In a surreal cascade of events, the internet personality Andrew Tate has launched a political party. He has done this seemingly in response to a resurgence of interest in the scandal of Britain’s predominantly Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs”, as these are euphemistically known; a fact made somewhat ironic because Tate himself, a self-declared Muslim convert, is alleged by Romanian authorities to have himself used the “loverboy” method to recruit young women into sexual exploitation.
I’ll spare you further analysis of his proposed programme for the “BRUV Party”, aka Britain Restoring Underlying Values, save to say that “BBC Punishment” merits an essay on its own. But his foray into politics is perhaps less a serious proposal than a symptom of the accelerating collapse of legitimacy across almost all of mainstream British institutional politics. More profoundly still, the shake-up now underway isn’t just of political parties or ideologies, but of the mechanisms themselves: a tectonic shift, in which ancient forms of power are re-emerging, and the terms of political engagement are suddenly radically up for grabs.
The backdrop to this is the decisive Covid-era shift, across the West, to a digital-first culture: a transformation has proved two-edged for the very elites who promoted it hardest. Our newly digitised world looked, at first blush, like a final consolidation of wealth and power for globalising, post-national and monolithically liberal oligarchy of “knowledge workers” or as NS Lyons put it, “Virtuals”, over those reactionary “Physicals”, the peons doomed to mere real-world toil. This is all true; but it has also turned out to be a powerful amplification device for any renegade oligarch willing to take (or even just appear to take) the peons’ side.
What this has, in turn, exposed is a world in which nation-states on the post-1945 model are not yet fully redundant — but where these entities, their associated political forms and processes, and their mechanisms for generating political legitimacy map at best uneasily onto the new reality of where power actually rests. For digital wealth consolidation has catapulted us back into a world of lords and princes: titans whose riches accord them a status more akin to (say) a Lorenzo de Medici than anything the West has seen since the two World Wars.
It was the actions of such a prince — Elon Musk — that tipped last November’s Presidential election for Trump, first by buying Twitter (now X) and then by triggering a preference cascade that moved several other tech princes to the Trump side. And it’s Musk, too, behind the brickbats currently raining down on Starmer in relation to the grooming gangs, a campaign of posting persecution that’s generated so much noise and chaos it appears to have spurred Tate to launch the “BRUV Party”.
This in turn highlights another aspect of the new feudal order: namely that these lords and princes are beginning to test their strength against elements of the legacy political system. Once an individual’s net worth is higher than the GDP of a medium-sized nation-state, after all, it is far from clear who ranks higher: plutocrat or Prime Minister? This is the broader context in which a domino-chain of internet events led from Musk trolling Starmer with the UK’s shameful record on the rape gangs, to a kickboxing (alleged) “loverboy” announcing his intention to stand for Parliament and replace him.
For if Musk’s status and role doesn’t compute at all, in terms of the postwar order, it makes perfect sense as a 21st-century update of a medieval one. He is fabulously wealthy, commands a principal field for political battle, is an enthusiastic and unabashedly partisan participant in that battlefield, and (not unconnectedly) also most favoured courtier to the man soon to enter office as leader of the world’s preeminent superpower – and who now, also not unconnectedly, owes Musk a favour. This all adds up to a rank and power perhaps akin, in the pre-democratic world, to “grand duke”: below kings and emperors, but above mere sovereign princes or dukes.
How does a grand duke — the real, toothy kind, not the handshaking ceremonial modern sort — interact with elected heads of state who offend him? To his sorrow, Keir Starmer is in the process of finding out. Since Starmer displeased Musk last summer with his conduct during the Southport riots, Musk has pursued an escalating war of words, that intensified recently when Musk began a campaign of X amplification of the ongoing rape gang scandal.
Musk’s declarations that Starmer should be in prison, and polls on whether the USA should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”, have now prompted Downing St to hit back on his “lies and misinformation”. The pearl-clutching in Westminster is such that (according to the BBC’s Nicholas Watt) his “incendiary remarks” have prompted “absolute horror at the highest levels of government” and could even threaten the UK-US security relationship.
So far though, slap-downs in the usual diplomatic register have not had the desired effect. A postmodern Grand Duke with an American passport and more money than the GDP of Finland is testing his political weight against a democratically elected, but widely hated, leader of a state so dysfunctional that some erstwhile loyal subjects are beginning to complain that its principal means of keeping order is subjecting the nation’s ethnic majority to colonial-style repression. And this leader has now discovered that the handbook of modern British politics contains no advice on how to survive the encounter.
Only time will tell if he does. Meanwhile, others in this Grand Duke’s more immediate orbit are also being brusquely schooled as to the proper forms of deference. Musk has previously indicated his support for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and before Christmas was rumoured to have been in talks with the party about making a large donation. But then Musk expressed his support for the Right-wing provocateur Tommy Robinson in connection with his activism on grooming gangs, and in response, Farage countersignalled both Robinson and Musk’s views on his GB News show. Now Musk appears to have cooled not just on the donation but also on Farage, posting on X that he “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party.
Once we pan out of all this pandemonium about rape, immigration, racism, Farage, Starmer, foreign political interference, “the far-Right” and the rest, we’re left with a big unanswered question. What is the relative status of elected leaders and postmodern lords and princes? The latter aren’t “legitimate” in the sense of elected, after all; but by virtue of their position, they’re able to re-order political and cultural realities around themselves, like iron filings round a magnet.
Musk’s influence-peddling is obviously extra-democratic, in this sense. But many other more progressively inclined lords and princes meddle openly in the democratic process without triggering nearly the same fury. Given this, for most, the outrage over Musk’s interventions may be less about the meddling as such, than anger at a major player siding with the plebs over the bureaucracy for a change.
But Musk is himself, in some respects as close as a knowledge worker can get to being a Physical, which is to say someone who works in the “real” world of atoms rather than bits. As evidenced by his achievements with SpaceX and Starlink, he’s less a data manipulator or finance guy than a visionary engineer, in the tradition of such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And this somewhat closer relation to materiality may have accorded him enough pragmatism to recognise what Peter Turchin has warned: that while, historically, elites have often been selfish and frequently exploitative of the lower orders, it doesn’t follow from this that you can simply ignore the peasantry’s interests altogether. The strong may, as Thucydides observed, do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must; but history is littered with elites that didn’t survive the weak deciding they’d had enough and taking collective action.
In other words: even if we don’t strictly live under liberal democracy any more, political legitimacy still matters — just as it did before everyone could vote. But how a leader gains that legitimacy seems once again to be up for grabs. It’s no longer necessarily enough just to win an election, as illustrated by the swiftness with which Keir Starmer’s “historic landslide win” was followed by plummeting popularity, curdling to widespread loathing. If Trump is anything to go by, it works the other way round: you garner political legitimacy first, using the international personality-plebiscite engine called “the internet”, and only then confirm it via elections.
This has left us in a bizarre position. The serious money and power has retreated and consolidated, into an international, borderless power-structure more neo-feudal than liberal-democratic. Public discourse itself — now a crucial engine of mass political legitimacy — is owned by the lords of this post-national, post-democratic overclass. Meanwhile, we still have to keep going through the national electoral motions, even though these are dominated by a bureaucratic class that no longer believes in nation-states, and is incapable of thinking outside the political dogmas that lock in our ongoing dysfunction — because we still can’t (and surely don’t want to) entirely do without them.
Now, though, one of the real overclass has made a hobby of poking fun at the Potemkin leadership this has produced in Britain. Under this assault, both our creaking institutions and the chancers and stuffed shirts that inhabit them, look so absurd that sleazy influencers are popping up to get in on the act, LARPing “getting elected” for clicks like Instagram tradwives pretending to ferment yoghurt for a video. It is difficult to see this situation resulting, at least in the short term, in anything but more chaos. And perhaps the only way out would be a political leader able to bridge the divide: a talent for garnering meme-lord adulation, and also a willingness to smash sacred cows, in the name of getting things done.
Could that be Prime Minister Tate? I struggle to picture it, though I’ve been wrong before. Perhaps it’s a forlorn hope, but it remains my wish that when Anglo-Bukelism finally, inevitably arrives, it will have better taste in cardigans than Tate Britain.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/