There are only a limited number of ideas in the world. Liberalism is one of them.
Here I will explain how the Liberal idea has changed, becoming its opposite in practice. It has become Liberal In Name Only.
In this third piece in my series on our culture of crime, I will show how Liberalism began as a system of ideas and values - but abandoned its own principles.
It is now a belief system which punishes unbelief at home and abroad.
If you want to know why the world is mad, how it came to be so and how to fix it, you must understand the ideology which brought us to this point.
I regret to say this involves the mention of Tony Blair.
Contents
Danger Close - Why Your State Is Not Legitimate m8
Taking Liberties - Sir Isaiah Berlin’s definitions of Liberalism
Regime Change Comes Home - The Politics of Dirty Tricks
Trans-Actual - Crimes Against Reality
Death by Infinite Growth - The Economics of National Suicide
I only know what I believe - Tony Blair’s Fantasy Fanaticism
Post-Mortem Liberalism - Home is Where the Hurt Is
DANGER CLOSE
We now inhabit the consequences of crimes against common sense.
Not only with mass immigration, whose door has been held open by both left and right, but also by a democratic deficit of trust and basic competence which undermines the legitimacy of government itself.
The people who commit these crimes never face any consequences for the mess they compel us to inhabit.
This has undermined their right to rule.
British philosopher John Gray reminds us in this brief exchange that democratic legitimacy is also based on trust. What he doesn’t say is that there isn’t any left.
“Legitimacy in regimes isn't a matter of fitting any theory like liberalism or marxism or some other theory
It's a complicated thing to do with peace, prosperity, security - having rulers you can halfway trust or at least not 100% mistrust”
Is Liberalism Obsolete? March 2022, with Francis Fukuyama
He mentions the “deaths of despair” by the use of legal and illegal opiates in the United States, saying “there is no one perfect system of government”.
It is under this one, which thinks itself if not perfect then the verdict of history itself, that drug abuse legal and otherwise is also endemic and widespread. Suicide personal and national is increasingly a government-approved choice.
Gray warned in July 2022 that the world is in a state of dangerous chaos akin to that of 1914, which was followed by the explicit and implicit horrors which defined the 20th century. Gray thinks the threat of nuclear eclipse is growing, that the shadow of mass extermination is once again moving over the sun.
In the personal and political sphere our system produces conflicts that it cannot resolve. The result is crime, which is a breakdown of moral and social and international order.
If the state can’t shut the door, keep the lights on, if it can’t provide basic security and prosperity, and instead only makes it all worse - and might even kill you all - what is it for?
No one believes in the government any more.
That is how the Soviet Union died, whose passing gave us the unipolar moment, and with it the pursuit of American Empire to become the “only global power”.1 To legitimise this, it would call it the necessary defence of liberal democracy.
TAKING LIBERTIES
In his speech of 1958 titled Two Concepts of Liberty Sir Isaiah Berlin said the moral superiority of Liberalism was that it was pluralist. This means it contained even its own contradictions, and unlike the Soviet Union would tolerate and even encourage the difference of opinion.
This is because he recognised that there was a finite variety of value pluralism, meaning there were a number of ways in which people saw the world differently and this difference had to be respected and acknowledged.
But the Soviet Union is gone and pluralism went with it. Once the enemy had vanished, there was no longer any need to pretend to be better. Liberalism had won, and that was that.
Berlin was perhaps the greatest champion of Liberalism ever to emerge, and I am certain that were he alive today he would describe the West as despotic. His last essay will show you exactly why, as the description he gives of an excusable tyranny fits our criminal system like no other.
This long extract from his last essay, published as “The First and the Last”, is his description of despotism. It fits our form of elite governance perfectly, and it shows how Liberalism has changed from a value system to a belief system.
Those who know the answers to some of the great problems of mankind must be obeyed, for they alone know how society should be organized, how individual lives should be lived, how culture should be developed.
This is the old Platonic belief in the philosopher-kings, who were entitled to give orders to others.
There have always been thinkers who hold that if only scientists, or scientifically trained persons, could be put in charge of things, the world would be vastly improved.
To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason, has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an elite which robs the majority of its essential liberties.2
Berlin died six months after the activist lawyer, Tony Blair, won the 1997 General Election.
What we got, first in Britain and then in the West, was less of the rule of law and more of the rule of lawyers.
Blair actually wrote a letter to Berlin one month before his death. In it, he seems to be seeking Berlin’s advice on the Blairite model to reconstruct the Left.
Blair was responding to an interview in which Berlin explained the horrors of the negative liberty - “how many doors are opened”, and positive liberty - “how should I be governed”.
Both ideas are basically noble, said Berlin, but positive liberty had been in practice far more “politically perverted”:
“positive liberty became total despotism, the crushing of all ideas, the crushing of life and thought”
This was a problem for Tony Blair, because he believed in positive liberty. Luckily for him, he believed even more in Tony Blair, and in the absence of any reply continued with the “permanent revisionism” of Blairism.
The British state he left is at one with the technocratic machine, ruled by elites whose right to rule is their Blairesque self belief. This is the model for most liberal democracies today.
Their philosopher-king wisdom is their attachment to mandatory utopian fantasies. As Peter Hitchens has observed,
“The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”
In order to prove reality wrong, the utopian machine wishes to destroy everything that is not itself, and it has no respect for civilisation of any kind, including its own.
REGIME CHANGE COMES HOME
Regime change has come home, and with it all the dirty tricks the West has used under cover of propaganda to maintain an illusion of persuasive soft power and the enduring appeal of a free way of life which is vanishing in its own nations.
The faction which directs these wars is not elected to do so and has no democratic mandate for them. A similar faction directs the environmental lobby. Both are operations which are accelerating the collapse of our civilisation at considerable speed whilst generating enormous profits. They are industries of crime.
Again, if that sounds dramatic consider when you had a vote on any of the endless wars, and how you might better describe a system of environmental and social goals whose main promoter, BlackRock, has itself admitted is driving the rapid decline of Western civilisation?
No one can vote away the ESG scores on which companies and public bureaucracies are rated creditworthy - or not.
Yet it is these policies which decide whether you will be employed or ignored, made redundant or managing director, and how your wider world will be shaped.
This is a system of financial sanctions, which is patterned on the means of international discipline used by the Liberal democracies to enforce its will.
Sanctions now apply to domestic journalists, who will see growing public interest in their work repaid by being kicked off payment and video platforms.
The Empire is sanctioning itself into extinction. Financially and intellectually, and also actually with the having of children now coded as a crime against the planet. Its morality is that of cancel culture, whose aim is the cancellation of our culture entirely. What is that if not a crime? How much has to go - books, statues, heroes, history - before you see it as such?
There isn’t even a name for a crime on this scale. Onticide was the best I could do:
“the mass murder of the essential reality of things.”
The doctrine of regime change was germinated in the late 1980s. Four decades later, the regimes which have changed most turned out to be our own. What is it that makes us what we are now? What makes us civilisationally distinct?
TRANS-ACTUAL
What is our cultural story? It is my story, my truth, my pronouns.
There is nothing left of our society but transactions. Crime used to be largely a distinct culture itself, formerly confined and codified by the hindrances of religion, morality and custom.
In this world there is nothing but the seeking of personal advantage, and the removal of restraint is a virtue. The logical result is to help yourself to whatever you can get.
Of course, we have been negatively liberated from the shackles of morality, and now entertain ideas of critical and queer theory as if the sterile debris of iconoclasm could seriously replace the silt of centuries. The aim of this cancel culture is to cancel culture. All of it.
These theories are the expression in ideas of the self against the chains of the world. Social constructs, like the taboo on having sex with children, must be removed because progress cannot stop - without stopping being progress.
Erotic desire as a wrecking ball for civilisation works well when there isn’t any power left anywhere else. Life has been aggressively privatised, leaving only desire and fantasy and tantalisation.
We aren’t social like we used to be. Our nations are just factions with passports. It comes down to what I can get for myself, because all the human scale relations have melted away.
What is left are transactions, the idea of life as a bargain hunt. Consequence-free crime is the ultimate special offer.
Everything must go. And it is. Why?
DEATH BY INFINITE GROWTH
Our economic model requires national suicide. Infinite growth in a consumer economy thrives on a limitless supply of new consumers. The model does not care where they come from or who they are - or what they are consuming.
To service the debt generated by wars and lockdowns, an infinite supply of consumers is required. The wars supply the consumers. This is the infinite growth model, which requires infinity migrants.
To admit that our economic wealth is the death of the nation is electoral suicide. In this, as in everything else, it is a case of us or them.
This bare life of “elections plus VCRs”, the democracy/consumer axis of Fukuyama’s end of history, is not combined with a clear-eyed Liberalism.
It is one based on fantasy. On the idea, like that of Blair, that if I only believe what I am saying myself then that is all that matters.
Our leaders start wars and call them “liberal interventions”. Tony Blair, who when asked for the “essence of Blairism” said in 2007
"It is liberal interventionism."
He first made the case for this in a speech in Chicago in 1999, which first laid out the Liberal case for war as an instrument of civilisation.
I ONLY KNOW WHAT I BELIEVE
This stance - “Liberals for war and empire” - was codified in the 2006 Euston Manifesto. It celebrated the Bush/Blair wars as in Iraq as principled crimes which were going to make the world better.
When they didn’t, and no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Blair said after this third election victory in 2004. Speaking to his own party conference, he told the truth for once.
"I know this issue has divided the country. I'm like any other human being - fallible. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe."
Blair’s major speeches combine a dedicated globalism with an unapologetic defence of war. After ten years in power, it was made clear to The Guardian in 2007 what he stood for.
Blairism is, he elaborates, about a progressive view of the world, starting from the reality of interdependence in an age of globalisation, and acting according to certain values.
"I'm a proud interventionist." He would not withdraw anything he said in his 1999 Chicago speech, with its liberal interventionist "doctrine of international community".
Mr Blair, whose system is that of every major Western party of government, was described by Paddy Ashdown as having one fatal flaw.
“The trouble with Tony is that he always believes what he is saying when he is saying it.”
Blair was a radical beyond compare, and constantly self-identified as whatever suited him at the time. His is the perfect face for the Liberal democracy of today, which is neither liberal nor democratic, but goes about wearing the hacked off face of its victim as if this were perfectly normal.
What was his method?
Our approach is "permanent revisionism", a continual search for better means to meet our goals, based on a clear view of the changes taking place in advanced industrialised societies.3
Blairism is the politics of radical centrism, where no progressive case can be made for the status quo. Things can only get moving. Progress must be made.
It is a sort of rainbow Trotskyism, an Orwellian bargain. Don’t look at the state of the world. Just believe in what they are saying, as they do whenever they say it, and everything seems all right again.
Post Mortem Liberalism
What is a “postliberal”? Surely it is someone who recognises Liberalism is dead. What is left, then?
What is going about under the name of Liberalism is a monster wearing the face of its dead victim as a mask.
Like all the religions of man, Liberalism has descended into barbarism. Our current system satisfies perfectly the description of despotism given by Isaiah Berlin, in his last published essay. Liberalism did not long survive him.
We are now presented by a media spectacle, in which our uniparty politicians participate. Its chief message is that nothing can be done about anything.
To paraphrase Adam Curtis, the choice presented by mass media is to stare into a lake mourning our murdered child, or watch someone baking a cake4.
We are passive before this fascinating axis of apocalyptic nihilism, which we witness like viewers hungry for distraction. Yet the crimes are no longer happening only to someone else, elsewhere, on a screen.
Now, they cannot be escaped. Home is where the hurt is.
Next week I will publish an interview with a man whose ideas will likely inform the future of the West. In it he shows exactly how things can - and will - change for the better.
Sanity is not treason, and its restoration to our political and national life is a matter of will.
I would say it is a matter of time.
If you liked this reality review, please fund my wife’s reign of terror here.
I will pay whether you do or don’t. If you do, it will only mean she can buy new boots with which to stamp on my face, forever. Who wouldn’t want that?
Thomas Hirschfeld US Grand Strategy for the 1990s and Beyond, RAND Corporation, November 1990.
“My Intellectual Path”, Isaiah Berlin, New York Review of Books, May 14th 1998. Berlin was arguing against essentialism. Well here we have it again, and it returns as an essence of make belief presented as immutable truths. Liberalism has become a fantasy dogma. I am certain Berlin would recognise our “liberal” democracies, shaped by technocratic elites, as both irrational and despotic were he alive today.
Tony Blair, Independent, Monday 21st September 1998. His revisionist notion of “stakeholder” economics is now a mainstay of technocratic NGOs such as the WEF and Open Society Foundation. Blair himself is arguably more powerful than ever, with his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change having a presence in 80 countries and hundreds of staff.
He has been approached by the Israeli government to act as “humanitarian coordinator” for the Gaza Strip.
Adam Curtis isn’t the source of the quote. Curtis says it came from the actress Diane Morgan. He mentions it in a 2021 interview with Direct Democracy.
“We were talking about television and she she came up with a great phrase: she said yeah it's always so predictable they're either someone who's had their children kidnapped and it has lots of shots of a detective gazing at a lake or it's full of people baking cakes and that's it.”
Excellent stuff as ever.
The point of cancel culture is to cancel culture; this is especially good.
Good old Tony Blair. The Tories have brought back Cameron. I wouldn't be surprised if Labour bring back Blair.
We really are now at the point of total insanity. Yet I believe the Tony Blairs are oblivious. His heirs, including the civil service and the institutions, likewise. Completely cut off from reality.
They call themselves liberals but they are really Platonists and everything they say is just a means to their ultimate end: pedo utopia. Tony Blair was a client of a certain man-who-didn’t-kill-himself too.