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Just a couple of years after I moved to America from Russia, I was discussing my career prospects with a friend, head of humanities at a Texas university.

My training and inclination naturally pointed to life in the academe, but my friend Peter warned against it: “It’s assumed that everyone at every humanities faculty will be at least broadly liberal.”

Since I knew I couldn’t be liberal even broadly, I began to look for different paths to economic survival. My academic career died before it got a chance to live, and my biggest illusion followed it to the knacker’s yard.

Everyone, Peter? There I was, thinking that pluralism in politics ipso facto promoted plurality of views, certainly in the intellectual arena. Yet according to my friend it fostered uniformity instead. I hoped he was wrong, but sensed he wasn’t.

Now, almost half a century later, an English friend also named Peter asked me about my “thoughts on the outlook for the USA”, and that made me recall the other Peter and the paradox at which he hinted.

It wasn’t the only one. The other paradox was the dichotomy between ‘public opinion’ and opinions of the public. The former was opinion with a public voice, produced by the vocal chords of “everyone at every humanities faculty”, the major newspapers, TV networks, publishers and assorted celebrities.

The latter was opinion enunciated in the public bar, an institution enjoying an overwhelming numerical superiority over the other one. Yet no war for a nation’s soul is ever decided by the large battalions so dear to Napoleon’s heart.

Those who think otherwise ought to remind themselves that the greatest revolutions of modernity, American, French and Russian, were each perpetrated by a few hundred revolutionaries, a few thousand at most. The majority either remained silent, or was seduced into joining the chorus of ‘public opinion’.

What matters is the specific weight of opinion, not its demographic spread. Thus I discovered that the public generally didn’t share ‘public opinion’. Long before terms like ‘political correctness’ entered the lexicon, the American public rejected ‘public opinion’ on all its pet subjects: race, taxation, foreign intervention, the role of the state, guns, contempt for American grassroots and history.

The rejection was visceral, rather than rational. Public bar opinion was happy to rail against ‘pinko preverts’, racial strife shoved down its collective throat, growing taxes and so forth. But for as long as ‘public opinion’ didn’t interfere too much with the pursuit of happiness also known as the American Dream, public bar opinion was happy to remain confined to its natural venue.

And when such interference overstepped a certain threshold, public bar opinion tended to find able enunciators, such as Reagan and, well, Trump. Those mouthpieces got themselves heard – and elected – by putting public bar opinion into words capable of converting it into a political force.

‘Public opinion’ was always aware of that danger, which is why it curbed its more extreme, totalitarian tendencies. Such self-restraint reflected a tactical consideration, not an inner need. Public bar opinion had to be kept in check, and that desideratum was best served by seeming moderation, not unbridled extremism.

With a beagle’s olfactory sense and a sapper’s eye for the landmines, ‘public opinion’ developed an intricate system of verbal control mechanisms, something I call glossocracy, government of the word, by the word and for the word.

‘Public opinion’ learned how to come up with words that public bar opinion wouldn’t perceive as too extreme. Thus ‘health insurance for all’ is better than nationalised health; ‘state investment’, than state control; ‘social justice’, than expropriatory taxation, ‘affirmative action’ than reverse discrimination; ‘identity politics’, than social atomisation – and so forth.

The glossocrats avoided certain words the way anglers avoid noise, and for the same reason: they didn’t want to scare off their prey. But for all the dominance of ‘public opinion’, words and realities can’t go their separate ways entirely.

Immoderate policies can’t hide their whole body behind moderate words: an elbow or a toe is bound to stick out. Hence, it’s not just extreme words that were off-limits, but also, to some extent, extreme policies. ‘You can’t say that’ isn’t the same as ‘you can’t do that’, but some link usually perseveres.

This long introduction was necessary for me even to attempt to answer my English friend’s question about the outlook for the USA. That outlook, I’m afraid, is grim, made ever so much grimmer by the Trump tenure.

Throughout his presidency I’ve been as complimentary about Trump’s policies as I’ve been scathing about his personality. Alas, his good policies are more easily reversible than the damage done by his bad personality.

Those seeking significant political shifts need both their gods and their demons, with these entities existing in binary glossocratic opposition. It could be proletarians and capitalists, Aryans and Jews, monarchists and republicans, liberals and racists or anything else.

To what extent such binary entities reflect reality doesn’t matter. What matters to budding glossocrats isn’t that they are real, but that they are plausible.

Thus, for example, Reagan had his opponents and even haters, but, hard as their tried, they couldn’t attach the devil’s horns to his public image. Reagan was too obviously a good chappie, or at least made a damned good show of being one.

His haters from the ranks of ‘public opinion’ had their gods, but they lost a great deal of their omnipotence without the plausible dialectical antithesis of an obvious demon. That dulled the cutting edge of glossocracy and delayed its triumph: dialectics won’t be defied.

Yet Trump is no Reagan. His repulsive personality, especially its post-November manifestations, gave the glossocratic ‘public opinion’ the demon it sought. For people blessed with easy command of language it’s child’s play to establish a link between Trump’s rotten character and the ethos that gave rise to his good policies.

That Trump’s undertakings will be undone by the Biden administration within months, not to say weeks, has always gone without saying. Yet much more damaging is the increase in the volume of ‘public opinion’ with a pari passu muting of public bar opinion.

Glossocratic ‘public opinion’ now doesn’t have to hide behind the smokescreen of moderation. It no longer has to forswear extreme words because it no longer has to forswear extreme policies. Since Trump is a plausible demon, ‘public opinion’ can easily demonise, and thereby silence, public bar opinion.

In practical terms, this means a forthcoming leftward turn in American politics, with every destructive consequence such an excursion will inevitably entail. The consequences would be hurtful even without the Covid pandemic devastating the country’s economy and denting its spirit. As it is… well, as it is, I can’t find many hopeful words.

All I can do is pray that the devastating effects of the extreme policies will only shake the foundations of America, rather than implode them. Public bar opinion has been shamed into silence, but it’s still there, waiting for a gentler, more persuasive voice than Trump’s to appear. I pray that it does, soon.

This expression, common in the north of England, gave rise to the title of Russell T Davies’s TV series, where the adjective is used in its sexual, or rather homosexual, sense.

Now Mr Davies, himself a lover of male beauty, has come out against casting straight actors as homosexuals. His reasons, he explains, are professional, not woke.

“It’s about authenticity,” he says. “You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them [sic] in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up.”

Far be it from me to argue with a professional about his area of expertise. If Mr Davies says that a straight man can’t capture every nuance of homosexual demeanour, I have to accept he knows what he’s talking about.

But then Cate Blanchett is a professional too, and, though straight, she happily played a lesbian in the film Carol. Miss Blanchett disagrees with Mr Davies: “I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience,” she says.

This rings true: an actor’s craft is all about creating characters detached from himself. Few would expect a thespian playing Richard III to be a hunchback in real life, one performing Macbeth to be a serial murderer or one playing Lear to have his eyes gouged out.

On the subject close to Mr Davies’s heart, many straight actors have excelled playing homosexuals: Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain, Hugh Grant in A Very English Scandal. And Sean Penn got an Oscar for such a role in Milk.

Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor played homosexuals in I Love You Philip Morris, which gave Ricky Gervais an opening when he presented the Golden Globe Awards.  “Two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay,” said the comedian in his deadpan voice. “So the complete opposite of some famous scientologists then.”

A collective gasp from the audience greeted that transparent reference to John Travolta. “My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke,” reassured Gervais. Then, after a perfectly timed pause, he added: “They’re not here.”

Jokes aside, I’ll let professionals sort out the issue of authenticity, although, getting back to Mr Davies’s statement, I can’t for the life of me see why an able-bodied actor couldn’t be believable in a wheelchair. And, as both Hanks and Penn showed, conveying homosexuality isn’t beyond the capacity of an accomplished straight actor either.

Alas, when Mr Davies says “you wouldn’t black someone up”, he belies his claim of not being woke. Blackface used to be a standard practice in productions of Othello. Actors like Lawrence Olivier were indeed blacked up without in any way lowering the dramatic tension of the role.

That practice has now been abandoned. Any production featuring a blacked-up actor as Othello would be picketed faster than you could say ‘racism’ and ‘cultural appropriation’. By the same token, you won’t see many men playing female roles, and when they do it’s usually for a valid reason.

Such transsexualism was de rigueur in Elizabethan times, when women weren’t allowed on stage for fear of offending public morality. But since actresses, even those who insist on calling themselves actors, are now in ample supply, it would be churlish to cast, say, Jason Statham as Ophelia.

So far so good – I am agreeing with Mr Davies and his likeminded friends, if only for the sake of argument. But they betray themselves by showing a lamentable lack of consistency.

If, as they maintain, a white actor can’t be convincing as a black character, nor a male performer as a woman, then logic demands that the reverse apply as well: blacks shouldn’t play whites and women shouldn’t play men.

However, when ideology talks, logic falls silent. Thus the same people who protest against ‘whitewashing’, welcome ‘blackwashing’, the casting of blacks in white roles (and, for that matter, actresses as men).

Examples are numerous. Off the top, in the TV series Bridgerton, black actress Golda Rosheuvel plays Queen Charlotte, and in Anne Boleyn the title role is played by equally black Jodie Turner-Smith – with no cultural appropriation mooted within my earshot.

In fact, there have been rumours about Queen Charlotte’s African ancestry, although no consensus among historians exists. But that’s neither here nor there: even if there was a drop of black blood in the Queen, this doesn’t explain the profusion of other black actors in Bridgerton: the court of George III wasn’t exactly known for its commitment to multiculturalism.  

Such casting is strictly ideological. The audience is expected to pretend it’s not distracted by the spectacle of, say, Anne Boleyn as a black woman. Yet any intelligent viewer is bound to look for some hidden meaning in such casting, and most would be frustrated at their inability to find any.

These days it goes without saying that Cleopatra must always be played by a black actress on the British stage. Now the queen of Egypt was a member of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, whose members could be suntanned, but never black. Portraying her as a black African makes no sense historically or artistically, but to modern directors it makes every sense ideologically.

The production I saw at the National featured not only transracialism but also transsexualism. Many male roles, including that of the warrior Agrippa, were played by women. Utterly confused, I walked out after the first act, a feat of escapism I’ve since repeated many times whenever I couldn’t figure out whether a woman actually was a man, or merely pretended to be one.

One such expensive exit (two theatre tickets will set you back some £150 in London) was from the play Raven, about the chess match between Fischer and Spassky. Many of the historical male characters were played by women, who would then revert to their own sex in subsequent scenes; blacks played whites; I headed for the exit, confused to the point of distraction.

It’s too much to hope that our directors stop using stage and screen as ideological battlegrounds. These chap are among those who inhale reality and exhale zeitgeist. Even if they have artistic sensibilities, they willingly trade them for woke rectitude, and no one can stop such transactions.

However, I do suggest Mr Davies attend a spiritualist séance and try to communicate with the spirit of Stanislavsky. I bet Konstantin Sergeyevich will see nothing but madness in Davies’s method.

Now it’s Clive of India (d. 1774) whose name has to be expunged for being offensive to our brittle sensibilities.

This military leader in the employ of the East India Company (EIC) did much to establish the British presence on the subcontinent, largely and satisfyingly at the expense of the French. He became the British governor of Bengal, and his tenure was controversial even in his own time.

Working with Warren Hastings, Clive laid the foundations of the British Empire, but both of them came under attack for mismanagement and corruption. Their most vociferous critic was Edmund Burke, who eventually redirected his animus towards the bigger target of the French Revolution.

Though both men were eventually acquitted at their trials, historians still argue about Clive’s career. This is a debate I’m neither willing nor indeed qualified to join. Yet those who wish to erase Clive’s name from history don’t join the debate either. They simply put their tyrannical foot down.

Their syllogistic thought proceeds from general principles. Thesis: Clive was a colonialist. Antithesis: Colonialism is evil by definition. Synthesis: Clive was evil.

Therefore his statue outside the Foreign Office should be toppled and, more immediately, his name must be taken off a house at Merchant Taylors’ School for Boys. According to headmaster Simon Everson, “Robert Clive has always been a controversial figure.”

True. But if we censor ex post factum every controversial figure in history, we’ll soon run out of heroes. In fact, we’ll soon run out of history.

For example, the Houses of Parliament are adorned by the statues of Richard I and Oliver Cromwell. Applying our exacting modern criteria to both, we find them not just controversial, but downright criminal. Richard offended our commitment to multiculturalism by leading a crusade, while Cromwell butchered the Irish – not something our Equalities Commission would countenance.

Like most modern perversions, such a retromingent approach to history’s giants is ignorant, immoral and inane. This goes to show yet again that any thought or action inspired by a wrong premise will itself be wrong.

In this case, the wrong premise is that colonialism is bad ipso facto. This belief is inspired by an ideological commitment to the equality of everything and everyone. If all civilisations are equally good, then there can be no moral justification for any claim to civilising interference.

Logically following from this is the insistence that, say, British settlers committed a crime against egalitarianism by colonising North America and wiping out, or at least segregating, the indigenous civilisation. Those Red Indians were every bit as civilised as the white colonisers, albeit in different ways.

There’s no denying that the colonisation of America entailed much brutality, some of it regarded as criminal even at the time. But on balance one would have to admit that the continent has derived a few benefits as well.

History is written not so much by the victors as by the victories. And victories outnumber defeats in the history of colonisation by a wide margin. For some civilisations aren’t just different from others, but also superior to them.

British civilisation, for example, was made greater when the Isles were colonised by the Romans in the first century and the French Normans in the eleventh. The Romans also civilised most of the Mediterranean peoples they colonised, including the rather brutish Franks. The Spanish and the Portuguese left Latin America better off than it had been before their arrival, while ending such multicultural practices as Aztec cannibalism.

And India still benefits from the institutions left behind by the British colonisers, for all their occasional cruelty, venality and corruption. They too put paid to some objectionable aspects of multiculturalism. For example, even the staunchest champions of diversity will find it hard to hail as charmingly idiosyncratic the ritual of immolating the widow together with her dead husband.

Even John Stuart Mill, not widely seen as a champion of tyranny, defended British presence in India. According to him the British promoted the protection of legal rights, tolerance of conflicting opinions, and an economy better equipped to handle natural disasters. In our own time, India wouldn’t have become the world’s largest democracy and one of the biggest economies without the legacy of British colonialists – including Clive.

I’m not suggesting that a pair of wings be attached to the bronze back of Clive’s statues in London and Shrewsbury – he was no saint. But the statues of saints adorn cathedral façades, not public squares. These tend to favour sculptural representations of soldiers and statesmen, few of whom would pass through the fine sieve of modern scrutiny.

Yet their names signpost our civilisation, making it a living organism. The opposite of that is historical amnesia, severing the country’s roots. And severed roots have the same effect on civilisations as they do on trees.

None of this is to imply opposition to historical revisionism as such. As new archives are found or opened, new facts come to light. Dispassionate historians use such discoveries for retrospective threshing, separating the wheat of historical fact from the chaff of historical myth. This may lead to a reassessment of past events and personages, something to be welcomed by everyone who values truth.   

But no new facts have been uncovered about Clive, Rhodes or other Empire builders. Frenzied attacks on their memory are inspired by a Procrustean attempt to squeeze history into the framework of a fly-by-night ideology. This, I suggest, is rather the opposite of truth.

Not being a subscriber to The Independent, I haven’t read the whole article. But the title told me everything I needed to know: George Clooney Says Capitol Riots Have Put Trump Family into ‘Dustbin of History’.

Venting the effluvia of the likes of Clooney must be one reason for the paper’s paid circulation languishing at around the 50,000 mark. But the problem goes beyond this scurrilous sheet.

Many other news outlets also provide a forum for ‘celebrities’ to share their insights into subjects they know nothing about and understand even less. Clooney, for example, is constantly egged on by his pseudointellectual wife to pontificate on matters cultural, and he is never short of conduits into which his newly acquired wisdom can flow.

So empowered, he has agitated for the return of the Elgin Marbles to… whom exactly? Here’s how George joined the battle some seven years ago: “I had to do a little bit of research to show I’m not completely out of my mind. Even in England the polling is in favour of returning the marbles to the Pantheon.”

Which Pantheon, George? The one in Paris or the one in Rome? Perhaps a wee bit more research would have come in handy, although these days it’s fashionable to plug holes in education with ideology – provided it’s the right, which is to say left, ideology.

What his ideology is comes across in Clooney’s choice of phrase. The destination he envisages for the Trump family was first mentioned in a similar context by one of history’s most sinister monsters, Leon Trotsky. When on 25 October, 1917, the Menshevik faction walked out of the Congress of Soviets to protest against the Bolshevik coup, Trotsky shouted: “Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!”

It hardly needs saying that George isn’t familiar with the provenance of the phrase. He may not even be able to tell Trotsky from a casting director. But he must often have heard that expression bandied about by his friends, who also got it third-hand, as a distant echo of a heart-warming manifesto.

In the same vein, someone who is steeped in Western culture will often use scriptural phrases even if he may be unaware of their origin. For example, the sentence “I’m at my wit’s seeing Western culture falling by the wayside or, at best, hanging on by the skin of its teeth” contains three biblical expressions that not everyone will identify as such.

Then there’s the issue of that proverbial repository awaiting not just Trump, but his whole family. How many generations of it? Perhaps the body text answers this question but, as far as I know, neither Ivanka nor Jared nor their children were implicated in inciting the Washington debacle.

Perhaps in this instance George takes his cue not from Trotsky but indeed from Scripture, with himself acting in the divine capacity: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations…”

There’s no doubt that Trump’s incitement of the riot, which he didn’t have the courage to lead, was a disgusting act – regardless of whether or not some electoral irregularities had indeed favoured Biden. The president’s delusional solipsism is such that in his own mind he can never lose fair and square. If it appears that he indeed lost, he must have been cheated or betrayed.

In that he’s closer to the French than to the English. When the French lose a battle, they utter the stock phrase nous sommes trahis – we’ve been betrayed. The English know, or at least used to know, how to win and lose with grace and dignity.

Grace and dignity just aren’t part of Trump’s makeup: his experience in real estate development and presenting a reality TV show instilled in him a different set of character traits. This came to the fore throughout his presidency, but especially since he lost it. Trump’s appalling behaviour has besmirched his legacy, there’s no doubt about that.

But this doesn’t mean there is no legacy. I’m not sure if his tenure was indeed the most triumphant first term in history, as Trump has claimed with his typically unpleasant braggadocio, but it was generally a success.

The economy was ticking along nicely until Covid arrived and effectively lost the election for Trump. The government can do little to affect a relatively free economy positively, but it can do much to affect it negatively – and Trump didn’t do anything like that. His tax-cutting policies were especially beneficial, but then his career had trained him to detest taxation.

Trump’s foreign policy had its share of victories too. Though his natural tendency is to treat international relations as a business transaction, he managed to restrain himself long enough to put a squeeze on Iran and North Korea, even though his record of dealing with Russia and China leaves something to be desired.

He also took America out of several corrupt international setups, such as the Paris Accords and UNESCO. The latter departure was prompted by that organisation’s several anti-Israel resolutions, and Trump was perhaps the best friend Israel has had among US presidents.

He certainly did more to normalise relations in the Middle East than any other president since Carter, who was instrumental in bringing about the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1977. And, though seemingly contemptuous of Nato, Trump strengthened this guarantor of Western security by forcing European governments to beef up their commitment to defence.

Throughout Trump’s presidency I praised most of his policies without making much of an effort to disguise my contempt for his personality. Unfortunately, the latter eventually overrode the former, and last Wednesday Trump came perilously close to any reasonable definition of sedition.

Yet professional Trump-haters, who number in their ranks most media and academic types along with intellectual giants like Clooney, should have been careful what they wished for. Having got rid of Trump, they’ve handed unchecked political power to the blatantly socialist Democrats, who now control not only the White House, but also both Houses of Congress.

Those of us who understand both the destructive potential of socialism and the vital role America plays in the well-being of the West, can only hope that the country won’t follow Trump into the Trotskyist receptacle invoked by Clooney.

It’s good to see that French teachers aren’t just teaching but also learning.

A few months ago their colleague Samuel Paty was beheaded by a pupil for illustrating a lesson on freedom of expression with Charlie Hebdo caricatures of Mohammed.

Following Kipling’s advice (“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”), half of French secondary school teachers now avoid subjects that may offend the delicate sensibilities of their Muslim pupils.

Specifically, they steer clear of sexuality, the Holocaust, Jews in general, evolution, pigs and any mention of Americans. This, I think, shows a singular lack of creativity. In fact, they could curry favour with their sensitive flock by safely uttering sentences including all such taboos.

For example: “Those f***ing American Jews, who have evolved from pigs, still insist that the Holocaust happened.” There, every objectionable subject covered, every pitfall avoided, diversity served.

Those circumspect educators also forgo visits to cathedrals, which used to be a feature in French curricula. Again, they cede their position too easily. They could still take their pupils on a tour of, say, Chartres – provided the youngsters are issued with paint sprays. That way they could still admire the cathedral’s Gothic architecture and sans pareil stained glass as they paint pig’s heads on the walls.

Another bone of contention is the presence of girls in sports, which too is deeply offensive. After all, those pig’s spawns prance about exhibiting their bare legs at least, and sometimes even more. That, however, doesn’t mean they have to be excluded.

Scantily clad young ladies can still be used as goal posts, archery targets and punching bags. That way they can participate in sports without either assailing the innermost feelings of Muslim pupils or playing with the teachers’ heads.

You see, one can maintain the highest multicultural standards without in any way restricting pupils’ ability to learn. All one has to do is use one’s head.

P.S. Two consecutive sentences in The Mail paean to Diana: “The couple met, he [Hasnat Khan, Diana’s lover] reveals, when she shouted at the Pakistani-born medic as he left work one day: ‘Oi, where are you going?” Mr Khan said: ‘One of her most attractive qualities was her vulnerability.’” I’d be tempted to separate the two statements with a little padding, but that’s only me.

Every revolution has its martyrs, a tradition upheld by Wednesday’s Walpurgisnacht in Washington (WWW for short). Police officer Brian Sicknick died this morning, after some rampaging thug had struck him on the head with a fire extinguisher.

The mob will doubtless claim its own martyrs: Ashli Babbitt, shot in the head when clambering into the Capitol building through a smashed window, another woman trampled to death by the stampeding mob, and two other rioters who couldn’t handle the excitement and suffered cardiac events.

Yet they have no right to that claim. A martyr is someone who willingly gives his life for a good cause, the adjective being the operative word. Hence, say, those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising were martyrs; the SS soldiers killed there were not.

We can argue whether the low number of casualties among the thugs was due to the restraint shown by the police or their incompetence. All I can say is that, had I been in charge when the Capitol building was breached, I would have ordered the police to fire at will.

Lest you accuse me of being a crypto-leftie, I would have issued a similar order last summer, when BLM and Antifa mobs were turning Minneapolis, Portland and Manhattan into a pogrom orgy of arson, looting and violence.

Our information on WWW is woefully scant. We need to know who organised it, for example. We already know who inspired it: Trump, with his incendiary messages and entreaties for all ‘true patriots’ to demonstrate against Biden’s congressional rubber-stamp.

“Be there, be wild,” screamed Trump on Twitter, and the mob complied with alacrity. How could it not respond to such an elegant appeal?

To be fair, Trump didn’t specifically call for violence, and neither did he take care of the organisational details. Yet someone did – a hundred people may act on the spur of the moment, but never thousands.

Exactly how many took part in WWW is another datum we haven’t got yet. Moments before she went through the window towards the fatal bullet, Ashli Babbitt shouted: “Three million plus people here. God bless American patriots.”

Maths couldn’t have been her forte for TV footage shows a crowd smaller by several orders of magnitude. But even that mob had to be enrolled, coordinated, kitted with posters and so forth. Someone evidently did all that, and we should know who.

Until we have all the facts we should refrain from making specific comments, a wise policy regrettably disdained by many commentators. But general comments ought not to be off limits.

First, I can’t accept the view that WWW threatens to bring American democracy down. Riots may put paid to a political regime, but a political system of long standing can’t be destroyed by anything other than itself.

Thus WWW won’t upend unlimited democracy. It has, however, emphasised this system’s congenital defects.

A democracy of near-universal and constantly expanding suffrage based on birthright was brought to the fore by the American and French Revolutions, which, among other things, vindicated the eternal law of political upheavals:

Every revolution produces consequences unintended by its perpetrators. The likelihood of such consequences being the exact opposite of such intentions is directly proportionate to the temperature of the perpetrators’ stridency.

The democratic revolutions of the 18^th century, just like the quasi-republican ones of the 17^th and the socialist ones of the 20^th, are a case in point. They too produced unintended consequences that gradually assumed a significance arguably greater than the intended ones (which were bad enough, but this is a separate subject).

One such was assigning an overriding importance to national politics, something that never existed in any pre-Enlightenment dispensation. People were given an illusion that they had the power to affect national affairs, rather than merely elect every few years this or that increasingly inane member of an increasingly homogeneous elite.

Another by-product is a gradual, eventually almost total, shift of political power from local to central government. That empowers the chaps in the capital to an extent unimaginable to even the absolute monarchs of Western polity: Louis XIV’s famous pronouncement on the nature of the state was more wishful thinking than reportage.

The democratically elected operators of central government can make the claim that people who put them into office consent to anything the politicians will then do in their name. Hence the shibboleth “consent of the governed”, which, like most other shibboleths, is often enunciated but seldom analysed.

Since neither Locke nor his followers could pinpoint the granting of ‘consent’ to any specific historical event, they had to talk about some nebulous ‘social contract’, to use the term first popularised by Democritus and later by Hobbes and especially Rousseau.

An important aspect of ‘consent’, as understood by Lockeans, is that it’s irrevocable: once given, or presumed to have been given, it can’t be reclaimed by any peaceful means.

Yet in no conceivable way could it be true that those voting in, or at least accepting, a government ages ago gave perpetual consent on behalf of all future generations. For example, I don’t recall ever consenting to the state extorting half my income, and I find it hard to accept, say, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as the time when such consent was given on my behalf.

Any real contract includes terms under which it may be terminated. Yet no ‘social contract’ can have such a clause. Therefore violence is the only recourse either party has, meaning that in a modern state a revolution – or at least a mini-coup like WWW – isn’t so much an aberration as a logical extension of the ‘social contract’, the only way for the people to withdraw their ‘consent’.

Conservative thinkers realise this inherent flaw of unrestrained democracy. That’s why they seek to mitigate it by opposing political extremism of any kind, an effort akin to trying to tame a wolf cub into growing up to be a cuddly pet. Alas, this side of Jack London’s White Fang the beast’s true nature may burst out at any time.

It’s pointless trying to plead with the masses that relatively benign politics doesn’t really matter, provided it stays benign. The notion that everyone is qualified to steer the political ship even in the absence of any navigational skills (Plato’s metaphor) has been indelibly etched into people’s minds.

Those minds are bound to become agued whenever they feel strongly, whether positively or negatively, about the figurehead of national government, its elected leader. They are inclined to think that their lives will be inexorably affected by yet another fool or knave governing in their name.

Elementary tradecraft can easily turn such febrile passions into violent action, and Brian Sicknick, may he rest in peace, fell its victim. Now I hope that some American conservative pundit, if there’s any such animal, will explain to the Trump fanatics involved that they are typological twins of the BLM mob. Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?      

He’s an old man, and he has gone 367 days without  catching Covid…

I don’t know why allusions to Hemingway have crept into my mind. Biden doesn’t really resemble Santiago from the novel with whose title I’ve taken liberties. And I don’t even like Hemingway.

Yet there may be similarities there. As you recall, Santiago, the eponymous old man, is a fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching a fish. But then a huge marlin takes his bait, and Santiago strains every sinew in his dilapidated body to fight the fish for two days. Finally he manages to harpoon it and win his potentially lucrative victory. But it turns out to be short-lived.

The old man straps the fish to the side of his boat and sails home. Alas, sharks, smelling the marlin’s blood, pounce and devour the fish, leaving only a bare carcass for the despondent Santiago to cry over. In the end, he realises he’s too old for such robust challenges.

Would it be too far-fetched to suggest that echoes of this plot may soon reverberate through Washington? For the marlin read Trump, whom Biden defeated square if perhaps not unequivocally fair. That fish is still thrashing about, but for now the old man can be satisfied with his work.

But who are the predators? The thugs who tried to storm the Capitol yesterday at best qualify as lantern sharks, the smallest species. They smelled a weakness and attacked, yet only managing to blemish, not to reverse, Biden’s triumph.

However, there was a weakness to smell, and sooner or later the whale sharks of China and Russia may catch a whiff. And closer to home are lurking other giant predators, in the shape of the US economy, international markets and currency speculators. All of them are sure to pounce on any sign of weakness, real or perceived.

It’s time now to get on the terra firma of politics and economics. Roaming that terrain are numerous challengers and adversaries who can smell even a droplet of blood with nothing short of shark-like acuity.

They won’t have to sniff for too long. Biden will be one of the weakest presidents in US history, as he would have been even had he ascended to power in 1988, when he first ran for president. Now 78 and showing signs of senility, he’s a walking target not only for his foes but, more important, also America’s and, even more important, the West’s.

Age isn’t a disqualifying factor in itself. Yes, as any septuagenarian, especially one in the later stages of that period, will confirm, advanced age brings about a diminution in cognitive ability, memory and energy levels. The numerical expression of this decline must vary from one person to another. Ten per cent? Twenty? Thirty? More?

Hard to tell, but then percentages don’t tell the whole story anyway – it all depends on the initial height from which the faculties descend. Thus, Aquinas would have remained an extremely intelligent man had he lost, say, 20 per cent of his intellectual capacity. Yet the same loss in an average Millwall FC supporter might produce a clinical idiot.

There have been examples of statesmen functioning effectively at an old age. Konrad Adenauer, for example, presided over Germany’s economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder for short) well into his 80s. But the baseline of his abilities was drawn immeasurably higher than Biden’s. Joe is no Konrad Adenauer, as I’m sure even his late mother would have acknowledged.

He is a typical DC apparatchik, of a leftward bent. In a political career spanning the best part of half a century, Biden has shown no sign of any discernible ability for anything resembling statecraft, although he’s doubtless a shrewd backroom operator in both Delaware and Washington.

Biden’s supporters call him a centrist Democrat, a designation Hemingway would describe as a movable feast. Being a centrist Democrat today isn’t the same as being one in the 1950s – the whole spectrum has shifted towards the red end. For lying to the left of Biden aren’t Adlai Stevenson types but the likes of Ocasio-Cortez, hard-left extremists who in the past would have been outside the party and now find themselves in its mainstream.

Biden’s VP to be, Kamala Harris, will be that group’s envoy to the White House during his presidency. In all likelihood she’ll act as de facto president or at least as a powerful éminence grise. She’s sure to drag Biden in the right, which is to say left, direction, not that he’ll be grabbing the railings along the way.

All the good policies of the Trump administration will be reversed, such as cutting corporate taxes and leaving the Paris Accords, UNESCO and WHO. Obamacare will be back, and this time it’ll be firmly ensconced in law. The word Only will be implicitly added to the slogan Black Lives Matter.

The global warming hoax will acquire a religious status, along with politicised ecofanaticism. That’s bad news for the fracking industry that was making America, and potentially the West at large, free from the clutches of unsavoury hydrocarbon producers.

Nor is it just the economy. For Biden, who didn’t mind touting his Catholicism during the campaign, is an avid supporter of every un-Catholic, not to say anti-Catholic, policy. He champions homomarriage and unlimited abortion reinforced by a repeal of the Hyde Amendment (banning the use of federal funds to pay for abortion).

All that is bad enough, but, getting back to the original metaphor, the real danger will come when the whale sharks of China and Russia begin to circle around the Biden administration.

At a time of existential global threats, America, the self-appointed Leader of the Free World, must respond with intelligence, courage, energy and resolve. The president should embody such qualities at their most crystallised, and I doubt that even Biden’s staunchest champions really believe he fills that particular bill.

I for one fear that avoiding Covid so far will go down as the president-elect’s greatest achievement.

Modernity is remiss not only intellectually and morally, but also aurally. How else could one explain the current profusion of ugly, jarring usages?

For example, no one with a good ear would ever use the construction to be sat, as in I was sat next to the hostess. Since this usage is rapidly gaining currency, the conclusion is inescapable: an increasing number of people suffer from a tin ear for language.

Otherwise, depending on what they want to communicate, they’d say I was seated, I was sitting or simply I sat. One could vindicate such preferences by referring to the entire history of English, especially its transition from the Middle to the Modern period.

When languishing for several centuries after the Norman Conquest in a secondary, almost dialectal status, English underwent massive changes. Most of them gradually made the language more streamlined and compact, with some grammatical categories (such as the cases and genders of nouns) becoming extinct and some others highly suspect.

One such category was the passive voice, which offended the emergent structure of the English sentence revolving around an active verb. Since language constantly interacts with the national mentality, alternately reflecting and forming it, this tendency probably sprang from the dynamic, pragmatic English character.

The same goes for the uncompromising demand for an active, rather than nominal, subject in an English sentence, one assuming responsibility for the action conveyed by the verb. By contrast, a Russian sentence can thrive without either a verbal predicate or a subject, possibly reflecting the characteristic Russian vagueness the West perceives as ‘the mysterious Russian soul’.

In English, however, these two allies, the subject and the predicate, join forces to relegate the passive voice to a suspect status. It’s to be avoided whenever possible, and only brought in from the cold in dire necessity (as in this sentence, for example).

One could enunciate one’s objections to I was sat in this rational manner, avoiding any allusion to aural acuity. But the better argument against this abomination is that it’s jarring to the ear – in the same way that a wrong note hurts the ear of anyone blessed with a sense of pitch.

In his presidential campaign of some 25 years ago, Bill Clinton asked the voters to “give Al Gore and I a chance”. That led to a lively argument on The Firing Line between the host William F. Buckley and his guest, who had just published a popular book advocating linguistic permissiveness.

The guest defended Clinton’s usage by asking a question he considered rhetorical: “Are you accusing this Rhodes scholar of being illiterate?” “No,” replied Buckley, “I’m accusing him of having a bad ear.”

Such an accusation would clinch the argument for anyone who heard language in the same tonal detail. A musician may also point out to a tone-deaf listener that the piece he has just heard is in the wrong key. The former requires no rational proof for his remark – he just knows it’s true. But the latter may wish to dip into the area of acoustics, wishing to know, for example, what frequency corresponds to D Minor.

Similarly, Buckley heard the false grammatical note, but his guest didn’t, or rather wouldn’t. He tried to excuse the Rhodes scholar’s illiteracy by offering a factually correct but conceptually irrelevant defence. Clinton, he explained, must have been taught as a child that it’s wrong to say Me and Hilary both want to be president. He should say Hilary and I…

That compromised in his mind the usage of me altogether, and Clinton, along with millions of others, felt one always had to opt for I to be on the safe side. In the same vein, many Englishmen taught not to drop their aitches as children actually pronounce the tricky letter as haitch, thinking they sound ‘well posh’ thereby.

Buckley’s guest didn’t explain why Clinton’s impressive transatlantic credentials didn’t cover the difference between subject and object. To Buckley that difference was self-evident, to his guest irrelevant, to Clinton nonexistent.

I would have been tempted to backtrack even further, to the same transition from Middle to Modern English, during which the whole category of the case came under attack. As a result, it suffered attrition, but still managed to hang on in personal pronouns.

Interestingly, Buckley also tried to make his point by suggesting that no one would say give I a chance. He was using an argument borrowed from transformational grammar, a useful teaching tool if nothing else.

But his crystal ball was murky: these days one can hear many Americans, and a growing number of Britons, saying things like they invited I to a party. Tin ear is a contagion spreading as fast and wide as some pandemics we’ve grown to know and love.

Buckley’s guest then tried to unsheathe a rusty truism as his defence weapon. “Language,” he said, “is constantly changing”. Like most truisms, as opposed to truths, this weapon ought to have been decommissioned a long time ago.

We’ve known since the time of Heraclitus that everything changes, emphatically including language. Hence a modern reader finds Shakespeare hard to read in places, Chaucer maddeningly so, and Beowulf well-nigh impossible.

That language changes is indisputable. However, the pernicious presumption of progress misfires here as badly as it does everywhere else. For not all change is for the better; much of it is for the worse. Its direction depends on who initiates the change, why and on what basis.

English used to be a club with a qualified open-door policy. Outsiders could be admitted, but they had to be vetted by the club members first.

The metaphorical club included the cultured elite endowed with the education, sensitivity – and yes, ear – to judge which newcomers should be admitted and which blackballed. They managed to keep undesirables at bay, sometimes forever, sometimes at least for a long time.

That elite used to be small in number, but it was never culturally marginal. Now it is. The masses broke the club doors down and rushed inside, trampling underfoot the linguistic treasures lovingly collected over centuries.

That onrush is these days growing exponentially, especially under the influence of social media. Increasingly, verbal communication gives way to either cryptic acronyms or hieroglyphics, all those smileys, emoticons and emojis.

The prerogative of using the written word to affect the usages of millions has been stolen from the elite and usurped by our comprehensively educated masses who don’t know the passive voice from a holding midfielder.

English has never had a single regulatory body like the French Academy. In the past the speed and temperature of change were on a short lead, but the lead wasn’t nonexistent. Now it has fallen by the wayside, and a game played by loose but definite rules has given way to an anarchic free-for-all.

Rather than becoming richer and bigger as a result, English has become poorer and smaller. For anarchic change is always ugly and reductive – in language and everywhere else.

I often find much that’s despicable in the news, but hardly ever anything that’s surprising. When one has lived for… well, a long time, one can’t help becoming somewhat jaded.

Hence I must thank Sarah Broughton, the head of consular affairs at the Foreign Office, for shaking me out of my torpor. In a few clear, unequivocal words she left me speechless, with my mouth open wide enough to accommodate my heart and what’s left of my other internal organs.

The words that had such a shattering effect appear in Miss Broughton’s letter to the lawyers acting for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliff, a Briton of Iranian descent languishing in a Tehran prison on a trumped-up charge.

British subjects, explained Miss Broughton, “have no legal right to consular assistance” or the government’s diplomatic protection even if falsely accused and tortured. This is the most revolting statement I’ve seen emerging from the government, and the list of candidates for that distinction is long.

It has been assumed since time immemorial that any British subject arrested oversees has the right to at least consular access. If falsely accused (like Mrs Ratcliff), the subject must be secure in the knowledge that the government will seek every possible diplomatic and legal redress to secure his release.

Such is the nature of the ancient compact between the state and the citizen: protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance; allegiance, protection). The Foreign Office statement breaks the compact, leading to a logical conclusion: if the government withdraws its protection, we can withdraw our allegiance.

Interestingly, HMG won’t do what it asks of others. Here, I’ve opened my passport to read these words on the inside cover: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”

Not only requests but also requires, eh? If I were a foreign official, I’d just say “Look who’s talking. Why should I assist and protect waylaid Britons if even their own government won’t do that?”

If the aforementioned legal principle is now null and void, we should campaign for the posthumous rehabilitation of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw. In 1946 that Nazi propagandist went to the gallows on a technicality.

Though Joyce was a US and Irish citizen, he managed to obtain a British passport on false pretences, developing a phony upper-class British accent in the process. That was the passport he used to travel to Nazi Germany, and that was the accent he used when becoming Goebbels’s Anglophone voice.

The prosecution was able to charge Joyce with treason and invoke the principle of protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio protectionem. Since he used a British passport to go to Germany, Joyce was entitled to the protection of the Crown, while the latter was entitled to his loyalty.

Had he used one of his other passports, he would have got off. Since neither the US nor Ireland was at war with Germany at the time Joyce went there, he couldn’t be judged a traitor to those countries. And Joyce couldn’t be a traitor to Britain because, as a non-subject, he didn’t owe her any subjectio.

What I found as astounding as the FO statement itself is the muted, nonchalant reaction to it. Thus The Times only mentioned that “the government’s position has profound implications for all British citizens travelling abroad”. I daresay those implications go quite a bit wider than that.

The government’s position brings into question the very nature of government, along with the factors of its legitimacy. It breaks the bilateral compact balancing rights and duties that lies at the foundation of any civilised state. This position implies a unilateral arrangement hitherto associated only with tyrannies: the citizens owe the state everything, while the state owes them nothing.

I’m not trying to distract public attention from genuflecting to the thunderous din of Black Lives Matter. All I’m trying to say is that other things matter too, and some, at the risk of being smitten with a woke lightning, may mean even more.

Prime among them is the constitutional relationship between the state and the people. When that disintegrates, so do a whole raft of erstwhile certitudes on which statehood rests. Its legs buckling, the state may go plop on its belly, crushing us all under its weight.

“All crimes are vulgar, all vulgarity is a crime,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his typically brilliant yet facile manner. Like most of his aphorisms, this is one is to enjoy, not to analyse.

Any attempt at decortication will show, for example, that not all crimes are vulgar – and nor, contrary to Hanna Arendt’s observation, all evil banal. But Wilde unwittingly raises an interesting question: What is vulgarity?

I’d suggest it exists on two planes: low, instantly obvious; and high, elucidated only by subsequent thought. Only the first type of vulgarity is perceived as such in common usage.

Typically it’s associated with a propensity for telling unfunny salacious jokes or peppering one’s speech with expletives based on sex organs and their use. This is so widespread, not to say universal, that there’s really no point belabouring it any further – not here at any rate.

What interests me is the higher, intellectual vulgarity, especially of the epistemological variety. For we can’t really acquire knowledge if we don’t understand what knowledge is. If such understanding is poisoned with vulgarity at inception, knowledge itself will be vulgar – which is another way of saying that the baby of knowledge will be stillborn.

This is a very serious matter indeed, for, if vulgar definitions of knowledge gain wide acceptance in a society, the society will become intellectually and morally diseased. This is worth pondering because it’s exactly the crossroads at which modernity has arrived after an orgy of crepuscular obscurantism going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment.

For a start, look at chess as a simplified epistemological model. A game is in full swing, one side is attacking, the other defending, and the position is complex. Looking at the weaknesses around his opponent’s king and the deployment of his own pieces, the attacker knows there’s a winning combination there somewhere.

He knows it intuitively, but in this very simple case his intuition is probably based on the recognition of some patterns that have occurred many times before in other games, his own and other players’. One way or another, he knows a killing blow is within sight. But, with the chess clock ticking away, he can’t find it.

The game fizzes out to a draw, and only in the post-mortem analysis does the player uncover the winning continuation he missed at the board. Does this mean he acquires knowledge only then? Or was the knowledge already there during the game, when he sensed its presence intuitively?

The answer is both. It’s just that any cognitive process starts from an intuitive impulse. Archimedes’s bathtub, Newton’s apple and Mendeleyev’s dream may all be apocryphal, but they still ring true. The scientists’ intuition was activated, and the intuition then galvanised a rational process.

Unlike our hapless chess player, they managed to rationalise, or rather post-rationalise, their intuitive knowledge successfully. But knowledge had existed before they managed to do so, just as an oil formation exists before an explorer finds it.

What an intuitive hypothesis is to science, metaphysical intuition is to faith, the knowledge of God. As St Anselm put it, “I believe so that I may understand, not understand so that I may believe”.

This adage alludes to the same cognitive sequence as that activated by Archimedes, Newton and Mendeleyev to such an effect: an intuitive knowledge successfully post-rationalised.

I’d go so far as to suggest that the higher the knowledge, the more it depends on the initial actuator of a powerful metaphysical intuition. Even if the desired outcome of knowledge is tangibly concrete, it descends to that level from the higher plateau of abstraction and intuition.

This gets us back to the subject of epistemological vulgarity, the dominant (mercifully, still not the only) feature of post-Enlightenment thought. Its principal characteristic is contempt for metaphysical intuition and metaphysics in general. This destroys the cognitive sequence of metaphysical intuition descending to the level of rational thought and thereby closing the cognitive loop.

Eventually that leads to the utmost vulgarity of defining knowledge in strictly material terms, to the turgid musings of Feuerbach, Marx, Compte and all the way down to Popper, Ayer et al. Yet not all epistemological vulgarity is vulgar stylistically – David Hume is a case in point.

One of the best writers of English treatises, Hume couched his epistemological vulgarity in the beautifully shaped prose of his essays. That makes them eminently enjoyable, without in any way mitigating the underlying vulgarity of Hume’s epistemology. To wit:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

My friend Peter Mullen points out that Hume’s statement is contradictory to the point of being nonsensical because it itself contains neither experimental nor abstract reasoning. That’s true, but the statement is also vulgar.

Therein lies the problem no materialists can solve. They can be brilliant people, but their understanding of life forces them to push their thought down to the quotidian level, away from first principles and last things, where post-rationalised metaphysical intuition reigns supreme.

That’s why a materialist philosopher is as much of an oxymoron as, say, an atheist theologian. Materialists can be physicists, physicians or physiologists, and they can even be social commentators. But whenever they venture into the discipline circumscribed by its quest for the truth of first principles, they sound out of their depth and, well, vulgar.

Is this the kind of vulgarity Wilde would describe as a crime? Probably not. But it’s the kind that has a lethal effect on the collective intellect, including its practical manifestations in morality, politics or economics. Intellectual vulgarity explodes at the epicentre, but its shockwaves travel wide.