Whither representative democracy? The BBC’s Nick Robinson says that Conservatives think of Reform leader Nigel Farage as ‘a kind of Sunday roast with all the trimmings’ while PM Rishi Sunak is ‘a quinoa salad’. The latest YouGov UK poll on 18 June has Labour leading, Conservatives and Reform level-pegging and Liberal Democrats fourth. Yet, because of the quirks of the first-past-the-post electoral system, with about one-third of votes Labour would win two-thirds of seats; the Conservatives would win twenty times more seats than Reform which would win less than one-third of its vote share in seats; and the LibDems, with only four-fifths of the Reform share of votes, would have thirteen times as many seats. The Australian electoral system in combination with the institutionalised practice of preference flows produces its own significant distortions. The Coalition consistently polls ahead of Labor in the primary vote but loses in the all-important two-party-preferred count. Although one cannot make linear extrapolations, under the UK system the Coalition would have won the last election and would be on track for a landslide victory next year.

With parliamentary representation and government composition going off at tangents from voter preferences, Australia and the UK demonstrate why there’s growing disenchantment with democracy itself. On 18 June, the Pew Research Center published its latest democracy satisfaction ratings in twelve high-income democracies in Europe, North America and Asia. The balance is a decisive 64 to 36 dissatisfied. For Australia it is 60 to 39. In the last three years, when Covid provided the trigger to the unchecked expansion and widespread abuse of state power, the satisfaction ratings have fallen by 9 to 21 points in the UK, Canada, Germany, USA and France. Climate alarmism is being deployed to the same end to tell people which car to buy and manufacturers and dealers which cars to make and sell; to tell people how to heat their homes; and so on.

The relentless negativity of the noisy activists towards the legacy of Western civilisations, culture and values is another factor contributing to widespread angst. Mobs have been out vandalising artistic and statuary symbols of this legacy with respect to racism and slavery. Yet, as the exceptional Katharine Birbalsingh pointed out in a 2019 debate, while slavery was common to all major civilisations and races, Western civilisation was the only one to develop a moral revulsion against slavery and to lead the fight (often literally) for its worldwide abolition. Should descendants of the soldiers who died in the US Civil War to free slaves, pay reparations to the descendants of the slaves who were freed?

Jeffrey Tucker, founder-president of the Brownstone Institute, splits the controlling state into three layers: the deep state of security, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies that operate mostly in the world of shadows; the middle layer of the administrative state to which legislatures and executives have delegated powers and courts have deferred in the exercise of these powers; and the mostly consumer-facing shallow state that complies with but also, through extensive lobbying, shapes the edicts of the administrative state. Matt Ridely, drawing on his experience as a member of the House of Lords, wrote in The Spectator that no matter who the citizens vote for, the blob always wins. Referencing Yes Minister, he writes: ‘Today, when Hacker suggests a policy, Humphrey reminds him that he has devolved responsibility to the National Paperclips Authority, or it’s not within his power, or judicial review will stop it, or it’s against human rights law, or he’s bullying Bernard by asking him to turn up to work.’ Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York who was a fierce and popular Trump critic, said recently that ‘if his name was not Donald Trump, and if he wasn’t running for president’, the sex case in which he was convicted ‘would have never been brought’. Cuomo is also a former attorney general of New York.

The vortex of the developments above explains why the New Right is challenging and displacing the left liberal consensus on migration, net zero and identity politics. What began as a drift to the right is threatening to turn into a stampede. In another extraordinary poll, 46 per cent of all UK voters, including 24 per cent of Conservative voters from 2019, believe the Conservative party deserves to lose every seat. The Tories have lost ground since 2019 among every voting group by gender, class and age. This is white-hot rage territory and the recent European elections represent a political earthquake. The scorn-spewing elites own the outcome of the European elections. The aftershocks could rattle the UK next week, the US in November and Australia next year. In these places too citizens have had enough of the uniparty’s progressive-green-globalist agenda to dissolve their rich civilisation into a relativist smorgasbord. ‘Reactionary’ views are firming on fossil fuels, gender wars, immigration and national security in an increasingly darkling world.

All ‘right-thinking’ people are assumed to subscribe to the consensus and be on ‘the right side of history’. The prospect of the ‘wrong-thinking’ people from the ‘wrong side of history’ emerging victorious at the ballot box is provoking an epidemic of conniptions. For they are viewed as not just wrong, but positively evil. Thus all who opposed the Voice referendum were bigoted racists. Critics of mass immigration from countries with cultures deeply hostile to Western values, who want to domesticate the Israel-Palestine conflict in local politics, are Islamophobes. Opponents of the jobs and growth-destroying net zero are climate denialists. Proponents of nuclear power in the energy mix want to produce three-eyed monsters. Advocacy for gender realism is hate speech. You get the picture.

The masses are in revolt against the homogeneous political establishment and the scolds and sneers who are their cheerleaders in the commentariat. Their lack of humility is matched by a surfeit of arrogance. The ‘deplorables’ find nothing to apologise for in cherishing their own culture, practising and defending the values they have inculcated to live by in a cohesive and closely knit community. They reject the concerted effort to deny space to anyone who gives voice to the fear that to import the third world is to risk becoming the third world. The message from Europe’s voters can be summarised thus: Europeans don’t want to become African, Middle Eastern, South Asian or Muslim. They don’t want to import the third world’s pathologies of slums, sectarian conflicts, violent street crimes, rapes, crumbling infrastructure and lack of affordable high quality public education and health care. They do wish to preserve their own heritage, culture, lifestyles, peaceful communities, public safety and good governance. Their tolerance has been tested to breaking point. They have had enough and are not going to take it anymore. Stolen from them in fits of absentmindedness, they would like their countries back, thank you very much.

If voter preferences continue to be disrespected instead of implemented as policy, how long before violent explosions erupt and civil wars return?