In an appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line back in 1980, newly inaugurated President Reagan was asked his thoughts on a number of key issues. His responses, despite now being 42 years old, remain all too relevant.
He argued for long-term investment in expanding the oil economy in the face of rising energy costs, an argument that Republicans are making once again as Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline has driven gas prices up to eye-watering levels, compounded further by sanctions on Russian oil. On the issue of inflation, he pointed out that “since government causes inflation, government’s the only one that can stop inflation,” in stark contrast with Biden who prefers to leap from calling inflation “transitory” to celebrating it to blaming Trump to blaming Russia.
Perhaps Reagan’s most pertinent words of advice were on dealing with aggressors:
“The United States cannot recklessly put itself in the position where the confrontation does take place. The United States… should make it plain that [the Soviet Union] can run that risk of having such a confrontation, if they continue with their imperialism and this kind of expansion.”
He followed this by stating:
“I think one of the foolish things we’ve done going clear back to the Vietnamese war is telling potential enemies the things we would not do. For example, when President Johnson repeated over and over again that, of course, we would never use nuclear weapons there. I don’t think we should’ve use nuclear weapons there. But I think the North Vietnamese should have gone to sleep every night worrying about whether we would. We shouldn’t tell them the things that we wouldn’t do.”
Reagan faced a Russian state spreading its imperial tentacles, acting through its various satellites as well as through its own troops – a situation that is playing out once again.
Biden’s tendency to rule out action represents a major stumbling block in dealing with Putin, who knows all too well that the West is simply not ready, militarily or otherwise, for a major conflict of any kind. At his meeting in Brussels, when asked if his clear unwillingness to go beyond a proxy war had “emboldened” Putin, Biden replied, “No and no,” as if saying it twice would make it any less untrue. Obama made a similar mistake by talking big with his “red line” threat but failing to follow up with any action. One can hardly blame Putin for expecting the same from Biden as he effectively acts out Obama’s third term.
When Biden does propose any action, as he did when he mistakenly suggested that use of chemical weapons would be met with a response “in kind,” the White House quickly performed damage control. The net result was an embarrassed Biden, a bemused Putin and a slightly nervous free world.
Whatever one may say about Trump, his unpredictability lent him a Reaganesque quality, with his talk of consequences for America’s enemies being followed through with appropriate, often severe, action, as was the case with his targeted assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
What is most alarming is that Reagan’s advice, given in 1980, has not been heeded by Biden and his team despite his being in politics since 1976. If he had paid attention, he may not have been called “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” by Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates. Although he had numerous failings, from Iran-Contra to his response to the AIDs crisis, Reagan was the man who helped end the Soviet Union. If history is to repeat itself, as it seems to be doing, perhaps following in Reagan’s example is the ideal course of action.
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Why The Tories Should Be Afraid of the Australian Labor Party’s Victory
The Australian Labor Party’s victory in Australia marks the end of almost a decade of Liberal Party rule. Indeed, the Liberal Party bears many similarities and its philosophy and ideology derived from the Conservative Party in their mother country. Having just scraped a majority in 2019, Scott Morrison has led the Liberal Party to its worst defeat since 1944. This claim however isn’t based on losing government but more critically losing its affluent seats like Goldstein, Higgins, North Sydney, Mackeller and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah failing to be won by the Liberals again. But with the shock victory of independent Dr Monique Ryan in Kooyong suggests a worrying foreshadowing of what is yet to come in Britain.
Poor Leadership, Good Results
Firstly, the presumptive narrative that ‘Keir Starmer is an awful leader, so we’ll get back in’ is to be questioned due to the Australian election. Net satisfaction with Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s performance fell to a record low of minus 14 per cent – the worst for an opposition leader since Bill Shorten – just in mid-April. Starmer too shares an abysmal rating with 53 per cent of respondents to a YouGov poll in April judging him to be ‘doing badly’ as Labour leader in Britain. Nevertheless, with a shared cost of living crisis due to high inflation and rampant house price increases, both conservative parties have failed on their perceived core mission of safeguarding the economy.
The Wavering Middle-Classes
May’s local election results in the UK display signs of dissatisfaction with the current Tory government. The Liberal Democrats (not to be confused with the Australian Liberal Party) exploited the dissatisfaction among middle-class Tory voters in historically safe Tory areas. Australian Labor too exploited this dissatisfaction with middle-class Liberal voters. Being dubbed the ‘teal independents’, predominantly female, middle-class, wealthy, small-l liberal and climate-conscious candidates swept through solid Liberal seats. Teal itself being a mixture of green and blue (the Liberal Party’s colour) displays similarities with NIMBY-minded candidates in solid Tory wards during the UK May election. England’s results saw a net increase of 194 councillors for the Lib Dems and 63 for the Green Party with Labour seeing an increase of only 22 councillors at the expense of a loss of over 336 councillors for the Tories.
Forget the ‘Red Wall’ concept in Britain and in Australia, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party are seeing their core base desert them before their very eyes.
Repercussions for Australia and Dangers for Britain
Republicanism is strong in Australia and the return of the Labor Party with outspoken republican Albanese at the helm, coupled with the culture war heating up over trans rights during the election, this presents danger to the future of the monarchy in Australia once again. For Britain, the story is already well understood since Blair that a Labour government (no matter how appealing to traditional middle-class Conservative voters) will irrevocably vandalise the British constitution once more.
One key lesson learned from this election is that it is a massive challenge to hold onto the prosperous middle classes (which are a core rightist constituency) without compromising on conservative social values. Values of ambition and enterprise have been consistently championed by each Tory government since around the 1860s, yet this current Tory government is the first to not encourage – or even boldly talk – about these values. To fight the culture war without a sound handling of the economy risks losing both to left wing manipulation and thus conservatives are once again in opposition dominated by a left-wing hegemony in economy and culture.
The implication of defending traditional values by the Liberal Party and – supposedly – by the Tory Party without the confidence of the middle-classes on the economy is to pave the way for a leftist victory. Due to the shared Anglo traditions of parliamentary sovereignty, this leaves Australia’s institutions open to vandalism and destruction.
Conclusion
With the end of almost a decade of Liberal rule in Australia marks the beginning of a new era of Labor government. The recriminations inside the Liberal-National Coalition will begin as the moderates seek to flex their dwindling muscle to make the case that the 2022 electoral strategy of chasing ‘Red Wall’ voters cost them their heartlands. Right wing Liberals who protested Scott Morrison’s party by voting for the United Australia Party or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation may return home, but this election has marked the end of solid conservative dominance in Australia.
The Conservative Party in Britain should be worrying. The long-held belief that the Tories will stay in government due to Labour being unable to produce a competent-enough leader has been proven wrong. Ineptitude in optics over Partygate and 40-year high inflation (the highest among G7 countries, currently) is cutting away the Tory Party’s electoral backbone. Forget the insipid ping-pong of which party leaders held illegal gatherings during lockdown and focus on the disastrous state of the economy. If the awful May local election results weren’t a warning of what is yet to come for the Tories, this Australian election result should scare the Tories to death beyond the years of Brexit.
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Is Conservatism Really All About Freedom?
Giving a speech in front of a room filled with people who no doubt think of themselves as conservatives, Liz Truss talked primarily about low taxes, personal responsibility, the “freedom to choose” — and just “freedom” more broadly. She also said that she would govern as a conservative, which instead makes one wonder: is governing as a conservative really all about freedom?
For fear of being accused a “squish” who relentlessly attacks Tory leaders while defending Sir Keir Starmer at every given opportunity, I ought to say that I really like Liz Truss; she understands that the free economy is the best vehicle for delivering economic growth and lifting people out of poverty, and that is certainly important. Important too are many of the traditional liberties which we all enjoy in Britain: the right to speak one’s mind freely, to worship in the manner one prefers and to enter into contracts without excessive state interference. However, does this mean that conservatism is all about freedom and not concerned with any other values at all?
My answer — and, indeed, the answer which conservatives used to give before our movement took on the heavily libertarian tone it now projects — is no. It is liberalism, not conservatism, which sees individual liberty as the end goal of politics; it is liberalism which starts from the position that individuals are by nature free and equal and that the role of the state is to protect that natural freedom and equality.
Conservatives start from an entirely different place. Per Aristotle, they recognise that man is a social and political animal. They look at the world and see that individuals are not born free: they are duty-bound to the families, communities and nations in which they find themselves in but never consciously choose. A child, for example, can never declare himself free of his parents; if he were to neglect his parents in their old age, shouting something or other about his natural freedom, he would rightly be seen as a moral monster. Nor can a person declare himself free of his nation, at least not on a whim. It is possible to emigrate, of course, as I have done — but it is not an option to spontaneously and arbitrarily assert your freedom from any allegiance to your country during a wartime draft.
It is also not the case that individuals are born “equal”; one can never, for instance, be equal to one’s parents, even if one enjoys a warm and friendly relationship with them — because the natural hierarchy between a child and a parent, which stems from the knowledge that the child would not exist if not for the parent, can never dissipate.
Conservatives believe that these natural loyalties and hierarchies are beneficial to human beings and conducive to their flourishing; without them, human beings would wander aimlessly through life, always reaching out for the key to happiness but never quite finding it. For this reason, it is authority, law and tradition that are at the heart of conservatism — not freedom — because, without direction, there is bound to be chaos in the public sphere; without tradition, a disorder in the private sphere; and, crucially, without authority, neither law nor tradition can be preserved.
This is not to say that conservatives do not value freedom. They are dearly fond of the ordered, civilised liberty which arises amidst the stability and security provided by law and tradition. What they reject is the Rousseauian notion that “man is born free but everywhere is in chains” due to the oppressive nature of our inherited social and political institutions, recognising instead that it is these very institutions that provide us with liberty which can actually be of use to us. What good, after all, is a notional “natural” liberty if your community is filled with criminals, hooligans and louts who make it impossible for you to go about your everyday activities in peace and with a smile? And, indeed, is it really an improvement to be liberated from the constraints of your traditional religious inheritance only to end up a slave to your own appetites, depedent on pornography and “light” drugs, as so many young men currently are? I rather think not.
I hope, therefore, that Liz Truss will focus not just on protecting freedom but on defending the institutions — from the Church to limited parliamentary government — which have shaped it, because that is what conservatism is truly all about.
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Why We Shouldn’t Abandon Politics
Until a few weeks ago, I was thoroughly resigned to the fact that I would not be voting for the first time in my adult life.
This wasn’t a flippant or particularly natural decision for me. A fan of unfashionable causes from a young age, I had always bought into our democratic political system and believed that despite its faults, ours was preferable to the large majority of those around the world.
I’d argue with my sixth form college history teacher, a chain-smoking trade union crustacean, that the Cuban revolution was not a good thing actually. At university, I set up the local youth chapter of UKIP and was one of approximately three students who even signalled that they would vote for Brexit.
As one can imagine, this made me very popular amongst the kombucha-brewing techno-listening charity shop fashionistas who I stubbornly brushed shoulders with by insisting on frequenting their hipster coffee shop, where once a ‘trans’ person told me I should “stop reading the fascist Spectator”.
My earliest political instinct, that our foreign policy did not serve our interests and was based on lies (an instinct that has only grown stronger) was also, I thought, sufficiently represented in our media and political system. I voted, I got excited about elections, watched the BBC and took politics seriously.
Everything changed in early 2020. Watching the entire ‘free world’ engage in highly coordinated state propaganda, erect detainment camps, lock people in their homes for months at a time, and by hook and by crook inject the vast majority of the population with a substance they weren’t allowed to scrutinise in polite society because ‘The Experts’ told them to, changed how I look at politics forever.
I was always aware of the military-industrial complex and its influence, and of that of the financial system. What I have since learnt is that these forces of evil are joined by many other interest groups: Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Food and the billionaire-foundation complex.
The mask-wearing millions even turned my anger towards them, the public as a whole, which was a very different feeling for a ‘power-to-the-people’, ‘silent-majority’ populist as I had up until then been. What morons, I thought.
How did I ever trust in the collective wisdom, the ‘common sense’ of the public, who had en masse accepted the (even then) clearly moronic behaviour of ‘stay-at-home’ rules and wearing chemical-laden Chinese face-nappies on while alone and outside?
When the Russians entered Ukraine in early 2022, this feeling was compounded. The Covid era had caught everyone off guard, but Ukraine was something I had seen coming for a decade.
In 2014, the year when the Russia-Ukraine war actually started, I had just started university studying, of all things, International Relations and Russian language. I had a large number of Russian and Ukrainian friends. I spent my summers volunteering at educational camps not far from the Ukrainian border. After graduating, I moved to Moscow and started working in TV.
This is my way of saying that I had followed the events since 2014 in detail, with interest, and understood the positions of both sides, the actors involved and like Nigel Farage, had a very strong feeling that this was a disaster in the making. Yet this was a position made paramount to treason. Putin was Hitler, and that was it.
Back living in London and working in UK media after riding out the worst of the pandemic in Istanbul, I had become fully cynical about politics.
How could our parochial, insular and frivolous party politics ever be a solution to the powerful global forces that had transformed the world within just a couple of years? How had I believed that the political fight I had been fighting actually had any chance of taking Britain away from corrupt globalist forces and ‘taking back control’ for the people? Brexit now appeared to be window dressing.
In fact, I had come to believe that I had been seriously deceived. Years of energy were given, and the country was seriously divided, and for what? To have more mass immigration and more economic decline under more Conservative government, with biomedical tyranny and continental war to boot?
In that time, I began to believe in the devil, which was then a stepping stone to believing in God. The world, it appeared, was the devil’s realm. The compounding increase in far-liberal and ultra-progressive ideologies, and the resulting destruction of the family and social degradation, made this clearer.
I concluded that the best way to fight in a world run by the devil, was not through politics, but through free will and faith, walking towards God through this darkness. I still hold that to be absolutely true.
Yet something has happened over literally a matter of weeks that has reignited my interest in politics, and it is more than the return of Nigel Farage, although that has been the catalyst.
The prospect of total Tory collapse was first enticing only out of pure spite.
I had been critical of Farage, one of my political heroes, for what I viewed as terrible positions taken by him and his party during the Covid era, and a perceived silence on our disastrous foreign policy, after years of being outspoken and having the right idea.
Though my disappointment in and disillusionment with politics did indeed make me cynical, nothing made me more cynical than working in British media.
After working with interesting, heterodox international and expat journalists abroad, I discovered that back home it’s staffed largely by mediocrities, as fickle and, frankly, basic as any KMPG graduate or marketing intern.
Outside of the narcissism of small differences, wholly adopted from newspaper op-eds and ‘journo Twitter’ in cyclical bouts of opinion bottom-feeding, they are often not the well-read intelligentsia that they present themselves to be.
Yet the depiction given by many in sceptic quarters, that narratives are tightly controlled by explicit political directives handed out from above, a view I have been sympathetic to in the recent past, does not seem to hold water.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact that there are a small handful of news wires which provide thousands of newspapers and news channels with the same stories, they decide to put out in the way they want, is far from ideal and does have the ability to influence the news cycle.
Yet on the day-to-day, factory-floor level, the reality is that the media, and politics, is largely made up of people who are subject to the very same waves of information warfare, perception manipulation and social acceptability that the general public and all of us are to an extent.
If it is indeed the case, as I now believe, that the enemy is not only far weaker than it has led us to believe, but has never been weaker than it is now, we do not only have the possibility the shift the Overton window through politics, which the media have no way of hiding from, but that we have a duty to be happy warriors and believe that it is possible to effect change.
For those still rightly enraged about the collective amnesia over Covid era mandates and who therefore see Reform as invalidated by not choosing to campaign on that, the reality is that its leadership now hold the correct view of the lockdowns and the jabs, even with the benefit of hindsight.
This won’t satisfy everyone, and I am completely sympathetic to that, but as Bismarck famously said, politics is the art of the possible, and what is possible at the moment is to mobilise around our current problems. Immigration is the obvious issue that will galvanise serious support against the uniparty – and our demographics are our ultimate destiny.
The rise of Reform to neck-and-neck polling position with the Tories is indeed an impressive feat. In fact, the campaign of the Conservatives in this election, which suspiciously feels like it is being directly run by the Labour Party for their own benefit, has got many wondering if this is not an orchestrated handing over of the baton.
In late March, Barack Obama, the man rumoured to be de facto running the Biden administration and campaign, dropped in to see Prime Minister Sunak, for reasons undisclosed.
In the following weeks there was talk by Andrew Bridgen MP that Sunak had been ‘told by the generals’ that we would officially declare we were at war against Russia in the summer ahead of a major escalation. The PM, it is alleged, responded that he did not want to be a wartime leader and a couple of weeks later had abruptly called an election.
All of this, alongside Rishi’s announcement in the rain, which bloggers have called a ‘humiliation ritual’, has led some theorists to believe the Tories are basically throwing the election. Reform, so the theory goes, is ‘controlled opposition’ designed to contain the Tory exodus.
There might be elements of truth to what I have just outlined but my personal experiences with Reform’s leaders do not lead me to that final conclusion. Farage and his team are genuinely running an anti-establishment revolt.
Not only is he running on the same issues which have only gotten worse since Brexit, our broken economy and the rapid demographic transformation of the country, but there is plenty of red-meat for sceptics; railing against the Tories for ‘taking away our freedoms’, hitting out against the World Health Organisation and the World Economic Forum, fighting against debanking, a cashless society and Net Zero lunacy. It’s not a bad platform.
The Andrew Breitbart doctrine is that ‘politics is downstream from culture’. It might then seem obvious that culture is therefore downstream from media, but as I have outlined, that is in fact not the case.
Our media is downstream from both politics and culture. Farage is very successfully using will to power to shift the Overton window and provoke the media into discussions they would ordinarily not have.
Whether you trust him to stick to these positions when push comes to shove almost doesn’t matter as much as his proven ability to act as a battering ram against our established political elite. In any case, he has been consistent on everything and on the Covid saga he has now come to the right place, which is more than can be said for others.
It has been Farage’s positioning on Ukraine, however, that has clinched it for me.
Despite the potential to alienate much of Tory Boomer-England who display their Ukraine flags with the same zeal that Corbynista students do with their trans-Palestinian-EU ones, Farage has stuck to his long-held position that this horrendous conflict was a long time coming.
The establishment, smelling blood, sought to use this to neutralise him, but he hit back harder and spent days making speeches outlining the failed wars of the uniparty, the lies they were based on and their horrific consequences. Labour in Iraq, the Tories in Libya and Syria and yes, Ukraine. “Foreign policy matters!” he’s been telling energetic crowds.
The power of taboos is a force more potent and yet more vulnerable than we imagine. A few hundred thousand of us silently crossing boxes in polling booths do have the power to change the parameters of acceptable discussion by the fallout it can cause for years to come. We should not scoff at that.
At a time like this, when all signs are that the most dangerous and corrupt elements of the collective West are itching for a global conflict, the man who proudly bellows to large crowds that “We only go to war as a very, very last extreme; I will campaign for peace wherever it is possible”, has my vote.
As it says in Psalm 146, Trust in God, Creator and Redeemer:
“Do not place your trust in princes, in mortal men who have no power to save.”
– Psalm 146:3I won’t, but I will not abandon politics as a way of shifting the dial to expand public consciousness and as a way to take us off potential paths of ruin. Not yet.
