Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
One of the most influential and popular ideas of the post-war era was that of the Authoritarian Personality, which linked fascism with a number of personality traits, including conventionalism, anti-intellectualism and prudery. Conservatism, in other words. It has become popular to believe that being right-wing is synonymous with being authoritarian. Society may have no common culture
Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the
Was 2017 that terrible? Everyone feels like they’re losing and the world is going to hell, and in many ways it does feel like a dark cloud is approaching. This article, about a sex robot conference being moved after a threat from Islamic extremists, did strike me as the sort of thing one of the more
Robert Tombs, author of the majestic ‘The English and their History’, has written in the latest Spectator about how Brexit has become the trigger for a new culture war in Britain. He likens it to the sectarian arguments of the 18th century, pointing out that: ‘When I hear prominent Remainers unquestioningly supporting the demands of
I love the Christmas season, so friendly and wholesome and filled with evocative memories – but don’t the machine guns and anti-terror bollards seem to go up earlier each year? Look at the touching festive scenes in Manchester, and Edinburgh, and we’ll see the police and barriers across the country from Liverpool to Lincoln. It’s not quite Bedford Falls
‘The sea is in my blood. My father made his living as a fish merchant, as did his father before him. Generations of Goves have gone to sea, harvested its riches and fed families with the healthiest — and most renewable — resource on the planet, our fish.’ So begins Michael Gove’s passionate call to
Whatever their views about the monarchy, most people will warm to the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement. Sentimental as it sounds, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last royal wedding and how happy I felt for Prince William and Kate Middleton, as she was then. It was one of
I’m never going to be able to own my home, that’s why I’ll vote Labour; also the Tories are horrible to immigrants and they don’t think animals are alive or something, my friend Molly shared it on Facebook. That’s basically the crux of the argument I’m hearing, obviously a reductio one, and I sense the
I’ve always thought of the Daily Mail as catering to a sort of Roundhead English tradition, the inheritors of low Protestantism, the solid middle class, high in conscientiousness and below average in openness. That’s not my tradition, personally; I identify with the Cavalier inheritance, more Catholic, more reactionary-but-in-a-jokey-way (or is it?), represented by the Daily Telegraph,
Q: How many Remainers does it take to fix a light bulb? A: Why should we fix it? It’s Russia’s fault it’s broken An old joke; I think the original concerned Arabs and Israel, but then there are numerous parts of the world where all manner of events are attributed to historic enemies. I remember a
Giles of Rome, the great 13th century author, once noted: ‘Considered in absolute terms it would be preferable that the King be elected; but the corrupt desires of men and their manner of acting must make heredity preferable to election.’ There’s little that would dissuade him of that view today. Britain’s politics are in a worse
One of the strange things I keep on hearing about this feeble government is that it has been spurred by Brexit to launch a culture war and reverse the Cameron-era detoxification of the party. They’re taking us back to the 50s, or the Victorian era, or maybe 1065. It’s one of those things one sees being
Here’s an uplifting story from the vanguard of the culture war. As the New York Times reports: ‘At the Advent School in Boston, Erina Spiegelman, who is an instructional coordinator, recalled that a teacher last year asked a group of students the big question: ‘What is gender?’. The first answer came from a second-grader: ‘It’s a
Remember when Keith Vaz got himself down to Luton Airport a few years back to greet new Romanian arrivals getting off the plane, declaring in his rather pompous way that: ‘We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January’. This was
I think it’s fair to say that Theresa May did not have a cracking conference, but the sympathy vote might even help her. I certainly felt sorry for the Prime Minister, and instinctively don’t like the nasty playground teasing from the Men of Twitter. (She does have diabetes, too, which can’t help.) But she has
There’s a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov’s maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the
However stressful and bad things get for a parent of young children, there is always one thought that puts it all in perspective – just wait until they’re teenagers and they’re calling you up at 3am asking for a lift from a nightclub in New Cross. So reports like this one, showing that one in
Never mind the terrorists, chaps, London will just keep calm and carry on. We’ll put the kettle on or defy them by going out and getting pissed, because life will just continue as normal. That’s the fitting response to terrorism, and it won’t affect our lives. Except it will. It will affect your life when
At my nearest library recently there was an art exhibition featuring the works of local school children on the subject of ‘unity’, with lots of drawings (many of them outstandingly good) emphasising how we’re all the same (and yet diverse) and that what we have in common is far more important than anything that divides
The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the
