It is commonly observed that a profound malaise has struck conservative thought throughout the contemporary West, particularly across the Anglosphere. Strong circumstantial evidence of this is the peculiar situation in which political mavericks — sometimes obvious non-conservatives such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Donald Trump in the United States — successfully express anxieties that would ordinarily define the fears and aspirations of the electoral center-right, but which are systematically censored from political debate by the candidates of more “respectable” parties in the so-called “moderate” center.
Nevertheless, recent attempts to revitalize opposition to the “progressive” behemoth have obtained mixed results: Despite receiving almost 13 percent of the popular vote at the last general elections, UKIP (UK Independence Party) failed to increase its strength in the House of Commons beyond a single MP (member of parliament). Although it has managed to dent the mainstream political consensus — it is now the third largest electoral force in British politics — UKIP’s decisive defeat in the Oldham West and Royton by-election dampened any enthusiastic predictions of an imminent shift in the party-political culture of Albion.1 Its success in spearheading the campaign to exit Great Britain from the European Union cannot be overlooked, but if this victory is to foreshadow a substantial adjustment to the British political landscape, the party will urgently need to evolve into something other than a single issue political movement. Meanwhile, faux-conservatives in Canada have been vanquished by the son of an iconic ’60s progressive statesman, New Zealand’s allegedly conservative government has assimilated leftist policies for the sake of perceived electoral “relevance,” less than impressive candidates in the U.S. Republican presidential primaries have been consistently overshadowed by an individual who has been oddly described by centrist commentators as both an “outsider”2 and a “populist,”3 and Australia’s maverick Senator Cory Bernardi, despite being widely popular among core constituencies of the centre-right, remains largely isolated form his governing party’s power center.
Conversely, the recent elections in Poland have seen the all-but-literal eviction of the explicit-left from its houses of parliament, ushering in a new era in which ex- and post-communists have been wholly ejected from the country’s executive and lawmaking branches for the first time in history. The President and Premier (Andrzej Duda and Beata Szyd ło, respectively) have wasted no time in preparing sweeping reforms, appointments and changes to the administrative sector, electoral law, security apparatus, and the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal, perhaps paving a way to a national renovation similar to that of its southern neighbour, Hungary.4 With the earlier victory and consolidation of Budapest’s national-conservative government under Viktor Orbán, this represents a trend towards an assertive right at least in Central Europe, where a sincere alternative seems to be gaining popular traction against the cultural imperialism of Brussels and the political imperialism of a revanchist Moscow.
Given the different social background to each of these electoral phenomena, immediate comparisons can only be superficial, necessarily reductionist, and may therefore lead a policy analyst to error if attempting to devise a unified theory of how best to confront the political left at the ballot box. No such unified theory exists because local politics are always a function of the local people, their specific history and particular culture. The nature of conservative politics itself — being a creature of different national traditions — renders it a globally heterogeneous phenomenon, not easily susceptible to universalised systems of reform or advocacy. However, glimmers of reactionary success anywhere across the turbulent social landscape of the West can illustrate that, to borrow from the parlance of the revolutionary agitators of decades past: another world — is indeed — possible.
These reflections follow the predictable — and predicted — events in Paris of November 13, 2015, the subsequent wave of assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, and of course the Brussels, Orlando, Florida, and Nice terrorist attacks of March 22, June 12, and July 14 this year, respectively. Cultural elites from across the Continent through to London, New York, and Canberra, those who set the tone for “polite” discourse on topics such as immigration and citizenship need to be incessantly reminded that what occurred in France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States was entirely avoidable, had they only heeded the warnings of those they were instead busy denouncing as unworthy of political acknowledgment, as embarrassing affronts to the enlightened sensibilities of a post-Cold War universalist, end-of-history “consensus,” and routinely defamed as “nativists,” “extremists,” “bigots,” and the like.
And yet, despite the obvious and evident failure of leftist social theory, so-called “mainstream” or “establishment” conservatives on the whole are incapable of shaping what one might expect to be a popular culture in desperate search for an alternative to the status quo.
One explanation for this — but undoubtedly the most important — is that these “establicons” seem to accept the moral authority of the principles and ideas upon which their ostensible opponent’s ideology is founded. This acceptance creates mental reflexes that are indistinguishable from linear Whiggish historical determinism, and which necessarily leads to putatively “conservative” positions that are, on closer inspection, merely a rearticulation of fundamentally leftist concepts or ideas.5 Occasionally one can see the liberal pathogen infect the thought-lines of purported critics of the liberal establishment, and even those who identify with the academic right itself. When these are encountered, it is important to illustrate how they fail to offer a viable counter to the encroaching steamroller of “progress.”
In “Turning the West into a Wasteland” ( Daily Telegraph, October 1, 2015), Dr. Kevin Donnelly of the Australian Catholic University acknowledges the oppressive hegemony of left-liberalism in Australia’s cultural and political discourse. Donnelly has been a prominent defender and advocate of intellectual freedom and educational standards in Australia, and is currently the Director of the Melbourne-based Education Standards Institute. However, in the abovementioned article he makes the fatal mistake of relying on Somali anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in support of his appeal to defend the intellectual legacy of the West. As one of the most vocal critics of Islam in the English- speaking world, Ali should be commended for her fortitude and courage. However, her advice about how best to combat Islamic extremism is to “inculcate into the minds and hearts of young people an ideology or ideas of life, love, peace, and tolerance.” As will be explained below, Ali’s injunction is a half-truth because ideological appeals to “love, peace and tolerance” will too easily decay into an attitude that ultimately reveres universal acquiescence and therefore ultimate defencelessness as civic virtues. Thus, in a near-fatal blow to his own argument, Donnelly concludes, “these are the very attributes that define Western civilisation, which is why it must be defended.”6 (emphasis added)
Donnelly’s error lies in the fact that Ali’s “ideology or ideas” are precisely what have enervated Western political culture in the face of a robust and self-confident albeit primitivist opponent beyond our borders, and a disingenuous champion of deracinated radical egalitarianism within. While the West’s vulnerability is correctly blamed on cultural relativism, Donnelly does not seem to appreciate that appeals to “love, peace, and tolerance” all too often translate into doctrinaire non-discrimination in policy and law, wholesale acceptance of ‘the Other’ in cultural discourse (indeed, the more other, the more she is accepted) and provides the sentimentalist impulse towards the very relativism which is identified as the root of the problem: from “all love is equal” to “refugees welcome.” Both Ali and Donnelly strive to be part of the solution to the decay and mendacity of modern political discourse; however, here they have unfortunately internalised a mindset that will undermine their own critique, rendering it increasingly ineffective with the passage of time.
Let us recall that Angela Merkel’s risible contribution to the global hand-wringing post-Paris 13/11 was to reemphasise “compassion,” “charity,” “the joy of the community,” and of course “tolerance” as a response to the terrorist attacks.7 The mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, recommended that German women keep North African and Arab immigrants “at arm’s length” so as to mitigate the risks of sexual assault.8 One day before the Brussels attack, Belgium’s Minister for the Interior Jan Jambon suggested that the cause of Islamist extremism in Europe was due to Muslims not feeling sufficiently “at home.”9 After the terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, the U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch stated emphatically that “our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity, and love.”10 After the 2016 Bastille Day truck bombing in Nice, some media commentators have suggested that “human sympathy” is the only response, and “[b]eyond that, there is nothing we can usefully do.”11 These statements reflect an ideology that has informed the attitudes and worldview of Western elites for decades. The resulting inversion of priorities is perhaps a consequence of a debased or flattened understanding of virtue,12 and the ideology that naturally follows it results in absurd policy outcomes: emblematic was the November 5, 2005, Fort Hood massacre, after which a senior U.S. military official declared that “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”13 Likewise, after being warned by NATO of the increased threat risk of an ISIL “dirty bomb” attack in Europe, Belgium began to distribute iodine tablets to its citizens14 — its borders and immigration policies, however, remain unsealed and unaltered.
These are the “attributes” of an ideology that has paralysed the West into impotence before a medieval aggressor, not the “defining qualities” of a particular civilisation that appears to be under constant attack from without and within. Effeminate abstracta are the reason for the reflexive patheticism that characterises public responses to entirely avoidable catastrophes, from the New York World Trade Centre and London tube attacks, the Bali and Madrid Bombings, to the recent terrorising of the capitol of the European Union itself: public weeping, most nauseating when seen among men; the mind-numbingly vacuous sloganising of young girls, intoxicated by their pampered naïveté, waving banners that “welcome” agents of their demographic displacement and eventual enslavement; the sub-juvenile belief that illegal immigration is “an act of love,”15 or that “flowers and candles will protect us”16 from Islamist AK47s and exploding vests; no righteous anger, only pavement murals of multicoloured chalk17 while John Lennon’s “Imagine” echoes in the background18 — an appropriate soundtrack for a civilisation enamoured of its own self-negation.
More importantly — and returning to the malaise in modern rightist thought — this childish emotionality also blinds conservatives by sentimentalising tragedy and therefore making genuine reaction to its underlying cause largely impossible: pace the liberal status-signalling grief-stricken mob, we are not Charlie Hebdo. Nor are we in affinity with the Brussels bureaucratic elites, who have spent decades labouring to build Babylon on the Zenne, largely without the consent of their national constituents, and thus contributing to the destruction of the civilisation in whose name they shamelessly act. As for post-Revolutionary France — the mother of la ï cit é — it is more than a little ironic that a militantly secular republic has been repeatedly targeted by a religion whose vendetta against the People of the Cross dates back to the seventh century. It is perhaps a kind of perverse poetic justice that Islamists see what Western liberal secularists refuse to for their hatred of Throne and Altar: that enlightenment values would not exist were it not for the Christian cultural bedrock from which they sprung.
Nevertheless, to the conservative who sees Europe as inseparable from its Christian heritage, we are not Paris circa 2015, Brussels or Orlando Florida circa 2016 either. An overdose of “love, peace, and tolerance” renders the defenders and advocates of Western civilization incapable of discerning with what and whom they should declare their solidarity in times of crisis and turmoil. Conservatives of any description embarrass themselves when they stand shoulder to shoulder with any ideology that has not only paved the way towards its own self-destruction, but has demonstrated no “love, peace, and tolerance” towards Christians or cultural traditionalists themselves. What the Bataclan and Pulse nightclubs represent is inimical to the spirit of Western restorationists; placing oneself among their ranks is a mindless self-contradiction that can do nothing but undermine and discredit calls for a return to a healthy, stable, and functional social order.
Thus cultural Marxists and local Jihadi sympathisers alike have effectively weaponised our weaknesses by turning what the generation of ’68 erroneously believes is our civilizational “essence” against us. It is counterproductive to pretend that these weaknesses represent the fundamentals of who and what we are, as Ali, Donnelly, and countless others in the mainstream parties of the self-described centre-right routinely do. Stressing the “softer” aspects of Western society in the face of those who reject their underlying liberal assumptions or refuse to “play nice” becomes a kind of thought-retarding autoimmune deficiency. Decontextualized calls to mercy without a sense of cultural fortitude or national identity eventually beget the politics of surrender. It leads to what is sometimes described as pathological altruism, a selective moral outrage, willing blindness, and the inability to take one’s own side in a conflict of competing group interests, all under the impulse of compassion ü ber alles. Why else is it that the names Dylan Roof, Trayvon Martin, and Aylan Kurdi are globally recognisable but not Nkosi Thandiwe, Jonathan Foster, or any of the “Rotherham 1,400?”
What Donnelly appeals to is therefore part of the oppressive liberal hegemony that he otherwise rightly decries and denounces. This is the political theology of the Australian uterati, from Penny Wong to Peta Credlin; its presence within “conservative” ranks has proven to be an utter disaster and it ought to be wholly rejected in favour of another model, more appropriate for the times. Conservatives who have systematically suffered defeat in the Culture Wars should have learned by now: you can’t “nice” your way out of the present mess. Unless we are bargaining with people who share the same virtues as we, the era of “soft power” is over. Today, we cannot afford an infantalised political culture, one focused on “social justice” instead of (actual) justice at home, foreign policy by tweeted emoticon,19 a belief that diversity is more important than not living in a police state, a political elite obsessed with exporting “freedom” and “democracy,” thus reducing North Africa and the Middle East to a Bruegelesque nightmare, or a naïve internationalism that has imported it onto the capitals of Europe and her settler nations abroad. This leftist stupidity simply cannot be survived, and the sentimentalist cult on which it is based is at its very heart.
What we need is less “love, peace, and tolerance” and more responsible governance, sobriety of thought, and the re-acknowledgment of concepts that were obvious to our forefathers but which our present political betters, in their “enlightened” pretentions, feel can be ignored without consequence. And here we come to a compounded error of relying on intangible abstracts as definitive “attributes” of the West: conceiving civilisation in these terms creates a mental framework that is not readily capable of — or indeed rejects outright — any particularist definitions of community. This too is identical to the progressive worldview and only reinforces the social pathologies that logically arise from it: the denial of reality and the cult-like doubling-down of cultural commissars to ensure ideological conformity in the public square.
Thus Lawrence Auster’s first law of minority-majority relations has it that “the worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.”20 Similarly, Takuan Seiyo identifies the “quadruple blindfold” of how liberal society manages minority-majority relations, the last of which states that “cuddly feelings” about the hostile group “or implanted feelings of guilt relative to it” trump any observable evidence of its incompatibility with the host’s cultural norms or standards.21 Political correctness, cuddly feelings, guilt, love, peace, and tolerance: the poison cocktail our present leaders imbibe, from left to so-called “right.”
The West can no longer tolerate this wishful thinking turned into social policy; the risk of public attachments to the jejune fantasies of yesteryear are unacceptably high, and the future of Western politics requires an underlying attitude more virile and self-confident, if it is to survive. That this new model will likely resemble an older paradigm should be no cause for shock or surprise. As Michael Tung emphasises in the 2015 Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum:
This is because the State and the political sphere are inherently masculine.To deviate from this is to feminise politics and detach the State from its higher, supra-individual aims [...] it is precisely since the Hearth of Vesta has encroached upon the altars and debating chambers that these institutions have taken such a turn for the worse.22
Reflecting on the ethos of the Australian and New Zealand military tradition, Tung identifies particularly fraternal camaraderie as the essential foundation upon which “the decisions and sacrifices that only men can make, and are expected to” can flourish:
The Australian and Kiwi tradition of “mateship,” encapsulating stoic ideals of solidarity, peer equality, and irreverent respect — consecrated by the Männerbund of ANZAC — springs from the same taproot as the Spartan Ö μοιοι .23
Note well that the “equality” and “solidarity” referred to here are experienced in a framework of a particular culture and community. In contrast, lofty notions are not “attributes that define Western civilisation” because culture and nationhood are no epiphenomena. Instead, they are the product of a particular people with an intimately shared history, going back many generations within a broadly defined geographic region (and in the case of the Anglosphere, extended by colonial settlement or conquest). The ethos described by Tung is antithetical to the politics of “love, peace, and tolerance” and the indiscriminate openness, acquiescence and passivity that it naturally engenders in the face of hostile competitors for geographic or political space.
Likewise, any focus on such an “ideology or ideas” will not only lead towards the dangerous emotionality — and occasional hysterics24 — of the liberal status quo, it also makes advocacy for the particularist definition of a people practically impossible. Contrast this to Poland’s Minister for Internal Affairs and Administration, Mariusz B łaszczak, who declared that his newly elected government’s decisions will be uncompromisingly steered by considerations of national security; this has been much to the chagrin of the bureaucrats of Brussels and Berlin, who seem unable to deal with this more assertive Polish government, at times displaying begrudging reluctance to accept its democratic legitimacy.25 In relation to the incessant demands of Eurocrat elites, namely that the flood of “refugees” from “Syria” must be spread across all EU member states in the spirit of “solidarity,” B łaszczak asks rhetorically: “is distributing the infected a solution to an epidemic?”26 The day immediately after the Brussels attack, his Government went so far as to repudiate their predecessor’s commitment to accommodate any asylum seekers within its national borders.27 In a similar tone, and remarkably during a speech commemorating Hungary’s National Day, Victor Orbán urged Brussels to respect Warsaw’s democratic mandate and declared the two nations’ “shared fate.”28 To Europe, he directed a slightly different message:
In Europe today it is forbidden to speak the truth. A muzzle is a muzzle – even if it is made of silk. [...]It is forbidden to say that the masses of people coming from different civilisations pose a threat to our way of life, our culture, our customs, and our Christian traditions. [...] Those who arrived here earlier have built a world of their own, with their own laws and ideals, which is forcing apart the thousand-year-old structure of Europe. [...] It is forbidden to say that Brussels is now stealthily devouring ever more slices of our national sovereignty, and that in Brussels today many are now making a plan for a United States of Europe, for which no one has ever given authorisation. [...] Mass migration is like a slow and steady current of water which washes away at the shore. It appears in the guise of humanitarian action, but its true nature is the occupation of territory; and their gain in territory is our loss in territory. Hordes of implacable human rights warriors feel an unquenchable desire to lecture and accuse us. It is claimed that we are xenophobic and hostile, but the truth is that the history of our nation is also one of inclusion and the intertwining of cultures. [...] But those who have come here with the intention of changing our country and shaping our nation in their own image, those who have come with violence and against our will, have always been met with resistance.29
Though this may strike a distant onlooker as somewhat indelicate by present liberal sensibilities, it is those sensibilities that are the problem and not what is being said by these Central Europeans. The “forbidding” referred to above is a system of legal prohibitions — i.e. the “silken muzzle” — designed to enforce tolerance at the cost of individual and national sovereignty. Given the gravity and proximity of the crisis, Orbán’s and B łaszczak’s comments are entirely understandable and apt. Far from being heartless, their attitude actually manifests an “equality” and “solidarity” that is couched in notions of community and public service — their community, their public. Assuming that democratic mandates and national interest means anything in the context of national-conservative electoral victories, no other policy could be more politically legitimate for an elected parliamentarian facing unprecedented demographic (and therefore cultural-political) catastrophe on his continent. It is only a pity that the leaders of the Anglosphere haven’t taken a stand similar to the Visegr ád Group’s.
Instead, in their attempts to build a society on the politics of “love, peace, and tolerance,” the utopian ideologues of yesteryear are clearing the path for the growth of eventual totalitarianism at home. France, as well as the rest of the Continent in the near to nearer future, is in the process of painfully learning one important lesson that will likely characterise the internal political development of multicultural states over the next century: one can live in a secure community with high levels of interpersonal trust and social cohesion, or one can have laissez-faire “diversity.” Presently, our moral and political “betters” have chosen the false security of an eventual police state whose coercive apparatus is necessary to keep the babbling colossus forcefully together. There is a term for this, anarcho-tyranny: tyranny from above to keep the anarchy below from spilling over into the streets, with ever-expanding laws having to be enforced by police and prosecutorial authorities whose powers seem always to expand, never contract.30
“The implication that leaders can somehow prevent such attacks by armed response is a total distraction from the intelligence and police work that might at least diminish their prevalence” writes Simon Jenkins in response to the recent Nice bombing.31 Yet he remains blissfully ignorant of the fact that a focus on “intelligence and police work” is itself a “total distraction” from policies that laid the foundations for the present mess. Those policies continue to enable the nihilism of local liberal politics, thus morally disarming any putative defence of Western civilisation from the international jihad that that politics has recklessly allowed to be imported into the social sphere of that civilisation’s constituent nations. What accounts for this ideological blind-spot if not a near-religious commitment to the cult of “love, peace, and tolerance” and its uncompromising appeal to indiscriminate “inclusiveness,” apparently at any and all cost? In this rhetorical environment, how can anything particular about the nations of the West be defined in any practical sense?
There will come a time when blind ideological commitments to Orwellian mantras or fatuous conceits such as “subscription identity” (a.k.a. “magic dirt theory”) will almost certainly be remembered as the political equivalent of phrenology and flat-Earthism. If identity is reduced to a list of ephemeral criteria it becomes wholly intangible, and in the context of a modernist culture of banality and permissivism, ultimately meaningless. Inculcating into the minds of young men an ideology of “love, peace, and tolerance” will hardly inspire the virtues necessary to defend the hearth and all the secondary luxuries so dear to the apostles of secular liberalism. Instead, it will serve only to reinforce the culture of self-effacement.
Predictably, talking-heads of what Paul Gottfried refers to as the “alternative left”32 rarely if ever speak about anything concrete and therefore real. Modern mainstream conservatism has thus become anonymous by way of its appeals to abstract universals which are — at their core — indistinguishable from the political theology of its declared opponent. Sadly, these are all self-inflicted wounds; mainstream conservatives petrified of offending their detractors can blame no one but themselves for the hopelessness of current attempts at political reaction against the bitter fruit of progressives’ cultural and political hegemony. Complain as they might about the rising electoral force of so-called populist outsiders, it has been establicon’s consistently ineffectual opposition to the projects of the broader-left that have laid the groundwork for frustrated and often crude reaction in the U.S. and Continental Europe.33 Merve Bendle provides the clearest diagnosis of this in the Australian conservative press when he writes that:
Culpability for the crisis in governance therefore lies with the political leadership and especially their egos and pursuit of self-interest [...] Populism is a disease of the elites, imposed by them on the people as they struggle to maintain control, and the present crisis and popular revolt is best seen as a reaction to this.34 (emphasis added)
Romantic Utopians of the twentieth century were once drawn to the magnetic promise of secular salvation that the ideological left offered its acolytes and subscribers. But today it is the universalist, anonymous, and uninspiring mainstream of the nominal “right” itself that has assumed the mantle of abstract, materialist and sentimentalist utopianism. By having nothing tangible or rooted in historical experience to offer the hearts and minds of Western Men, there is no reason to doubt that it too will go the same way as the morally bankrupt Cold War Left. The question is, what will replace it: the so-called “Kalifat,” elements of which appear to be spreading across the West (either surreptitiously or in open defiance of local objectors) with the tacit approval, sponsorship, or wilful blindness of left-liberal elites? A “Rainbow Soviet,” with which suicidal progressivism appears smitten? Or a movement where the appeal to “love, peace, and tolerance” is defined strictly according to and within particularist considerations of culture and peoplehood?35
Whatever it might be, it
does not appear that the present conservative establishment has the competence
or courage to provide a genuine alternative to the dominant worldview,
primarily because it insists on being informed by a political theology that
militates in favour of a leftist global outlook. Unless it starts thinking for
itself —
and on its own terms — it will remain but another obstacle that
sincere defenders of the West will need to traverse and overcome.
Endnotes
The writer wishes to acknowledge John O’Sullivan, who provided advice on the initial 23December 2015 draft of this paper. [This edit: 20 May 2016; updated 18 July 2016.]
1. For background on the origins and rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party, see Timothy Stanley, “Britain’s Pat Buchanan Party” The American Conservative Vol.14 Issue1 (January-February 2015) pp.21-23. See also “BBC News – Elections 2015 – Results” BBC (online) (undated) <bbc.com/news/election/2015/results> (accessed 7April 2016).
2. For a recent example in Australia, see: Nick Carter, “The Revolt of the Outsiders” Quadrant Vol.60 Issue5 (No.526 [mislabelled in print edition as No.525]) (May 2016) pp.16-18.
3. Likewise, see: Peter Murphy, “Populism Rising – The New Voice of the ‘Mad as Hell’ Voter” Quadrant, ibid. pp.8-15.
4. For an elucidation of political developments in Poland, see: Ryszard Legutko, “Letter from Warsaw” Quadrant Vol.60 issue1-2 (No.523) (January-February 2016) pp.70-72; For additional context, see: Matthew Tyrmand, “Free Expression in Poland” The European Conservative No.12 (Summer/Fall 2015) pp.9-11; Steve Sailer, “Diversity vs. Solidarity” TakiMag (20January 2016) <takimag.com> (accessed 29March 2016). For a rebuttal to the claims made by the Western (i.e. German) press concerning the current Polish government’s reform initiatives, see: Ewa Thompson, “The Return of the Polish Question” Chesterton Review Vol. 42 Issue 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2016) pp.280-288 [DOI: 10.5840/chesterton2016421/253].
5. See also by the writer: “Conservatism’s ‘Unfortunate Reformation’” New Oxford Review Vol.83 Issue5 (June 2016) passim.
6. Kevin Donnelly, “Turning the West into a Wasteland” Daily Telegraph (1October 2015) p.25.
7. “Merkel: Antwort auf Terror müssen Nächstenliebe und Toleranz sein” [“Merkel: response to terror must be charity and tolerance”] Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (online) (14November 2015 @ 13:19DST) <deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de> (accessed 23December 2015) at ¶ 6 of block quote therein.
8. Kate Connolly, “Cologne attacks: mayor lambasted for telling women to keep men at arm’s length” The Guardian (online) (6January 2016 @ 23:07AEST) <theguardian.com> (accessed 4March 2016) passim.
9. Nima Elbagir, Bharati Naik, and Laila ben Allal, “Why Belgium is Europe’s front line in the war on terror” CNN (online) (24March 2016 @ 20:43HKT, updated 12:43GMT) <edition.cnn.com> (accessed 4April 2016) at ¶1 under seventh subheading.
10. “Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks in Orlando – Remarks Prepared for Delivery” The United States Department of Justice (21 June 2016) <justice.gov> (accessed 5 July 2016) at ¶7.
11. Simon Jenkins, “Sympathy should be our only response to the Nice terror attack” The Guardian (online) (15July 2016 @ 18:22 AEST) <theguardian.com> (accessed 18 July 2016) at ¶11.
12. For an analogy in relation to a critique of the term “humility,” and the effect on political discourse within the reactionary right, see: E. Antony Gray, “Evola, Humility and Mythos” Social Matter (blog) (4April 2016) <socialmatter.net> (accessed 5April 2016).
13. Tabassum Zakaria, “General Casey: diversity shouldn’t be a casualty at Fort Hood” Reuters (blog) (8November 2009) <blog.reuters.com> (accessed 4April 2016) at ¶6.
14. Matthew Holehouse, “All Belgian residents issued with iodine tablets to protect against radiation” The Telegraph (online) (28April 2016 @ 7:19GMT) <telegraph.co.uk> (accessed 7May 2016) passim.
15. Ed O’Keefe, “Jeb Bush: many illegal immigrants come as an ‘act of love’” Washington Post (online) (6 April 2014) <washingtonpost.com> (accessed 14May 2016).
16. Nicola Oakley, “How do you explain the Paris terror attacks to a child? This father found the most beautiful way” Daily Mirror (online) (17November 2015 @ 11:37, updated17:18) <mirror.co.uk> (accessed 23December 2015) passim.
17. Haroon Siddique and Nadia Khomami, “Brussels square covered with messages of defiance after attacks” The Guardian (online) (23March 2016) <theguardian.com> (accessed 7April 2016) passim.
18. Daniel Kreps, “Watch Pianist Perform John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ Outside Paris’ Bataclan” Rolling Stone (online) (14November 2015) <rollingstone.com> (accessed 7April 2016) at ¶2.
19. Matthew Knott, “Emoji diplomacy? DFAT asked meaning behind [Australian Foreign Minister] Julie Bishop’s use of a red-faced emoji to describe Vladimir Putin” Sydney Morning Herald (online) (22October 2015) <smh.com.au> (accessed 23December 2015) passim.
20. Lawrence Auster, “Clarifying the First Law” View from the Right (blog) (14November 2007) <www.amnation.com/vfr> (accessed 23December 2015) passim.
21. Takuan Seiyo, “Oppression Instead of Admission: Part II” Gates of Vienna (blog) (23January 2015) <gatesofvienna.net> (accessed 23December 2015) at §1 under second sub-heading.
22.Michael Tung, “Ride That Tiger; or The Party’s an Ass” SydneyTrads (17October 2015) <sydneytrads.com> (accessed 23 December 2015) at ¶10.
23. Ibid.
24. Jim Goad, “I Have Met the Enemy, and He is Easily Terrified” TakiMag (21March 2016) <takimag.com> (accessed 4April 2016).
25. Filip Mazurczak, “Poland & Hungary Under Fire” The European Conservative No.13 (Winter-Spring 2016) pp.8-11; Max Denken, “Plan White – Redux” SydneyTrads (12March 2016) <sydneytrads.com> (accessed 4April 2016); Dorota Heck, Correspondence, Sarmatian Review Vol.36 Issue 2 (April 2016) pp.1995-1996.
26. K.G., “Ostra reakcja Błaszczaka na słowa Schulza: Jest oderwany od rzeczywistości” [“Błaszczak’s blunt reaction to (President of the EU Parliament, Martin) Schulz: he is divorced from reality”] Onet Wiadomości (online) (17November 2015 @ 8:24CEST) <wiadomosci.onet.pl> (accessed 23December 2015) at ¶6.
27. “Premier Szyd ło: Nie widz ę mo żliwo ści, aby w tej chwilin imigranci przyjechali do Polski” [“Prime Minister Beata Szyd ło: I see no possibility for Poland to accept immigrants at this moment”] Republika (online) (23March 2016 @ 13:59CET) <telewizjarepublica.pl> (accessed 4April 2016).
28. “Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on 15 March” Website of the Hungarian Government – Prime Minister (15 March 2016 @ 6:57 CET) <kormany.hu/en> (accessed 5April 2016) at ¶4.
29. Ibid. at ¶¶15, 18.
30. The concept of “anarcho-tyranny” was originally foreshadowed in an article by U.S. political theorist and commentator Samuel Francis, who drew a parallel between the present U.S. multicultural behemoth and the pressures that lead to the dismemberment of the Empires of old: “Principalities & Powers” Chronicles Magazine Vol. 14 Issue 7 (July 1990) at p.10, and later expanded in “Anarcho-Tyranny USA” Chronicles Magazine Vol.18 Issue7 (July 1994) passim. An example of Australian anarcho-tyranny was the controversy surrounding the proposed (and failed) repeal of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) which establishes liability for conduct that is “offensive” in relation to “race, colour or national or ethnic origin.” Under subsection (2)(c) an accused may even be criminally liable if the complainant merely overhears an “offensive” comment that is private or otherwise not intended for her. This creates the legal infrastructure for agitators to actively seek offense and engage in what has come to be known as ‘lawfare’ against political dissent.
31. Simon Jenkins, op. cit. at ¶10.
32. For a justification of this term in the European and U.S. contexts, see generally: Paul Edward Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Paul Edward Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave, 2007) Chapter6 passim.
33. Indeed, Peter Murphy and Nick Cater’s description of “problem” candidates as both “populist” and “outsider” ( vide supra nn.2, 3) constitutes an implicit admission that mainstream politicians have lost touch with a significant portion of their electoral base. Yet Murphy and Cater’s analysis is an unreflective apologia for establishment conservatism, which puts analysts firmly in the camp of those who bear liability for the advent of contemporary populist reaction. One might treat their critique of Donald Trump with greater seriousness if it contained a recognisable dose of contrition or mea culpa. But for a passing comment in Cater’s conclusion (p.18), it does not. This is symptomatic of political bankruptcy as well as typical of the establishment’s lack of self-awareness and accountability.
34. Merv Bendle, “Populism from Above” Quadrant Online (online) (17May 2016) <quadrant.org.au> (accessed 17May 2016). N.b.: Bendle foresaw this phenomenon earlier in the year in his “The Coming Conservative Revolt” Quadrant Online (online) (30January 2016) <quadrant.org.au> (accessed 17May 2016).
35. For an early background on this political disposition, see: Paul M. Weyrich, “Blue Collar or Blue Blood”, Samuel T. Francis, “Message from M.A.R.s”, Clyde N. Wilson, “Citizens or Subjects”, and Thomas Fleming, “Old Rights and the New Right” all of which feature in Robert W. Whitaker (ed.), The New Right Papers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982). For a further elaboration, see generally: Joseph Scotchie (ed.), The Paleoconservatives (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999). For a brief synopsis: Brian Patrick Mitchell, 8 Ways to Run a Country – A New and Revealing Look at Left and Right (Westport: Praeger, 2007) Chapter8. For further historical background in a recent work: George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2016) Chapter 7 .