Time to check out of politics
The case for cultivating our own gardens
They are, to borrow their parlance, flooding the zone with shit. Some of the shit even has an entertaining quality, like say the US going to war with Denmark, which would allow the Danes to prove just how atavistically their Viking roots lie. And this is not just in the UK; Giorgia Meloni has a 57% approval rating, the AFD pulled in 20% of German voters, and even in the UK we have a centre-left government so cowed by the spectre of populism that they’re proposing illegal immigrants be permanently barred from British citizenship. Because famously no-one who ever came to a country illegally ever achieved anything of note there.
In the first Trump term, his opponents had enough energy left for outrage, for pussy hats and denunciatory Tweets. Now Twitter is a far-right petri dish and the left is downsizing to a Blue-Skyed echo chamber.
It’s not only that American liberals lost. It’s that they lost following a Biden administration which delivered on many of liberals’ traditional priorities or at the very least their theory of how to become popular. Give the people stuff and create jobs and they’d reward you with the votes. It really was the closest thing we’ve seen to that old timey big government New Deal energy and voters, if not hating it outright, rejected it for an austerity literally on ketamine.
To the extent people like me had a solution to that populist energy, it was in massive public investment, like the US’ IRA climate bill or Labour’s commitment to 1.5 million new homes. Leaving aside that neither the Democrats then or Labour now may have the best people to sell interventionist government, they still don’t seem to cut through, or at least stick in the media landscape we have now. The centre-left seems exhausted, and its wins at the moment feel like only brief respite from the populists.
The energy is with them – they have something to break. You only really need to know what you oppose to win elections, albeit not to govern, and the putative alliance of techno-libertarianism and emergent fascists know what they hate; the liberal world order that made their prosperity possible. They believe in no limits for the elites while the citizenry below should dedicate themselves to traditional family lives. Biedermeier on Mars, as it were.
It’s a bad scene, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. I’ve sat on in enough long anticapitalist meetings where a brilliantly executed critique of the existing system gives way into an awkward silence as to what to replace it with, which is better than flat-out advocating for communism I suppose. Until recently my answer would have usually been that all that was needed was a social democracy confident in itself.
But traditional social democracy is currently not proving bold enough against the disruptive populist energy. Scholz, Albanese, Trudeau, Starmer; these men look like intervals to the periods in power of the nutjobs, look dated, focus-grouped, and bereft of the honest malevolence of the far-right. These politicians don't aim big enough and don't get enough time to create permanent change; in face of diminished state capacity, they are left to tinker with the existing system.
And yes, nutjobs. Whackos. Kooks. Make no mistake, a lot of the Musk crowd are into some seriously dark shit. We’ve seen, as ever, what happens to people playing fascists for a laugh; they just end up as fascists. From the outside, someone doing a Nazi salute for a laugh is identical to someone doing a Nazi salute out of ideological conviction. As ever a lot of the rage of these people seems to be at that most unbeatable enemy, your former self; as recently as 2016, Elon Musk was saying that Donald Trump did not have the character to be President. Opposing social justice politics has brought many to a very peculiar place, where a critique has become a worldview and an authoritarian one too.
Personally, I’ve disliked wokeness as much as any genuinely liberal-minded person, but unless you’re at a liberal arts college and it’s still 2018 where you are, the Very Online Left is no longer the biggest problem in town. Anti-woke is now in charge running the world’s largest military, not that the anti-woke podcasts seem to have noticed, as they still try and pretend things are still as at the febrile political moment which created them. Self-righteous social justice zealots remain annoying; they are not, I contend, the key problem facing the planet in 2025.
There’s one thing, however, that I advise anyone against doing, and that’s following every tiny detail of the current political car crash. A lot of this stuff is intellectual junk. Executive orders banning plastic straws and crackpipe dreams of annexing Canada, the world filtered through the prejudices of an ageing and impulsive boomer, like basing foreign policy on a trove of rediscovered 1980s’ VHS tapes. It must give Trump an enormous sense of security that the bad guy is once again Russia.
I feel sorry for all the various serious minds forced to waste their best years on this stuff – attention-grabbing as populism is, its energy is not insight. You can't run the United States government like Brian Clough coming into Leeds. Still, whatever its gruesome fascination, in the top five regrets of the dying, ‘I wish I’d followed the Trump White House more closely’ seems unlikely to feature. No-one will go to their grave wishing they’d thought more about Elon Musk, including most probably Elon Musk.
Am I advocating ignorance? Not about everything; there are always an infinite amount of things to find out about. You could read a history of Viking Northumberland or learn about Jupiter’s moons. It has 95, you know. But as for the minutiae of geopolitics - and with the exception of if you happen to be a high-ranking judge in the United States - yes. Ignore them. For the time being, leave the live tracker and the 24-hour news network well alone.
This is a wild and incoherent political moment, with an ideological architecture so internally contradictory as to be fundamentally unsound. There will be some form of internal collapse. Musk will inevitably, just like Dominic Cummings in the UK, end up outside the tent pissing messily in.
But at the moment, the only real option seems to be to let that play itself out. To try and take a step back and engage with the moment more deeply; read off paper, do some thinking about your views rather than expressing them. Talk less and more sense. Whenever there’s the opportunity to – and if the option persists – vote, and get these bastards out. You need to stay just informed enough to do that.
Beyond that there’s little point exhausting yourself with each detail of what these chancers are up to in the White House or what the latest small-time European populist has said. What they have is energy, and they shouldn’t demand yours. We’re past the moment when social media could be presented as activism, and the period where it was certainly didn’t seem to benefit the fortunes of the left.
One of the things that will ultimately defeat Trumpism and its ilk is its lack of a sense of the common good. Humans are a social species with an intrinsic sense of collaboration; we will always find our way back to some sense of community as it is that, rather than zero-sum thinking, which has powered our survival. That is a more profound challenge to the Trumpian worldview than a thousand memes about mushroom dicks.
For now, that is what I advocate people to do, to focus, in minute detail, on the circumstances of their own lives. Of course, this retreat into the personal is always to an extent what darkening times facilitate, and I'm not advocating for downplaying the dangerousness of the people now creating chaos in our institutions, as some ostensibly intelligent people have done. Just that exhausting yourselves in anguish at the populist grotesquerie is no form of effective opposition.
Be kind to those you know and meet, be generous where you can and your work and family life allows, and embody some some kind of resistance to the lack of class we’re seeing at the very top. I’m not sure love is the answer to everything, but its absence certainly explains a lot about Donald Trump.
I had a friend who died. Her name was Alex. She was very left-wing, always off to socialist events.
Towards the end of her life, as she fought melanoma, she came to a realization. The reason that people didn’t get involved in revolutionary politics was not because they didn’t want change but they were simply overwhelmed by the challenges of the everyday. This is of course also why it makes sense that a government by plutocrats is so ideological; they can afford to indulge in abstract ideas.
Alex loved a quote, this from Milan Kundera:
During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages to guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. - from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Who knows what will be our age’s equivalent of the blackbird’s migration?
In 100 years we’ll probably all be much more likely to remember the inauguration of Everton FC’s new stadium than anything those goons in the White House are up to. I know that it is a rare privilege to have time to watch the world closely enough to even intuit what might be the real story. What is really happening in 2025? Areas of the world are after all still getting better. Parts of Africa and Asia seem full of hope.
Yes, it is time to look after our own gardens for a while. Ignore these rich men and their particular method of wasting their one and only lives. We have no control over them but we do over our own little plots. There have been worse times than this and good people who lived in them, and it was their robust personal integrity – and I believe integrity has been possible in every political epoch – which paved the way for the better lives we now live. It is our own integrity which will pave the way for the better lives to come.