In a way, Boris Johnson epitomizes the present moment. There is, across the western world, an inchoate, organic rise of ordinary commoners, people who want a political framework that lets them live their ordinary lives, working and wiving and thriving, without the drama of world wars and climate change and systemic racism.
Boris Johnson was elected in Britain to “Get Brexit Done.” So he did. But where is the rest of him? Everything else he has done has been standard educated class globalist stuff, from climate change to immigration and the trendiest trends in the LGBT universe. That is a question you might want to ask Sir Humphrey Appleby.
For those that don’t know, Sir Humphrey Appleby is the Brit civil service permanent secretary to the minister in the Brit TV series Yes Minister. La Wik:
Yes Minister follows the ministerial career of Jim Hacker, played by Paul Eddington. His various struggles to formulate and enact policy or effect departmental changes are opposed by the British Civil Service, in particular his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, played by Sir Nigel Hawthorne.
We could say that unless a political party in the western world comes into power with a well-constructed plan of action it will find that the civil service professionals have other ideas, and that it will be almost impossible to override them.
You know, kinda like Donald Trump and his MAGA plan to boost the economy, redo NAFTA, stand up to China and build a wall to defend our borders.
Otherwise the Applebys and the liberal NGOs and the Widow Jobses and the WEF and the mostly peaceful activists are going to have their way. Projecting this setup on the whole western world we could say that the educated class, from all countries, forms an intellectual community and instinctively comes together and promotes the same political agenda. What is the purpose? To give meaning and status to educated people all over the western world.
Of course, then we have the fact that all politics is about mobilizing our friends to fight the enemy, because otherwise we are lost. Doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and the UK in Europe prior to 1914 that was ready to fight against the German threat, or the progressive movement in the United States that is currently sworn to defend abortion and defeat far-right systemic racism, or the universe of NGOs and activists, or the ultra MAGA movement of Donald Trump that is sworn to fight and defeat the “deep state.”
“There is no politics without an enemy.” So there must either be a foreign threat to our nation, or an internal threat from “far-right” or “far-left” conspiracies.
Actually, climate change is rather a clever way of creating an enemy that everyone, all over the world, can join together to fight. It meets the essence of the political, the friends coming together to fight the existential threat.
Of course, there are plenty of other things to fight, if you have a mind to it: inflation, recession, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, crime, monopoly, bureaucracy, wokism, police brutality, immigration. Do you see the point? All these enemies require, if not actual violence, the application of force. And forcing is what government does.
But if there is no need for force then there is no need for government. Do you see the problem? If you are a middle-class commoner you really don’t have an existential enemy to fight. You just want to be left alone to work and wive and thrive raise your kids in peace. But then you leave the political arena to our liberal friends and their NGOs and their activism which are, when you think about it, all about fighting the enemy, only with peaceful protest and marching through the institutions instead of “gun violence.”
After all that word salad, it is pretty obvious what to do. For commoners, the enemy is the educated class that is blasting gas prices into the stratosphere, that is “grooming” our kids for LGBT instead of educating them, that is wrecking the economy, that is corrupting elections, that is bankrupting the government with trillion dollar handouts to Democratic voters.
So, in Britland after Boris they need a leader to announce a Make UK Great Again — MUGA — and fight the North London luvvies that have wrecked Britain with their climate change, LGBT, immigration madness, and their housing unaffordability.
Just as in the US we need to continue the Trump movement and make lefty wokies the issue rather than “far-right” insurrectionists.