Oct 4, 2025 01:10 AM
Our American masters have moved on
https://unherd.com/2025/10/the-extinctio...liberalism
INTRO: With the rump Conservative Party assembling in Manchester, so begins what is effectively the fifth Reform conference of the year: for Farage’s immanent presence now suffuses the entirety of British politics, turning the probability of an incoming Reform government into a near certainty. If European philosophy, as A.N. Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, British politics is now merely a series of hesitantly defiant ripostes and sassy fact checks to Reform.
From late-life TikToker and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s bizarre claims that Reform will import America’s culture of school shootings, to noted Labour intellectual and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy’s hurriedly retracted assertion that the younger, and presumably time-warping Farage once “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, the waning forces of British Left-liberalism have retreated onto the comforting plane of fantasy, as their worldview crumbles into dust.
For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial centre. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course.
Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalisation would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change.
Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.
But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalisation was always just a superficial Americanisation, from which America itself has now withdrawn.
Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.
It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron... (MORE - details)
https://unherd.com/2025/10/the-extinctio...liberalism
INTRO: With the rump Conservative Party assembling in Manchester, so begins what is effectively the fifth Reform conference of the year: for Farage’s immanent presence now suffuses the entirety of British politics, turning the probability of an incoming Reform government into a near certainty. If European philosophy, as A.N. Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, British politics is now merely a series of hesitantly defiant ripostes and sassy fact checks to Reform.
From late-life TikToker and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s bizarre claims that Reform will import America’s culture of school shootings, to noted Labour intellectual and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy’s hurriedly retracted assertion that the younger, and presumably time-warping Farage once “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, the waning forces of British Left-liberalism have retreated onto the comforting plane of fantasy, as their worldview crumbles into dust.
For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial centre. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course.
Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalisation would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change.
Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.
But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalisation was always just a superficial Americanisation, from which America itself has now withdrawn.
Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.
It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron... (MORE - details)
