February Diary

Hello,

Obligatory shilling. This month at THE ZONE I reviewed The Brutalist, reflected on Polish cultural change, praised romance, mused on cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, asked if the right or the left is more dishonest, remembered anorexia, addressed the Hitler salute and satire and pondered the exploitation of high trust societies.

I wrote for The Critic about Quran burnings, cancel culture and private conversations, youthful oikophobia, George Monbiot, the ARC conference and sex differences in politics.

For The Spectator, I wrote about pickles.

The old country. A trip to ARC meant a trip to London. As I wrote:

No, it’s not the nightmare that some American conservatives imagine it to be, with knife fights breaking out on every street corner. But there is a sense of slow and miserable decline. A tube carriage contains adverts for egg freezing and infertility treatments. Flats are being advertised at prices that would bankrupt a small South Asian state. A 13-year-old has been arrested for stabbing a fellow teen.

It’s also an extraordinary city, of course. You could walk around the parks for days. The architecture, the art galleries and the museums could absorb you for weeks. You could eat in a different restaurant every day for years. But there is something poignant about that. Walking past the Houses of Parliament — such a grand, time-haunted building — one can’t help but think, “How have you fucked things up THIS MUCH?”

What is it good for? The third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has bloodily come and bloodily gone. Hawks are furious about Donald Trump’s attempts to end the war. It’s Munich, 1938 all over again! Amid all the chest-beating I have yet to see a serious attempt to argue that Ukraine can win and to demonstrate how it will happen. Perhaps such a case can be made. But for now, Ukraine is losing an horrendous war of attrition. “The fat man grows thinner,” one analyst told the New York Times, “But the thin man dies.” Worse is when people appear to want Ukraine to fight not so much because it can win but because it is weakening the Russians. So much more convenient than spending more on defence!

Still, the slanders towards the Ukrainians have been gross. I have criticised some of their tactics myself. But calling Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, for example, because he will not hold elections in wartime, with millions of his citizens abroad, and hundreds of thousands on the frontlines, and in defiance of his constitution is inane — with Trump himself sunnily retracting the charge. Look — you can decide not to support the Ukrainians’ fight but you can’t blame them for fighting.

Red, white and bleaurgh. More on America. I complained this week about American Conservatives turning the Hitler salute into a meme. What about child sexual abuse? The House Judiciary Republicans, of all things, posted a link to Twitter to the long-awaited Jeffrey Epstein files, which turned out to direct people to the video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Hilarious. Meanwhile, other Republicans — though, to be clear, in the face of right-wing criticism — have celebrated the arrival to the US of the alleged sex criminal and open advocate of “pimping hoes” Andrew Tate. I get that Brits griping about Americans can sound like we are basking in a sense of elevated sophistication. I’m making no claims for cultural or aesthetic superiority here — still less moral superiority. But I think Donald Trump, bone deep showman that he is, has inculcated a sense of moral insincerity. If you worry too much about your means you might never reach your ends, yes. But if you don’t worry at all about your means you might forget why you ever cared about your ends — if indeed you did.

Europe rising (and falling). Is Europe going to depend less on the United States? I hope so. I’ve argued for years that it should and that Trump might be a useful catalyst. But if European powers are going to take external threats more seriously, they have take internal threats more seriously as well. People are not going to like spending vast amounts of money protecting ourselves from potential threats if nihilistic newcomers keep carrying out attacks our streets. Besides, as Clement Knox argues, strong states need strong nations.

InstaZONE. In case you like the pictures I illustrate these diaries with, I’m now on Instagram.

The sour taste of victory. Luca Watson reflects on the triumph and failure of the British Left:

The millennial socialists of yesteryear are unable to face up to the confluence of events that have swept them by. There is no place for them in British politics anymore, their ideas having already been tested to the extreme, and the deeply undesirable outcomes now clear for all to see. So the Left is forced to retreat inwards, disengaging from the realities of Britain today, instead preferring to fight the views they held just ten minutes ago. Perhaps identity politics has gone too far! Maybe this Woke stuff is a bit silly! Could it have been the Left who were the real racists? Really boundary pushing stuff!

Against postliberalism. Travis Aaroe writes contra communitarians:

Postliberalism has become our governing classes’ default response to right-wing populism. Not just because it is, in almost every respect, an elaboration of the status quo, but because it redirects people’s specific grievances towards abstract moral problems. It is the Carter-ism of our age. In Britain, people like David Cameron and Boris Johnson campaigned as neoliberal populists who would close the border, lower taxes, and lock up the criminals. In both cases these mandates were – often through the influence of these same theorists – then hocus-pocused into a search for community and belonging, into the Big Society and Levelling Up.

Hello Hanoi. Ed West visits Vietnam:

The city is shabby but colourful, overflowing with life from the bugs up. You see crowded vegetable shops at the basement of five-story grey concrete blocks with plants growing everywhere; most of the streets are a jumble of three, four and five-story shacks besides the occasional colonial era apartment blocks, with towels hung everywhere. Many of the cars, notably, are brand new.

Owning the libs. Gavin Haynes reflects on YouTubers:

As a form, the YouTube video essay is entirely at odds with how we’re told we should receive our media — in five second Idiocracy doses. Yet for perhaps five years, this brand of often half-hour-long philosophical treatise was not only everywhere, but was vaguely hip. For something chiefly made by one-man bands and bedroom hacks, it was actually an excellent approximation of the liberal ideal of “debate in the public square”.

Old Testament doom. Poppy Sowerby considers Andrea Dworkin:

Steinem said of Dworkin that she had a quality of “Old Testament” doom to her, and as such was often “misunderstood”. Her voice booms with the prophetic weirdness and unforgiving directness of such a god; now that we are used to politically correct pop feminists of the kumbaya, New Testament mode, this can feel unsettling.

Administrative Britishness. Chris Bayliss ponders citizenship:

Looking at societies, around the world today and historically, that have taken citizenship seriously, it feels that the modern British position of near automatic eligibility after only five years is to treat citizenship as a triviality. Crass as academics and journalists might find it, the “administrative” tag comes closer to the mark than the nearly sacred manner in which societies like ancient Rome or republican France hold the ideal of citizenship, and all it stood for. This is just not how most British people have ever really thought about what it is that makes them British.

A short hop? Kit Wilson writes on Ross Douthat and belief:

In his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Douthat insists that earnest seekers like me should, if we follow things through ­rationally, end up with not high-minded ambivalence but active faith. The gap between nonbelief and belief, he wants to show us, appears vast only from the ground, where the trunks of the two trees stand far apart. But climb up into the ­branches, and you find the two arching toward each other …

Have a lovely month,

Ben