerance and even embrace of totalitarian rhetoric across the political spectrum. I’m synthesizing a bit on Houellebecq’s behalf, but I think this vision can help us make sense of much of the tension we’re seeing today.

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In the case of Christianity in Europe, I think the question to ask is something like this: can a civilization maintain its identity if it sheds its native religion? Houellebecq doesn’t think so, and neither do I. This isn’t a political or polemical point. Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.

Honestly, it’s frightening to think what a truly post-Christian West would mean for our basic institutions. I’m not stumping for Christianity here; I just happen to have the intellectual conviction that the analysis of human society begins with religion. If you incline toward Marxian thinking, which looks at things in the diametrically opposed way, you’re going to hate what I’m saying. But that’s how I see it.

What just happened yesterday in Great Britain is Houellebecqian. The Muslim voters who came out for the Greens know exactly what they want. They are, shall we say, metaphysically confident. The idiot white Britons who voted with them find meaning in hating everything traditional in their country. Britain long ago allowed its Christianity to atrophy. The radical Left ally with the same kinds of people that will jail or kill them should their party come to power, because the — the white left — are driven by hatred of their home and all it means. They are essentially nihilists.

Civil war is coming to Britain. Mark it. Rupert Lowe MP’s rape gang inquiry heard this testimony:

The Green Party platform calls not only for opening the borders, but for abolishing the police. Think about that — and think about how the Greens are the most popular party among under-30 Britons. Then again, I’m not sure why we should be worried about abolishing the police. When it came to protecting white English girls from Muslim rape gangs, the British police abolished themselves.

Here in Hungary, we are facing a national vote in April. Viktor Orban, the man who prevented Hungary from becoming like the rest of Western Europe — balkanized and trending Islamist — is on the ballot facing a former member of his own party, Peter Magyar, who has the backing of Brussels. The same mainstream European establishment that has overseen the slow Islamization via mass migration of most western European countries, including Britain, is doing everything they can to stop Orban. Please, American readers, as you take in the news reporting from Europe, understand what you are not being told. There’s a Narrative the media are upholding.

AI And The Jobs Of The Future

Jack Dorsey, former Twitter owner, has laid off 40 percent of the workforce at his new tech company, Block. Why? Because AI can do their jobs. Excerpt:

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says his technology firm Block is laying off almost half its workforce because artificial intelligence (AI) “fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The layoffs will mean headcount at the company - which owns Square, CashApp and Tidal - will fall to less than 6,000 from 10,000.

Where will those people find jobs, with “the majority of companies” soon to reach the same conclusion and “make similar structural changes”? I don’t think we are remotely prepared for the social turmoil the coming wave of unemployment is going to cause.

The Wall Street Journal asked AI executives what they’re telling their own kids about jobs of the future. I unlocked the article for you. Excerpts:

[Manny Medina:] There are two areas that I think will be vibrant in the short to medium term. One is energy. The other is healthcare.

Outside of the sun, the most powerful source of energy is the atom. I’ve been telling my kids, you should really figure out how to get into nuclear. My oldest kid just got a job at TerraPower, a company founded by Bill Gates that works on applications of nuclear power. It took him a few years, but he listened to me.

One of the other shortages we’ll continue to have is healthcare, specifically around cancer. My 19-year-old decided to go into nuclear medicine, which is using nuclear isotopes to treat cancer. It’s superdangerous, but it’s very effective.

With the younger ones, I have more flexibility in seeing what’s coming out, but also a lot more stress in that I can’t see the future that far out. The part I want to make sure of is that they don’t look at AI as a threat. They should just figure out how to do something amazing.

Just figure out how to do something amazing, kids! C’mon!

This, from Jaime Teevan:

Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking.

For that, a traditional liberal-arts education is really important. That’s true at a macro level, at a time of extreme disruption. And it’s also interestingly true at a micro level. Think of what AI does. It used to be that communicating with a computer was deterministic: You press this button, and this thing happens. Now it’s based on natural language, providing context, expressing intent and thinking critically.

Well, it’s a good thing we have preserved a liberal arts sector in the universities that teach critical thinking skills. Ha ha! No, we turned the liberal arts and humanities faculties into woke madrassas, where the last thing any professor wants is for students to think critically (as opposed to regurgitating the politically required answer).

Constantinople In The Sixth Century

I WANT TO GO TO THERE!

Why Does America Feel Worse Than Europe?

In an important essay, Noah Smith says by most economic measures, the US is doing much better than Europe. So why do things feel worse in America? Answer: crime. Excerpt:

As an American, when you go to a European city or an Asian city — or even to Mexico City — and you see pretty buildings and peaceful clean streets and there are nice trains and buses everywhere, what you are seeing is a lack of crime. The lack of crime is why people in those countries ride the train, and encourage train stations to be built in their neighborhoods instead of blocking them. The lack of crime is why people in those countries embrace dense living arrangements, which in turn enables the walkable mixed-use urbanism that you can enjoy only on vacation.

Absolutely true. I feel it every time I go home to the US. And let’s be honest: violent crime is statistically associated with young black males. It is always strange and disheartening to return to the US to visit, and to have to revert to learned safety habits, such as being wary around young black males. This isn’t racism (though in some forms it could be); this is paying attention.

In European cities, crime is heavily associated with migrants from Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It’s a painful but undeniable truth: the more European a city is, demographically, the safer it is. You aren’t supposed to notice this, but you have to be blinded by ideology not to. In 2022, an American friend came to visit me in Budapest with his son, then age 10. I couldn’t figure out why my friend got so tense every time his little boy got more than 60 feet or so in front of us. Then it hit me: Oh, right, he’s American. My friend didn’t yet realize the meaning of living in Budapest, where kids can run around without fear of bad things happening to them, as is normal in America.

I wouldn’t have let my 10 year old in the US run free like that in a big city either. But Budapest is not an American big city. Nor a British or western European one. In Budapest, they can be honest with themselves about what causes crime and social disorder, and they don’t want any part of it. Same throughout Central Europe. It’s obvious what liberalism on culture, religion, and migration have done in the west.

Culture matters. I fear that here in Europe, in the coming decade, we are going to learn that the hard way. I don’t think we ever will in America, which is large enough for the middle classes — including the law-abiding black middle class — to keep moving away from the problem, which is unsolvable.

Unsolvable, that is, absent the Bukele Strategy, which is simply to lock the anti-social gangsters away in prison and throw away the key. A horrible solution, but a society with its back against the wall and a knife at its throat will be sorely tempted to take it. El Salvador is a good place to live now, because the men who made it impossible for decent people to thrive are now in jail. But it’s not really a liberal democracy as we are accustomed to think of liberal democracy. Maybe that’s the best future available to us. What’s brewing now in broken Britain is the end of liberal democracy, which depends on non-political cultural pillars that have now been kicked out from under it.