by David Webb

Conservatives have often been told they are “on the wrong side of history”. This is a confusing comment. Does history in fact have a preferred side? This seems to embrace a Marxist understanding of history as the forward march of “progress”. Economic progress does seem to be a cumulative process, or at least it is usually so, but many of the ideologues who express themselves in this way mean the forward march of progressive ideas—ideas that not everyone would agree were “progress” at all. Another similar phrase is the following, attributed to Martin Luther King, but probably borrowed by him from the abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. This also implies that the right side, the progressive side, will win out in the end.

If we accept that history is made by man, then there is no teleological end that is preferred by the unfolding of history. What would probably make more sense is to tell someone “your views are behind the times; society is changing and there is no way back to a romanticised past”. And yet there is always the possibility that society will change in more than one direction: the victory of progressivism is not guaranteed; it is possible that “reaction” will win in the end, and therefore that those who were told they were “behind the times” may end up being seen as having been ahead of their times. The newest term for these cultural shifts, vibe shift, apparently means at this historical juncture (the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves) a vibe shift against progressivism. “Vibe shift” means roughly the same thing as a shift in the Zeitgeist or l’esprit d’âge, but it has a cooler, Gen-Z feel to it.  The term was invented by Sean Monahan, and interprets cultural shifts as a kind of “vibration”, as if culture were like the cosmic microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. Allison P. Davis explains the concept as follows:

A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch.

Her explanation connects the term to youth cultural phenomena. I’m more interested in the political vibe shift that may be underway, and understanding its provenance and prospects.

It is the arrogance of youth—and maybe young people are accordingly the typical bearers of vibe shifts, as people over a certain age often have more fixed views—that their views result from their own personal intelligent reappraisal of cultural and political issues. Yet, in nearly all cases, their views align, as if by magic, with the wider culture, suggesting that young people have their views “given” to them by that culture, even if they assert and earnestly believe that this is not the case.

Vibe shifts align with the rise of new generations to cultural power within a society, but they also operate against the background of historical reality. Often it can be shown that both generation change and real geopolitical events co-operate in order to pave the way for vibe shifts. I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Western thought, and so can only focus on the historical periods I know best. I think it is likely that the transmission of cultural trends has become accelerated in the modern period by the mass media and also by the less filtered Internet (including forums, chat groups, social media platforms and the like). From the standpoint of England, many of the more recent vibe shifts emanate from America (California being a trendsetter), and quickly leap over the pond to England.

Early vibe shifts in 1776 and 1848

Taking the 1770s-1790s as our starting point, the US War of Independence (dubbed “the American Revolution” in the arguably fraudulent terminology preferred in America) was followed relatively quickly by the French Revolution. An entire cycle can be traced from about 1770 to 1815. It is clear that American and French politics influenced each other—this is why the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre was interested in American politics. He wrote “Liberty, insulted in Europe, has winged its flight to another hemisphere”, but it is clear that French comment on this also reflected a more deeply-rooted Gallic pleasure in seeing England defeated in war. The infectiousness of vibe shifts is seen in the way that the Irish rebellion of 1798 was influenced by the French example, and indeed received French military support. Thus the spread of ideas is facilitated by geopolitical interests of key players. You could oversimplify by pointing out that this “turn” in global events was largely a function of the rise of Britain and France as great imperial powers, with rivalry between them. The adoption of new political ideologies by new generations gives rise to the actors who respond to changing reality and are therefore seen as having revolutionary inspiration. Shifting geopolitical realities, developments in political thought and the rise of new generations operate together to produce the shifting vibe.

The European revolutions of 1848-1849 are another good example of the way in which ideas can spread transnationally, as all national players seek to keep up with events elsewhere. The wave of revolutions began in Italy, but spread to all the German states, France, Denmark, Hungary, Romania, Poland—and Ireland. It could be argued that economic development had ultimately provided fertile soil for the rebellions, as the rising urban merchant class sought greater political power vis-à-vis the landed aristocracy. In Ireland, the Young Ireland rebellion came against the backdrop of the Irish Famine. As with many vibe shifts, the revolutionary movements were often led by the educated in the towns, underscoring the fact that the Marxist theory of revolutions from below is generally not how revolutions happen. Without significant support from the well-heeled, they generally don’t get off the ground at all. The potential for democracy was thus born in economic development, as the new urban elite believed that nationalism, the formation of modern nation-states, would allow them to keep the support of the lower orders in a new social set-up that overthrew the aristocrats. The geopolitical significance of 1848 was in the demand for nation-states, a demand that came to fruition in Germany and Italy in the decades following and led to the emergence of the German Empire as an anti-status quo challenger in the global system, thus setting the stage for the run-up to the First World War and the next vibe shift.

The Revolution that changed everything (1917)

Intellectual and geopolitical ferment go hand in hand. The grandaddy of all vibe shifts was the Russian Revolution in 1917, in the aftermath of which we still live. We see here that geopolitical events—the backdrop of the pointless First World War—the rise of the working class political movement and the devising of an ideology that claimed to represent that (communism) coalesced in large revolutionary movements across Europe. Clearly, we should ask which of these points was decisive: Russia had the smallest industrial working class of any major European country, but the war had discredited the elite and there was an educated stratum ready to lead the revolution. Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party distilled the role of this educated layer, disproportionately drawn from an ethnic minority that felt itself held down socioeconomically by Czarism.

The collapse of Russian society was not fully replicated anywhere else. There was a Communist uprising (the Spartacists) in Berlin in January 1919. A Soviet republic was formed in Hungary in March 1919, and a Soviet republic was declared in Bavaria in April that year. These all had a significant ethnic-minority component, identical to that in Russia. Those brief regimes were overthrown in Bavaria and then Hungary in May and August that year. Yet there was serious unrest in many countries in Europe in 1919. These included the British Isles, where a civil war in Ireland raged and troops had to be deployed in Glasgow in January 1919 to put down the “Red Clydeside” strikers in Glasgow (with no deaths on the day, but many injuries). Although it seems the lack of a vanguard party as organised as the Bolsheviks prevented communists in most countries from exploiting the moment of extreme vulnerability of most ruling elites across Europe, the intellectual movement created by the Communist International has influenced political thought ever since.

The rise of the Baby Boomers (1967)

I won’t explore in great depth the impact of the ideology of communism in the inter-war years, where fascism emerged in large part as a response to communism. We can simplify by saying that, pace communist dogma, there is no teleological development of the vibe: all depends on human reaction to events and human shaping of those events. So fascism was a reaction to communism, and came pretty close to victory in the Second World War. If Hitler’s Germany had won the war, it would have touched off a vibe shift, or a series of vibe shifts, even bigger than the 1917 revolution in Russia. The defeat of fascism (of which “national socialism” was a particular national form) in 1945 created a narrative that has strengthened the Left over the past 80 years. The failure of the workers’ movement in Western Europe in fact led to the turn to Cultural Marxism (led by the same ethnic group that spearheaded Bolshevism in Russia), prioritising “racism, sexism and anti-colonialism” over workers’ rights—all causes that have been enthusiastically embraced by “conservatives” to this very day. This pattern of ideological development has influenced several generations that have been in power all over the West since 1945.

There isn’t really one moment at which a vibe arrives and dominates social and political thought. Looking at the post-war trajectory of political thought, the period from 1945 to 1967 could be said to be one where the events of 1945 were being digested. Around 1967, there was a sudden movement in politics in many countries at once, but as the rise to power of a new generation still left them sharing power with older members of the elite, the 1967 generation didn’t have it all their own way until around 1990. This is the expected pattern of vibe shifts: in a free society, there will still be pushback and compromises, and so I think it is logical to see 1967 as the vibe shift zenith and 1990 as the zenith of the subsequent vibe shift. In general terms, 1967 marked the rise to power of the Baby Boomers—those who were born in the immediate post-war period, which was marked by a “baby boom”. Younger members of the previous Silent Generation began the cultural shift by adopting much of the new ideologies, but the Baby Boomers were beginning to enter the workforce from that point, a process that would continue well into the 1990s, and began to drive cultural change with greater and greater success as older members of the elite began to retire and die off.

To define generations by exact years can be a little arbitrary, but stepping back from exact definitions there is still some logic to the analysis. Those born in 1901-1927 are known as the Greatest Generation, largely those who fought the Second World War. Those born in 1928-1945 are referred to as the Silent Generation (the backbone of the “silent majority” of relatively traditionalist people who nevertheless were influenced by the history of the 1930s and 1940s). The Baby Boomers were born in 1946-1964, during the Cold War, and were heavily influenced by anti-racism and similar causes and have emerged as strong supporters of wars in the Middle East.

Looking back at the 1940s, it was by no means clear to people alive at the time that the wars being fought against Germany and Japan would be written up as wars against nationalism and “racism”. A survey of 4,793 enlisted US personnel in 1943 showed that only 148 believed that black and white military units should be integrated. Only 1 in 12 believed that black and white servicemen should use the same service clubs. British and US military personnel who fought in the Second World War were not Baby Boomers, and didn’t have the mental framework of those born in the post-war period when the war was being redefined in retrospect as a war against nationalism and “racism”. Most GIs would have thrown down their rifles if told that they were part of historical developments that would lead to the end of segregation and the adoption of explicit anti-white policies in America. Similarly, British people were told by Winston Churchill in his “Finest Hour” speech that the British Empire might last 1,000 years. If the geopolitical and intellectual aftermath of the war meant, and could only mean, that the British Empire would be wrapped up quickly, this was not something British leaders were explicitly conscious of in 1940.

The US emerged in 1945 as a superpower, but not immediately hegemonic as such: the Soviet Union was a rival, and this position was cemented by the testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949. The Cold War, as it became, ultimately disaggregated the earlier conservative movement (now dubbed palaeo-conservatives). This is because it refocused the Western discourse on “freedom” (as opposed to the Soviet example). But desire for freedom as an abstract fails to suggest what we should do with our freedoms. It also meant that the intellectual fightback against communism incorporated a turn in the Western elite to “anti-imperialism” (however mendaciously; the current behaviour of the US shows that imperalism has gone nowhere). Those who returned from France to the US in 1945 soon found campaigns for racial equality and against segregation. It was ultimately difficult to fend off such campaigns, as it was argued that “racism” and segregation and colonialism were a little too close to Hitlerism, leading Western political thought down a trajectory that continues today. The US desire to assume the superpower position and relegate Britain also meant that it had its own interest in pushing anti-colonialism on the British.

You could say these developments in political thought were in a maturation phase in 1945-1967. The rise of the neo-conservatives—led by Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, members of a minority that viewed themselves as historically oppressed and with roots in Eastern Europe—saw former Trotskyists move right over into the conservative movement. Their hatred of Russia and fluency in Russian allowed them to become enthusiastic proponents of the Cold War and a muscular US foreign policy. At the same, they argued against segregation and for greater non-traditional immigration into the US (a stance many of them explicitly linked to their families’ history of living in countries in Eastern Europe with a dominant ethnic majority). Real conservatives, now dubbed palaeo-conservatives, were pushed out into the John Birch Society. Britain followed a similar trajectory, due to a needy desire to be at the top foreign policy tables, and thus follow all of the US foreign and domestic policies.

When the tipping point was reached in the 1960s, in country after country, this led in swift order to the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the passage of laws on race relations and the passage of laws on sex discrimination. The whole of the Third World, as it was once known, was now given independence—this served the US interest in clearing Britain and France off the world stage, but also responded to communist anti-colonial propaganda. The sense that Britain was going soft saw the Provisional IRA launch its armed campaign in 1969 with greater support from the Catholic population in Northern Ireland than had been given to the Official IRA in its border war in 1956-1962. The rise of the neo-conservatives was reinforced by the Six-Day War in Israel (an unprovoked Israeli attack on its neighbours to conquer East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Sinai peninsula) and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to topple the Dubček government.

Let us recap how this vibe shift played out. Firstly, there was a generational shift. In 1945, many of the pro-imperialist elite were still in charge in all British institutions and in much of the West. It takes a generational shift for new people to emerge to tilt those institutions towards a new philosophy. If you consider how until 1960 at least, most English children went to Sunday school, the shift in what we would now call “values” was led, not by the working class, but by the cultural elite. Many working-class men wore ties on their days off, well into the 1960s, and objected to swearing in front of women—it would take decades of louche films and other forms of cultural propaganda to weaken these cultural views. Increasingly, within the ranks of well-placed individuals, there were more and more people who found Christianity, the monarchy and the Empire embarrassing—redolent of the politics of the 1930s in fact—but they originally had to contend with many, still in place, who supported the old views. Even as late as the Thatcher period, the Colonel Blimps and the Tory Wets occupied the same party, with the former gradually losing influence. The Baby Boomers in effect shared power with the Colonel Blimps from 1967 to 1990, finally taking sole control in the 1990s in the next vibe shift moment.

In the 1960s-1980s, the sense was growing that the West was losing the Cold War. The Korean war wasn’t a complete victory. The US was struggling to win in Vietnam. More and more young Americans began to oppose US geopolitical games: this was seen in the Berkeley protests demanding “free speech” (i.e. the right to oppose US policies vocally; the very same people run everything throughout the West and now oppose free speech). They imagined that they had arrived at their views themselves, rather than regurgitating what they learnt from TV and Hollywood. James Dean’s performance as an alienated teenager in Rebel without a Cause in 1955, screaming at his parents “you’re tearing me apart” caught the mood of younger members of the Silent Generation and the emerging Baby Boomers—and also confirms that the political views that became prominent in the 1960s were given to them by the cultural elite, who wished to see a move away from pre-war political culture, away from the nation-state, away from religion, towards sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, seen as “cool” simply because the cultural elite was pointing society in that direction. They believed that nationalism was the problem that had led to the Second World War, and a particularly determined ethnic component in the US elite that rose to dominance in the media, Hollywood and party financing also believed that life in a more diverse society would always benefit their group.

The total triumph of the Boomers (1990)

If 1945-1967 saw the gestation of the 1960s vibe shift, and the 1960s saw the rise of a new generation to share power with the Colonel Blimps, then 1990 saw the final dying off of the Blimps. The Boomers were at their apex. Once again, generation politics, political thought and geopolitics all combined to produce the shift. The key geopolitical fact was the collapse of the Soviet Union. China’s earlier shift to a market economy had presaged this in some ways. This produced the unipolar moment, with the US now hegemonic and encouraging all of its allies to adopt globalism, immigration, feminism, gay rights and other parts of the same package. The Cultural Marxists moved from allowing more physical migration to controlling speech and thought: the 1990s saw the spread of “political correctness” as the Empire-wide ideology of the US Empire. Britain was an enthusiastic adopter.

Of course, different countries reacted at differing speeds to the vibe shift. Britain delayed its shift in power to 1997, although arguably John Major’s administration amounted to a partial retreat from full-throated conservatism. Britain now flung open its doors to migrants from all over. The IRA was allowed to win the Troubles in Northern Ireland, now that Britain asserted it had no “selfish interest” in retaining Ulster. The decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1960s was now lowered from age 21 to age 16—and campaigns were begun in all schools to promote this form of sexuality (future generations may one day find this hard to believe.) Apartheid ended in South Africa. The EU embarked on its more Utopian globalist schemes, including the eurozone Single Currency and the Schengenland visa-free zone. The Irish government dropped its religious conservativism and now backed divorce, abortion, homosexuality—and unlimited migration.

In generational terms, the 1990 vibe shift coincided with the entry into the workforce of Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980. This of course makes me a Gen-Xer. Gen-Xers largely grew up during a period when cultural movements touched off by the 1960s were dominant: many/most Gen-Xers are from broken homes, with around two-thirds of marriages now ending in divorce, and so the growing lack of moral clarity appears to have had a big impact on the personal lives of this generation. The old lesbian slogan, “the personal is political”, is turned on its head: for Gen-X the political had increasingly deep personal ramifications. Yet this generation also grew up in the years following the success of the civil rights movement in America: it was not yet clear this experiment would fail. Consequently, Gen-X appears to me not to have truly broken with the post-war consensus, hanging on to the idea that social fragmentation (in terms of family life, feminism and racial demographics) might one day end up being seen as an inspired idea that modernised society, or put it on the only viable path to modernity.

In terms of geopolitical effects, the conceit of the US Empire led it to believe that it had achieved “the End of History”, as set out in a famous book (“The End of History and the Last Man”) published by Francis Fukuyama in 1992. The US would reign supreme over the world, supported by a burgeoning number of satrapies all engaged in destroying their societies demographically in a way that made it hard to unpick the cultural change. Apparently, all countries would move towards “democracy”, seen as easily manipulable by the US and its deep state agencies.

The end of the cycle in 2007

If 1945-1967 was the period of gestation of the vibe shift that matured around 1967, then the period from 2007 to 2024 is a similar period when new social and political trends were developing. This has a number of aspects. As a generation, the Baby Boomers are on their last legs. Donald Trump is the last gasp of the Boomers in the US and has, as could have been expected, failed to break with the Boomer ideology of multiracialism, forever wars and wars in particular for a Middle Eastern country whose supporters have been fanatical supporters of immigration and muscular foreign policy since at least the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Trump ran on a platform of opposing both immigration and the forever wars, but does not represent a generational shift himself, and so remains captive to the ideas that have dominated the Western elite for decades. Nevertheless, his presidential candidacy in 2016 served to advance the ideas that are maturing before our very eyes in a new more nationalist vibe shift.

At the very juncture when the generation that has run the West for the whole of my life are set to die off, the cultural elite overreached in all Western countries. If the 1960s saw the “first wave” of anti-racism, feminism and gay rights, in that the Race Relations Act and the Sex Discrimination Act were passed and homosexuality decriminalised over 21 years of age, the 1990s saw the “second wave” of political correctness, requiring much greater personal compliance with these causes, in a campaign that was introduced in all workplaces. The last 20 years has seen the “third wave” of critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion, supplemented by the demented trans narrative. This amounted to a clearer attempt to denounce all white people and all men than was seen in the political correctness years. Yet oddly, the more extreme theories were rolled out just as the generation that was behind the original first-wave iterations of these causes reached advanced old age.

Of course, the extreme vituperation that has accompanied the third wave of these cultural movements largely reflects ideological polarisation among younger generations (Millennials and Generation Z in particular). Many generations overlap in all time periods, and some of the Baby Boomers doubt the wisdom of the vehemence of the third wave causes (Hillary Clinton once stated she was opposed to the trans agenda). If we focus on 2007, the earlier part of this period, this marked the maturity of Generation Y, also called the Millennials, usually defined as people born in 1981-1996. Whereas Generation X generally went along with the post-war narratives, and were lucky enough to grow up during years of prosperity in the early years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Millennials grew up during a period of increasing economic uncertainty, characterised by high house prices and student debt. The 2007 Great Financial Crisis, from which Western economies have never really recovered, led to an explosion of public debt and a period when successive governments visibly struggled to return to the prosperity of the Thatcher and Blair years.

At the same time, the Great Financial Crisis highlighted the reduced relative power of the US. The fact that the US had wasted US$4trn on forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed by the neo-conservatives, while allowing US debt to soar, underscored the fact that the US now no longer had any grand strategy. Its decision to keep interest rates low in the “new normal” before 2007 because cheap Chinese goods kept consumer price inflation low meant it took its eye off the ball—the inflation of property assets was not properly tackled, and indeed was fuelled by immigration, which meant the Western countries were the very economies that mired the world in the financial crisis. Finally, the geopolitical shift that accompanied this is the fact that the US is no longer as dominant economically as it once was. The G7 countries that were two-thirds of the global economy in the 1970s were now only one-third of the global total. China was on the rise, and India too.

The return of great power competition

I see Generation X and Generation Y as intermediate generations, with their own psychologies that have been commented on extensively in the press. The Millennials are noted as the entitled “me-generation”. This unfair characterisation ignores the fact that Baby Boomers grew up during a period of low house prices. The “me-generation” are excoriated for wanted their own houses too. But in the end, the generations between the Baby Boomers and the latest Generation Z are fundamentally transitional: new political ideas and new geopolitical events are required to turn a generation into a world-historical age-cohort that recreates society and the world.

The fundamental geopolitical shift at work is the decline of the US Empire and the return to power competition between states. This forms the backdrop to our lives. The fact that the US Deep State sought to destabilise Trump’s first term, precisely because it wanted a proxy war against Russia, and then the election of Biden and the launch in 2022 of a long proxy war that has pitted Russia against more than 30 countries in the West changes everything. This is because the US has not won. We were told that Russia was running out of weapons, but it was the US that ran out first—a development none of us could have imagined. This has been complemented since October 7th 2023 by the Israeli war on the people of Gaza. Who could have imagined this would still be going on? Or that most observers would come to believe that accusations of genocide (by the Israelis against the Palestinians) were credible? You could argue that the Israelis want to quickly dispose of the Palestinian population in both the West Bank and Gaza and annex the lot while a certain ethnic lobby in the US retains influence, as the rising Generation Z is increasingly opposed to Middle East entanglements. Who could have believed that Iran would bomb Israel and that Israel and the US would run seriously short of interceptor missiles? (This point is glossed over in the press.) Now we see Trump openly destroying relationships with all US satrapies. His trade war is largely focused on his “allies”. He has moved from claims that he would invade Greenland, a Danish possession, to imposing 15% tariffs on the EU.

This is important because the ideology of multiracialism and mass immigration is the ideological reflex of US hegemony. Countries like Britain only embarked on an insane opening of their borders in the 1990s once the zenith point of the 1990 vibe shift was reached. It was argued in the 1980s, when Enoch Powell was railing against immigration, that the migrant population would stabilise below 3m. Now it seems we will be in a minority in England by the 2050s. Yet mass immigration only makes sense if all population groups are interchangeable and we have indeed arrived at an End of History moment. Once Great Power wars are back, then population groups are not interchangeable at all. In the 1940s, the Japanese were interned in the US because the US was at war with Japan. If we are on an apparently irreversible course towards war with China, then what is going to happen to the Chinese populations of the West, who will inevitably be seen as (at least potentially) disloyal? Once Great Power wars are back, other nations are potentially your enemies, and their citizens are not easily integratable future citizens of your own country at all.

It is important to note that Generation Z is a very diverse generation. These are defined as people born between 1997 and 2012, with subsequent age-cohorts now said to be a Generation Alpha. Gen-Z has grown up without a common culture: the Internet has partly disaggregated mass culture, but demographic developments lead in the same direction too. In the US, the majority of people under 18 are from ethnic minorities, and to that extent ethnic minority Gen-Zers are now a thing. Ethnic minority Gen-Zers are generally impervious to claims that a Middle Eastern country is America’s greatest ally and that its interests are to be put above those of the US itself (this is the incredible claim that is nevertheless made by many Americans over a certain age). At the same time, the white Gen-Zers are growing up in a world that is instinctively anti-white. Claims made in school and university—that white people are the cancer of the world and it would better if they just died out—would surprise even the Baby Boomers who originally pushed racial diversity. As ethnic Gen-Zers move to the left, white Gen-Zers are moving to the right, but within this reality, a gap has opened up between men and women. Women in particular have moved to the radical left, while men are more likely to have moved to the radical right. This polarisation reflects the pressure on young white men to respond to an increasingly hostile social and cultural environment.

Social polarisation, which some believe could lead to civil war eventually (I personally don’t quite believe this, as we would need to see elite leadership of this), is unlikely to be reversed. An America where white identity is becoming ever more explicit cannot be prevented—and, indeed, should not be prevented. It is difficult to see exactly how this will play out. Will there be some states where the rule of law is fairly strongly implemented, and other states where the police do little to maintain order? Will there be more and more states who openly ignore federal law (as with the sanctuary cities that defy Washington DC on immigration)? A full-scale civil war is still unlikely, but lower-level civil conflict (along the lines of the BLM riots of 2020-2021, only larger) is not. Commitment to democracy itself is no longer particularly strong in elite circles.

Internationally, US interest in wars of choice is likely to decline, and the influence of a lobby that has pushed for such wars since the 1960s is likely to decline too. This doesn’t necessarily mean that warfare itself is unlikely, but only that the ideologically-charged atmosphere that calls for pointless wars will give way to wars that are conducted for real national interests. A US-China war is not unenvisageable and there would be more real national interests at stake in a war with China than in the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.

Britain tries to hold the line

The Starmer government in the UK is a kind of historical accident, the product of the first-past-the-post system and a divided electorate. This government is still pushing globalist causes, like the European Convention of Human Rights, migration by refugees and controls on free speech to keep the Cultural Marxist causes politically viable. This is unlikely to work in the long run. The Conservatives are also ideological adherents of the same Cultural Marxist causes, but individual leaders like Robert Jenrick appear aware of the need to move on to more sustainable turf. It remains to be seen if this is the latest in a long line of Conservative tricks. At the same time, the Reform Party is riding high in the polls, its ascent only limited by its leader’s adherence to the very same Cultural Marxist causes that have undermined the Conservative and Labour parties.

One way or another Britain will become more nationalistic and causes like immigration restriction and financial incentives for migrants to return home will be adopted. This will not return us to the demographics and culture of the 1930s, of course. Nevertheless, the Trump phenomenon, probably an interlude between Boomerism and genuine nationalism, has opened up space in the political discourse in the UK too. We must do everything to exploit this opportunity. The weakness of the US Empire is a chance to get out of the imperial ideologies, chief among which is multiracialism. Gen-Z is reacting to this confluence of geopolitical developments and political ideas by becoming more radical: the demonstrations against migrant hotels are one instance of this. I should add that such demonstrations should NOT be accompanied by violence, but our economic travails mean we can’t afford to be pursuing Boomer causes like the refugee scam any longer. We can’t afford to subsidise in our shores millions of people who turn up to sit on benefits (and even where they don’t do that are hostile to us).

We seem to be finally sloughing off the legacy of the Second World War. Although Gen-Z is racially divided, those who are English should strongly support our identity and vocally condemn those who continue to peddle outdated causes like anti-colonialism and white guilt. We can’t force all the minorities to return home, but can insist that they do not campaign against us in our own country and in our schools and in every institution in this country. We need to discredit the ideology of the Boomers root and branch. Maybe we can start by pointing out that the Second World War was never a war against nationalism, racism and fascism to begin with—and that the demise of our Empire was the worst thing to happen to the world. There is still time to forcefully rescue our own identity in our country—and the rise of countries like China and India will eventually leave us no other choice than to do so. Boomerism has been like a pall on our consciousness. Those who peddle Boomerism are living in the past—and it is they who are truly on the wrong side of history. We cannot just assert that, however, as if history had a “side”. All we can really do is to really make that true. Once the dam breaks, there will be many who join our side and, indeed, who will assert that they were opposed to Cultural Marxism all along…