Passing the Peak, or: The Great Correction

How Western politics became so hysterical and crazy, and why their worst excesses may be headed for a drastic correction.

A pleasing window.

One of the most salient behaviours of modern liberal democracies, is their tendency towards inertial politics. Not all political programmes and initiatives have inertia, but the very worst of them always do.

The cycle invariably begins with a period of growing concern, hysteria and press coverage emanating from confined activist or expert circles. At first the state remains pacifically indifferent, but soon the general mobilisation crosses a threshold and governments respond with a lot of haphazard interventions on all sides. The greater the hysteria, the more expensive and intrusive these interventions must be, and for a time they provide still more energy to the inertial programme. Eventually, though, the system begins to lose momentum – less because the original problem persists despite everything, and more because human attention is a limited resource that is soon exhausted and the cure rapidly proves worse than the disease. It can take a few months, a few years or a whole decade to get past the peak, but once the slide begins, it is as inexorable as the initial swell. There is no saving it.

Covid was like this, and in writing about Covid I began to appreciate that its inertial properties were in no way unique. Many political causes exhibit similar behaviour, from anti-smoking campaigns to our present efforts to reduce carbon emissions to mass-migrationism to antiracism. The root cause of this behaviour appears to be the wide distribution of power in liberal democratic systems. For our states to do anything, thousands and thousands of people have to be brought on board. Fragmented managerial power structures, which lack clear hierarchies, mean that emotional appeals and hysteria must be the coordinating forces instead.

Crucially, panic-induced coordination is ephemeral, which is why inertial programmes sooner or later come crashing down. None of them last forever, they almost always turn out to be for nothing, and when the dust has cleared, everybody finds himself exactly where he was before it all started – if with a few more senseless laws and a few more state bureaucrats on the public payroll. It is all very stupid.

Inertial programmes share some common features. They attach to civilian life most of all, and they generally relate to the problems of mass society. Health and safety on the one hand, and humanitarianism on the other hand, are recurring themes. The appeal is that we must work together to mitigate an immediate danger or injustice, which has arisen through our own vice or inattention. Inertial programmes generally advance via conversion. There is an awakening – a moment in which you are called upon to join the ranks of the enlightened. You go Woke. Individuals realise that they can’t just keep driving cars or they’ll destroy the atmosphere, or that Covid is not just the flu and that if they celebrate Christmas they’ll kill their grandparents, or that sex-specific bathrooms repress the gender expression of sexual minorities. Each of these conversions comes complete with a call to action, and because there is nobody so zealous as a new convert, inertial politics can be very powerful.