A meme has taken hold in the online right ahead of this year’s UK general election: Zero Seats. It is both a wish and a promise: to repay the Conservative party for 14 years of betraying the British public. Although the Tories look to retain some true-blue constituencies, they are forecast to suffer their worst election in a century. But Zero Seats is more than a call to desolate the Conservative party electorally, as they have Britain culturally, economically, and demographically. Refusing to vote for the Conservative party in its current form is an ambition to lift the post-war paradigm that lies like a dead hand upon national politics.
Following the First World War, F. Scott Fitzgerald prophesied “a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” But his prediction was premature. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the consciences of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers were so wracked by atrocities that a disjunction was made with the past, and a new politics of international cooperation, the alleviation of psychological repression, and antiracism was created to ensure another Holocaust was never perpetrated. Our politics has run in place since 1945. While the aims of this politics were indisputably noble, its faulty premises have played out to disastrous effects decades later—including for the Jewish people it aimed to protect.
Let’s appropriate a pejorative label for this paradigm: Boomer Truth. Under Boomer Truth, a country, culture, and people cannot act on behalf of their own particular interests—only on behalf of those not yet basking in the light of liberal imperialism, at the End of History—for fear of an undue comparison to Adolf Hitler. This mindset is a paralysing agent and isn’t confined to Boomers alone; it passes the permeable barrier between generations, with diminishing returns the further it travels in time from its inciting incident. The European Union said as much in their attempt to establish “a shared European history.” They insisted on the importance of acknowledging “crimes committed by Nazi, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes as well as under colonialism”—as if Britain’s Empire were indistinguishable from the Third Reich. Such crimes “serve as a ‘negative foundation myth’ and provide a strong sense of purpose for the European peace project.”
Despite disentangling itself on paper from the European project, the UK lives beneath Boomer Truth too. When polling looks bleak, Tories pay lip service to the time of Margaret Thatcher. Harkening back to a period of electoral success, both liberal internationalists and Eurosceptic social conservatives claim to be the true inheritors of the Iron Lady’s legacy. This amounts to little more than puppeteering her proverbial corpse around by regurgitating lukewarm neoliberal talking points on terrestrial television. But what both squabbling siblings fail to recognise is that microwaved Thatcherism is why the Conservative party remains incapable of conserving anything but the liberalism which eats away like acid at parochial traditions.
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Jewish-American academic Yoram Hazony charted the course of the conservative movement during the Cold War. In the United States, William F. Buckley Jr.’s doctrine of Fusionism brought disaffected, anti-communist liberals like Frank Meyer into coalition with conservatives like Russel Kirk, and delivered Ronald Reagan the presidency. In the UK, Hazony observed that Thatcherism similarly germinated from Friedrich Hayek’s liberalism. Having fled Austria in 1932, Hayek warned Europe that “it is Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating.” He elaborates:
There is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany [following the First World War] and the present current of ideas in the democracies.
To avert course from Soviet communism and German Nazism alike, politics must preserve individual liberty as the “highest political end,” “supreme principle,” and “ultimate ideal.” Hayek’s anxieties animated Thatcher’s anti-socialism. Different nations, cultures, and traditions were recast as liberal individualist, in Thatcher’s narrative of opposition to totalitarian collectivism. Such was the claim made by Mrs. Thatcher, that “There is no such thing as society”—only its individual constituents with a plurality of self-interests. Thus, the liberal state exists to be the parameters in which the self-authoring individual pursues those interests, unencumbered by social expectation, historical precedent, or peer discrimination.
This fear of acting in ways which invite comparison to Adolf Hitler paralyses politicians to inaction on behalf of Anglo-European peoples, cultures, and nations, as distinct entities beyond atomised individuals. As Ralph Schoellhammer says, they ask ‘What would Hitler do?’, and do the opposite—even when the policy is not the exclusive domain of National Socialists. This fear is why every contemporary political conversation feels like a countdown to someone invoking Adolf Hitler to insult their opponents. Even Mike Godwin himself has fallen afoul of his eponymous law. Leo Strauss—who, like Hayek, feared Britain and America retreading the same road Germany took to Nazism—called this tendency reductio ad Hitlerum.
Renaud Camus has called this antibody reaction to being seen to impose collective responsibilities, or hold in-group preferences for one’s own culture or nation, “the Second Career of Adolf Hitler.” A nation can no longer justify itself without making a religion of antiracism, as proof of its non-Nazi credentials. Britain now goes out of its way to redistribute resources to non-natives as patronage. It dislodges its subjects from their history, land, and culture, declaring its irretrievable corruption to prove their non-racism. In this way, the memory of the evils of Adolf Hitler dictates the politics of even the nations which went to war with him: hence the Holocaust memorial being built beside Parliament, despite Churchill’s statue already standing in Parliament Square.
This antiracism functions as if the false anthropology of liberalism were true—that human beings are blank slates. To avoid affiliations with the evils of Nazism, our immigration policy works on the assumption of an egalitarian fundamental sameness, an ignorance of cultural prejudices which some peoples are unwilling to part with even when material conditions improve. We pretend that reason is exercised in equal capacity by all persons and assume therefore that contact with our prosperous secular liberal civilisation will seem self-evidently preferable to even the most ardent Jihadean. Even Steven Pinker, who repudiated blank slateism two decades ago, wrote Enlightenment Now, suggesting that moral progress relies on the technological advancement of the scientific and liberal revolutions, and that all places and peoples may achieve equal peace and prosperity through replicating Western liberal secularism.
This supposition is expressed by the dismissal of ‘culture wars’ as a distraction. Incompatible and competing conceptions of the good are imported within the parameters of the liberal state; but when an inevitable clash occurs, its existential nature is marginalised by managers who hope that the precise allocation of material resources will ameliorate all conflicts. People are treated as fungible, interchangeable integers from a spreadsheet’s-eye-view. This is in market interest: with an increase in the working population creating competition for wages, driving down the cost of labour, and increasing the recruitment pool from which the exceptionally productive can be drawn. But it is inconsiderate of anything but the liberty of the individual to earn disposable income and consume commodities in isolation from culture, history, and social responsibilities.
Ironically, in ensuring the Cold War victory of this liberal individualism, Thatcher rendered her own tastes for immigration restriction unfashionable. As I explained in a previous essay, the logic of Hayekian liberalism leads ineluctably to scientific progress, aimed at alleviating privation and achieving material abundance. As such, more stuff was equated with the ability to persuade tribal, impoverished peoples to be as secular and liberal as post-war Britain. Her 1978 migration scepticism, couched in fears that Britain might be “swamped by people with a different culture” which undermine its democratic values, gave way to a “Golden Arches” optimism. At the End of History, all borders became like the Berlin Wall: needless impediments to the free exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Her Tory party has since insisted adequately managed improvements in material conditions can ameliorate all cultural conflicts, and foster cooperation on “post-ideological” humanitarian goals. When speaking of “British values,” they refer only to the inoffensive, inclusive tenets of liberalism: freedom, individualism, and tolerance. They describe a container, but never its contents.
The man Thatcher called her greatest achievement, Tony Blair, went on to decree globalisation to be as inevitable as the changing seasons, and set Britain on the course to mass immigration. This was, according to Blair’s speechwriter Andrew Neather, also a “deliberate policy … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity” and to render the position of cultural parochialism “out of date.” Mass immigration was not, as Fraser Nelson insists, “an accident.” Rather, it was a conscious and inevitable consequence of the liberal post-war project, which regards human beings as infinitely mouldable by market demand, and insists they be seen that way lest the charge of racism be levelled at you. Mass immigration was a decision made by a Conservative party trapped in the Boomer Truth paradigm. It will remain that way until forced otherwise.
This is what Camus conceived of as the Great Replacement: the treatment of particular peoples, cultures, and histories as interchangeable “Undifferentiated Human Matter.” But to call it an “antisemitic conspiracy theory,” as Wikipedia does, is a discourteous smear. Camus used the term to warn French Jews against the mistaken belief that all foreigners are like their ancestors, fleeing persecution. Laws like the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention were written to prevent the repetition of Jews being returned to their deaths in Germany. But in extending those to Islamist sympathisers seeking personal enrichment in Europe, liberals have ensured the spectral “Second Career of Adolf Hitler” gives rise to the very real threat of Muslim antisemitism. Now, liberals like Bella Wallersteiner express horror at how the permissive immigration policies they once supported have erased the considerations and protections given to Jews, peculiar to the Christian English-speaking world.
The six-month anniversary of the atrocities on October 7th just passed. A salience of the role of Jewish people in politics has since become ubiquitous. Just as in 2019, when Corbyn’s Labour party faced accusations of antisemitism, the self-preservation of Jews will influence this year’s general election. While the Conservative party claims to act on their behalf, they—under the blank slate delusion of Boomer Truth—imported the millions of Hamas sympathisers who now chant “intifada from London to Gaza” every week in Westminster. British Jews can make common cause with social conservatives who pour scorn on the party for disarming them of objections to non-consensual demographic and cultural change. They now have just as much a stake in seeing Boomer Truth wither and die, as Jews before them did in buying into it, thinking it would protect them.
The time to do so is now: both because of the impending election, and because of the simultaneous wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas. Our geopolitical moment has been misconstrued by Boomer media as a rerun of the Holocaust and Cold War. But the comparison doesn’t quite line up. With this low-resolution view, One Nation Tories appear to be tilting at 20th century windmills, and losing support from what would otherwise be a conservative base. An alternative, committed more to conserving English culture, traditions, and history, than advancing the liberal ideal beneath the banner of Boomer Truth, will prove popular in years to come.
There will be many bemoaning the loss of the potency of Nazi comparisons in politics, fearing the rise of something resembling the Third Reich. To those people I say, as I recently explained on TRIGGERnometry, that whether or not we transition to a new political paradigm is not up for negotiation—only how we do it. The passage of time will ensure that, the further we get from the Second World War, revolutionary politics and centralised power are less taboo for those born since 1997, when things did not in fact get better. A 2022 Onward report found 58% to 66% of voters aged 18-35 support “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections,” and 45% to 59% support “putting the army in charge.” Sheer desperation to have something be done in the national interest will take precedence over the hold the Second World War has on the political imagination.
The question remains: will that reactionary rising power extend neighbourly consideration to minority groups who have an affinity for Britain; or be wholly exclusionary out of an abundance of caution, and a rejection of reductio ad Hitlerium? Ensuring the former requires an honest recognition of the limits placed on positive and preferential political action by Boomer Truth.
Let me be clear: I am not endorsing voting for the Labour party. Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising company which generated Thatcher’s election-winning “Labour Isn’t Working” slogan in 1979, have started working for Sir Keir Starmer. Both parties exist within the post-war liberal milieu, and are indistinguishable in the types of top-down civilisational transformation they offer. Instead, I am only saying that conscience dictates I cannot vote for the present Conservative party, and hope that a better cohort of politicians take their place.
Play Boomer Politics, Get Zero Seats
Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash
A meme has taken hold in the online right ahead of this year’s UK general election: Zero Seats. It is both a wish and a promise: to repay the Conservative party for 14 years of betraying the British public. Although the Tories look to retain some true-blue constituencies, they are forecast to suffer their worst election in a century. But Zero Seats is more than a call to desolate the Conservative party electorally, as they have Britain culturally, economically, and demographically. Refusing to vote for the Conservative party in its current form is an ambition to lift the post-war paradigm that lies like a dead hand upon national politics.
Following the First World War, F. Scott Fitzgerald prophesied “a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” But his prediction was premature. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the consciences of the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers were so wracked by atrocities that a disjunction was made with the past, and a new politics of international cooperation, the alleviation of psychological repression, and antiracism was created to ensure another Holocaust was never perpetrated. Our politics has run in place since 1945. While the aims of this politics were indisputably noble, its faulty premises have played out to disastrous effects decades later—including for the Jewish people it aimed to protect.
Let’s appropriate a pejorative label for this paradigm: Boomer Truth. Under Boomer Truth, a country, culture, and people cannot act on behalf of their own particular interests—only on behalf of those not yet basking in the light of liberal imperialism, at the End of History—for fear of an undue comparison to Adolf Hitler. This mindset is a paralysing agent and isn’t confined to Boomers alone; it passes the permeable barrier between generations, with diminishing returns the further it travels in time from its inciting incident. The European Union said as much in their attempt to establish “a shared European history.” They insisted on the importance of acknowledging “crimes committed by Nazi, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes as well as under colonialism”—as if Britain’s Empire were indistinguishable from the Third Reich. Such crimes “serve as a ‘negative foundation myth’ and provide a strong sense of purpose for the European peace project.”
Despite disentangling itself on paper from the European project, the UK lives beneath Boomer Truth too. When polling looks bleak, Tories pay lip service to the time of Margaret Thatcher. Harkening back to a period of electoral success, both liberal internationalists and Eurosceptic social conservatives claim to be the true inheritors of the Iron Lady’s legacy. This amounts to little more than puppeteering her proverbial corpse around by regurgitating lukewarm neoliberal talking points on terrestrial television. But what both squabbling siblings fail to recognise is that microwaved Thatcherism is why the Conservative party remains incapable of conserving anything but the liberalism which eats away like acid at parochial traditions.
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Jewish-American academic Yoram Hazony charted the course of the conservative movement during the Cold War. In the United States, William F. Buckley Jr.’s doctrine of Fusionism brought disaffected, anti-communist liberals like Frank Meyer into coalition with conservatives like Russel Kirk, and delivered Ronald Reagan the presidency. In the UK, Hazony observed that Thatcherism similarly germinated from Friedrich Hayek’s liberalism. Having fled Austria in 1932, Hayek warned Europe that “it is Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating.” He elaborates:
To avert course from Soviet communism and German Nazism alike, politics must preserve individual liberty as the “highest political end,” “supreme principle,” and “ultimate ideal.” Hayek’s anxieties animated Thatcher’s anti-socialism. Different nations, cultures, and traditions were recast as liberal individualist, in Thatcher’s narrative of opposition to totalitarian collectivism. Such was the claim made by Mrs. Thatcher, that “There is no such thing as society”—only its individual constituents with a plurality of self-interests. Thus, the liberal state exists to be the parameters in which the self-authoring individual pursues those interests, unencumbered by social expectation, historical precedent, or peer discrimination.
This fear of acting in ways which invite comparison to Adolf Hitler paralyses politicians to inaction on behalf of Anglo-European peoples, cultures, and nations, as distinct entities beyond atomised individuals. As Ralph Schoellhammer says, they ask ‘What would Hitler do?’, and do the opposite—even when the policy is not the exclusive domain of National Socialists. This fear is why every contemporary political conversation feels like a countdown to someone invoking Adolf Hitler to insult their opponents. Even Mike Godwin himself has fallen afoul of his eponymous law. Leo Strauss—who, like Hayek, feared Britain and America retreading the same road Germany took to Nazism—called this tendency reductio ad Hitlerum.
Renaud Camus has called this antibody reaction to being seen to impose collective responsibilities, or hold in-group preferences for one’s own culture or nation, “the Second Career of Adolf Hitler.” A nation can no longer justify itself without making a religion of antiracism, as proof of its non-Nazi credentials. Britain now goes out of its way to redistribute resources to non-natives as patronage. It dislodges its subjects from their history, land, and culture, declaring its irretrievable corruption to prove their non-racism. In this way, the memory of the evils of Adolf Hitler dictates the politics of even the nations which went to war with him: hence the Holocaust memorial being built beside Parliament, despite Churchill’s statue already standing in Parliament Square.
This antiracism functions as if the false anthropology of liberalism were true—that human beings are blank slates. To avoid affiliations with the evils of Nazism, our immigration policy works on the assumption of an egalitarian fundamental sameness, an ignorance of cultural prejudices which some peoples are unwilling to part with even when material conditions improve. We pretend that reason is exercised in equal capacity by all persons and assume therefore that contact with our prosperous secular liberal civilisation will seem self-evidently preferable to even the most ardent Jihadean. Even Steven Pinker, who repudiated blank slateism two decades ago, wrote Enlightenment Now, suggesting that moral progress relies on the technological advancement of the scientific and liberal revolutions, and that all places and peoples may achieve equal peace and prosperity through replicating Western liberal secularism.
This supposition is expressed by the dismissal of ‘culture wars’ as a distraction. Incompatible and competing conceptions of the good are imported within the parameters of the liberal state; but when an inevitable clash occurs, its existential nature is marginalised by managers who hope that the precise allocation of material resources will ameliorate all conflicts. People are treated as fungible, interchangeable integers from a spreadsheet’s-eye-view. This is in market interest: with an increase in the working population creating competition for wages, driving down the cost of labour, and increasing the recruitment pool from which the exceptionally productive can be drawn. But it is inconsiderate of anything but the liberty of the individual to earn disposable income and consume commodities in isolation from culture, history, and social responsibilities.
Ironically, in ensuring the Cold War victory of this liberal individualism, Thatcher rendered her own tastes for immigration restriction unfashionable. As I explained in a previous essay, the logic of Hayekian liberalism leads ineluctably to scientific progress, aimed at alleviating privation and achieving material abundance. As such, more stuff was equated with the ability to persuade tribal, impoverished peoples to be as secular and liberal as post-war Britain. Her 1978 migration scepticism, couched in fears that Britain might be “swamped by people with a different culture” which undermine its democratic values, gave way to a “Golden Arches” optimism. At the End of History, all borders became like the Berlin Wall: needless impediments to the free exchange of goods, ideas, and people. Her Tory party has since insisted adequately managed improvements in material conditions can ameliorate all cultural conflicts, and foster cooperation on “post-ideological” humanitarian goals. When speaking of “British values,” they refer only to the inoffensive, inclusive tenets of liberalism: freedom, individualism, and tolerance. They describe a container, but never its contents.
The man Thatcher called her greatest achievement, Tony Blair, went on to decree globalisation to be as inevitable as the changing seasons, and set Britain on the course to mass immigration. This was, according to Blair’s speechwriter Andrew Neather, also a “deliberate policy … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity” and to render the position of cultural parochialism “out of date.” Mass immigration was not, as Fraser Nelson insists, “an accident.” Rather, it was a conscious and inevitable consequence of the liberal post-war project, which regards human beings as infinitely mouldable by market demand, and insists they be seen that way lest the charge of racism be levelled at you. Mass immigration was a decision made by a Conservative party trapped in the Boomer Truth paradigm. It will remain that way until forced otherwise.
This is what Camus conceived of as the Great Replacement: the treatment of particular peoples, cultures, and histories as interchangeable “Undifferentiated Human Matter.” But to call it an “antisemitic conspiracy theory,” as Wikipedia does, is a discourteous smear. Camus used the term to warn French Jews against the mistaken belief that all foreigners are like their ancestors, fleeing persecution. Laws like the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention were written to prevent the repetition of Jews being returned to their deaths in Germany. But in extending those to Islamist sympathisers seeking personal enrichment in Europe, liberals have ensured the spectral “Second Career of Adolf Hitler” gives rise to the very real threat of Muslim antisemitism. Now, liberals like Bella Wallersteiner express horror at how the permissive immigration policies they once supported have erased the considerations and protections given to Jews, peculiar to the Christian English-speaking world.
The six-month anniversary of the atrocities on October 7th just passed. A salience of the role of Jewish people in politics has since become ubiquitous. Just as in 2019, when Corbyn’s Labour party faced accusations of antisemitism, the self-preservation of Jews will influence this year’s general election. While the Conservative party claims to act on their behalf, they—under the blank slate delusion of Boomer Truth—imported the millions of Hamas sympathisers who now chant “intifada from London to Gaza” every week in Westminster. British Jews can make common cause with social conservatives who pour scorn on the party for disarming them of objections to non-consensual demographic and cultural change. They now have just as much a stake in seeing Boomer Truth wither and die, as Jews before them did in buying into it, thinking it would protect them.
The time to do so is now: both because of the impending election, and because of the simultaneous wars between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Hamas. Our geopolitical moment has been misconstrued by Boomer media as a rerun of the Holocaust and Cold War. But the comparison doesn’t quite line up. With this low-resolution view, One Nation Tories appear to be tilting at 20th century windmills, and losing support from what would otherwise be a conservative base. An alternative, committed more to conserving English culture, traditions, and history, than advancing the liberal ideal beneath the banner of Boomer Truth, will prove popular in years to come.
There will be many bemoaning the loss of the potency of Nazi comparisons in politics, fearing the rise of something resembling the Third Reich. To those people I say, as I recently explained on TRIGGERnometry, that whether or not we transition to a new political paradigm is not up for negotiation—only how we do it. The passage of time will ensure that, the further we get from the Second World War, revolutionary politics and centralised power are less taboo for those born since 1997, when things did not in fact get better. A 2022 Onward report found 58% to 66% of voters aged 18-35 support “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections,” and 45% to 59% support “putting the army in charge.” Sheer desperation to have something be done in the national interest will take precedence over the hold the Second World War has on the political imagination.
The question remains: will that reactionary rising power extend neighbourly consideration to minority groups who have an affinity for Britain; or be wholly exclusionary out of an abundance of caution, and a rejection of reductio ad Hitlerium? Ensuring the former requires an honest recognition of the limits placed on positive and preferential political action by Boomer Truth.
Let me be clear: I am not endorsing voting for the Labour party. Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising company which generated Thatcher’s election-winning “Labour Isn’t Working” slogan in 1979, have started working for Sir Keir Starmer. Both parties exist within the post-war liberal milieu, and are indistinguishable in the types of top-down civilisational transformation they offer. Instead, I am only saying that conscience dictates I cannot vote for the present Conservative party, and hope that a better cohort of politicians take their place.
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