The Woke revolution

 Just as cultural energy in the West has moved fluidly from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter, climate strikes, trans activism and now pro-Palestinian fervour, we can trace a similar rhythm in the revolutionary waves of the 20th century. These, too, promised justice, redemption and the cleansing of a corrupt world – only to collapse beneath the weight of their own moral absolutism.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 promised liberation for workers but quickly descended into mass arrests, purges and famine as ideological loyalty replaced the rule of law. Two generations later, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long convulsion in which teenage Red Guards destroyed temples, denounced teachers and tore apart their own families. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia and declared the start of “Year Zero”, its vision of agrarian socialism leading to the deaths of nearly two million people.

Each of these revolutions shared a common grammar: a sense of absolute moral clarity, a desire to root out internal enemies and a belief that justice required purification. Their language was different, their geography varied, but their structure and psychology were the same. Like today’s activists, their adherents believed they stood on the right side of history, that neutrality was complicity and redemption could be achieved only through total commitment.

In each case, the fervour eventually burned itself out. But revolutionary energy never goes extinct. It waits for the next generation disillusioned enough to take it up again. Cultural movements of the past decade, though far less violent, run on the same emotional circuitry as the most destructive revolutions of the 20th century. They offer belonging, clarity and a sense of moral purpose along with the seductive thrill of joining a righteous vanguard.

It may be that this energy, in the second decade of the 21st century, has not yet peaked. On the contrary, it may be only beginning. More and more young people feel they have no economic future. If the next generation becomes disenchanted enough, they may not demand reform but revolution. And when this energy is finally harnessed by left-wing economic populists – when it shifts its focus from race, gender and sexuality to class, to elites, landlords, property owners and professionals – that is when liberal societies will once again find themselves in real danger.

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.

Capitalism Needs Champions

 The Wallstreet Journal

Capitalism Needs Champions

Matthew Hennessey

Let Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York serve as your periodic reminder that capitalism is in dire need of able defenders. Socialism has more cheerleaders than it deserves, considering its record of consistent failure. Markets need champions too. This is always true, especially now. If you thought soft-headed notions about inequality and making the rich pay their “fair share” would die out as dinosaurs like Bernie Sanders faded from the scene, you should know by now how wrong you were. The 83-yearold Vermont senator isn’t fading. He’s still jetting around the country barking about oligarchs and exploitation. In Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Mamdani, he has talented and energetic heirs. They will be around for decades. Believers in free markets and free people need to strap in. The adversary is formidable—young, good-looking, social-media savvy. It’s going to be a long, exhausting fight. In this twilight struggle the truth has an advantage: Socialism is incompatible with human nature. People are driven to build, to invest, to strive and be productive, to pursue their own families’ well-being above all. Socialism subverts these impulses. It reCapitalism Needs Champions quires coercion to achieve anything resembling success. It’s an intellectual lab leak. Misery follows wherever it’s tried. Yet each generation somehow produces naïfs who are certain that collectivism is the true longing of the human heart. They know they can make it work this time. The young voters who supported Mr. Mamdani were primed by their expensive educations to buy his line that capitalism is rigged in favor of the rich. All they’ve ever been told—by teachers, professors, TV and TikTok—is that markets are inhumane. Capitalism is rapacious and bad for the climate. They may never have heard a single word to the contrary. This is a failure of education, yes. Basic economics is rarely taught in high school or required in college. But it’s equally a failure of public relations. Who is making a sustained and coherent public case for American-style capitalism? The field is wide open. We need new Milton Friedmans and Thomas Sowells. The product itself isn’t the problem. Free markets have made life better, healthier and more prosperous in demonstrable ways for billions of people. Anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago. Take a moment to imagine life without washing machines or chemotherapy. Competitive markets foster innovation and allocate resources with remarkable efficiency. They work. Even when markets come up short or create externalities like pollution, the incredible wealth they generate can be used to fill the gaps. When socialism fails, as it inevitably does, the only option is brutality. This always gets glossed over on MSNBC and CNN. I’d like to hear Mr. Mamdani explain how he plans to keep New Yorkers captive when his experiment goes south. Markets are more than efficient, which would be argument enough in a head-tohead competition with socialism. They’re also moral. Markets enable willing and mutually beneficial exchange among free people. They abominate coercion. They encourage a belief that tomorrow will be better than today. No one would bother investing absent an expectation that it will pay off. Capitalism is synonymous with confidence in the future. No, the problem isn’t capitalism. The problem is complacency. Capitalists take too much for granted. They assume the product is so good it will sell itself. Mr. Mamdani’s victory shows otherwise. The world is full of capitalists who don’t realize that’s what they are. The owner-operator of a corner deli is no less a capitalist than Jeff Bezos. Most capitalists go about their business quietly. By serving customers’ needs, they do more for society’s overall well-being than any charity. They should be celebrated, not vilified. Politicians vying to lead cities built on business ought to understand and respect market forces. Capital is mobile and goes where it’s treated well. There are no walls around Wall Street. Margaret Thatcher correctly diagnosed socialism’s inherent defect: Eventually you run out of other people’s money. Mr. Mamdani seems committed to teaching 8.2 million New Yorkers this lesson the hard way. My appeal isn’t to tech gurus and investment bankers. It’s to all the everyday capitalists in New York and beyond, the striving small-business owners and sole proprietors who are building something of value where nothing existed before. If you believe in free markets, speak up. Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor. Socialism is on the march. If you believe in free markets, it’s time to speak up. 

Values

 Where are our values?

A slew of recent articles declaring that we are living beyond our means, are addicted to government support and that tough times are coming raises the inevitable question. Do Australians have the mettle to weather a storm? Well, do we? For to prosper in our new world, we would need our old values: thrift, consideration for others, duty, responsibility, selflessness and tenacity. These values may have been forged by our Judeo-Christian culture, but they were fortified by tough times. Strengthened by deprivation. Reinforced by lessons about the courage and integrity of our historical heroes. Yet today it seems these values are not just dated but risible.

But while we may well mourn their loss, these values didn’t fall.

They were pushed. For when we reduced our family size, our children didn’t have to make do, didn’t need to learn thrift or learn the lessons of being one of many.

When we built bigger homes with separate bedrooms and multiple bathrooms, they didn’t learn the need for compromise, co-operation and consideration. When we swapped the grand backyard for a media room, they didn’t learn about teams, turns and negotiating, and could go for days without being inconvenienced, challenged, wrong or disliked. When we shielded them from hurt and sadness, showered them in empty praise and fought their battles, they didn’t learn strength and tenacity.

When we took on their responsibilities, they didn’t learn independence. When we stopped looking after our own elderly, they didn’t learn duty or selflessness.

And when the government stepped in with its ever-increasing list of benefits including, incredibly, paying us to care for our own, they learned dependence.

Tough times require strength.

Values, our muscle.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

The loss of values and truth

 Indulgent West

Elica Le Bon is bewildered by the West’s appetite to “sacrifice values on the altar of tolerance”. I think she’s being generous. I would suggest that we sacrificed our values on the altar of indulgence.
We swapped restraint, duty and self-control for a world of self-love, instant gratification and cheap highs. Duty became old-fashioned. Shame, even after poor behaviour, was considered not just outdated but outrageous.
Judgment was (ironically) condemned.
We swapped fortitude, tenacity and responsibility for dependence.
Restraint for licence.
Christianity for crystals. Courtesy, respect and moderation gave way to uninhibited freedom and finally to permissiveness.
There was no right or wrong.
Everything was relative. Thus we were ripe to be asked to tolerate the intolerable. And we had no grounds to refuse. Because in a world of moral and cultural relativism we can’t declare any one behaviour or any one culture better or worse than another.
But that’s simply not true.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

Finally A reality check

 US leads the way in reversing cultural decline of the West

KONSTANTIN KISIN

Since speaking at the last Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, it’s clear that the tide is turning and our American friends are leading the way.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, is being dismantled.

This is happening not just in the US government but, much more importantly, across the global corporate world. We can once again dream that our children will be judged on the content of their character and not the colour … of the square they post on Instagram.

Government profligacy and corruption is being exposed on an industrial scale. DOGE may not be perfect but according to one report, USAID gave $US3m ($4.7m) to a rapper in Gaza who makes anti-Semitic songs. Whatever your politics, we can all agree that is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Kanye West would have done it for free!

Thanks to the end of censorship on X, we have the ability to express reasonable and widely held views. Because of this, other social media companies are wary of being so aggressive in their censorship too.

So that’s the positives, but there has been lots of bad too: if you want to understand how bad the crime problem has got, British people used to deal with crime by moving criminals to Australia.

Today, British people deal with crime by moving to Australia.

I know there’s a lot of frustration with the state of Britain and much of the Western world.

But let’s keep things in perspective: of all the things human beings have invented over the past two hundred years, our culture and its values are responsible for most of them. I’m not saying we have a monopoly on ingenuity. One of simplest things most people no longer understand is that we don’t lead the world on innovation because we are richer. We are richer because we lead the world on innovation.

But all of this is at risk because we are in danger of forgetting how we got here. 

We need to understand that we’ve been lied to. For decades, people went on TV and told you that your history is all bad and your country is plagued by prejudice and intolerance. I have debated these people many times and I always ask them the same question: If you were a woman or an ethnic minority or someone who was spirit gender or whatever, where would you live rather than the West? None of them ever answer.

Because we all know the answer.

We are being accused of performing terribly on the very things we lead the world in.

A healthy sense of your own self-worth is not a conservative value or liberal value, it is the value of every successful group of people in history. Decline is a choice. And the good news is this: most people don’t want managed decline. Most people don’t want to be browbeaten and chastised for their history.

Most people don’t want their children to be poorer than them.

Recent election results around the world bear that out.

Like him or loathe him, the reason millions of people admire Elon Musk is not his charismatic speeches and ill-advised hand gestures.

They admire him because he builds big things and in doing so reminds us that we are meant to reach for the stars.

We are a civilisation that is waiting to be inspired. So let’s stop listening to the people who want us to fail. Let’s ignore the counsel of our enemies. But to do so we’re going to have to win the arguments.

On free speech, we’ve allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner.

The attack line against us is that we want to return to some cruel time when people could be mean and nasty. But the truth is, we don’t believe in free speech because we want to go back to the past. We need to speak freely in order to think freely and if we can’t think freely we won’t move forward.

Free speech is not a rightwing value or a left-wing value, it’s a Western value.

The second argument we must win is on identity politics and multiculturalism. For several decades now, our societies have attempted these two failed experiments. The result is tension, disunity and a toleration of the intolerable for the sake of “community cohesion”.

Multiethnic societies can work, multicultural societies cannot. We must be British and American and whatever else we are first, and white, black, male, female and all that other stuff a distant second.

And the final argument we must win is about whether human beings are good.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in which he argued that human population growth was about to outstrip food supplies leading to mass starvation, societal collapse and the need for drastic measures to control population growth.

None of this happened. He was completely wrong. But his ideas live on, unaffected, in the minds of our political and media elites. At the core of the net zero agenda is a fundamental sense that human beings are a pestilence on the planet. That if only we could find a way to stop them reproducing and encourage them to die out peacefully, the planet would finally be safe. This has become so ingrained that many people now say they will not have children because of climate concerns.

We must never get used to this because what it represents is a grotesque moral inversion. The birth of a child is a universally celebrated thing. At a cultural level, any successful civilisation in history would see more of itself being created as an unalloyed good. What do you imagine happens to civilisations that don’t? So we must say, without apology, the solution to climate change can’t be poverty. Before the industrial revolution, nearly 40 per cent of children died before they hit puberty.

The promise of a better tomorrow is not just a nice thing to have: it’s the debt we owe to our children. We have to make energy cleaner, yes, but we also have to make it as cheap and abundant as possible. And once we in Europe win that argument, we will finally have the one thing that’s been missing: an economic vision that can inspire people to believe that the future will be better than the past.

Konstantin Kisin is a satirist, author and co-host of the popular podcast Triggernometry. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.