The grass between the bricks.

That’s a photo I took this morning of the bricks in my driveway at home.

I was doing some gardening on the weekend and I was thinking that the bricks look impenetrable but somehow between the cracks grass always finds a way to grow.

I was contemplating that as I was reading an oped by Ezra Klein about the new world of Donald Trump in yesterday’s New York Times. Klein pointed out that while in electoral terms, Trump’s victory was relatively small, the impact of his win felt enormous. This was partly because Trump’s success reflected the ‘vibe shift’ the victory represented. Klein referred to a piece written in July last year by the American economist, Tyler Cowen, ‘The changes in vibes – why did they happen?’ In Cowen’s words those reasons included:

• The ‘Trumpian Right’, whether you agree with it or not, has been more intellectually alive and vital than the Progressive Left, at least during the last five years, maybe more.
• The Obama administration brought, to some degree, both the reality and the perception of being ruled by the intellectual class. People didn’t like that.
• Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.

Cowen added a few points at the end:

• Trump is funny (he is one of the great American comics in fact).
• Trump acts like a winner. Americans like this, and his response to the failed assassination attempt drove this point home.

(About 50% of what Cowen says about America applies to Australia. Much of the explanation for that missing 50% is that we don’t have a Trump.)

Klein and Cowen, like many other commentators, including Niall Ferguson who I mentioned last week, talk of the change in ‘the vibe’ as a shift in the culture. I tend to think of what’s happening to the public culture as less of a shift and more like what’s occurring on my driveway. The bricks haven’t shifted. Today’s legacy media and existing corporate, cultural, and civic institutions are the bricks. In the gaps between the bricks, grass grows. The alternative and honest voice to the orthodoxy of today’s media and public culture is the grass. The public now has alternatives to the traditional television channels and the morning newspaper. The rise of social media has made it more difficult for the government and established institutions to control dissident voices – but that doesn’t stop politicians trying.

From time to time I’m asked by those who receive this email who I read on Substack and I thought that as we’re getting into 2025 and you plan your reading for the year ahead you might be interested in these suggestions. I’ll add to the list during the year.

David McGrogan – News from Uncibal

I first came across David’s work on the brilliant Daily Sceptic website in the UK, and I looked him up and discovered he had a Substack. One of my favourite posts of his is ‘Machiavelli’s Bear Hunt – The only way out is through’ from last year. It brilliantly captures our current condition.

Across the West, people are in a bleak state of mind. This I think is one of the rare opinions that unites people across the political spectrum, and on both sides of our rumbling culture war: an inchoate sense that things are going quite rapidly downhill.

On what is called ‘the left’ this tends to be associated with apocalyptic fears about the climate, about pandemics and other health concerns, or a resurgence of fascism. On ‘the right’ it appears in a generalised sense that entropy beckons: freedom, civility, competence, excellence, the sense of national belonging, all appear to be ebbing away at an alarming rate.

At such times inquiring minds naturally turn to the question of what is to be done. This is a dangerous question to ask. And it is also, in an important sense, a slightly misleading one. There are things that people who care about the future can do – and I will come to those in due course. But the trajectory which we are on is, I am afraid to say, more or less fixed. This is because our problem is modernity itself and the way in which it must inevitably, play out.

As the famous children’s book, ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’, has it, we can’t go over it, we can’t go around it – we have to go through it. This is the bad news: things are going to get worse and worse. The good news, if we can put it that way, is that once we are through it, things will probably improve.

David is an associate law professor at Northumbria Law School and writes about politics, political philosophy, history – and the intersection of all three. He understands the ‘civilisational moment’ we are living through. He is always thoughtful and thought-provoking; when I read him, I always learn something new. This is how he started his most recent piece.

The country is at an inflection point. Leaving aside the bewildered clingers-on, the old-age-pensioners in the room, the Rory Stewarts and James O’Briens and Emily Maitlisses of the world, we can all I think sense that something is dying, and that something unknown is in the process of being born.

In order for a regime to endure, the values of the ‘some’ and the ‘many’ have to be roughly aligned – or, failing that, at the very least the ‘some’ must have a plausible account of why their rule is indispensable, so that the ‘many’ will accept them out of fear of the alternative.

We have for the last several decades been living in an age of misalignment of values. But for a long time the regime has been able to sustain itself through the ‘some’ portraying themselves as possessing the necessary competence to be indispensable. We are now reaching a point at which this is no longer possible.

This is partly a problem of sheer appearances – it is difficult to portray oneself as an efficient technocrat when one is patently ineffectual at everything one does.

I enjoyed David’s posts so much that I asked him to be a guest on the IPA’s ‘Encounters’ podcast series last year. You can watch my discussion with David here.

Matthew B Crawford – Archedelia

Given that David McGrogan works at a UK university and Matthew Crawford is at the University of Virginia in the U.S. maybe there’s hope yet for higher education in the English-speaking world. Crawford’s by-line – ‘I do philosophically informed cultural criticism, often with a historical angle. One of my unifying themes is the felt lack of individual agency in contemporary life. Why do we feel so smothered and stultified?’ – makes it sound as if what he’s writing is a bit depressing – which it isn’t at all. Like McGrogan, Crawford understands our challenging times, and like McGrogan, he’s optimistic for the long-term – it’s just getting through the short-term that’s the problem.

‘The vibe shift’ is one description of the end of the beginning of the twenty-first century’s phase of woke. Crawford calls it a potential ‘glasnost’. This is from a post last week.

Politically, this feels like a movement of re-set that is more significant than any I have lived through previously. The victim narratives that have provided a core cultural logic for the last few decades have gone eerily silent. It is hard to imagine BLM eruptions happening next summer with any real conviction or energy. Likewise, one doesn’t expect another round of MeToo defenestrations to be carried out in the legacy press – our version of the Inner Party purge.

Narratives of oppression have long anchored what Hannah Arendt already in the 1960s identified as a ‘politics of repudiation’ in which the governing classes point to the rottenness of America and thereby release themselves from allegiance to the nation, and from the claims of the common good upon their conscience…

Will this logic remain tenable?.. The phrase ‘American glasnost’ keeps popping into my head, by analogy with the ideological thaw that immediately preceded the fall of the Soviet Union… I don’t think the American empire is at risk of collapsing so precipitously, but the ideological thaw is palpable.

Bari Weiss – The Free Press

The tagline of the Free Press says it all, ‘A new media company built on the ideas that were once the bedrock of American journalism.’

Weiss is an American journalist who famously quit as opinion editor of The New York Times in 2020. In her resignation letter, which she made public, Weiss wrote:

…a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else…

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of the realm – language – is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes.

Three recent pieces on The Free Press demonstrate the breadth of discussions and take a perspective that’s unlikely to be found in the mainstream press.

• ‘Climate Change Did Not Cause the LA Fires’ is an interview with Steve Koonin, the author of ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’ and former undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration. According to Koonin – ‘What’s going on is not quite a conspiracy, but it’s an alignment of interests. The media want clicks and eyeballs, and it’s news when something catastrophic happens. Politicians can use ‘climate change’ as a vague and amorphous enemy to blame for bad things – instead of their incompetence.’
• Douglas Murray’s regular column ‘Things Worth Remembering’ a few days ago, was about the great Mark Steyn and his appearance in 2016 at a debate in Toronto on immigration. Steyn was up against Simon Schama. Steyn demolished Schama – ‘If the debate ring was a wrestling ring, then this was the moment Steyn slammed his opponents to the mat and made sure they stayed out. I wish more people had had his courage. If they had, then fewer people would have suffered.’
• ‘How Intellectuals Found God’ by Peter Savodnik on how ‘Almost 150 years after Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’ some of our most important thinkers are getting religion, includes an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who last year was baptized as a Christian.

Ali recalled a conversation she had with the British philosopher Roger Scruton shortly before he died in 2020.

‘I was telling him about my depression,’ Hirsi Ali said of Scruton, who belonged to the Church of England, ‘and he said, ‘If you don’t believe in God, at least believe in beauty.’ ‘Mozart, opera, church hymns – they were a way out of the dark she said.

She couldn’t help but be moved by something Scruton said: ‘The greatest works of art have been inspired by some connection to God.’

Thank you for your support.

Kind regards John