Political Magic

This blog was never supposed to be about politics per se, but my eye was drawn to this in the online edition of The European Conservative.

The ever acerbic and cantankerous David Starkey is in fact completely correct to condemn "magical thinking". And for what it's worth, I think our own polity currently needs "re-enchantment" like a hole in the head. His problem of course is his mad libel that the Christian religion is "magical". It's a claim derived, although he himself is an atheist, from his native Protestantism, and before that from mediaeval English Lollardy. For this Sebastian Morello rightly takes him to task.

What Catholics mean by "magic" (in the sense of "black" magic) is the use of any manifestly inadequate means to achieve a specific end - which necessarily implies either a test of divine providence or a deal with the Devil. In either case a mortal sin against the First Commandment. The two worst sorts of magical thinking in politics at the moment are domestically that we as a nation can live permanently beyond our means and internationally that we can somehow retire from the world's stage and become a private but prosperous backwater state, safe and secure without our own island borders.

The former delusion can be summed up as a simple denial by the political Left of economic reality. There is, for example, no reason at all to think that the bond market will "fall into line" with an ever more spendthrift HMG. On the Right, meanwhile, there is still a vague idea that some sort of "social" conservatism can somehow just happen without a radical change to our established economic assumptions. To paraphrase Mrs Thatcher though, there can be no conservatism unless there is economic conservatism. In Starkey's case, this would be "cultural" or perhaps even "constitutional" conservatism, and in Morello's case it would be some sort of esoteric traditionalism - although to be fair to him in practice that would include actual "moral" and "religious" conservatism as well.

The tragic results of magical thinking in foreign policy, on the other hand, which ultimately come from the West's collect decision to "decolonise" the rest of world, have by now become only too apparent for those who have eyes to see, as the enemies of our country and of our allies have only become ever bolder. As Kipling put it

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the resurgence of Arab terrorism in Israel were all easily foreseeable and avoidable. Perhaps it's not quite fair to attribute wishful thinking, magical thinking, or any sort of thinking at all to someone like Joe Biden. But all it took for evil men to succeed was for those who just imagined it could never happen to do nothing.