The West's circular firing squad - or is it a daisy chain?

There is a peculiar pathology at work in the commentary class of the Western right. It is not stupidity, exactly. It is something more insidious: a reflexive cynicism turned inward, a habit of holding its own side to standards it would never dream of applying to the left. The result is a circular firing squad, or, given how enthusiastically its participants seem to enjoy the arrangement, perhaps a daisy chain.

The pattern is consistent across the Anglosphere. In Britain, Nigel Farage and Reform UK have been subjected to a level of forensic scrutiny, from ostensibly conservative commentators and mastheads, that the Labour Party has not faced in a generation. Every policy costed to the last pound. Every inconsistency catalogued and every supporter's biography excavated for embarrassment. The implicit message is clear: populist insurgency must earn its seat at the table by meeting a standard of intellectual propriety that the establishment never required of itself.

Australia runs the same script. One Nation's rising fortunes have produced, almost on cue, a sudden appetite for microscopic policy analysis from voices that spent decades giving the Coalition and Labor a free pass on everything from housing affordability to border security to the slow hollowing out of regional Australia. The Spectator, to its credit, has been better than most. But even there, the occasional tremor of establishment unease is visible when Hanson says something impolite but not actually wrong.

The left, by contrast, has never suffered this affliction. The Greens can advocate positions of staggering economic illiteracy and face no equivalent dissection from their own side. Labor can preside over institutional decay of impressive scale; the NDIS, the housing crisis, the capture of the public service and the progressive commentariat will find a way to locate the fault in the previous government, the global economy, or Rupert Murdoch. Whatever you think of the strategy, it is at least coherent.

How did the right's commentariat arrive here? The answer, I think, lies in comfort. The three decades from roughly 1990 to 2020 were, for the Western professional class, extraordinarily kind. Asset prices rose. Interest rates fell. Neoliberal monetary policy created the conditions for a long, pleasant ride in which it was possible to believe that the system was basically working. You didn't need original ideas. You didn't need courage. You needed a plausible resume and the ability to signal the right values in the right rooms. The B-graders didn't seize control through a coup. They inherited a vacancy created by prosperity.

The result was an institutional class in politics, the public service, corporate Australia, and the media that had never really been tested. People who had ridden the rising tide of asset price inflation and mistaken buoyancy for ability. When the tide eventually turned, and thirty years of policy failure began producing visible consequences stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, open borders, industrial decline, cultural incoherence, so these were not people equipped to diagnose the problem honestly. They were too implicated in it.

This is the boiling frog problem, and it is further advanced than most of the commentariat is willing to admit. The temperature has been rising for decades. Welcome to Country at every corporate function. Genocide language at the Anzac Dawn Service, delivered without challenge, absorbed without protest by people who would once have considered such an intrusion unthinkable: And then there is the transgender movement, arguably the greatest organised assault on women’s rights since Australian banks required women to resign upon marriage, though at least the banks had the honesty not to insist it was feminism. The stickiness of this garbage and persistence long past the point where basic common sense should have dispatched it, tells you something about the institutions that are hosting it.

Even Kemi Badenoch, who has never been mistaken for a original thinker, is now talking about it. When the most cautious, most establishment-acceptable voice of the British right starts articulating the boiling frog concern, you know the water is very warm indeed. The tragedy is that it took this long, and that the people best positioned to have said it earlier were too comfortable, or too institutional, or too afraid of being impolite to do so.

Which brings us to Iran and to what I regard as the most revealing test of this pathology.

The grinding question that almost none of the Western commentariat is asking plainly is this: can we afford to allow a theocratic regime whose founding doctrine includes the elimination of Israel to acquire a nuclear weapon? Not as a geopolitical abstraction. As a practical, binary question with a binary answer.

Russia wants advantage. China wants advantage. Their methods are brutal and their intentions hostile, but they are playing the same game we are; competition for influence, resources, and position. They can be deterred, contained, negotiated with, because they want to survive and prosper within a world order, even if they want to reshape its terms. The Iranian regime is not playing that game. It is animated by an eschatological framework that does not operate on the same strategic logic. This is not a controversial observation among serious analysts of the region. It is simply not discussed in polite company.

Donald Trump is impolite, frequently inconsistent, and not a man you would describe as burdened by the Western literary tradition. None of that is the embarrassment. The embarrassment is the political leaders and business figures, those who can be, and frequently are, bought off by American largesse,  squirming under his ridicule while knowing perfectly well he is right. That squirm is telling. It is not the wince of the wrongly accused. It is the flinch of, as Freud said, the found out. The commentariat’s role in all this is to reframe that hideous indictment of abject failure as merely an obnoxious smell to be wafted away. A matter of tone, manners, of how one conducts oneself in power politics.