One minute I’m listening to the repeating call of a nuthatch. A few minutes later, the distant roar of a B1 Lancer bomber heading for Iran. I’m in the Cotswolds, about ten miles from RAF Fairford. Iran, and as Trump would have it, Iranian civilization, is under immediate threat. (They are as I write gathering in Islamabad for ceasefire talks.)

I’m wondering how the world got into such a mess. How conservative America having elected Trump hasn’t drawn a line when it came to his excesses in the Near East. (Or his pandering to Putin, and disdain for Ukraine. Though the likes of Tucker Carlson are challenging his support for Israel.) Or how they came to elect a charlatan in the first place. This is my attempt, and it is only an attempt (and written, at a distance, by a Brit), at an explanation. Apologies for its length. But if you’re interested in such things, do give it a read.

I’ve always advocated for liberal democracy in this blog, for parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech and association. At the same time, I’m a traditionalist, a lover of country, our institutions, our way of life. I’m sure of my ground on issues of climate change and immigration, race and gender. But in an open, non-ideological society my views may not carry the day.

We’ve always found consensus but now, in the USA, the very idea of consensus is under threat. For decades the far left were seen as a potentially subversive force, and for many on the right social agendas and immigration were seen in the same light. But the actual processes of democracy were only questioned on the fringes. No more.  

I’ve found it useful, especially in the American context, to explore the roles of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals as precursors to the current debates, and current events.

Neo-liberals has focussed on free markets, de-regulation and limited government. Individuals would be left to help themselves, with minimal support from the state. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, while economically liberal, and more interventionist when it came to foreign engagements, advocated an explicitly socially conservative agenda.

Proponents such Irving Kristol had intriguing backgrounds as Trotskyites in the 1930s: their opposition to the straitjackets of Soviet Communism morphed in the post-war years into an advocacy of unfettered free markets. The counter-culture of the 1960s was anathema to them. Also anathema were Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had left the old dispensation regarding race in place. Not so the Johnson reforms.

To liberals back in the 1970s and 80s neo-conservative ideas constituted a separate world. In a sense they triumphed with Reagan but any social conservative agenda never really took hold. Nor did it, as you’d expect, under Clinton, but in the House of Representatives in the 1990s Newt Gingrich did draw up battle lines. You didn’t communicate with the other side. Universities and the radicalism of both faculty and students, and policies of positive discrimination became, the more so as decades passed, anathema to many. Identity politics on the left as they impacted race and gender became defining issues. So too a government which attempted to dictate on education and welfare.

Both sides dug in their heels, both sides demonised the other. Men who worked across the floor of the Senate like Edward Kennedy and John McCain are remembered as relics from another age. The Obama years, aided by Trumpian malice, only served to harden these battle lines. Issues were weaponized. Conspiracies, not least the birthing conspiracy invented around Obama, became common currency. When conspiracies take hold in a society, they are hard to counter, so much more with the growth of social media.  

Many of the left demonized the right on issues of race and gender and immigration. Climate change was drawn into the argument. Changes allowing electoral funding by third parties exacerbated the divide. What had seemed to the political centre-left to be a debate they would win, all in good time, as they’d seen every debate to have been won over the post-war years, was of a sudden very much open to question. What could have been seen as arrogance on the left would only have riled the right further.

Battle lines were hardened during the first Trump administration. Battle was joined, and it became brutally one-sided, in January 2025 when Trump returned. Just how much should we pin on Trump? The MAGA movement which he’s help crystalize is small state and conservative and, compared to the hardened neo-liberals, naïve. Trump’s deal-making philosophy gave an opening to others with a far more thought-through agenda of others, above all the radical neo-conservative agenda of the Heritage Foundation. What the likes of Irving Kristol back in the 1970 and 80s could surely never have envisaged is the venom of the attacks on government institutions and the universities.

It’s given space to outright opponents of democracy such as the libertarian tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Where might unconstrained free markets take us? Democracy could only be an impediment. Just where might AI in the hands of the likes of Thiel and Musk take us?  And Thiel is now giving lectures on the Antichrist, venturing as far as Rome. Whether the Christian nationalism of the likes of Pete Hegseth goes that far, I don’t know. Hegseth of course has the weaponry.

If we are liberals by inclination and belief, especially if we’re watching all this fury from the relatively safe remove of the UK and the even further remove of the Cotswolds, must we wait on the mid-terms and see how much the Iran fiasco has damaged Trump?

An early indicator might be the Hungarian election next week. Can this new breed of autocrats, hiding behind a democratic veneer, so subvert the democratic process that there is for some countries, Hungary, and, in that terminal scenario, the USA, no way back?