Tensions in the South China Sea are on the rise. The United States has just pledged to defend Philippine vessels if they are attacked over there, after Beijing and Manila blamed each other after a China Coast Guard ship fired water cannons at a Philippine boat. The incident may well be deliberately provoked by China to test the commitment of the United States in the region.
A few weeks ago, a record-breaking number of Chinese warships were spotted in waters around Taiwan within a 24 hour period. This was followed by the unexplained firing of China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, a close ally of Chinese President Xi Xinping. In the same week, Taiwan held major military drills that simulated an invasion of the island, centred around defending vital beaches and airports.
This volatile mix of escalation and uncertainty is breeding a sense of anxiety for China’s regional neighbours who are all in tense dispute with China over its legally baseless claim to the entirety of the South China Sea – and all the vast mineral wealth beneath the waves.
ASEAN – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – could well play a role here. This is a political and economic union of 10 member states in Southeast Asia. With lingering fears of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan within the next five years, ASEAN nations must build stronger ties between themselves to act as a stable and unified counterweight to China. This would not only help to push back against Chinese aggression in their own waters, but also give support to Taiwan in any eventual outbreak of war. Furthermore, it would alleviate the burden on the United States.
If ASEAN partners do not present a united front on territorial disputes in the South China Sea then the door will be left open for China to isolate certain nations and coerce them into giving in to Chinese demands. Given its rather particular interpretation of international boundaries, it is only a matter of time before China engages in legal warfare to challenge international boundaries, to the extent it has not already.
Malaysia already experienced something along these lines, albeit not coming from China. Last year, a French court ordered it to pay $14.9 billion to the heirs of the last sultan of Sulu, a part of Malaysia whose sovereign enjoyed compensation from the British when they ruled over the area, which is resource-rich. The newly formed Malaysian state simply continued to pay the heirs an annual stipend of $5,300, until in 2013, following an armed incursion from the Philippines by a group claiming to be the heirs. The French court decision to rule in the way it has is highly controversial, to say at least. The arbitrator who issued the award in the case, Gonzalo Stampa, has now even been slapped with criminal charges in Spain over his role.
In sum, even internationally well-accepted boundaries do not seem safe from legal challenges. Looking at how China has been treating Lithuania, after it was deemed too friendly towards Taiwan, Asian countries should not exclude that the increasingly assertive Chinese state tries to turn courts into an extension of its foreign policy domain.
It would be foolish to underestimate the chances of war in Asia breaking out. Decades of smaller scale lopsided conflicts have already blindsided us to the possibility of large-scale devastating conflicts and we can’t allow that to happen again.
One only needs to look at how Russia took advantage of western dithering to launch the largest war this century which has killed thousands and displaced millions across the European continent. The war in Ukraine is predictably capturing the much of the West’s attention given the acute geopolitical headache it poses, but this is allowing China to escalate tensions around Taiwan and the South China Sea under the radar.
A potential war between China and Taiwan is likely to draw in The United States and make Russia’s war against Ukraine look almost trivial in comparison – impoverishing billions and bring ruin to the wider region.
Indonesia has been singled out as one of the ASEAN partners unwilling to fully show solidarity in opposition to China’s territorial stances when it comes to the South China Sea, but it is not the only one. ASEAN trading nations should take notice how even Germany, always wary of conflict and probably the most diplomatically minded of Western nations, has decided to send two warships to the Indo-Pacific in 2024, repeating what it has already done in 2021.
Germany’s purpose is to make clear to China that pursuing good trade ties should not mean allowing just anything. According to German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, the aim of this move is to demonstrate that Germany is “dedicated to the protection of the rules-based international order that we all signed up to and which we all should benefit from – be it in the Mediterranean, in the Bay of Bengal or in the South China Sea.”
Those ASEAN countries that are still on the fence should take note.
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AUKUS and The Path Towards an Anglosphere Bloc
In 2023, the international order seems completely up-ended. Moscow has reverted to imperialism with its invasion of Ukraine, China’s regime is unrelenting in its designs towards Taiwan and Iran is edging closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Three decades on since the end of the Cold War and it would seem that Western intentions for a peaceful world now lie in tatters.
Yet we Westerners face our own set of problems. The UK remains more or less directionless on the world stage, its economy and reputation in freefall. On the continent, Hungary and Poland seem determined to stall EU centralisation efforts and the once ironclad relationship between Paris and Berlin appears to be weakening. Meanwhile, the US is mired in a state of total electoral chaos that one would normally associate with a banana republic. Perhaps the next leader of the free world will be running the show from a prison cell. At this point, who really knows?
Recent years have seen the UK, like the US, be radically transformed into a viscerally divided country. Although the polls seemingly indicate a majority now regret Brexit and would seek to reverse it, little thought has been given to how willing the British public would be to adopt the Euro or join Schengen – both of which Brussels would force upon us if we were to rejoin. Yet staunch Brexiteers haven’t exactly had much to offer us either. Since leaving, we’ve just about managed to re-secure the existing trade agreements we already had as an EU member and have joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – which is predicted to grow the UK economy by just 0.08% over the next decade. Evidently, any future success we will enjoy as an isolated, declining power remains very unclear.
What is clear though is that the UK desperately needs bolder vision if it wants to drag itself out of the quagmire it is currently sinking into. It needs a new, invigorating national project that can unite its splintered political factions and galvanise support towards a stronger future. The UK has just exited one of the most successful blocs the world has seen, yet it may have already joined an even greater one – AUKUS.
AUKUS – an acronym of its member countries of Australia, the UK and the US – was formed in 2021 to act as a deterrent to Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. As a military pact, its initial moves have been to assist Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines as well as to step up information sharing on AI, quantum and hypersonic technologies.
Although originally hesitant about joining, New Zealand’s government has now expressed interest in becoming AUKUS’s fourth member, with Canada quickly following suit. The addition of these countries makes sense given that both have economic and geopolitical interests in the Pacific and equally view China as a threat. Furthermore, being members of the ‘Five-Eyes’ intelligence pact, neither would seek being shut out of any agreements involving information sharing.
However, their compatibility with AUKUS goes beyond military and security concerns. With a shared democratic ethos and a common system of governance, AUKUS represents not just a strategic pact, but also a values-based alliance uniting all of its members, including potential additions Canada and New Zealand. As such, the potential for AUKUS to welcome even broader collaboration seems apparent already.
Proposals for stronger ties between the five countries are nothing new. By far the most popular concept to be imagined has been ‘CANZUK’. Yet another acronym for its member states, this would involve a hypothetical trade and cooperation bloc comprising all aforementioned countries – with the notable exception of the US. Focusing strictly on expanding economic, security and foreign-policy collaboration, its proponents dismiss the idea of any political union. Crucially, free movement would be implemented, however – just not the kind we associate with Schengen. For it would bar anyone with a criminal record, an infectious disease or those considered to be a national security risk.
Its advocates certainly sell the CANZUK vision well. As they point out, with a population of at least 135 million and a combined GDP of over $6 trillion, CANZUK would be among the top four economic powers in the world. It would comprise an area of 18,187,210 km, making it larger than the Russian Federation. Moreover, with similar levels of development, the potential for the kind of one-sided migration occurring between poorer and affluent member states, as witnessed in the EU, would be minimised. It also helps that free-movement treaties are already in effect between some of these countries – notably the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTTA) between Australia and New Zealand.
Yet for all its great potential, proponents have glossed over one major problem – trade. Whilst these countries combined make up a significant chunk of the global economy, commerce among them is minimal. As of last year, the UK was New Zealand’s ninth largest trading partner, Canada’s fifth and Australia’s eighteenth. Similarly, Canada ranks low on trade with Australia and New Zealand and vice versa. However, what they each have in common are strong trade links with the US – ranking anywhere from first to third largest trading partner among them. For this reason alone, an Anglosphere bloc without the US does not make sense economically.
This takes us neatly back to AUKUS – or more precisely, the need for its evolution. Embracing the aforementioned ideals of economic integration, foreign-policy coordination and the establishment of a common travel area would undoubtedly turbocharge AUKUS’s power and completely reshape global politics. The addition of Canada and New Zealand into the mix certainly aids this. AUKUS has already shown it is prepared to respond to a crisis, namely China. The looming threat of a Chinese-dominated century being the driving force behind a gradual transformation of AUKUS into an Anglosphere bloc should not be underestimated. Beijing’s potential to start to outpace the West economically, technologically and even militarily would naturally bring Australia, the UK, the US, Canada and New Zealand into each other’s arms.
Washington’s involvement would be vital for many reasons, including reducing the group’s dependency on trade with China, something that Australia has already declared it seeks to implement. Yet whilst the need for closer cooperation with a behemoth like the US is clear, it would be naïve to suggest that the US could afford to forgo such an arrangement. Indeed, the US needs the Anglosphere now more than ever. The initial reluctance of NATO members France and Germany to step up their support towards Ukraine and Macron’s comments about the EU distancing itself from American policy on China raises big concerns about Europe’s ability to commit to enforcing global security.
The EU itself is riddled by infighting over immigration, enlargement and the contentious issue of ‘ever-closer union’, casting doubt on its survivability. In short, America cannot rely on Europe in the long-term. The EU’s lethargic reaction to the Ukraine crisis underlines this. With multiple, often clashing, foreign-policy objectives among its member states, the prospect of a united Europe, ready to take on the geopolitical challenges of the 21st century, looks remote. If it took the continent as long as it did to pull together and reinforce its eastern frontier against invasion from its most immediate adversary, Russia, then little hope can be expected from future interventions either.
Contrast this with the response from the UK and the US. Both were quick to provide Ukraine with military support, whilst France and Germany sat back and hoped a diplomatic solution would prevail. For Berlin and Paris, their economic ties with Moscow greatly weakened their resolve for a more direct response, to the ire of the Anglosphere as well as fellow EU member Poland. The US, like the UK, now has to accept that its partners on the European continent do not always share its economic or geopolitical interests, nor are they fully capable of putting theirs aside for a common cause. Again, this further highlights the necessity of AUKUS for the US – and in many ways, it renders its expansion into an official bloc more of an inevitability than a hypothetical concept.
For the UK, the conclusion is self-evident. AUKUS is the only realistic option on the table for a directionless UK left out in the global cold. The alliance will continue to be crucial for the UK given our post-Brexit pivot to the Indo-Pacific. But the UK must push for something much larger than a military pact if it hopes to remain relevant in the 21st century. It must call for AUKUS’s expansion into a fully-fledged trade and cooperation bloc, encompassing the totality of the Anglosphere. There may well be push-back and the notion that this could happen overnight would be folly. Nevertheless, the UK will need to start somewhere if it wishes to shake off the Brexit blues. It must step up and begin to take charge of its destiny.
Dreams of a return to the EU are just that – dreams. The mere political unpalatability of having to surrender our currency and control over our borders makes a return to the EU simply incompatible with most British voters. There would be no chance of a rebate over the UK’s financial contributions either. We would need to be all in, or stay out. Nor should we presume that Brussels will be eager to welcome back a country that so openly defied it, for fear of sparking similar exits. We could expect similar reactions from member states such as France, which twice vetoed the UK’s application to join back in the 1960s, as well as Spain, which would no doubt force us into concessions on Gibraltar. The UK must now accept this new relationship with the continent and simply move on.
AUKUS provides the UK with a chance to reinvent its beleaguered image, both at home and abroad. It paves a way out of the tangled forest of confusion and division over our place in the world and heralds a return to a more optimistic and confident UK. The economic benefits it would bring, combined with the chance to rekindle ties with Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and repair our fractured ‘special relationship’ with the US, make it simply too good an opportunity to pass up.
With the EU, Russia and China now having all put their cards on the table, the need for an official Anglosphere bloc has never been more immediate. All that is missing now is the willpower to make it happen.
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An Interview with the JFvD
In late September, a few members of the Mallard team were fortunate to get the opportunity to sit down with representatives of the JFvD, the youth wing of the Dutch ‘Forum for Democracy’ (FvD) party. We discussed the incredible success of their political and cultural youth movement; the founding and future of their party; and their views on what the future of the Netherlands and Europe should be.
The Mallard (TM): We want to get a sense of what the FvD is; what it stands for; and what the JFvD does within that.
Massimo Etalle (ME): So the FvD was founded in 2015 as a think tank. Our party leader (Thierry Baudet) was a journalist, and he had a critique on the world around him but did not believe that these problems could be solved through politics. So, he founded this think tank to influence the ideas in our society. Politics is downstream from culture, so to influence politics you have to influence culture. We had a unique opportunity at the time due to the referendum with Ukraine [the 2016 Dutch advisory referendum on the proposed Ukraine – European Union Association Agreement]. The FvD has always been a very Eurosceptic organisation, so when the association agreement was proposed in a referendum, we campaigned against it. When the referendum was held, it was overwhelmingly opposed by 62% of the Dutch people. In response, the government ignored it and signed the agreement anyway. At this moment we realised we needed to do more than just influence ideas. You have to get closer to power to influence society. So we started a political party and we won 2 seats out of 150 in parliament. The energy was unmatched and, as soon as we started, we flew through the polls. The youth movement (JFvD) was founded in March 2017. Due to the lateness of its founding, we had to have 100 members before midnight to secure subsidies and funding. Before midnight we had over 1000 members and by the next day we had 2000 members. We were the fastest growing youth movement ever in the history of the Netherlands.
Iem Al Biyati (IAB): So we (The JFvD) know we are a youth political movement but we don’t see politics as the number one way to change stuff. It’s a part of it but not the most important thing. We believe in transforming peoples mentality and influencing culture from bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom. We want to bind them to history and culture; identity and family instead of the modern view of the Dutch people which is to hate themselves and their culture – we want to oppose that. We think a lot of young people are aimless with no sense of identity anymore, and we are trying to make them see this and give them an opportunity to evolve this feeling and better themselves. We have a culture of losers who are afraid of risks and not being part of ‘the group’. We embrace these things, and we are proud of it. We stand totally against the modern degenerate culture.
ME: Exactly. I wouldn’t describe us as a counter-movement. The modern world is the counter-movement. Ugly buildings are the counter-movement. They are anti-European. We embrace who we are, and all we see around us is opposition to who we are. This starts at the first day of school when we are taught things like participation being more important than winning. This is a total inversion of truth. There is no point in human history when this was true. It breeds a country of losers who don’t want to excel, instead they want to be equal. We want to return to this truth and to who we are. We want to go back to what we have always been and to what is our ‘eternal fate’. That is what we do. We want to mentally and physically challenge our members to become who they truly are.
TM: Do you think that young people in the Netherlands are becoming more radical?
IAB: I think that the youth are becoming more radical, but it goes two ways. I see that there are less centrist people and they go towards the ends. We have more communists and left-wingers and more radical right-wingers. Maybe this is a good thing or not, I’m not sure. But it’s because everyone feels that there is something not right. We no longer live in harmony, and I feel that that is the similarity between the radical left and radical right. We both feel something is off but the left have a different solution and cause. They think that lack of equality is a problem and want to form the world to eliminate stress and struggle. We believe in embracing struggle and accepting that life is this way instead of complaining and whining.
TM: Would you say that you prioritise changing the way people think over advocating for certain political policies?
IAB: Yeah. Policy changes aren’t even possible in our party’s current position. Maybe we never will be. We see it more as a metaphysical and philosophical struggle.
ME: Whilst you cannot change a policy, you can change your resilience to a bad policy. You can become more immune to things that the government does to hurt you.
TM: It’s interesting you say that because, in the UK, a lot of right-wing movements focus entirely on policy. Maybe it’s due to the homogenous nature of our politics. We don’t really have a movement that tries to affect culture instead of specific policies.
ME: The failure of Brexit proved the irrelevance of policy. Whilst you left the European Union, your politicians are now proud to say that your immigrants don’t come from Poland any more, instead they come from Pakistan. The problem you had wasn’t just the European Union, it was that your mentality was wrong. If you could change that mentality even a slight amount, the influence would be bigger in every new policy. Whilst if you change one policy, everything that will be built around it will still be rooted in perverse thought.
IAB: The most important thing to do is to implant those ideas in people to make them feel as though they are good and true because they are. That is what the JFvD and FvD is trying to do. We still participate in politics of course and try our best but the ideas are what is important. We had the state opening of parliament a few days ago when all the politicians came and met up. This is quite rare in the Netherlands. Two days of debate and all they talk about are the same boring stories: rising energy prices and cost of living. They are too afraid to tell a different story. We got our opportunity to speak for about 15 minutes, but after about 10 minutes our party leader made a criticism of one of the other members of parliament, and our speaker of the house turned his microphone off after members of the government signalled her to do so. The entire government stood up and walked out to avoid listening to him. After this stunt the Prime Minister came back to act upset about it and, when Thierry came back to speak he was only allowed to do so if he apologised. He refused to apologise and his right to speak was taken away. He had to leave.TM: Yes that happens in this country as well. A lot of politicians have cottoned on to the fact that, if you get kicked out, it makes headlines. So, people will say things that they want in the newspapers and then they will accuse someone of lying which will result in them being kicked out. This gets them in the papers and videos of it go online.
IAB: That’s actually pretty funny but of course it goes to show that it’s a theatre. It’s all a show.
ME: Just to be clear, our youth movement doesn’t focus on policy, but the main party does. We have ideas on how to solve the energy crisis, for example. We have the largest gas reserve in Europe and we give it away to the Belgians. We do propose and fight for policies but, especially as a youth movement, we have a very cultural and ideological task. Everyone is in the process of becoming an adult.
TM: So what do you do to promote cultural things?
ME: So we have a few things that we do. We have a summer camp and some other events which Iem will talk about and then we also have a magazine ‘The Dissident’ which I will talk about.IAB: So we have so many young members, and it’s very uncommon to be a member of a political party as a young person in the Netherlands. So, the first step was to attract the members and then we had to do something with them. We can’t just take 5 Euros from them a year and then not do anything with them. We want to select and train people how to be potential members of the future party as a nurturing role. We have a summer camp which takes about 80 people. It’s a shame because hundreds apply but we don’t have the space to take any more than 80. But we also want to connect with people on an individual level which is hard to do as a massive group. We engage in sport and physical activity and also lectures. We try to attract a different range of people.
ME: We don’t want to do just lectures. We believe in the unity of mind and body. It’s not just who is the smartest or the strongest. It’s the person who is expressing his desire to fight on all fronts.
IAB: Someone who can write stuff should also be able to express things physically in their lifestyle and not just academically. We look for these people and try to give them ideas in the lectures about politics, philosophy, health etc. We even do singing lessons and things. We try to challenge individuals and the group to create the ‘aristocrat’. We scout talents and we invite them to more exclusive academic training weekends. We obviously have other events but those are smaller and more specific. That’s how we try to make our ideas true.
TM: And the magazine?
ME: So, people can have a certain feeling about ideas but struggle to express them. They know the FvD is what they want, but the ideas are a struggle. Everything is so fast and changes all the time and your brain can get completely overloaded with information. To do something about that we started our magazine. It talks about all aspects of who we are. Our ideals, our actions, our history. You name it, we do it. It’s a very open platform which we allow people to pitch to. It’s our testament of who we are as a permanent record. Hopefully it will inspire people for a long time. It declines the chaos of every moment; we have no articles about quick news. Everything we talk about is timeless and we strive to keep it eternal.IAB: We didn’t have this before and we don’t want to lose the ideas that we have. We believe in action. We should try to make these ideas physical and then do things about these ideas. Putting the ideas into a physical record helps this. What I see a lot on the internet are people who have ideas that are similar to ours. They really believe in the traditional idea but they are a bit stuffy and get upset about more modern things. They make things like magazines, but their covers are old school. They are trying to hold on to ash.
TM: Like LARPing?
IAB: Yeah, just like LARPing. It’s not real. It needs to be more real. They like to pretend it’s the 1950’s.
ME: We went to Trafalgar square earlier and it felt a lot like being in a very very big museum. We were surrounded by all this beautiful art, but it felt like being in-between a museum and Pompeii. The volcano is erupting but the guard is still standing on duty. The monuments in Trafalgar square are still being cleaned but they are monuments to an idea, a people, and an empire that aren’t there anymore. That feels a lot like a museum. It was the main impression we got from Trafalgar Square.
TM: To focus more on the Netherlands in particular. How do you feel about the farmers’ strikes? What do you think is going to happen with that?
IAB: They have obviously been angry for a long time now and with the visits to ministers houses it’s getting more radical. I’m not really sure what will come out of it.ME: I think the government has a trick up its sleeve, honestly. Obviously, I fully understand and support the farmers. The big problem that caused this is the nitrogen storage and emissions laws. It’s a rule that they only apply when they want to hurt someone. The land the farmers have is valuable and it’s worth only a tenth as much as a farm when compared to housing. There is a very strong economic impulse to build on it and move the farmers elsewhere. Our land is too valuable. The farmers obviously don’t want to leave but the government is trying to use these economic sanctions to get them to leave. I don’t know what tricks they have up their sleeves. This will escalate and the rules will become more stringent. So, they have our full support and I hope they manage to resist this.
TM: I’ve been reading the FvD’s views on the Netherlands’ future in Europe. What do you think the future will be like for Dutch people and the Dutch nation in Europe at the moment if nothing changes, and what would you like the future to be?
ME: I think at the moment we are on the way to becoming a big metropole. There is a plan called the ‘Three State City’ which seeks to unite most of the big cities in the Netherlands with some cities in the Ruhr in Germany and the port of Antwerp in north Belgium. It would be a massive 50 million population city. That’s why they want to hurt the farmers to take their land.
IAB: I hope that our party will have a leading role in Europe to try and stop this. We have seen what has happened in Sweden and the trends in Italy and France. Maybe soon there will be a topple. Hopefully this will happen in the Netherlands, but our government has always been the leader of liberalism. I think this is the opposite of the Dutch soul. I hope that we can change this and become a leader in Europe in a more traditionalist way.
TM: So earlier you said that you think Brexit has been a failure. Does that imply that you want the Netherlands to stay in the European Union?
ME: I totally oppose the so-called ‘European Union’. It is very anti-European. It is built to castrate Europe and to keep it small and weak. It blocks everything Europe is good at. They promote the idea that participation is worth more than winning. This keeps everyone down and from excelling. Our ideal is a country where the people on every scale from individual to collective can express their fate and the European Union crushed it.
TM: It feels as though your opinion is that the wrong people carried out Brexit. Would you agree with that?
ME: Yes, definitely. After Brexit they built a structure around it that was done by the wrong people.IAB: This is why changing policy doesn’t change anything. Our countries are run by managers, they are not leaders. They are people who were bullied at school and now that they have the taste of power, they use it to bully successful people. They have no idea how to run a country and should be managing a Tesco instead.
ME: The civil servants are the ones who actually tell politicians what to do. The politicians come up with general policy ideas and then the civil servants are the ones who tell them what to do.
TM: There are generally two different schools of thought in the UK about influencing power. Either you infiltrate existing structures, or you set up parallel structures. Obviously, your party isn’t in power but you do sit parallel to it. Do you think there is any use in infiltration into institutions?
IAB: If there is a war, you don’t just use one tactic. You use land, air, and sea. You also use spies and infiltration. It’s a combined offensive. That is how I view politics. This is a sort of war and you have to fight it on all fronts. You have to infiltrate and also set up parallel societies and organisations. We are in the process of setting up schools and apps and other things. Our planned app for example allows people to do commerce and provides alternatives for maps and things. You can also use it to see what businesses are run by FvD supporters. They get discounts at these shops and things. You don’t have to go to a leftist’s or a communist’s pub or shop by accident anymore. You can support people who agree with you and who are like you and stop helping people who hate you.
TM: Yeah, that would probably be illegal in the UK. We have a few acts of parliament that would make that not even an option.
ME: Wouldn’t you say that that actually makes you sort of stateless? I mean, you can say you are fighting for a state which defends your ideals and who you are. Your current state doesn’t just not have a place for you, it actively opposes who you are. It stops you from expressing yourself. I would think that you are stateless and that you should orient your actions as a stateless person.
TM: In the UK we talk a lot about how a fair amount of our problems are caused by older people. They were the recipients of low house prices and a well-funded welfare state. Now that they are in a position of money and power, they have pulled the ladder up and made it harder for young people. We call it the ‘gerontocracy’. Do you agree with that? Do you have something similar?
IAB: That group was very mediocre throughout their lives too.
ME: Are they really that united against you though? It feels sort of like a false dichotomy. Think of a company like Blackrock which buys up huge amounts of land and property to turn it into rental property in Amsterdam and here too. The influence of one such company is vastly superior to one group of Baby Boomers who, to some extent, have taken actions to hold on to their wealth. I don’t think it’s necessarily the Boomers fault, they are a product of the world around them. They were posed different challenges than us. That’s life, I think.
IAB: Being a Boomer is of course an age thing but I think it can be a part of someone’s soul. People can have a Boomer mentality even if they are young. They believed that we are able to become anything we want. My parents said to me that I can just go to school and get a diploma and just do whatever I wanted. They gave us this box with all these things we could achieve and when we opened it, it was actually full of nothing. We had to work with that. Old people will complain about young people but that’s because they just don’t know what the reality is. I agree with Massimo though that a lot of these problems are actually caused by big companies like Blackrock.
ME: The greatest crime of the Boomer is raising a generation of spoiled kids. It’s the reason why people don’t understand that things are hard and that you have to struggle to get things. They didn’t have to fight in wars or do anything. Our greatest challenge is undoing this mindset and bringing struggle back to people’s lives.
TM: Yeah I think a lot of these older people, the Boomers, were raised in a more harsh or ‘Victorian’ way. They reacted to that by raising their children in a very hands-off and spoiled kind of way.
ME: They get their kids spoiled and then they scream when they grow up and find out that life is not as easy as they thought.
IAB: The weakest people are praised for it all the time. They are drained in the face, and they are rewarded for it. The few people who are actually struggling to carry everything and fight for things are seen as dangerous.
ME: Life in the end turns out to be hard and it implodes a lot of people. This is a renunciation of real life and it never had to be like this.
TM: Especially in the short-term things are seemingly getting worse with the war and the strikes and the prices of things rocketing. As things get harder, do you think maybe people will embrace struggle?
ME: It can go one of two ways. People are either going to rely much more on the state for handouts and welfare to make their lives easier. If there is no support offered and people start having to struggle, that may awaken something in people that shifts them.IAB: The whole ‘Build Back Better’ thing implies that something has to be destroyed. Things like social credit may be actually destroyed by this. We may end up going down the communist path of trying to make the world malleable and changeable. Or you can accept life as it is and build back something that’s true. You can’t avoid struggle and I don’t think our current artificial way of life is sustainable. There will be a time maybe in 10, 100, or 200 years where it does collapse and we might not even realise until after it’s happened. We think we probably aren’t going to be the generation that goes through that and turns it all around, but we will be the first people to lay foundations and make way for it so that future generations can continue this project and we can return to who we are.
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Populism and a Sense of Betrayal (Magazine Excerpt)
Leading up to December 2022, when I was preparing for my PhD viva, I was told by colleagues – quite consistently – that populism was back on the academic agenda. Clearly, I had timed my PhD well, the covid pandemic aside.
Now, at the conclusion of the process, I have people ask me what my core conclusions are. The truth is, I say, populism is going to remain a permanent feature of our political system for a long time, to such an extent that I think, for all his mistakes and poor insights, Cas Mudde was right to describe our era as the ‘populist zeitgeist.’ I am not alone in making this prediction: in his farewell speech to the European Parliament, Nigel Farage said populism ‘was very popular’; and there abound many different academic attempts at explaining the likely enduring appeal of populism.
Among them I find particular value in Nadia Urbinati’s Democracy Disfigured (2014) and Me, The People (2019): the former is particularly focused on how democracy can be transformed, though populism is only part of that story. In that book, Urbinati attempts to analyse the role of what she calls the doxa in democracy, emphasising the linguistic and dialogical elements of democracy as methods of identifying conflict and resolving them; in response to this, says Urbinati, populism attempts to ‘fix’ the inevitability of conflict. It can do this because democracy (and politics in general) is actually about never attempting to remove conflict, merely attempting to ‘win’ the immediate conflict, whilst accepting that you may ‘lose’ the next one. The underlying unity is, as a result, quite thin, and little more than a general agreement on the process of conflict and resolution, rather than an agreement on the resolution of conflict specifically.
Populism, says Urbinati, works from within the logic of democracy to recognise the inherently conflictual nature of politics and democracy, and then seeks to deny it. Instead of attempting to win now, and accept the possibility of losing in the future, populism attempts to win forever, and deny the possibility of future conflict. In doing so, populism becomes anti-politics.
In the latter book, Urbinati delves deeper into populism specifically, and considers the internal mechanisms of populism, rather than just the impact it has on democracy. In doing so, Urbinati looks at the role of ‘antiestablishmentarianism,’ ‘antielitism’ and, crucially, the messianic leader, in the emergence of populism.
This is an excerpt from “Ides”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
