Status games are largely for strivers, the professional and managerial classes.
The central driver for mass immigration at the top in Australia has always been strategic and economic. Canberra seeks engagement with Asia via migration. It aims to use migration policy to win friends and influence people overseas and to keep nominal GDP going every quarter.
The present reaction owes much to the exhaustion of the social capital built up by the White Australia policy and post-war welfare capitalism. Australia is now too socially and ethnically fragmented to maintain the old consensus on migration/multiculturalism. The surge in migration under Albanese, coupled with the mass mobilization of jihadists and their fellow-travelers and the massacre have brought it all to a boil.
The aggressive enforcement of taboos that made it impossible to discuss migration dispassionately robbed our elites of the situation awareness necessary for good policy.
Exactly. It is not Trump’s substance that is at issue for most of us it’s his style that many find offensive. Right now there are three Americas: those that despise him ( we call it TDS…Trump Derangement Syndrome) , those that absolutely love him ( the ones who are most angry) and those who really don’t like the way he does his business but support his policies. I am the last group. Even the ones I initially opposed upon consideration, I gained an appreciation for. Like the dynamics associated with his trade policies,
But while some of Trump’s trade policies are good - getting other countries to lower their tariffs, most notably, and the actual NAFTA renegotiation and limiting transshipments - and others ok/TBD, as he has done with China, many are *not* good things, like keeping higher tariffs across the board and having numerous one-off company specific deals, which is little different from cronyism.
Now I certainly agree that his (imo not net positive) trade policies are not nearly the problem than those with TDS claim that they are or will be.
Indeed. As I said an interesting education. While not a fan, Trump has forced re-evaluation on a great many things that have proven enlightening. First, by his erratic behavior toward trade policies I have given infinitely more attention to Canada and their internal processes. Through Iran, I have become fascinated by the UK and its internal processes and personalities. For some time, as a result of Ukraine, the whole EU dynamic is absolutely astounding. Now, as a result of this thread, Australia fascinates me. Prior, Australia was just a place that I wanted to immigrate to….a perfect place. For better or worse, Trump at least forces engaged Americans to pay attention.
Australia is huge. There are parts of the country that might be ideal for you. Other parts a nightmare.
There are whole regions where you will find the old-fashioned types (down to earth, very straightforward), especially Western Australia. The capital cities across the east coast are a mixed bag. It is very much hit and miss.
Trump was an inevitable (and to my mind welcome) reaction to managed decline. His foreign critics neglect to acknowledge that most US trade partners got rich from concessions by the US (market access, investment by US companies, outsourcing of manufacturing from the US). Trump’s domestic critics exaggerate how right-wing he is and underestimate the validity of the discontent over globalisation.
Well said. This is an education that I find absolutely amazing. As an American I thought that immigration (in our case illegal) was particularly an American problem. It is tearing apart the fabric of the country. In reading these posts it is obvious that both England and Australia are experiencing something similar. The fascinating piece is that this is simultaneously happening. As I understand it, Canada, to what it appears to lesser extent is exp something similar. Interesting.
There is a constant exchange of personnel and ideas between Australia and the UK. Political parties and the public service have secondments, postings etc. The national government here is very, very close to Starmer and regards Westminster as setting best practice, especially in regulating the internet, policing, multiculturalism, Islamophobia.
Starmer as an example or model? That is indeed disappointing and somewhat confusing. In my younger days I had the opportunity to get to know a few Australian guys. Quality men. Direct, honest and extremely forthcoming with their opinions. While my opinion won’t count for much but Starmer doesn’t fit what I would think Australia would appreciate. But times change.
Starmer is way less competent politician and PM than Albo (as Australians call him). So, Starmer himself is not the relevant vector, the problem is the transnational (one might even say globalist) transmission of similar ideas and status games.
The Australian ABC, the Canadian CBC, the British BBC all push much the same narratives as PBS, NPR, the NYT and the Washington Post. While there is something to Jessie Singal’s notion of mainstream media “go broke, go woke”—that the collapse of the business model lead to hiring cheap recent graduates—that the financially secure public broadcasters in many ways led the push shows that there is a different pattern going on.
Basically, such status games become dominant among the unaccountable classes—those who are paid if they turn up—because their beliefs do not have to be reality-tested so become dominated by status games.
Ah, the inherent instability (and coincidentally the insecurity) within the globalist agenda. While one can say much negative about Trump, he at least is not a globalist in comparison to the leaders of the other English speaking nations. In America he is forcing a “rebalancing” of the globalist paradigm which is causing an unbelievable amount of friction in and out of the nation. Speaks to the difficulty of ACTUALLY changing policy. He is quite the economic and political apostate. Trump the Apostate, with all due respects to Julian. That being said, fundamentally, Trump is not the cause but the result of a growing resistance (resentment) to a globalist agenda in America. In England, one sees a similar phenomenon in Farage and Reform UK. It appears organic bottom up political dynamics. Poilievre in Canada appears significantly less anti-globalist (perhaps understandably). He presents as a traditional globalist “conservative “. I understand that the current American “experiment” might not resonate with much of the world, but does Australia have similar dynamics?
Australia is currently experiencing its own populist moment with a surge in electoral support for Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
Hanson is fundamentally a centrist, nostalgic for the old, much more cohesive Australia of old when prosperity and opportunity were more widely shared. She is not a chauvinist, nor malicious or self-interested. She lacks Trump's experience in big business but is pretty canny. Her candour on Islam, migration, energy policy and standards of living is attracting lots of voters from both sides of politics, especially disillusioned conservatives.
The big difference between the US and Australia is that we are substantially more deindustrialised than the US. Also more demilitarised. And our politics owes a very great deal to the legacy of British colonial practice. Australians are vastly more obedient to political authority and are largely resigned to an authoritarian style derived from the days when we were a collection of penal settlements.
Fully agree with your comparison between Albo and Starmer. At a personal level Albo is a nonentity, but he receives at least some of his advice from people who are undeniably capable. Starmer is also under the thumb of UK intelligence. In Canberra, on the other hand, the federal government appears to have the intelligence agencies very much under their thumb.
My sense is that the convergence is ultimately downstream from geopolitics. The UK and Australia are both deindustrialised US dependencies torn between loyalty to Washington and competing forces (EU and China respectively). Both are governed by comprador regimes with tenuous loyalties to their own people. Both are heavily in debt.
The great contrast is that in the UK the status games are played out in the wake of a class system that has always been explicit. In Australia the legacy of performative egalitarianism complicates things. But the leadership class in Australia certainly take their cues from the UK and the US and are blind to the connection between their games and managed decline.
The once typical behaviours like routine candour are increasingly rare nowadays, especially at the top.
You will still find the old Aussie type, just not in Canberra and only rarely in the metropolitan professional and managerial classes. In rural areas and amongst working class Anglos candour is common enough.
My own feeling is that those with a predilection for status games are by definition incapable of 'thinking things through'. All that matters is what is reflected in their social mirror
Mass low skill immigration is problematic in a country whose economy is not growing, which seems to be more or less what your piece is stating, although you frame it more specifically.
And I agree with you fully re: leftist elite performative status games.
But it’s less clear to me that Net Zero is unique as opposed to overregulation in general and NIMBY housing policy and high taxes on capital in terms of being the key specific thing that causes national populism to surge given mass immigration.
Even as I don’t disagree with you that Net Zero is the least defensible leftist elite policy (other than brazenly illegal mass immigration as under Autopen Biden in the U.S. for 3.5 years starting in 2021).
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"
- Philip K. Duck
Both Net Zero and mass immigration are denials of reality.
Net Zero assumes that we can have prosperity without widespread and low cost energy. This is simply denying reality.
Mass immigration assumes that we can have prosperity in the face of mass immigration, when in fact it leads to massacres such as Bondi, and then far worse. Assuming we will have prosperity in the face of, or even because of mass immigration is also denying reality.
But, as Mr Dick observed, reality doesn't go away, no matter what our self-priclaimed elites believe.
Pursuing a Net Zero policy will lead to poverty and immiseration for the majority. Adding mass immigration to that will introduce ethnic and racial conflict. The eventually result will be low-level civil strife/war, as David Betz has perceptively predicted for Western Europe.
Our smug, self-congratulatory "elites", are leading us to disaster. The rise of One Nation will most likelyl be resisted by all Right Thinking People of the establishment, and our country will hurtle into the toilet of history like a fucking comet.
I remember reading sci-fi stories as a kid, maybe Heinlein, where Australia was depicted as a small but tough and powerful
nation of sun tanned laconic blokes who were not to be fucked with. Now we are led by Anthony Albanese of all things. It's enough to make a man weep.
Best thing I've read in a long time, maybe ever, on the dynamics of populist politics. Now we need a theory of elite formation that would hep reformers design strategies to close the gap btw elite and popular opnion. A problem already address by Wu JIng in the Tang dynasty (Essentials of Governance).
SOCIALISM = "you will have nothing and be happy". There's still an elite, it's still hereditory, and imposed from above, we just use different words to describe ourselves. Like "nice", and "kind".
CAPITALISM = if you work you get paid, your lifestyle improves. There's still an elite, but you get to elect some of them.
You are saying it as if national populism is a bad thing. Depends what else is on the menu.
And if center right conservatives are so impotent, the populace needs someone to protect their interests. Thus, if national populism does it, they should be your friends. Particularly, given the Labour, Greens and their other left allies destructiveness, that you describe so well. Also, patriotism has value to a lot of folks, while elites are hell bent on demonizing it.
Those two links are classic example of the left-progressive war on human flourishing. That so many Very Serious People completely ignore—or remain supremely ignorant of—the Biden Administration’s use of debanking to punish political opponents, and to seek to cartel the AI industry and suppress crypto, is another example of convenient ignorance.
Yes, when you read these links you cannot fail but to notice that very much like Lenin and Marx, the Biden progressives have now developed a hate for middle-class (bourgeoisie) values; the proletariat is also suspect. It always was, actually, in Leninism - they only allied with lumpen and criminals - not unlike what's happening these days.
Very much along the lines of the bogeyman of the Frankfurt School - the authoritarian personality inventory - which was concocted to deconstruct the majority population’s values so “it” doesn’t happen here; and to lead to intersectional communism too. The same goes for the constant screams about fascism - they imagine fascism in anything opposing their communism (it makes a simplistic sense: anyone who disagrees with us is certainly an evil Nazi or fascist - because we are the good people).
Which reminds me of the skit “Are We the Baddies?”. Perhaps progressives could take a look in the mirror, with their daily calls to violence? No, they won’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Humans tribalise very readily. Trying to get progressives to face their tradition’s actual history is damn near impossible: they have all these mechanisms to make that history pristine—I come across them all the time. “Real Communism has never been tried” is the classic, but that is only one such mechanism.
A larger problem is getting folk who aren’t progressives but cannot see patterns that are very clear to those of us who pay attention and have a sense of the history. Who cannot see why so much of DEI training devolves into struggle sessions. That DEI officers are modern commissars/inquisitors. That genderwoo is the new Lysenkoism. That the conformity in arts/literary circles is a form of Zhadanovism, etc.
They have bought into the pristine history in another way. Just because they are networked rather than a democratic centralist Party, that adherents talk about race/sex/gender etc, these patterns have no longer history.
Tyler Cowen has released a free book that is an excellent history of marginalism, but he discusses recent shifts in Economics. I had not realised how much there has been a retreat from Theory within the discipline.
Theory is rather too readily ahistorical in various ways: you can see this in how folk like Noah Smith and Scott Sumner write about immigration. The new emphasis on very large datasets tends to bring history back in.
Just a small addition - all above is absollutely correct. And it happens in the US. But EU is now absolutely unhinged, and it took less than a decade to turn this way. We have seen countless videos of arrests and imprisonments in the UK, based on innocent tweets on gender, migrants, Islam, you name it. Essentially, imprisonment for blasphemy against woke piety - this is why they are so similar with Shariah. Here is one from Ireland: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2039354627205071114?s=20
What I am worried about is that Newsom far-left intersectional administration in the US will proceed to do the same. Debanking was already bad during Biden, but imprisonments were few. And these are the people screaming about authoritarianism...
A very legitimate fear. The same foundational ideas lead to the same patterns, if in updated form. The problem is so many Very Serious People are so wilfully blind on this point. Folk who mostly don’t buy into the status games but who still dismiss this stuff as shallow campus madness and do not realise how much they are in an information bubble.
As bad as leftists winning national power in the U.S. would be, our First Amendment would protect us even then from the kind of imprisonments we have seen in the U.K. On this particular point, your fears are unfounded..
Which is not to say that they wouldn’t attempt even more speech suppression than they did the last time, e.g. through the social media companies. They just wouldn’t be able to do imprisonments.
I agree with you 100% on your last sentence, though (and pretty much on all your others).
And sure enough, 20% of bachelor degrees at most makes sense. >50% makes it for low IQ resentful elite overpopulation (add grievance studies as a cherry on a cake).
Old USSR in 1989 had 8% of population who achieved higher education, this is likely why they could break out of communism peacefully in 1991.
“Theory is rather too readily ahistorical in various ways: you can see this in how folk like Noah Smith and Scott Sumner write about immigration. ”
Can you say more about what you mean here, specifically on Sumner (I don’t care about Smith)?
Sumner politics are too left for my taste, sure. But I don’t find his policy positions inherently unreasonable, nor his logic problematic (except for his acknowledged TDS). Is your only point that he is not opposed to low-skill immigration into the U.S.?
Well, “seek to cartelize the AI industry” was *not* their goal, whether or not you’re correct that that is what their preferred policies would lead to.
It does rather depend on how the national populists perform once in office. I entirely agree, conventional conservatives absolutely deserve the kickings they have been getting. What have you conserved? is very much the brutal question.
That it is now the turn of Western countries (after Russia and China) to have their human flourishing degraded by left-progressivism is much of what is happening. Especially as way too many Very Serious People do not take these patterns anywhere seriously enough. They literally do not recognise commissars, Lysenkoism, Zhadanovism and struggle sessions when they are right in front of them: they suffer from the stupidity of arrogance. (Ex-Soviet bloc folk typically understand very well what is happening.)
So, how much left-progressives will be able to pull of turning a catastrophic level of Western institutions into skin-suit institutions—that do not do what they are supposed to do, but rather just spread the social virus of left-authoritarianism—is a very large question.
However, in this case (as always) the problem goes deeper - it starts from human cognitive adaptations. Particularly one of what I call broadly religiosity, and envy. It does not have to be belief in supernatural, any irrational belief will do - in the case of left progressives it turns into belief in sanctity of blank slate of humans and insane worship of "environment", animal species, etc. The later two of course would be good in moderation and as a guide to compromise between preservation and necessary use of resources, but the forest is so lost behind the trees! Thus, open borders and net zero, as you correctly pointed.
Yet, it ends up with submission of all Western countries' cultures and their natives to Islam shariah laws. Europe was fighting against Islam aggression for about 1000 years, until starting from 1800s, Islam was not a serious threat anymore. And now left progressives are replacing their local populations, including eventually themselves, with much more cohesive low IQ muslims - Somalis, Pakistanis, Palestinians - who take over legislation - Khan or Mamdani or Omar, as a few examples. It is not just left-authoritarianism, it is left-authoritarianism with shariah law - it fits like a glove.
And, from this weekend, No Kings. Have you seen conservatives doing anything like this, and what would happen if they tried during Biden or Obama? "White supremacy" would be one of a hundred slurs:
What it all is about lately? As you stated recently (again), every cause is not a cause, every cause is revolution. Open border is the cry of the day. Every large city is full of such city trash.
And, as it is human nature,
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
FWIW, I think you can create a model where there is increased rates of crime in diverse communities even if every constituent “community” has the same tendency towards criminality. It merely requires the recognition that the social (and possibly legal) consequences for malefactors will typically be lower if their depredations are against members of an out group, which seems an intuitively correct assumption.
This is not to say that there aren’t massive differences in propensity to criminality among different communities. These are, I understand, a matter of statistical fact.
I mean obviously there are also plausible models where crime decreases due to multi communality. But those are the ones where the chances of pogroms massively increase.
“The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.”
I agree with your broad thesis on Net Zero plus mass immigration being directly responsible for the rise in national populism. And I agree that cheap energy was critical to the Industrial Revolution, and absolutely necessary for it.
But you leave out an awful lot of technological innovation, as well as the political innovation away from the landed aristocracy that also mattered at least as bigly.
And while again agreeing with your broad thesis, even the elevated energy prices that Net Zero and its ilk bring still have energy *relatively* cheap compared to the distant past, and I don’t think you can credibly say it is more important than free trade.
In fact, if you understand the basic Adam Smith idea that specialization and the division of labor are limited by the size of the market, I’m quite sure you have this part wrong.
Cheap energy plus a market only the size of Australia would surely leave Australians relatively poor compared to Europe. Even if we assume that you got all the advantages of technology adoption from the rest of the world.
Isn't it simply that "net zero" and "open borders" are both typical policies of a progressive government? I'm not sure I follow your cause and effect here.
Status games are largely for strivers, the professional and managerial classes.
The central driver for mass immigration at the top in Australia has always been strategic and economic. Canberra seeks engagement with Asia via migration. It aims to use migration policy to win friends and influence people overseas and to keep nominal GDP going every quarter.
The present reaction owes much to the exhaustion of the social capital built up by the White Australia policy and post-war welfare capitalism. Australia is now too socially and ethnically fragmented to maintain the old consensus on migration/multiculturalism. The surge in migration under Albanese, coupled with the mass mobilization of jihadists and their fellow-travelers and the massacre have brought it all to a boil.
The aggressive enforcement of taboos that made it impossible to discuss migration dispassionately robbed our elites of the situation awareness necessary for good policy.
Nicely put.
Exactly. It is not Trump’s substance that is at issue for most of us it’s his style that many find offensive. Right now there are three Americas: those that despise him ( we call it TDS…Trump Derangement Syndrome) , those that absolutely love him ( the ones who are most angry) and those who really don’t like the way he does his business but support his policies. I am the last group. Even the ones I initially opposed upon consideration, I gained an appreciation for. Like the dynamics associated with his trade policies,
Well I about 95% agree with you.
But while some of Trump’s trade policies are good - getting other countries to lower their tariffs, most notably, and the actual NAFTA renegotiation and limiting transshipments - and others ok/TBD, as he has done with China, many are *not* good things, like keeping higher tariffs across the board and having numerous one-off company specific deals, which is little different from cronyism.
Now I certainly agree that his (imo not net positive) trade policies are not nearly the problem than those with TDS claim that they are or will be.
Indeed. As I said an interesting education. While not a fan, Trump has forced re-evaluation on a great many things that have proven enlightening. First, by his erratic behavior toward trade policies I have given infinitely more attention to Canada and their internal processes. Through Iran, I have become fascinated by the UK and its internal processes and personalities. For some time, as a result of Ukraine, the whole EU dynamic is absolutely astounding. Now, as a result of this thread, Australia fascinates me. Prior, Australia was just a place that I wanted to immigrate to….a perfect place. For better or worse, Trump at least forces engaged Americans to pay attention.
Australia is huge. There are parts of the country that might be ideal for you. Other parts a nightmare.
There are whole regions where you will find the old-fashioned types (down to earth, very straightforward), especially Western Australia. The capital cities across the east coast are a mixed bag. It is very much hit and miss.
Trump was an inevitable (and to my mind welcome) reaction to managed decline. His foreign critics neglect to acknowledge that most US trade partners got rich from concessions by the US (market access, investment by US companies, outsourcing of manufacturing from the US). Trump’s domestic critics exaggerate how right-wing he is and underestimate the validity of the discontent over globalisation.
Well said. This is an education that I find absolutely amazing. As an American I thought that immigration (in our case illegal) was particularly an American problem. It is tearing apart the fabric of the country. In reading these posts it is obvious that both England and Australia are experiencing something similar. The fascinating piece is that this is simultaneously happening. As I understand it, Canada, to what it appears to lesser extent is exp something similar. Interesting.
There is a constant exchange of personnel and ideas between Australia and the UK. Political parties and the public service have secondments, postings etc. The national government here is very, very close to Starmer and regards Westminster as setting best practice, especially in regulating the internet, policing, multiculturalism, Islamophobia.
Starmer as an example or model? That is indeed disappointing and somewhat confusing. In my younger days I had the opportunity to get to know a few Australian guys. Quality men. Direct, honest and extremely forthcoming with their opinions. While my opinion won’t count for much but Starmer doesn’t fit what I would think Australia would appreciate. But times change.
Starmer is way less competent politician and PM than Albo (as Australians call him). So, Starmer himself is not the relevant vector, the problem is the transnational (one might even say globalist) transmission of similar ideas and status games.
The Australian ABC, the Canadian CBC, the British BBC all push much the same narratives as PBS, NPR, the NYT and the Washington Post. While there is something to Jessie Singal’s notion of mainstream media “go broke, go woke”—that the collapse of the business model lead to hiring cheap recent graduates—that the financially secure public broadcasters in many ways led the push shows that there is a different pattern going on.
Basically, such status games become dominant among the unaccountable classes—those who are paid if they turn up—because their beliefs do not have to be reality-tested so become dominated by status games.
Ah, the inherent instability (and coincidentally the insecurity) within the globalist agenda. While one can say much negative about Trump, he at least is not a globalist in comparison to the leaders of the other English speaking nations. In America he is forcing a “rebalancing” of the globalist paradigm which is causing an unbelievable amount of friction in and out of the nation. Speaks to the difficulty of ACTUALLY changing policy. He is quite the economic and political apostate. Trump the Apostate, with all due respects to Julian. That being said, fundamentally, Trump is not the cause but the result of a growing resistance (resentment) to a globalist agenda in America. In England, one sees a similar phenomenon in Farage and Reform UK. It appears organic bottom up political dynamics. Poilievre in Canada appears significantly less anti-globalist (perhaps understandably). He presents as a traditional globalist “conservative “. I understand that the current American “experiment” might not resonate with much of the world, but does Australia have similar dynamics?
Australia is currently experiencing its own populist moment with a surge in electoral support for Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
Hanson is fundamentally a centrist, nostalgic for the old, much more cohesive Australia of old when prosperity and opportunity were more widely shared. She is not a chauvinist, nor malicious or self-interested. She lacks Trump's experience in big business but is pretty canny. Her candour on Islam, migration, energy policy and standards of living is attracting lots of voters from both sides of politics, especially disillusioned conservatives.
The big difference between the US and Australia is that we are substantially more deindustrialised than the US. Also more demilitarised. And our politics owes a very great deal to the legacy of British colonial practice. Australians are vastly more obedient to political authority and are largely resigned to an authoritarian style derived from the days when we were a collection of penal settlements.
Fully agree with your comparison between Albo and Starmer. At a personal level Albo is a nonentity, but he receives at least some of his advice from people who are undeniably capable. Starmer is also under the thumb of UK intelligence. In Canberra, on the other hand, the federal government appears to have the intelligence agencies very much under their thumb.
My sense is that the convergence is ultimately downstream from geopolitics. The UK and Australia are both deindustrialised US dependencies torn between loyalty to Washington and competing forces (EU and China respectively). Both are governed by comprador regimes with tenuous loyalties to their own people. Both are heavily in debt.
The great contrast is that in the UK the status games are played out in the wake of a class system that has always been explicit. In Australia the legacy of performative egalitarianism complicates things. But the leadership class in Australia certainly take their cues from the UK and the US and are blind to the connection between their games and managed decline.
The once typical behaviours like routine candour are increasingly rare nowadays, especially at the top.
You will still find the old Aussie type, just not in Canberra and only rarely in the metropolitan professional and managerial classes. In rural areas and amongst working class Anglos candour is common enough.
“…robbed our elites…”
The passive voice makes it sound as if “our elites” are merely victims.
I'll grant you the attempt at sarcasm.
Otherwise, well said!
My own feeling is that those with a predilection for status games are by definition incapable of 'thinking things through'. All that matters is what is reflected in their social mirror
It’s stunning that the people, noticing they are harmed and realizing they’re hated should react as reactionaries.
“Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century, politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.” - Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Net Zero is badness, period.
Mass illegal immigration is net bad, period.
Mass low skill immigration is problematic in a country whose economy is not growing, which seems to be more or less what your piece is stating, although you frame it more specifically.
And I agree with you fully re: leftist elite performative status games.
But it’s less clear to me that Net Zero is unique as opposed to overregulation in general and NIMBY housing policy and high taxes on capital in terms of being the key specific thing that causes national populism to surge given mass immigration.
Even as I don’t disagree with you that Net Zero is the least defensible leftist elite policy (other than brazenly illegal mass immigration as under Autopen Biden in the U.S. for 3.5 years starting in 2021).
Yes, agree with what you say. National populism was a thing before Net Zero, it is just that the combination is particularly conducive to it surging.
This post was triggered by asking why One Nation, which has been around for decades, suddenly surged in Australia now?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"
- Philip K. Duck
Both Net Zero and mass immigration are denials of reality.
Net Zero assumes that we can have prosperity without widespread and low cost energy. This is simply denying reality.
Mass immigration assumes that we can have prosperity in the face of mass immigration, when in fact it leads to massacres such as Bondi, and then far worse. Assuming we will have prosperity in the face of, or even because of mass immigration is also denying reality.
But, as Mr Dick observed, reality doesn't go away, no matter what our self-priclaimed elites believe.
Pursuing a Net Zero policy will lead to poverty and immiseration for the majority. Adding mass immigration to that will introduce ethnic and racial conflict. The eventually result will be low-level civil strife/war, as David Betz has perceptively predicted for Western Europe.
Our smug, self-congratulatory "elites", are leading us to disaster. The rise of One Nation will most likelyl be resisted by all Right Thinking People of the establishment, and our country will hurtle into the toilet of history like a fucking comet.
I remember reading sci-fi stories as a kid, maybe Heinlein, where Australia was depicted as a small but tough and powerful
nation of sun tanned laconic blokes who were not to be fucked with. Now we are led by Anthony Albanese of all things. It's enough to make a man weep.
Best thing I've read in a long time, maybe ever, on the dynamics of populist politics. Now we need a theory of elite formation that would hep reformers design strategies to close the gap btw elite and popular opnion. A problem already address by Wu JIng in the Tang dynasty (Essentials of Governance).
Financial incentive structures support both the elites and their patronage network, as well as the Populists. Morals are just the cover story.
In simple terms:
SOCIALISM = "you will have nothing and be happy". There's still an elite, it's still hereditory, and imposed from above, we just use different words to describe ourselves. Like "nice", and "kind".
CAPITALISM = if you work you get paid, your lifestyle improves. There's still an elite, but you get to elect some of them.
It's a no-brainer.
You are saying it as if national populism is a bad thing. Depends what else is on the menu.
And if center right conservatives are so impotent, the populace needs someone to protect their interests. Thus, if national populism does it, they should be your friends. Particularly, given the Labour, Greens and their other left allies destructiveness, that you describe so well. Also, patriotism has value to a lot of folks, while elites are hell bent on demonizing it.
See the US Biden years pearl: https://washingtonstand.com/article/biden-cia-memo-tied-motherhood-and-homemaking-to-white-supremacy
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/03/19/biden-cia-warned-traditional-motherhood-homemaking-white-extremist-tactics/
When they get power back, and they will soon, this will be the game over for the Western civilization.
Those two links are classic example of the left-progressive war on human flourishing. That so many Very Serious People completely ignore—or remain supremely ignorant of—the Biden Administration’s use of debanking to punish political opponents, and to seek to cartel the AI industry and suppress crypto, is another example of convenient ignorance.
Yes, when you read these links you cannot fail but to notice that very much like Lenin and Marx, the Biden progressives have now developed a hate for middle-class (bourgeoisie) values; the proletariat is also suspect. It always was, actually, in Leninism - they only allied with lumpen and criminals - not unlike what's happening these days.
Very much along the lines of the bogeyman of the Frankfurt School - the authoritarian personality inventory - which was concocted to deconstruct the majority population’s values so “it” doesn’t happen here; and to lead to intersectional communism too. The same goes for the constant screams about fascism - they imagine fascism in anything opposing their communism (it makes a simplistic sense: anyone who disagrees with us is certainly an evil Nazi or fascist - because we are the good people).
Which reminds me of the skit “Are We the Baddies?”. Perhaps progressives could take a look in the mirror, with their daily calls to violence? No, they won’t: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Humans tribalise very readily. Trying to get progressives to face their tradition’s actual history is damn near impossible: they have all these mechanisms to make that history pristine—I come across them all the time. “Real Communism has never been tried” is the classic, but that is only one such mechanism.
A larger problem is getting folk who aren’t progressives but cannot see patterns that are very clear to those of us who pay attention and have a sense of the history. Who cannot see why so much of DEI training devolves into struggle sessions. That DEI officers are modern commissars/inquisitors. That genderwoo is the new Lysenkoism. That the conformity in arts/literary circles is a form of Zhadanovism, etc.
They have bought into the pristine history in another way. Just because they are networked rather than a democratic centralist Party, that adherents talk about race/sex/gender etc, these patterns have no longer history.
Tyler Cowen has released a free book that is an excellent history of marginalism, but he discusses recent shifts in Economics. I had not realised how much there has been a retreat from Theory within the discipline.
https://tylercowen.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/TheMarginalRevolution-Tyler_Cowen.pdf
Theory is rather too readily ahistorical in various ways: you can see this in how folk like Noah Smith and Scott Sumner write about immigration. The new emphasis on very large datasets tends to bring history back in.
Just a small addition - all above is absollutely correct. And it happens in the US. But EU is now absolutely unhinged, and it took less than a decade to turn this way. We have seen countless videos of arrests and imprisonments in the UK, based on innocent tweets on gender, migrants, Islam, you name it. Essentially, imprisonment for blasphemy against woke piety - this is why they are so similar with Shariah. Here is one from Ireland: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2039354627205071114?s=20
What I am worried about is that Newsom far-left intersectional administration in the US will proceed to do the same. Debanking was already bad during Biden, but imprisonments were few. And these are the people screaming about authoritarianism...
A very legitimate fear. The same foundational ideas lead to the same patterns, if in updated form. The problem is so many Very Serious People are so wilfully blind on this point. Folk who mostly don’t buy into the status games but who still dismiss this stuff as shallow campus madness and do not realise how much they are in an information bubble.
You are being forgiving calling these folks Very Serious People. Countless less charitable epithets come to mind.
As bad as leftists winning national power in the U.S. would be, our First Amendment would protect us even then from the kind of imprisonments we have seen in the U.K. On this particular point, your fears are unfounded..
Which is not to say that they wouldn’t attempt even more speech suppression than they did the last time, e.g. through the social media companies. They just wouldn’t be able to do imprisonments.
I agree with you 100% on your last sentence, though (and pretty much on all your others).
I just ran into X, confirming once again our thinking. Essentially, that elites are and have always been the source of all this dysfunction.
https://x.com/robkhenderson/status/2039126527934349446?s=20
And sure enough, 20% of bachelor degrees at most makes sense. >50% makes it for low IQ resentful elite overpopulation (add grievance studies as a cherry on a cake).
Old USSR in 1989 had 8% of population who achieved higher education, this is likely why they could break out of communism peacefully in 1991.
It is the group just below the top who typically lead revolutions. Especially the blocked or downwardly mobile ones.
“Theory is rather too readily ahistorical in various ways: you can see this in how folk like Noah Smith and Scott Sumner write about immigration. ”
Can you say more about what you mean here, specifically on Sumner (I don’t care about Smith)?
Sumner politics are too left for my taste, sure. But I don’t find his policy positions inherently unreasonable, nor his logic problematic (except for his acknowledged TDS). Is your only point that he is not opposed to low-skill immigration into the U.S.?
Well, “seek to cartelize the AI industry” was *not* their goal, whether or not you’re correct that that is what their preferred policies would lead to.
Very much agree with you on the rest.
It does rather depend on how the national populists perform once in office. I entirely agree, conventional conservatives absolutely deserve the kickings they have been getting. What have you conserved? is very much the brutal question.
That it is now the turn of Western countries (after Russia and China) to have their human flourishing degraded by left-progressivism is much of what is happening. Especially as way too many Very Serious People do not take these patterns anywhere seriously enough. They literally do not recognise commissars, Lysenkoism, Zhadanovism and struggle sessions when they are right in front of them: they suffer from the stupidity of arrogance. (Ex-Soviet bloc folk typically understand very well what is happening.)
So, how much left-progressives will be able to pull of turning a catastrophic level of Western institutions into skin-suit institutions—that do not do what they are supposed to do, but rather just spread the social virus of left-authoritarianism—is a very large question.
Good points with which I completely agree.
However, in this case (as always) the problem goes deeper - it starts from human cognitive adaptations. Particularly one of what I call broadly religiosity, and envy. It does not have to be belief in supernatural, any irrational belief will do - in the case of left progressives it turns into belief in sanctity of blank slate of humans and insane worship of "environment", animal species, etc. The later two of course would be good in moderation and as a guide to compromise between preservation and necessary use of resources, but the forest is so lost behind the trees! Thus, open borders and net zero, as you correctly pointed.
Yet, it ends up with submission of all Western countries' cultures and their natives to Islam shariah laws. Europe was fighting against Islam aggression for about 1000 years, until starting from 1800s, Islam was not a serious threat anymore. And now left progressives are replacing their local populations, including eventually themselves, with much more cohesive low IQ muslims - Somalis, Pakistanis, Palestinians - who take over legislation - Khan or Mamdani or Omar, as a few examples. It is not just left-authoritarianism, it is left-authoritarianism with shariah law - it fits like a glove.
Here again one of the countless examples from the UK, every time you think it cannot be any more outrageous and self-defeating, woke come up with a new one: https://x.com/realMaalouf/status/2038247207141347521?s=20
And, from this weekend, No Kings. Have you seen conservatives doing anything like this, and what would happen if they tried during Biden or Obama? "White supremacy" would be one of a hundred slurs:
https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2037994812335354122?s=20
https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/2037993080242979172?s=20
What it all is about lately? As you stated recently (again), every cause is not a cause, every cause is revolution. Open border is the cry of the day. Every large city is full of such city trash.
And, as it is human nature,
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Welcome dark ages.
I love the fact that the chart about Danish crime admits that Australians are less criminally inclined than the Danish themselves.
At least, than the Australians who went to Denmark. (Which includes Queen Mary.) But it does give this descendant of convicts a giggle.
FWIW, I think you can create a model where there is increased rates of crime in diverse communities even if every constituent “community” has the same tendency towards criminality. It merely requires the recognition that the social (and possibly legal) consequences for malefactors will typically be lower if their depredations are against members of an out group, which seems an intuitively correct assumption.
This is not to say that there aren’t massive differences in propensity to criminality among different communities. These are, I understand, a matter of statistical fact.
I mean obviously there are also plausible models where crime decreases due to multi communality. But those are the ones where the chances of pogroms massively increase.
I actually met a person who thought that net-zero meant no carbon dioxide emissions at all. Why bother explaining.
“The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.”
I agree with your broad thesis on Net Zero plus mass immigration being directly responsible for the rise in national populism. And I agree that cheap energy was critical to the Industrial Revolution, and absolutely necessary for it.
But you leave out an awful lot of technological innovation, as well as the political innovation away from the landed aristocracy that also mattered at least as bigly.
And while again agreeing with your broad thesis, even the elevated energy prices that Net Zero and its ilk bring still have energy *relatively* cheap compared to the distant past, and I don’t think you can credibly say it is more important than free trade.
In fact, if you understand the basic Adam Smith idea that specialization and the division of labor are limited by the size of the market, I’m quite sure you have this part wrong.
Cheap energy plus a market only the size of Australia would surely leave Australians relatively poor compared to Europe. Even if we assume that you got all the advantages of technology adoption from the rest of the world.
Isn't it simply that "net zero" and "open borders" are both typical policies of a progressive government? I'm not sure I follow your cause and effect here.
Indeed: but those policies then have consequences is my point.
One day half the people of Spain chose to live, the Right half.