“The Establishment” was a phrase coined by Henry Fairlie in the Spectator in 1955. “By the Establishment,” he wrote, “I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.” Well. The Establishment of 1955 to 2015 has been rattled in our time by the first great challenge to its authority. This Establishment – represented by its voices in the media – has for some time been irritated into attempting some sort of analysis of what is going on: what the recalcitrant are up to. There are three major suggestions. In short:
- We have lurched to the Right. Reality remains what it was, and we are simply changing position in it.
- We have diagonalised: which means that we are trying to break up the old distinction of Left and Right in order to form a new consensus. We are reforming reality.
- We have gone down the rabbit hole, gone off the deep end, crossed over into the mirror world. We have left reality altogether.
The first and third are lazy. The second is trying to be clever. All have some truth in them. But they are all incorrect. All avoid asking why we are doing this.
But of course the Establishment is not interested in asking why.
1
You must have noticed that everyone nowadays is “lurching” to the Right. I cannot be bothered citing examples. Simply search the internet for “lurch to the Right” and you’ll see that you can find it being used by Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Newsweek, Politico, the American Conservative, the New European, the BBC and others. Seldom does anyone lurch to the Left. No, they shift to the Left, in fact, probably glide. Though we should note that the Right only tends to “lurch” in headlines: in the text one finds gentler words like “swing” or “move”. (Who controls the editors?) Nonetheless, in the headlines everyone lurches. “A huge lurch to the Right and more austerity”, groaned Owen Jones a few years ago. I wonder who invented this form of speech: everyone took it up and it is now a glorious cliché.
The suggestion, delightfully, is that anyone who is even slightly critical of the Establishment is not quite in control of their movements. For the word “lurch” means a sudden, unexpected movement, apparently uncaused: associated with the human stagger when tired and emotional. It is not deliberate, it is accidental: caused only by one’s having drunk too much alcohol or one’s having been rebuilt as a Frankenstein’s monster, thereby disqualified from comprehensible behaviour. There is something alarming about a lurch. So anyone who talks about a lurch to the Right is using language to imply a complete lack of justification for the movement.
Incidentally, I noticed a few days ago that the Guardian in the last few days described Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump at a rally as evidence of his having “swerved” to the Right.
Trump then veered into more familiar territory of falsehoods about immigration and other topics. Later he called up on stage Musk, the Chief Executive of Tesla and owner of social media platform X, who has swerved politically Right. Wearing a black cap and black “Occupy Mars” shirt and coat, Musk jumped around with his arms held high and was greeted with cheers… Musk argued: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. Get everyone you know, drag them to register to vote. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That is my prediction.”
I thought that the use of the word “swerve” was unusual. Perhaps the writer, one David Smith, was, like Blur, thinking of cars? Whatever the cause, the metaphor is revealing. For one lurches as a consequence of something unexpected: it is unintended, uncaused: one is stupid. But one swerves to avoid something. One swerves consciously. Something is happening and there is a tiny concessionary hint that one is responding to it with one’s intelligence.
Still, the language is unflattering. As analysis, it is very lazy. It certainly fails to mention why Musk “swerved” and what he was “swerving” away from.
2
“Diagonalise” is the sort of word you’ll forget three minutes after reading this article. Hang on, what did diagonalise mean again? Can’t be bothered checking, forget about it. But, while you are here, let me tell you that it is a clever coinage by two writers for the Boston Review, William Callison and Quinn Slobodian, who in 2021 published an article on “Coronapolitics“. They wrote:
Diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of Left and Right (while generally arcing toward far-Right beliefs), to express ambivalence if not cynicism toward parliamentary politics, and to blend convictions about holism and even spirituality with a dogged discourse of individual liberties.
The suggestion seems to be that people are not lurching or swerving to the Right, but doing something else entirely: namely, tearing up the very distinction between Left and Right. Our authors derive the term “diagonalising” from a German term, Querdenken, which was used to describe the German, Swiss and Austrian Coronaskeptiker movement.
Callison and Slobodian observe rightly that not all sceptics are on the Right. So no talk of lurching or swerving here. They say that diagonalists are a Widdecombe Fair (Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all) of odds and sods and rags and tags who, whatever their old politics were, are now agreed that all power is a conspiracy and hence that the Establishment in all its manifestations (they list “the state, Big Tech, Big Pharma, big banks, climate science, mainstream media and political correctness”) is tending or trending totalitarian.
Callison and Slobodian are unfriendly analysts. We find them occasionally lapsing into standard Establishment scorn: “It would be easy to dismiss… freelance media hustlers, movement messiahs and entrepreneurial contrarians… neo-Nazi attendees… lack of charisma… river of falsehoods… Alex Jones.” They say, for instance: “When removed from platforms like YouTube for spreading unfounded conspiracies, they decry their loss of ‘free speech’ and ‘constitutional rights’ and often blame the Government for their newfound unfreedom.” This in fact is one of the most irritating moves in the entire anti-sceptical, anti-diagonalising Establishment strategy. What everyone does, from the BBC to CNN to the Guardian is, when they are not 1) quoting Establishment “experts”, is 2) quoting the lurchers and swervers and diagonalisers in exactly the opposite manner. When they quote an expert, that is the story. But when they quote an anti-expert, a critic, a sceptic, then the story is about the self-evidently rhetorical trickiness and falsity of whatever it is they – we – are saying: a lot of inverted commas, scare quotes are needed, the more the better.
They put ‘free speech’ in brackets, so that it is not a thing, not a value, not something important, but a talking point: a bit of noise made by the excluded Skeptiker. They mock the idea that there is a sense in which all power is a conspiracy, whereas, read Machiavelli or Naudé, or anyone, the Bible, for God’s sake, it is. They engage in sneer and smear and slight: “Typical of diagonal entrepreneurs worldwide, the Querdenken cohort battles the ‘Corona Dictatorship’ on behalf of the ‘Truth Movement’ while making a buck on the side.” They do not mention the fact that they are making a buck on the side too: oh, and that Fauci made a buck on the side, that Mann made a buck on the side, that Kerry made a buck on the side.
This is my favourite bit:
Angela Merkel spoke to the topic of Querdenken in mid-December [2020] with rare emotion. Calling the movement “an attack on our entire way of life”, she said that “since the Enlightenment, Europe has chosen the path of building our view of the world on the basis of facts”. Confronting an “anti-factual” movement was very difficult, she said, “perhaps it will be a task for the psychologists”.
Again, what Callison and Slobodian miss is that there are two sides to this question, and that while there is, no doubt, Merkel’s Enlightenment, there is also another Enlightenment, which alleges that the facts that Merkel and her cronies were standing on were not facts at all but something else entirely: and that there was an enlightened way of trying to oppose them. In short, that Merkel’s “faktenbasierten Sprache” was balderdash on rollerblades.
Anyhow, Callison and Slobodian are onto something. They say we tend to “paint a dystopian picture of the conspiracy of power”. They also say this, which is (almost) fair:
Diagonalism could be seen as a fight over science. But both sides put open-ended investigation at the centre of their identity. Public health officials acknowledge that science is done in public, knowledge of the virus is evolving and forecasts are only ever provisional. Diagonalists respond that the truth is hidden by elite obfuscation and constant search is necessary in alternative fora.
Aye, aye. Still, they cannot explain why neo-Nazis, libertarians and members of the Green party, plus Thomas Fazi and other aggrieved Leftists bother diagonalising when they could simply swerve instead.
3
If one is tired of reading headlines about “lurching”, and gets a headache from words like “diagonalising”, then the quickest fix is to say that we have gone “down the rabbit hole”. This is simplistic, but not as simple as “lurch”. “Lurch” assumes one world. So, does that matter, does “diagonalise”, even if it hexes and vexes that world. But “rabbit hole” assumes the existence of two worlds: one world of appearances, and another of reality. One, the world we have always known, the world we live in, the world of convention and, indeed, the Establishment: the Matrix. And another world, the world of esoteric knowledge, hidden conspiracies, fascinating possibilities, and the dark suggestion that cancer is the grandest taboo subject of our time.
“Down the rabbit hole” is the favoured phrase of James Delingpole. But it is also used by people, like Alice’s sister, who very strongly doubt that it is possible to go down a rabbit hole, unless one means to go as mad as a hatter, ha, ha, how do you know what a mad hatter is, eh?, unless you have done down the rabbit hole? Naomi Klein used the phrase in her book Doppelganger, in which she tried to work out what was wrong with Naomi Wolf. Klein is a one-worldist (“there’s nothing to see here that you can’t already see on CNN”). To her horror, Wolf is a two-worldist (“there’s something you have not been told…”).
The problem with the language of “going down the rabbit hole”, though useful, in fact, a lot more useful than “diagonalising”, or, of course, “lurching”, is that it does not explain why anyone would go down the rabbit hole. Because it’s there, is one answer. But that is not an answer for those who don’t want to go there.
4
So I’ll just suggest instead that all these bits of analysis are flawed by the fact that Establishment types cannot believe they are wrong. So their analysis is actually incomprehension under a thin and cracking veneer of analysis.
The truth is, of course, that the Establishment is heavily invested in denying that argument is possible, and that its members have engaged in a great conspiracy to commandeer knowledge on the old Baconian and new Foucauldian ground that “knowledge is power”. They might prattle about “‘”Enlightenment”, but they have wholly forgotten the good old Scottish Enlightenment insight – found in David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others – not only that what goes up must come down but that what goes up goes up at the same time that something else goes down. There is more in the world than in their philosophy, Horatio. The world is a complicated dialectical contradictory mess. They fail to see this, or are paid to ignore it. So they have fallen back on strange abuse and stranger analysis to try to shore up their trumpery sandcastle.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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I suspect the the Establishment is an egregore from Wikipedia:
Whether it is a religious set of beliefs, an ‘incorporated business’, or some cultural movement, the egregore is not a real thing but a set of common beliefs (or ‘spirit of the group’) that continue beyond an individual’s involvement.
The Establishment changes as the common beliefs within it change, although slowly. Unfortunately the political views of Original Liberalism in Britain were based on core concepts such as classical economics, free trade, laissez-faire government with minimal intervention and taxation and a balanced budget. Classical liberals were committed to individualism, liberty and equal rights – and the Establishment has resisted such dangerous democracy for some time. No current UK political party comes close.
I’m currently reading ‘Manifesto’ by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson and reading who exactly the current Establishment truthfully is.
I just want me and my family to be left alone to get on with our lives, in liberty, unless we steal, rape, murder or assault, and the for state to keep order, protect our borders and provide those services which it makes sense for a centralised body funded by coerced taxes to provide.
“I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who”.
Should be compulsory in schools in order to make kids think (Also true for 75% of the population).
Won’t be though, it’s Kipling, that well known Indian/English fascist bigot and of more importance it may wake up the masses.
Bread and Circuses rule. Keep polishing your shiny electric? 4×4’s bought on tick while you dream of your next foreign holiday.
And you don’t give a fying f+++ what’s wrong with the world.
Rudyard Kipling, our most renowned Far Right poet…
The Beginnings
It was not part of their blood, It came to them very late With long arrears to make good, When the English began to hate. They were not easily moved, They were icy-willing to wait Till every count should be proved, Ere the English began to hate. Their voices were even and low, Their eyes were level and straight. There was neither sign nor show, When the English began to hate. It was not preached to the crowd, It was not taught by the State. No man spoke it aloud, When the English began to hate. It was not suddenly bred, It will not swiftly abate, Through the chill years ahead, When Time shall count from the date That the English began to hate.My history teacher told me that poem when I was doing my ‘O’ level history. She said if I answered all those questions in my history essay, I would have provided a comprehensive answer.
I have never forgotten it. It’s why I question everything and always have.
David Icke explains it well.
“With a little research and a clear-thinking head, you will find that all major geopolitical, socioeconomic events are not just haphazardly occurring side by side or in certain sequences, they are all linked up throughout the world. So, connecting the dots, you will see that we are living in a well-orchestrated web, where all makes sense – for those who are in command of the web — and to the detriment of the vast bulk of populations.
There is a tiny-tiny elite behind the web, pretending to have all the power, only because we believe all the lies from our government and institutional so-called authorities, dictated to them by this elite.
We have been taught in school to trust in authority and to obey authorities. It is a difficult axiom to break.
The constant drill of the mainstream media assures a steady drop-by-drop indoctrination of lies becoming the truth.”
The English equivalent of querdenken is think outside of the box. This only insofar arcs towards far right beliefs as any opposition toward’s Merkel’s anticonstitutional reign of terror was – for establishment convenience – smeared as far right because members of the so-called far right, eg, AfD MPs publically demanding the constitutional order to be restored, were also opposed to it.
Imagine that – I’ve seen that as live recording from the Bundestag at that time – there’s an MP holding a speech and demanding that the constitutional order of the so-called liberal democracy must be restored. And that guy is obviously one of these extremely dangerous extreme far rightists because otherwise, he couldn’t possibly make such demands. If that’s clown word, the clown is obviously called Pennywise.
My wife uses the phrase “he’s gone down the rabbit hole” very frequently, usually when we’re in company and she’s keen to highlight my obviously wayward eccentricity in all matters, but also in some matters specifically (which particularly preoccupy me). All she really means is that I display an ability to be very interested in specific topics – whereas she pays many things the briefest possible attention before moving on. “Going down the rabbit hole” to my mrs simply means having a capacity to be more interested in life than she is.
I’m inclined to think of this phenomenon as broadly male/female, but actually almost all the members of a WhatsApp group of old college friends (about 20 of us, all male from a formerly all-male college) to which I belong (and which in my enthusiasm I actually founded) are inclined to do the same. “Oh gawd, there goes Corky again, off down his rabbit hole” they chorus. But it’s my own fault – WhatsApp is not the right environment for serious thought! Derrr, Corky! (I left the group recently, exhausted by the constant requirement not to be ‘too’ interested in a variety of topics; I’m told that the group is now more or less an ex-parrot, the fear of ‘rabbit holes’ having pushed the rabbits themselves to extinction. Lol.)
The lurch to the Right is a reference to age. Christopher Hitchens was accused of exactly that in that he was a Trotskyite and became a neocon, a curiously commonplace phenomenon. He spoke in his autobography about some demented old man, decrepid shuffling I think they might’ve used but it means the same The idea is that as you get older you become more conservative, less radical and if this is seen as selling out or a diminution of spirit then it is a decrepd lurch. The rabbit hole is just a stupid lazy way to refer to a number of things that have come under closer scrutiny in recent years. There is nothing magical about CIA overthrows, high level assassinations, false flag terror. These actions are usually squalid and tawdry and only rarely well-executed. And then they lump in New Age thinking and any alternative or revisionist position on anything as well. All of these things are apparently down the rabbit hole. This just means that you have defined the rabbit hole by the parameters of your own erstwhile ignorance.
I don’t know if we’ve lurched to the right.
What I do know – because I’m old enough to remember the past – is that things which would have been considered insane until about five minutes ago (on a historical scale) are now commonplace.
And no, I don’t think it’s me being a bigoted, old fool, because I can see the consequences of these things and it’s not pretty.
I think most conservative thinking people have stayed where they are (as they tend to do, with beliefs based on values etc, vs fashion), however the political landscape itself has lurched to the left, steadily and surely
A nice example of this is the change in the political position of the German CDU (Christian-Democratic-Union, nominally a conservative party) on immigration into Germany:
The AfD whose political position on this topic is by-and-large that of the CDU of the 1990s and 2000s is nowadays considered extreme far right and completely beyond the pale, basically just an association of “Nazis” which has to be outlawed.
They just want to keep you in this state of mind arguing about trifles whilst thet get away with all the spoils. Of course there aren’t going to be any spoils but they are like a junkie who will rob his own grandmother for a bit more smack. In our times you have to understand that the real pathology of our overlords is being put on full display.
It took me a while to discern it but the subtext and purpose of this agenda is essentially an attack upon the literary. To begin with anyone who has spent their life in books is very well-armed to take on allcomers. I have seen that in introverts who absorb themselves in literature. They don’t say much but they know what to say when they have to say it. Neil Postman argued that childhood is a concept that only has meaning within the context of a literary culture. If you disregard that period of book-learning and innocence that we allow for a child then a child is reduced in value.
This is black September and dark October. You shouldn’t expect to feel normal. We are moving into very different times. There isn’t always a way to acknowledge this but if you head into the eye of the storm with complete determination and courage and to face the abyss without flinching then no one can fault you for that.
You might think that these islands will never be a target. Honestly nothing could be further from the truth in terms of overlapping target-rich environments. I know we have had it cushy for a long time and I wish it would continue but this is going to change rapidly. As long as you are a versatile guy then you are good to go. I like the contentedness of the Brits but at this moment in time it is waltzing towards Armageddon.
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall…
Feed your hare.
Excellent! Let me buy you a pint at the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley.
Let’s face it, we aren’t lurching to the right or going down the rabbit hole, we are just spiralling around the drain, desperately hoping for national leaders to stick the plug in to stop the death of western civilization. The plug is visible in some countries in Europe and they might stop the madness of the communist climate changers and illegal immigrant lovers, but we are a long way away in this country before we can stop being sucked down to our death and destruction.
It’s very simple. The Establishment – now part of a Global Establishment – has move into the territory of Marxist-Socialism and its evil spawn, Fascist technocracy.
We – the People – are exactly where we have always been.
The German empire always had had a technocratic government composed of subject matter experts appointed by the emperor as he saw fit. This was complemented by a parliament elected based on universal male suffrage which had the right to decide on budgets and whose approval was needed to pass legislation.
Establishment types cannot believe they are wrong.- this is so true.
Thank you for a most interesting article.