Why are our politicians unprincipled and what is the future of the rotten party machines which require components over competents? To answer these questions is to understand the machinery of electoral success in the West.
In this essay I explain what machine politics is, where it comes from, where it is going and what might come next - with the help of technology.
This post is the tenth extract from my forthcoming book, A Brief History of Liberal Democracy.
A Century of Technique
Technique is the process of standardising results. It is seen in Western politics through the transition of political parties from their basis of principle to the practice of winning elections. This can be called machine politics.
Its context is the engineering of our society to present this politics as the supreme product in its line.
Why would anyone need an alternative to perfection?
I explained this technique in chapter eight here:
For over a century we have been increasingly ruled by media - the mediums of mass communication, education, workplace terms and online conditions, entertainment and all the products placed before us to consume including the output of our mass-market intellectuals.
This soft power was mobilised to dominate two spheres - foreign and domestic - meaning the purpose of cultural production collapsed the distinction between subversion overseas and abroad.
For this reason some commentators correctly observe there is no difference between foreign and domestic policy.
This technique - the sponsorship of mass culture - produces “soft power”.
MARSHMALLOW TOTALITARIANISM
This power is called “marshmallow totalitarianism” by the English writer Peter Hitchens.
Here is an explanation of this concept from 2017:
Hitchens…warned that an “established atheism” is creeping up on Britain.
Citizens are becoming the subjects of a “soft, marshmallow, totalitarianism”.
This does not involve dawn raids by secret police but instead subtle threats to employment and livelihood.
Hitchens said it is
“Made clear in the lives of particularly those who work in the public sector that there is no job security and there is no advancement if you will not conform…”.
In this case, the conformity is as it is in every case: to the liberal agenda, which makes compliance with trans-sanity a legal duty for employers - and those who wish to remain employed.
Hitchens also called the European Union a “marshmallow tyranny”, noting how the then Czech President Vaclav Klaus said:
“It is post-democracy, really, that rules the EU.”
Hitchens said in 2009,
The sticky, marshmallow bonds of the EU are obviously not the iron shackles of the old dictators. But they are bonds all the same, and once they are in place, the Czechs will have little to distinguish them from their neighbours apart from their beer, their literature, their music and their complex language.
From having been a country, they will become a regional oddity in a state called Europe.
This “post-democracy” is a forced consensus, and it is not enforced by the brutal and overt methods of Soviet Communism - but by a process which is familiar to practically anyone living in the West today.
In our marshmallow totalitarianism, the threat is usually much softer – the dissenter’s job and standing are threatened, and if he does not give in, his livelihood and his reputation are taken away.
The terms and conditions of the liberal consensus are enforced everywhere. We are surrounded by the sticky blob of the soft, sickly-sweet power of the liberal state.
Instead of the torture machine and Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the Twitter Mob, howling with execration, incessant and relentless, frightens most bodies into sacrificing the necessary victim.
It seems to work. The chosen individual suffers, but everyone else soon gets used to it.
Why does this work? Consumer liberalism replaces norms with normlessness, God with nothing, and meaning with the memes of its machine. The result is a passive population with no principles.
Most people don’t have very strong convictions about anything, so they never get close to these threats, and just adapt.
An opinion becomes a principle when you lose something valuable in its defence. Hitchens says the rate of change from a principled politics to the manufacture of public opinion has been giddying:
I am endlessly amused by the behaviour of politicians and mainstream media persons, presenters of TV and radio shows etc, who have seamlessly shifted their received opinions in the last 30 years, and swallow things as normal which in the 1980s they would have regarded as stark staring mad.
This is the milieu in which machine politics makes most sense. Principles come at a price few are now prepared to pay. Why not offer something else instead?
FURTHER CONTENTS:
+++FROM MACHINE TO ALGORITHM+++PURPLE WITCHES STEAL YOUR KIDS+++LIBERALISM VERSUS REALITY+++MENES+++
TONY BLAIR: THE DARK LORD OF MACHINE POLITICS
Tony Blair is the greatest machine politician of our time. He invented the modern machine politics adopted from Canada to Canberra - and across the European continent.
He ditched the Labour Party’s foundational principle of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange - replacing materialist socialism with aspirational slogans - and permanent change.
This change, he said, would produce stability and prosperity.
For a time this seemed true, as British people were gaslit into disbelieving their eyes about the wave of mass migration which followed the upbeat jingle of “Things Can Only Get Better.”
A war in Iraq was confected which killed over a million historic Christians. It powered a surge in migrants from the Middle East, combining with the assault on Syria to produce the 2015 migration crisis.
After Blair came Cameron - a so-called “conservative” elected by following the Blairite playbook. His war in Libya, conducted with Hillary Clinton, smashed open the floodgates to African migration into Europe and Britain.
Later, his fellow Conservative Boris Johnson opened them wider - allowing 5.3 million migrants into the UK from 2020-2024.
How did all this happen? Machine politics made election victories possible in Britain, as elsewhere in the West, by completely disconnecting manifesto promises from policy.
A continuity politics was formed in which the same basic agenda of war, migration and rainbow flags was pursued by successive governments in red and blue ties - from the US to the Ukraine.
This is why Tony Blair matters - wherever you are in the West. Your politicians use his methods and his messaging, and they are looking to him to provide a way out of the mess their policies have made.
The basis of Blair’s super structured election machine is the economic system of global liberalism. It is in every dimension a war economy, requiring permanent wars abroad to continue its volcanic eruptions of borrowing, and using the resulting debt to finance the sponsorship of mass culture to manufacture electorally convenient public opinions.
The problem with this system without principles is that the populations it rules have begun to notice what it produces. The marshmallow appears to be toasted.
There are two remedies to this predicament:
Change the political economy - or
Change the process of power.
Blair is leading global leaders to do #2 by promising #1 to the voters.
Tony Blair invented the machine politics now used in almost every state in the liberal western empire. This machine is breaking down, as the information monopoly it requires has been broken.
This has happened for two reasons.
Reality contradicts the messaging of the captive media, and the media itself is no longer totally controlled.
Liberal democracies have responded by branding counter-liberal information as terrorism, treason or hate speech - and thereby sugaring the pill of censorship.
Elections are cancelled, rerun, and candidates criminalised. Parties offering an alternative to permanent war at home and abroad are branded as extremist.
The centre of machine politics cannot hold its ground, because the liberal system relies on soft and not hard power. It sanctions its own populations but refrains - in the main - from beating, imprisoning and directly killing them.
If it moves too far in this direction it openly discards its image, which is all it has to conceal its true nature. Liberal democracy is the rule by media of a permanent elite, and its elections are designed to prevent this from ever changing.
Tony Blair is now promoting a rapid transition from this form of governance to a total digital state. This would tie your behaviour and opinions to your ability to earn, eat and travel.
Freedom would be reduced to a choice to eat the marshmallow or starve.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is serious about its mission, and it employs over 800 former government leaders, technocrats and specialists to achieve it. The mission is driven not only by Blair’s own messianic zeal - its success or failure is the fate of the liberal system.
Like Blair himself, the liberal-global system sincerely believes in whatever it is saying at the time. This self belief is infectious. A good actor will often say that to play the part well they must first convince themselves of the feeling they wish to convey.
This has been seen recently in the rebranding of global liberalism as the national interest in Canada, in the UK - and in the rerun Romanian election.
Politics is always part performance. Technique is always refining. With the use of technology an algorithm of governance can be developed to replace the Blairite electoral machine - delivering permanent continuity of policy regardless of elections, forever.
It will look like the perfect democracy onscreen. This is the ultimate advert - an illusion which cannot be escaped, an artificial paradise which everyone knows to be false, but in which the price of principled objection will be everything.
In the former East Germany, dissidents had their children taken away by the state to be raised by party loyalists.
Margot Honecker, wife of the German Democratic Republic’s dictator Erich, did this. Here is the “Purple Witch” in 1989 talking about the technique of moulding the young to defend an economic system.
Ours is a time of struggle. It needs youth who can fight to strengthen socialism who can defend it with word and deed - and when necessary - with a weapon in the hand.
Two forms of total state control have dissolved in the last few decades.
Where there are weapons in the hands of young people, they are now often carried and used by the peoples the liberal system has imported into the nations it wishes to replace - with a global consumer marketplace.
It is this reality which is radicalising men, women and children against a system whose only future guarantee of security and order is a digital prison.
The liberal machine also uses word and deed to defend its ideology.
Ideology is an advertisement for an economic model.
The one we live in has reduced peoples to consumers and life to a product, translating all meaning into values reducible to number.
The technique of machine politics is the standardisation of humanity.
If the human can be reduced to the terms and conditions of a permanent online community, social media will be the only society we know. A suspension or ban will have real life consequences which will be experienced but never really seen.
Soft power suffocates in silence those who spit out its sugar-substitutes.
To a dissolving empire, desperate not to lose, the combination of Blairite messaging and technology promise a lifeline which will never run out.
The technique you are now seeing from the liberal remnant is this: we have the answers to the problems we have caused, and for this security you will have to give up your liberty.
It is the latest stage of the permanent war on our civilisation which the liberal system has waged for over a century.
Every one of its wars reduced personal freedom, with belief, behaviour and being snared in an ever decreasing circle. Before the First World War, an Englishman had practically nothing to do with the State outside the Post Office.
Now, throughout the West, there is practically nothing you can do without it.
The machinery of permanent politics is everywhere, in our films, our supermarkets, in codes of conduct, in medical ethics and in the values and standards of the armed forces. It is forever on our screens.
It should be a source of inspiration to you that this total system has not produced total power.
Look at the face of Tony Blair, and that of his acolytes in Britain, Canada, and in the EU. These are not confident expressions. Boasts of visionary strength and swift remedies are no longer convincing. Reality speaks against them, and the time horizon is within sight.
If you would like to know what a time horizon is and why it matters, see here:
FUTURE POLITICS
Machine politics is having a breakdown, and it can only be replaced - not repaired. The obscene conditions set by the formerly unlimited terms of liberal machine politics are reshaping the political calculus beyond its control.
Will the digital transition come in time to save the old world order?
The state of emergency created by the liberal agenda and its economics of crisis is now being used to promote the digital remedy.
A system designed to prevent meaningful change now urges it with its every act. The marshmallow centre cannot hold.
It is into what, not whether this change will come - and it is within our time that it will certainly arrive.
God bless you all and thank you again for your support - without which I could never have produced the work you see here.
"Every one of its wars reduced personal freedom, with belief, behaviour and being snared in an ever decreasing circle. Before the First World War, an Englishman had practically nothing to do with the State outside the Post Office.
Now, throughout the West, there is practically nothing you can do without it."
This that you wrote hit home to me the most. This is the way it is in America now. We live as prisoners now in America. We are controlled at all times and in all ways. It is making me insane but it does not seem to bother most people. We must give up our freedom in all ways, big and small in nearly every aspect of our lives. We must accept SMART everything which results in putting us in a cage. If we try to refuse the SMART evils we are not able to. When we become older and have health problems and require interactions with the medical world it really becomes intolerable because it feels like "life or death" depending on whether the person/patient is willing to surrender to Big Brother in order to receive medical care. There was a time when doctor-patient confidentiality was acknowledged as a thing. I remember it. Now doctors wear recording devices that tape everything that is said by the patient in the examination room and then that recording is kept electronically and made available to government, insurance companies, the cloud, other medical offices and hospitals and any hackers or basically anybody who can get access to it. This is now considered acceptable. It is BETRAYAL. When a child is born the collection of that child's personal information begins at the hospital. The blood is drawn and the results are put in the files. The damaging shots are begun. The government is informed of the arrival of a new slave for them to rule and a number is assigned to the slave. Nobody bats an eye.
I wrote this on another Substack platform. Translates perfectly to your recent missive Frank. Bravo.
https://substack.com/@gwooster/note/c-335365841?r=1xhpfd&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
An ungovernable force has been unleashed on Western Europe by political leaders and sadly, demonstrably, by self loathing whites who worship ideology over community safety and future security. The consequences have already been witnessed and will only get worse and the perpetrators further emboldened with each passing decades. Something epoch defining has to implemented in our favour at their expense. We don’t have equal rights. We have special rights for certain groups at our expense. The myth of inclusivity is portrayed as a progressive utopia. When you try and extract yourself from imposed participation you’re not allowed to. We have no ‘out’ option. We are potential victims to savage unruly forces that are the preferred class of the parasites in Brussels and Westminster. Hear Hear by the way.