However, the official memory of World War I, heavily curated by historical narratives, state-sponsored educational initiatives, and public commemoration, has successfully expunged the racial terrors that drove the Australian political establishment to commit its youth to the industrial slaughter of the Western Front and the Middle East.1

If we remove the sepia-toned romance of the Digger, a different picture of the nascent Australian state emerges. The picture is that of, a paranoid, sparsely populated outpost of the British Empire, terrified of its geographic reality and obsessed with the maintenance of its racial purity.2

Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The War for White Australia, 1914–18 represents this succinctly. The title itself operates as a ironic inversion of the traditional “Lest We Forget,” suggesting that the nation has wilfully chosen to forget the true, uncomfortable motivations behind its foundational conflict. Cochrane argues that the Australian commitment to the Great War was not just some expression of reflexive imperial loyalty or an innocent blunder into European militarism. But, rather, it was driven by a societal anxiety: the absolute necessity of preserving a racial-national project known as “White Australia” against the existential threat of an “awakening Asia,” most notably the ascendant Empire of Japan.3

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Kaufmann’s central claim is plain and intentionally abrasive: the populist surge associated with Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the wider nationalist right is not best explained by wage stagnation or deindustrialisation alone, but by immigration-led demographic change and the felt decline of historic white majorities. He writes that “today’s populist earthquake has little to do with economics”.2 “Whiteshift”, in his own account, has two meanings. In the short term, it names the decline of white majorities and the polarisation that accompanies it, in the longer term, it names a process by which those majorities blur, expand, intermarry, and eventually absorb mixed populations into a new, looser majority identity. The book organises white responses to this transition under four headings; fight, repress, flee and join and its political ambition is to move readers, however reluctantly, towards the last of these.

What makes this more than a culture-war provocation is that Kaufmann refuses two consolations at once. He rejects hard ethnonationalism, because he personally does not want racial purity, closed membership, or the expulsion of minorities (which makes sense since he is half Jewish, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Costa Rican); but he also rejects the dominant liberal manoeuvre of treating identity-based concerns among majority populations as either morally illegible or straightforwardly racist. His own term for the politics he wants to name is closer to “ethno-traditional nationalism”: a wish to preserve the historic preponderance of majority groups through much slower immigration and stronger assimilation, without excluding minorities from national membership.

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This piece continues a series I’ll be developing here, in-depth book reviews that go beyond summary and into substance. Each essay explores not just what a book says, but how it says it, the ideas it engages with, and why it still matters.

These reviews will remain reserved for paid subscribers. They take more time, more research, and I want this space to offer something genuinely worthwhile for those who choose to support my work.

If you’d like to follow the series and access the full archive as it develops, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In the early months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a very overt transformation occurred in the public discourse of Western democracies. This crisis of public health and epidemiology quickly mutated into an arena of intense moral, political, and existential polarisation.

Within an astonishingly short period, populations spilt along the lines of the “vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated.” This division escalated into an ontological categorisation. The unvaccinated were frequently framed in public rhetoric as literal vectors of death, a “highway with multiple off-ramps” for the virus, compared unfavourably to the vaccinated, who represented a “maze of dead-end streets” where the pathogen’s journey ended.1 The unvaccinated were rapidly codified as enemies of the social order, threats to the collective survival of the community, and targets for systemic exclusion from public life.

This phenomenon is one of the most recent manifestations of a broader civilisational reality. It is mirrored continually in the digital realm, where the architecture of social media routinely accelerates disagreements over policy, culture, or language into campaigns of cancel culture. In these spaces, an opponent is very rarely granted the grace of just being incorrect, they are rapidly diagnosed as a purveyor of “misinformation,” a “threat to democracy,” or a danger to the physical and psychological safety of marginalised groups. Algorithms amplify this by turning every citizen into an enforcer of political boundaries through likes, shares, and retweets, fostering a culture of rage and collective identity formation based on mutual hostility. The speed with which these conflicts escalate from procedural debate to existential condemnation illuminates a intrinsic reality about human association that the liberal democratic consensus has spent over a century attempting to suppress.

We instinctively believe that we are engaged in debate, but we are, in fact, engaged in politics. And politics, stripped of its liberal euphemisms, is not fundamentally about governance, resource allocation, or the search for a rational consensus. It is, at its core, about the existential distinction between friend and enemy.

This proposition is the central thesis of The Concept of the Political, the 1927 masterwork by the German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, the essence of the political is entirely in the capacity of a collective group to identify its public adversary and, if necessary, to engage in combat against it.2 Schmitt’s framework exposes the mechanics of human grouping, without the fake liberal illusions of universal harmony, and forces a confrontation with the reality that, beneath the veil of civilised discourse, the structural demand for an enemy remains the animating force of modern political life.3

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This piece continues a series I’ll be developing here, in-depth book reviews that go beyond summary and into substance. Each essay explores not just what a book says, but how it says it, the ideas it engages with, and why it still matters.

These reviews will remain reserved for paid subscribers. They take more time, more research, and I want this space to offer something genuinely worthwhile for those who choose to support my work.

If you’d like to follow the series and access the full archive as it develops, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

It feels trite to say that the word “fascist” is deeply misunderstood, but it still truthfully is. This word is deployed in contemporary political discourse with such frequency, ferocity, and semantic elasticity. It is most often hurled at populists and traditionalists, at advocates of border control and proponents of free markets, at those who question the prevailing orthodoxies of gender, and at citizens protesting state mandates. The word is everywhere, and yet, it is increasingly empty, a floating signifier completely removed from its historical and ideological origins.

The inflation and liberal use of it has transformed a highly specific, historically bounded phenomenon into a universal moral weapon. When one labels their opponent a “fascist”, they are not making a precise taxonomic claim about their political philosophy, rather, they are trying to excommunicate them from the boundaries of civilised society.

It is a declaration that the accused is not just mistaken or has made a silly point, but positively demonic, harbouring an adamantine wickedness that must be destroyed for good. And yet, a sense of unease accompanies this ubiquitous usage. As the term expands to encompass any and all dissent against the progressive consensus, it has lost its descriptive power. The language of political analysis has been replaced by the language of moral panic.

It is within this zeitgeist of ideological chaos and linguistic degradation that Paul E. Gottfried introduces Fascism: The Career of a Concept.1 Gottfried traces the semantic twists and turns of the concept since the 1930s, allow his book to serve us as a historical corrective. Yet it also does something more, it reveals to us the deeply unsettling trajectory of a civilisation that has forgotten its past and relies on the invocation of phantom enemies to manage its present.

What the Book Does

Fascism: The Career of a Concept is a fantastic attempt to rescue political terminology from the hands of propagandists and social engineers. Gottfried’s central thesis posits that “fascism” has been historically distorted and ideologically weaponised, stretched beyond all recognition to serve the polemical needs of the post-war Left and, increasingly, the managerial establishment. The text argues that genuine fascism must be understood as a specific, situational movement belonging to early twentieth-century Europe, fundamentally distinct from both traditional conservatism and German National Socialism.

The intervention Gottfried makes is primarily one of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). He maps how a term originally used to describe Benito Mussolini’s corporatist, syndicalist, and hyper-nationalist regime mutated into a catch-all term for any resistance to progressive social change.2 Gottfried critiques modern liberal discourse, arguing that the indiscriminate application of the fascist label is not an accident of sloppy thinking, but a deliberate political strategy. By expanding the definition to include cultural conservatism, bourgeois morality, and national patriotism, the post-Marxist Left has successfully conflated mainstream traditionalism with the horrors of the 1930s.3

The text avoids the trap of moral condemnation in favour of analytical clarity. Gottfried is not interested in mitigating the realities of historical fascism, nor does he offer an apologia for authoritarianism. He instead insists that historical accuracy demands we distinguish between different political families. By rejecting the semantic abuse of the term, the book makes the reader confront the actual mechanics of modern power, stripping away the rhetorical camouflage that disguises the coercive nature of contemporary progressive governance.

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This piece continues a series I’ll be developing here, in-depth book reviews that go beyond summary and into substance. Each essay explores not just what a book says, but how it says it, the ideas it engages with, and why it still matters.

These reviews will remain reserved for paid subscribers. They take more time, more research, and I want this space to offer something genuinely worthwhile for those who choose to support my work.

If you’d like to follow the series and access the full archive as it develops, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In the sweltering August of 1936, at the exact centre of the Iberian Peninsula, a Spanish firing squad composed of leftist militiamen raised their rifles and took aim. Their target they had in the firing line this time was not a fascist general, a rebellious politician, or a wealthy aristocratic landowner. They were aiming at a statue. The Monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a lofty stone edifice erected in 1919 at the Cerro de los Ángeles near Madrid, was formally “executed” by anarchist and communist forces before being dynamited into rubble.1

What does it mean for an army to execute a stone monument? To the modern and secularised mind which is conditioned by the logic of post-Enlightenment rationalism, an act like this would appear as just vandalism or theatrical political propaganda. It seems an absurd misallocation of military resources in the midst of a desperate conflict. But to understand the Spanish Civil War and to comprehend the visceral depths of the tragedy that consumed the nation between 1936 and 1939, one must recognise this act for what it truly was: a metaphysical and metapolitical assassination. It was a violent attempt to excise the divine from the public square and to permanently sever the Spanish nation from its traditional and spiritual roots.

Spain in 1936 was a nation perched precariously on the edge of the abyss. The Second Spanish Republic, born in 1931 with soaring promises of liberal democratic reform, had rapidly disintegrated into a blood-soaked arena of radicalised ideological warfare. The collapse of the political centre gave way to a uncompromising polarisation. On one side stood the forces of ideological leftist modernity, encompassing revolutionary socialists, Soviet-backed communists, and anarcho-syndicalists, all determined to forcibly birth a new, egalitarian, and radically secular society.2 On the other side stood the defenders of tradition, monarchists, conservatives, the military hierarchy, and devout Catholics who viewed the revolutionary left not just as political opponents with differing economic theories, but as existential threats to Christian civilisation itself (which they were).

Decades of mainstream historiography, heavily influenced by the romanticised narratives of foreign volunteers and leftist intellectuals, have often reduced the conflict to a simplistic dress rehearsal for the Second World War, a neat, Manichean binary of “democracy versus fascism”. Yet, this distorts the reality of the Spanish civil war and fails to capture the eschatological nature of the war.

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These reviews will be reserved for paid subscribers. They take more time and more research, and I want to make this space something genuinely valuable for those who choose to support my work.

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WASP’S: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy

Context

Michael Knox Beran’s WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy traces the grand, tragic arc of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that dominated American cultural, financial, and political life from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Chosen for its sweeping insights into the nature of leadership and the absolute necessity of a ruling class, this book fits intellectually into the study of elite formation, institutional power, and eventual decay. It examines the WASP as a distinct, self-conscious institutional culture, nurtured in the exclusive crucibles of the Groton School, Harvard’s Porcellian Club, and Yale’s Skull and Bones, that explicitly sought to guide and elevate the American republic. It is a study of a class that viewed itself as the stewards of the nation’s moral and geopolitical destiny.

Core Argument

Beran’s central thesis is that the WASP establishment emerged from the ashes of the post-Civil War era, specifically driven by a moral revulsion toward the narrow, materialistic self-interest of the new industrial tycoons of the Gilded Age, such as the Vanderbilts and Goulds. Influenced deeply by the British traditions of civic humanism championed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, early WASP luminaries like Henry Adams, John Jay Chapman, and Theodore Roosevelt sought a “vision of human completeness”. They utilised institutions like Groton, under the stern guidance of figures like Endicott Peabody, to instill “muscular Christianity” and the Athenian ideal of eutrapelia, a graceful, multifaceted capability into their privileged youth, explicitly preparing them to reject idle club life in favour of rigorous public service.

However, Beran chronicles how this magnificent class ultimately came to grief. Through what he terms “toxic blood pride,” an eventual reliance on the vitality of exotic outsiders, the self-inflicted wounds of egalitarian reforms, and the disastrous, hubristic miscalculations of the Vietnam War led by the “best and the brightest” like McGeorge Bundy, the WASP elite lost its mandate of heaven. They were the architects of the postwar order, yet they surrendered their authority to a technocratic, meritocratic machine that lacked their underlying civic soul.

Tone & Style Reflection

Beran writes with an elegiac, almost poetic melancholy that perfectly suits his subject matter. He is unflinchingly honest about the idiosyncrasies of his subjects, noting their neurotic debilities, their suffocating snobbery, their frequent descents into lunacy or suicide, and their polite but firm anti-Semitism (notably in figures like Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot). Yet, crucially, he refuses to engage in the cheap, moralising iconoclasm that is so deeply popular in contemporary left-wing academia. His tone is that of a composed historian mourning the loss of a flawed but desperately necessary ideal. It feels profoundly like a work of truth, acknowledging that while the WASPs failed, their failure leaves a cultural and political void in American life that remains painfully, perhaps permanently, unfilled.

Verdict

WASPS is a great reading for anyone seeking to understand the architectural collapse of American civic leadership and the origins of our current elite malaise. It is a highly valuable, nuanced testament to the reality that a civilisation cannot survive the moral exhaustion and institutional suicide of its founding aristocracy.

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