Quotulatiousness

September 9, 2026

The day after counter-tariff Tuesday

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:

Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.

Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.

The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.

They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.

Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.

You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.

Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.

Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.

John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?

This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.

This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.

There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.

The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.

Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.

Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.

If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.

Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.

And that’s why we pile on.

And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:

… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?

Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.

But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.

I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.

But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.

And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.

Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.

But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.

The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.

And just when the hell did that happen?

We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.

Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.

September 3, 2026

John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957

Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.

John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.

It was also a hell of a ride.

The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.

To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.

Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.

Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.

Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.

The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.

The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”

September 1, 2026

Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:

It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.

On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.

Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.

DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.

The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.

Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.

Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”

In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.

July 30, 2026

Canadian conservatives need different leaders, say Liberal media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Unlike the Liberals and NDP, whose leaders get a media honeymoon that sometimes lasts for years, Conservative leaders are never given the slightest break by presstitutes paid by the Liberals. (Anyone further to the right than the centrist Conservatives get almost no media attention at all, as Maxime Bernier can attest.) L. Wayne Mathison responds to “helpful” suggestions for how the Conservatives can get rid of their current unpopular-with-the-state-media leader and replace him with someone more “acceptable”:

The pattern is obvious.

Scheer was supposedly too awkward. O’Toole was too inconsistent. Pierre is now too aggressive, too divisive, too nasty. Change the leader and the criticism changes with him. The objective stays the same: keep Conservatives apologizing, retreating and replacing leaders while the Liberals remain the default governing party.

The elite Red Tories never wanted Pierre Poilievre as leader because he threatens the arrangement they are comfortable with. They prefer a Conservative Party that manages Liberal policies a little more efficiently, attends the right receptions and never seriously challenges Ottawa’s permanent political class.

Put on the economics hat and the incentives become clear. The people closest to government often do very well under bigger government. Consultants get contracts. Lobbyists gain influence. Bureaucracies expand. Well-connected corporations receive subsidies and protection. Housing owners watch scarcity drive up their assets. Ordinary workers get higher taxes, weaker wages, expensive housing and declining public services.

Pierre’s real offence is that he speaks directly to the people paying the bill.

Canada has nearly every advantage a country could ask for: energy, minerals, farmland, fresh water, educated people, stable institutions and access to the largest market on Earth. We should be one of the wealthiest and strongest countries in the world. Instead, our political class keeps managing scarcity, blocking investment and teaching Canadians to expect less.

Conservatives should stop chasing approval from commentators and insiders who will never support them. Back Pierre. Defend the principles. Make the economic case clearly.

Prosperity should not be reserved for the people who already know how to work the system.

The best investment the Liberals ever made was buying the loyalty of the relic media with a dollop of cash from the government’s coffers. They already were mostly onboard with the Liberals — those that didn’t think the NDP was too far right — but the financial leash made even the mavericks think twice about substantive criticism of the man who co-signed their pay cheques.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 29, 2026

The changing nature of Canadian patriotism

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jay Currie contrasts the kind of patriotism most Canadians grew up with against the politicized version hijacked by the Liberals as a tool in their never-ending quest to re-shape Canadians in their preferred image:

Sitting out here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island overlooking the Olympic mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I am bemused by the Eastern Canadian debate on Canadian patriotism. @BenWoodfinden weighs in as does Auntie Andy @acoyne

The current version of the debate is focused on whether the Conservative Party is “patriotic enough”. In less fraught times that would translate to “love of Canada” but now it comes down to anti-American and, more importantly, anti-Trump enough.

Probably because, after twelve years of Trudeau/Carney there is very little “Canada” left to love. We’re a post-national, genocidal, nearly European entity ruled from an embattled Ottawa beset by Americans, Chinese and our own separatists.

From the Ottawa/Toronto point of view Canada’s singular attribute is our willingness to punch Trump right in the nose. And woe betide the traitors like Smith, Moe and Frechette who are not willing to get behind Captain Canada as he takes his roundhouse swings.

And the Conservative Party is failing on the patriotism front precisely because a significant part of it thinks punching the Yanks in the nose is possibly the dumbest thing they have ever heard. Why the Hell would we do that?

On the Auntie Andy/Woodfinden scale of patriotism this disqualifies the CPC from ever winning a federal election because only Canadian Patriots should be allowed to command the Ottawa ramparts eyes firmly fixed on the perfidious Yanks.

As a thought experiment try to define Canadian patriotism without reference to the US or Donald Trump. I assure you it can be done. The way you do it is begin with the ground you are on. Where is it? What is it? What can you see?

Now, think about your neighbours, the stores you go to, the pub you like, the golf course or soccer field or swimming pool you prefer, the schools you went to, the teams you played on, yes, your favourite NHL team, vacation spot, drive.

Essentially these and hundreds of other details are the ground truths of your Canada and it is that Canada where your patriotism begins. The Canadian flag, the Peace tower, your favourite version of “Oh, Canada” are all abstractions of this ground truth.

People don’t fight for “King and Country”, they fight for their children, their spouse, their parents, their neighbours. That is where the real loyalty lies. It’s acutely local and it accretes across time, across generations.

The Liberal Party project of the last half century has been to replace this hyper-localized patriotism with an synthetic, denatured, atomized Patriotism which defines itself by what it is against, not what it is for. It is a deeply unsatisfying project.

The fact the CPC is wary of this synthetic patriotism is to its credit. Looking at its messaging in the last election at least a part of the CPC understands that Canada is the ground you stand on, not an invention of Ottawa. It’s the right message.

At Without Diminishment, Carl Vallée identifies one of the structural strengths of the left that allow them to concentrate on achieving and maintaining power: unity of vision across all progressive parties.

Exit Trudeau, enter Carney.

It must be admitted that the Liberals have dominated the political landscape for much of the past century, enabling them to weave their own partisan symbols and values into the fabric of Canadian institutions.

The federal state as it exists today is a legacy of Liberal Party rule. Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms fundamentally changed the trajectory of this country, but the ideology underpinning it had begun to take shape even before his time. Whether one considers multiculturalism, mass immigration or the red maple leaf flag, Canada is a country whose institutions naturally lean, if not lurch, to the left.

Therefore, conservatives must swim against the current, almost perpetually. Why is this? I submit that it stems from the fact that Liberals in both English Canada and Quebec are ideologically closely aligned and share a common vision of Canada. The left often looks much the same everywhere. Certainly, its values, methods and codes of communication are identical across the Western world.

In Canada, Liberals will not hesitate to weaponise the state to ensure their values endure. The alignment between Liberals in Quebec and English Canada has been critical to their electoral success.

Conversely, the right are more locally rooted and provincial, and are therefore less inclined to share a broad common vision with their compatriots across the country. This poses a challenge to both the coherence of Canadian conservatism and its electoral arithmetic.

Conservatism in Quebec is not libertarian, and here we envisage using the state to advance nationalist and conservative ends. What we conserve in Quebec is not what our friends in Western Canada or Ontario seek to conserve.

Arrayed against our alliance of local political traditions are the Liberals, who share and promote a single, pan-Canadian narrative. The inability of the right to offer a catch-all vision capable of rallying the anti-Liberal vote partially explains the electoral success of the Liberal Party over the past few decades.

Structurally, the 1982 rupture over the imposition of the Charter has made this phenomenon almost permanent, despite the efforts of prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper to rally coalitions against the Liberals. Neither was able to prevent the Charter from entrenching itself as Canada’s new national narrative, despite the explicit opposition of Francophones, one of the country’s founding peoples.

If there is a fault, it does not lie solely with the pan-Canadian conservative movement, but also with Quebec’s bleus, who failed to invest in the Conservative Party of Canada, the only political party capable of rivalling the Liberals. As a result, the Quebec vote is split between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, whose voters are much less left-wing than the party’s current leadership. In the 2025 federal election, the combined Conservative and Bloc vote in Quebec actually exceeded the Liberal vote.

July 19, 2026

The rise of the populist right in Australia

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Celina outlines the conditions that allow populist movements to displace traditional centre-right parties as Australia’s One Nation under Pauline Hanson is in the process of displacing the Liberals:

Everyone has an opinion about why One Nation is surging. Most people argue it’s immigration. Others say it’s the cost of living, housing, or just a general distrust of politicians. And obviously all of those things are factors.

But of course, all of those explanations are just opinions, and more importantly, they don’t really explain why this is happening now.

One Nation isn’t the first party of its type to emerge, in fact, Australia is actually pretty late to this trend. We’ve already watched similar parties rise in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and across much of Western Europe.

[…]

So if immigration alone explains One Nation’s rise, why didn’t One Nation explode ten years ago?

The answer, according to a growing body of political science, isn’t simply that voters changed. It’s that the centre-right stopped functioning the way it used to. For decades, parties like the Liberal Party acted as gatekeepers. They bundled together free-market economics, cultural conservatism and a vague patriotism into one broad electoral coalition. But the Liberal Party has fractured rapidly and everything has changed.

This is exactly what happened with Trump and the Republican Party, with Brexit and then Reform UK in Britain, and with similar populist parties across Europe. The rise of the populist right isn’t just about people becoming more conservative, it’s about the collapse of the old centre-right policy formula. Australia is now going through exactly the same process.

As a comparison, Reform UK established itself as the dominant force on the British right rivaling the Tories whilst they were already crumbling, which allowed those voters to become apart of Reforms broader support base. Analyses of the 2024 election in the UK found that around 80% of Reform voters had voted Conservative in 2019. The same thing now seems to be happening with One Nation. Some of that growth comes from former Liberal voters. Some comes from people who previously supported smaller right-wing parties and have now consolidated behind One Nation because they think it’s the only party capable of replacing the Liberals. Some comes from Labor. But overwhelmingly, this is a story about the collapse of the centre-right rather than some sudden ideological revolution among Australians.

So yes, immigration matters. Cost of living matters. Housing matters. But those things explain why voters became dissatisfied. They don’t explain why millions of those voters suddenly stopped expressing that dissatisfaction through the Liberal Party and started expressing it through One Nation instead. To answer that question, you need political science and when you look at the research, the rise of One Nation starts looking like Australia’s version of a much bigger political realignment that’s already transformed much of the Western world.

So, populist insurgencies are underway in Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands … so why not in Canada, where all of the conditions are at least as pro-populism as any of the others? My answer is propaganda. Most Canadians still get their daily news and opinions from traditional sources — almost all of whom are now directly on the government’s payroll. Most Canadians are as insulated from dissident voices as Germans were in the 1930s … and Canadians still trust their government more than most other westerners.

July 16, 2026

QotD: The nostalgic British elements of Canadian nationalism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In The Strange Demise of British Canada, Chris] Champion’s argument is that the new liberal nationalism manufactured by Pearson and others was itself a product of and ended up perpetuating Britishness, and didn’t just kill it. The book develops a complex and lucid account of what Britishness actually meant, and Champion shows how Canadian Britishness “has always been more fluid, a home-grown ‘cluster of identities’ shaped by the intersection of factors like ethnicity, education, religion, and class”. There was undoubtedly an ethnic component to this Britishness in the early days of Confederation. But in the postwar era both defenders of the older form of nationalism and the newer Liberal version tried not to marginalize and to foster attachments of Canadians from other ethnic backgrounds.

Britishness survives as civic nationalism. Old British Canada may be gone, but aspects of that Britishness live on. We should celebrate our history and our historic symbols, but this alternative shouldn’t set about restoring it all. A future oriented embrace of our history needs to be built around the active parts of this Britishness that have now become truly Canadian. For example, the Crown in Canada is not now just a British institution, it’s a Canadian institution. Same with our democratic institutions and parliamentary traditions, which we must work to strengthen and renew.

Embracing this enables us to thread the needle on our relationship with America. Part of what makes us different historically, culturally, ideationally, and in disposition from America, is this history. Just as Canadian Britishness has survived to the present day in unique ways, our desire not to become Americans is alive and well. A homegrown Canadian Britishness enables us to continue this without falling into crass anti-Americanism, and without requiring us to embrace the new Liberal nationalism to reject America. We should see America as an amicable cousin, but one that we are distinct and different from.

But most importantly, what this new kind of national identity needs to build around needs to be an evolution of the liberal nationalism that emphasizes and consciously builds around our regional pluralism. […] but the kind of rationalistic liberalism that our modern national identity is built around, while sold as a way of dealing with diversity, suffers from some serious internal tensions. Liberalism, especially the Canadian variant of it, implicitly depends upon and encourages a degree of homogenization that flattens hard cultural differences. We need to become more pluralistic, and less liberal.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

July 13, 2026

A Fair Reading of The Camp of the Saints

Filed under: Books, France, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Jul 2026

Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints has gone from obscurity to infamy in recent years, drawing condemnation for its highly … unflattering depiction of third-worlders. Much of this condemnation comes from people who haven’t read it, or gave it only a shallow and cursory read. But if we let the book speak for itself it can be quite insightful at times, and the true target of its scorn becomes brutally evident.

Rather than use politically-charged b-roll, it’s all hiking shots this time. Mostly to cover some edits. This is a great one for those who listen to these on the commute. Or the commode as the case may be.

00:00 Intro
01:03 The Story
14:22 Escalation Curve
17:38 Hamadura and “Whiteness”
22:05 Culture and Ethnicity
26:33 Why so Serious?
30:09 The End of a World
34:14 Your Virtual Right-Wing Uncle
35:48 A “Martian” Perspective

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com
🔹 Oh, and book 2 of Stellar Drift is out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTVXK4CN

May 20, 2026

Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health

Filed under: Cancon, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:

Image from The Audit

The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.

I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.

There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1

I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.

I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.

Anxiety

I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.

The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.

Overall Mental Health

Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).

  1. In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.

I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:

As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”

First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.

The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.

Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.

We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.

So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.

Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?

The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.

May 12, 2026

First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:

Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.

The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.

Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.

Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!

Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.

It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:

    The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.

And that is the point. He goes on:

    The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …

    Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.

Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”

May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

May 2, 2026

Cancelled chancellor?

Filed under: Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

April 26, 2026

Rightists think leftists are stupid and leftists think rightists are evil

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby discusses political categories and explains why they aren’t the same as moral categories:

A lot of people who class themselves as being on the Left clearly feel that there is some automatic moral kudos from being on the Left. As a direct implication of this sense of moral kudos, they also clearly think that there is some moral deficiency from being on the Right.

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

April 21, 2026

Hungary in the news

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple considers the recent change in government as Victor Orbán was replaced by Péter Magyar, who had been an Orbán supporter until the last few years:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out of office after 16 years in power. One of the complaints often heard in such democracies is that “they are all the same”, they being members of the political class of whatever political party.

But there is benefit in a change of government personnel irrespective of all else, for those who remain too long in power come to think of that power as their right, and the citizenry as their servants rather than of themselves as servants of the citizenry.

The recent removal from power by election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary after so long as prime minister (and his full acceptance of the defeat, despite accusations that he was like an authoritarian dictator) was perfectly normal. He had been replaced by a man who is no fire-eating radical, Péter Magyar, a young man who was, until comparatively recently, a supporter of the leader he has replaced.

The electorate, according to polls, was concerned about the state of the economy and the level of corruption in the country. Governments that come into power promising to eradicate corruption often reveal themselves to be no different in this respect from the last: the fruits of corruption are distributed to different people, that is all.

The new prime minister differs greatly from the old in two attitudes: firstly, to the war in Ukraine and secondly to the European Union. Unlike Mr. Orbán, he is no friend of Vladimir Putin’s; and unlike Mr. Orbán, he is more likely to do the Union’s bidding in order to gain access to the latter’s funds. One important question is whether he will be forced to change Hungary’s attitude to mass immigration, opposition to which was a source not only of Mr. Orbán’s conflict with the Union, but of his long domestic popularity.

His policy was regarded as xenophobic, but this was an unjustified slur. Xenophobia is a hatred or fear of foreigners as such, ex officio, and on my visits to Hungary I found none of this. I met, for example, a Kurdish physiotherapist well integrated into Hungary, and a Moroccan academic likewise, who did not complain of personal antagonism to them. Other foreign residents whom I met did not complain of it either. A desire to protect a small country from the effects of mass immigration that have been seen in Sweden (a country of similar size of population), for example, is not xenophobia: it might on the contrary be regarded as both prudent and as a manifestation of love of one’s country. It is part of the malign legacy of Hitler and the Nazis that love of one’s country is now felt by many European intellectuals to be inherently vicious and aggressive. But love of one’s country is not the same as hatred of everyone else’s, though it is true that patriotism can sometimes degenerate into such hatred.

The European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is contradictory. It regards ethnic and cultural diversity as good in themselves, as if what existed before was lacking some important ingredient that such diversity will automatically bring.

April 17, 2026

Hungary in the news

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The way the mainstream media reacted to the recent Hungarian election results, you’d think it was the 2020s equivalent to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Outgoing leader Viktor Orbán has been portrayed as Hungary’s Trump when he hasn’t been discussed as Hungary’s Mussolini. His successor, Péter Magyar is largely unknown outside Hungary where he had been a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party before leaving to join his current party, Tisza. In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith provides some useful background on the state of politics in Hungary today:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tisza — the name being a portmanteau of the Hungarian words tisztelet (respect) and szabadság (freedom), and a reference to the nation’s second largest river — was founded in 2020 and registered in 2022. It was a very marginal conservative party with policies like “raise the minimum pension” and “stop migration”.

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the party fielded no candidates at all.

Tisza became a major force in Hungarian elections when Péter Magyar joined the party. Magyar, who has a legal background, had been a member of Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz. More significantly, he had been married to the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, from 2006 to 2023.

In 2024, Varga resigned, along with Hungarian president Katalin Novák, after both were exposed as having signed a pardon for a convicted paedophile who had been a director of a state-run children’s home. Magyar resigned from Fidesz, accusing Orbán of “hiding behind women’s skirts”.

“For a long time I believed in an idea, a national, sovereign, civic Hungary,” wrote Magyar in a much-quoted statement, “But in recent years, I have slowly and finally realized that all of this is really just a political product.”

Magyar became a ferocious critic of alleged government corruption. His ex-wife responded to his anti-Orbán activities by accusing him of domestic abuse. Magyar denied this. Undaunted, he led various anti-government demonstrations, which attracted tens of thousands of Hungarians. He was also chosen to lead Tisza.

Magyar has profited from good timing. He is also a photogenic man who has performed well on social media. His politics are more mysterious. He has called himself a “critical pro-European and a conservative liberal”.

He is not the sort of liberal that anti-Orbán Westerners might want him to be. While he has said that he will “move away from the current, uncritically friendly approach towards Russia”, he has also said that it will take time to stop buying Russian fuel, and he has criticised the Ukrainian approach to Hungarian minorities. He has sometimes tried to outflank Orbán on sovereignty, saying that Fidesz have brought in too many guest workers, and even questionably saying that migrants have been stealing ducks from Hungarian ponds. Still, it remains to be seen if the pro-EU Magyar will maintain his more right-wing opinions or be swept along by European orthodoxy — not least when he has emphasised the importance of unlocking EU funds.

At The Sceptic, James Alexander says that the situation is more complicated than a split between Orbán and what he terms “the Roral Response”:

President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025.
Official White House photo by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons.

What is the Orbán-Roral Divide? It is the Manichaean yin-yang binary of the simplistic political imagination, which supposes that, on one side, we have Orbán, Putin, Trump etc., and that, on the other side, we have von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer, Carney, Zelensky and of course the man after whom I name the category: Rory Stewart.

It has some truth in it, but it is bewildering when we see the binary exalted as if it is the only truth of politics. The downfall of Orbán illustrates this almost perfectly.

The subject today is Orbán Developments. And the Roral Response.

News.

As you all know, Orbán, after 16 years of power, fell in the recent election.

  • Viktor Orbán = Fidezs = 37.8% = 55 seats
  • Peter Magyar = Tisza = 53.6% = 138 seats

“Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,” quoth King Lear.

Orbán lost.

Now, I like Orbán, symbolically. I don’t know about actually: never studied him. I read one of his speeches once, and it read as more intelligent than any equivalent political speech. I have one thing in common with him, which is that he was present at the funeral of Norman Stone. Anyhow, like him or loathe him, we have to be philosophical. And we have to respect him, even if he is an Oxford man.

  • Oxford: Obsessed with power. Corrupt. Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Viktor Orbán etc.
  • Cambridge: Lord Acton: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So let us look at what people say. The amusing thing is that people immediately editorialise. Twitter, X, Whatyouwill.com, turns everyone into William Rees-Mogg. Look at all these Editors.

Here is Ferenc Horcher, a very important Hungarian scholar:

    Time to face reality: the Hungarian electorate ousted the ruling power. The electoral system Fidesz introduced gave its opponent a two-thirds majority. Orbán established a one-man rule, tailored the campaign to himself, he is responsible for the defeat, he has to resign.

That’s grim talk from a conservative. So here on the jolly side is Sam Moyn, a very important Yale Law School professor:

    Yay for Hungary. What if the answer to illiberalism is democracy?

Ho hum. I sigh a bit over the innocence of making a contrast between illiberalism and democracy, as if liberalism = democracy.

(more…)

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