Britain, we hear from TV studios, Telegraph columns, Whitehall assembly rooms and post-industrial focus teams, is a “tinderbox”. Persons are disconnected and indignant; our cities and cities are lawless hellscapes overrun with threatening migrants and gangs of knife-wielding teenagers. There’s an apocalypticism within the air, with the far proper again on the streets barracking asylum accommodations with shouts of “remigration now!” The persons are successful. The small M25 city of Epping has turn into the locus of a nationwide confrontation, with sustained protests this week resulting in a Excessive Court docket injunction blocking the usage of the Bell Resort for housing asylum seekers. There’s rather more to return. Issues can’t go on as they’re. It’s time for civil warfare.
A type of who claims to have taken the nation’s temperature and located it feverous is Dominic Cummings, former chief adviser to the prime minister and as soon as a consummate political insider. “This regime,” he not too long ago instructed an viewers in Oxford, “has turn into cancerous… Step-by-step, the previous regime has piled up the tinder” in order that we are actually “solely random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting uncontrolled”. “The yookay trajectory,” he wrote in July (utilizing the ugly, very-online-right neologism for modern Britain that now has its personal Wikipedia sub-page), “will not be sustainable.” To get us out of this nightmare requires “regime change”, irrespective of how “painful and divisive” it could be.
As with many of those predictions of immanent doom, it’s exhausting to disentangle terrified warnings from gleeful rallying cries. Is Cummings a Cassandra, shouting his dire prophecies into the void, or a cheerleader, ready to learn from the approaching dysfunction? Is he “affected person zero” of the frenzied politics now sweeping the appropriate, or its diagnostician? If you’re studying this, you might be seemingly already conscious of Cummings and the voluminous on-line weblog that he has maintained, in numerous kinds, because the early 2010s and which he now hosts on Substack. You could even be amongst his subscribers, paying £10 a month for an irregular dose of unfiltered and really a lot unedited Dom.
Even these of you who don’t learn him will certainly be acquainted with the form of factor it gives: nuggets of upper gossip from the Vote Go away marketing campaign and his time in No 10; numerous bits of knowledge gleaned from the world of science and tech; glosses on science and philosophy; and anatomies of up to date politics spliced with invectives about, properly, kind of everybody. Starmer (ineffective), Johnson (“the Trolley”, for the best way he crashes round from one subject to the subsequent), and the vast majority of the media and the civil service (“NPCs”, gamer slang for “non-player characters” managed by the pc, not human gamers).
Throughout journalism and politics, his output is learn with all the pieces from devotion to disdain, however all the time with consideration. Cummings is the form of insider-outsider that politicians and the media love, reflecting the darkest ideas – too harmful to state brazenly – of the Institution again at itself. More durable to find out, although, is simply what Cummings, one among Westminster’s most influential public intellectuals, really believes. On the head of his most up-to-date essay, Cummings quotes his hero, Bismarck: “If we don’t put together for ourselves the position of the hammer, there will probably be nothing left however that of the anvil.” The Britain that will probably be solid between the 2, nevertheless – that continues to be unclear.
What coherence there may be in Dominic Cummings’s output has typically felt the end result extra of the person behind the phrases than the phrases themselves. Typically maddeningly wide-ranging, it has at instances been exhausting to observe the path of Cummings’s considering to any form of agency world-view. The closest he has come to a manifesto is his 240-page essay on “Odyssean Schooling” from 2013. There, Cummings sketched out each the issues confronted by the British state, together with the alternatives they current for the nation lastly to discover a post-imperial position for itself.
Studying it once more at this time, it’s placing much less for its size and vary (absurd and startling in equal measure) than its comparative timidity. Cummings takes the which means of “Odyssean” from the Nobel-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to explain a great type of elite training, one that’s interdisciplinary and integrative and which might be used to coach “synthesisers”, the type of people that can perceive and react to the more and more interconnected and complicated world round us. Set in opposition to this, for Cummings, is the usual British elite training, whose consultant determine is the Oxbridge PPE graduate. This, Cummings says, does “not prepare political leaders properly”, encouraging “superficial bluffing, misplaced confidence”. Fatally, it additionally embeds an ignorance of recent arithmetic and science, notably chance and statistics, in our elites. “Most of our politics,” Cummings writes, “remains to be carried out with the morality and the language of the straightforward primitive hunter-gatherer tribe: ‘which chief we could shout for to resolve our issues?’” Whereas the world has moved on, gaining in complexity, we’re nonetheless mired in “chimp politics”. “Our fragile civilisation is susceptible to massive shocks and a continuation of conventional human politics because it was throughout 6 million years of hominid evolution,” Cummings writes. This, he says, “might kill billions”.
The excellent news is that with the appropriate instruments we will “construct groups that suppress Chimp Politics [his caps]”. To map our route out of the previous, Cummings sketches a broad syllabus in maths, logic and the sciences for the longer term elite. As many readers have famous, it’s daringly, typically breathlessly broad, protecting all the pieces from a cribbed historical past of financial thought to the event of recent physics and the connection between genetics and IQ. At instances it reads just like the mind dump of an over-caffeinated teenager hooked on YouTube. However there’s little doubt that it’s the product of the prodigious studying of a devoted autodidact. The general goal of all that is the creation of a world wherein a “mixture of science and market establishments [would] allow nine-tenths of ~10 billion individuals to thrive in affluent and peaceable nonzero-sum [sic] societies”.
But for all its futurology, Cummings’s emphasis on the facility of a scientifically educated technocratic elite that may shepherd us into the longer term feels oddly old style. This can be a imaginative and prescient which learn, for the mental historian Stefan Collini, like “CP Snow on pace”. Snow, in fact, was one such technocratic member of the institution, a novelist and civil servant educated in chemistry whose 1959 lecture on the “Two Cultures” was a quick trigger célèbre in mid-century Britain. Within the lecture, Snow (sounding very like Cummings at this time) chided the British elite for his or her scientific illiteracy. But because the stacks of yellowed CP Snow paperbacks in my native Oxfam attests, Snow is much less a thinker for the century forward than one among a really explicit second within the British previous.
Within the decade and a bit because the publication of his ideas on “Odyssean Schooling”, Cummings has continued to publish his different musings on-line. With this has come a refined if significant change to his considering. It’s now not complexity, training, reform and danger that outline Cummings’s world, however disaster.
The broad outlines of Cummings’s biography are well-known. Born in Durham in 1971, Cummings learn historic and fashionable historical past at Exeter School, Oxford, the place his tutors included the classicist Robin Lane Fox and the historian and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Stone. Quickly after commencement, Cummings moved to Moscow, partly on the suggestion of Stone, to see the newly post-Soviet world being created. Amongst his ventures included a failed try to start out an airline to attach the Volga metropolis of Samara with Vienna, in Austria. Returning to Britain in 1997, Cummings entered the world of right-wing suppose tanks and strain teams, and was later a key determine within the “North East Says No” referendum marketing campaign in opposition to a proposed regional meeting. After a quick stint on the Spectator, Cummings was appointed a particular adviser to Michael Gove on the Division for Schooling in 2011. It was then that he started publishing his writing on-line.
A lot of his early work was knowledgeable by the mental environment of this right-wing insider milieu. It mixed a religion within the energy of the market and a technocratic managerialism with a deep distrust of the particular workings of the state and civil service. “Odyssean training”, due to this fact, was as a lot a challenge of placing the state to work within the pursuits of science, know-how and business, fostering a brand new high-tech entrepreneurialism match for a Twenty first-century economic system, because it was about training or civil-service reform. For this, his touchstones had been the titans of mid-century state-directed R&D: the Manhattan Venture and Darpa, the Chilly Warfare-era moon-shot establishment that performed a pivotal position in all the pieces from the event of mRNA vaccines and GPS to the web. The questions that motivated him, he wrote in 2019, had been: “How can we make economies extra productive and what’s the relationship between primary science and productiveness?”
His latest essays, although, have seen a shift in priorities, and a distinct sense of the tenor of the current second. What has emerged is a darker, harder-edged Cummings. If 2013 Cummings might see a means out of the mess, 2025 Cummings can’t. The modern world, he tells us, is more and more loopy. “Consensus actuality”, the concept no matter politics or background we’re all dwelling in broadly the identical world – seeing the identical information, experiencing actuality in the identical means – is collapsing. That actuality was the product of the revolutions of the mid-Nineteenth century, which birthed the mass media and new applied sciences of communication. The proliferation of newspapers, radio and tv fostered a unity of expertise inside nation states, even throughout borders. However because the tempo of technological change turned ever extra speedy, and new media, notably the web and AI, has begun to interchange the previous – with its skill to react to particular person customers by way of algorithmic filtering and siloing – this unity of expertise has fractured. In flip, the crumbling of our shared political and social actuality has, in a form of insanity doom-loop, solely added to the craziness.
The world at this time, then, is very like that of the 1840s, the period wherein the earlier consensus actuality was created. Again then, a era that had lived by means of the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars had been confronted with a quickly altering world, wherein the previous certainties had been quickly disintegrating earlier than, as Cummings has defined, in 1848 “dominoes fall, regimes fall, new international locations are created”. Curiously, Cummings will not be the one one to see parallels between the 1840s and at this time: the film-maker Adam Curtis has stated that his most up-to-date sequence, Shifty, was impressed by studying Christopher Clark’s historical past of 1848. “The world [Clark] describes,” Curtis instructed the Guardian, “feels so just like at this time.”
Within the modern doom-loop, the data that comes out of Whitehall and Fleet Avenue is more and more dysregulated and (a favorite Cummings adjective) “faux”. The information cycle spins ever sooner, and what’s on the entrance web page sooner or later is quickly forgotten (“memory-holed”) the subsequent. Greater than that, information tales are sometimes fully the creation of journalists, or else are fed to them by political insiders merely to maintain the wheels turning. In flip, there may be “fixed mimetic Narrative Whiplash” as tales race throughout Twitter feeds solely to get replaced by ever-more pressing information, nothing ever settling for quite a lot of days, even hours. (One other favorite citation of his, this time from the Def Jam impresario Rick Rubin: “Professional wrestling is actual, the information is faux”.)
[See also: Inside Robert Jenrick’s New Right revolution]
Historical past, for Dominic Cummings, is cyclical not linear and progressive. On this schema, the breakdown of consensus actuality is merely one of many stronger signs of a deeper disaster. Roughly each 50 years a disaster develops, Cummings tells us, which modifications the stability of historic forces. Buildings which have been at work over the longue durée, working above the heads of politicians and pundits, begin to tear on the seams of the previous regime. For some time the forces of order proceed to perform as earlier than, whilst altering materials situations distort their skill to make and implement selections. However errors happen with rising frequency, and disruption and instability acquire in magnitude and unpredictability. The slide in the direction of catastrophe gathers momentum. All of that is spurred on by elite inertia. As soon as the disaster reaches a sure stage, the ultimate step within the course of is regime change: new elites and new concepts take the place of the previous, which is swept apart as a lot mud on the manufacturing unit flooring of historical past.
The size of this current disaster is as nice as some other in fashionable world historical past. Drawing on the German-American conservative thinker Leo Strauss in a weblog revealed on 30 April this yr, Cummings wrote that there have been three distinct waves of modernity, every of which discovered kind in political philosophy. The primary, inaugurated by Machiavelli, got here within the sixteenth century with a rejection of the classical inheritance; the second, by Rousseau in 18th-century France, with the transfer from particular person to common will. The ultimate got here with Nietzsche within the Nineteenth century and was powered a fierce critique of Enlightenment rationalism. Every in flip produced distinct types of politics: liberalism, communism and fascism. For Cummings we are actually on the verge of one thing new, because the cracks within the edifice of the third wave of modernity develop ever wider. “A fourth wave of modernisation has begun,” he writes, “not pushed by conventional philosophers or the colleges however primarily by the web and know-how.” (There’s maybe an unstated assumption right here: at this time’s inheritor to the three nice philosophers of modernity is the sage of De Beauvoir City himself, Dominic Cummings.)
The dangers of this technological acceleration are compounded by what Cummings sees as a very antiquated political system. On the coronary heart of up to date British politics and society is what he calls, quoting Carl Sagan, “a flamable combination of ignorance and energy”. In chronologically recognized layers, these are a mix of: “Twenty first-century markets plus science plus applied sciences,” much more disruptive than the revolutionary situations of Nineteenth-century industrial capitalism; “Twentieth-century state bureaucracies”, more and more centralised and anti-adaptive; “Nineteenth-century disaster administration”, “equally educated males sitting round tables like the cupboard desk in 1914”; “Pre-Nineteenth century… training and coaching for political leaders”; plus “Stone Age instincts”, that drive in-group collectivities and out-group violence. It’s a interval when, in previous vulgar Marxist lexicon, the superstructure of society begins to fetter its materials base.
On this state of affairs, all kinds of horrors are produced. “Ever puzzled what it was wish to reside within the Austro-Hungarian Empire pre-1914?” Cummings writes. “Surprise no extra.” One other favorite historic analogue, marshalled commonly, is that within the run-up to the First World Warfare, one other second when Britain stood on the precipice of a brand new world, there was solely a single assembly between the British prime minister and the army command in regards to the implications of the Belgium assure. In 1914, the British elite sleepwalked right into a battle that the nation was unprepared for. A lot the identical, Cummings tells us, is going on at this time. The sample of breakdown is strikingly acquainted: “Gradual rot, elite blindness, quick disaster, sudden collapse.”
But if a lot of the elite remains to be blind to the approaching chaos, some within the institution are beginning to catch up. Certainly one of Cummings’s latest blogs, revealed on 28 Could, displays on the work of David Betz, professor of warfare within the fashionable world at King’s School London, in addition to writing by the historic social scientist, Peter Turchin. Each thinkers see imminent mass civilisational breakdown as a really actual prospect. In latest months, Betz has made headlines along with his predictions a couple of looming risk of a brand new British civil warfare. Falling dwelling requirements, the rise of identitarian factionalism, together with spiritual and ethnic sectarianism, rising ranges of immigration and a disaster of political legitimacy might all result in catastrophe. Turchin, in the meantime, is the founding father of the research of what he calls “cliodynamics”, the modelling of complicated techniques to generate long-term guidelines for the rise and fall of nice civilisations, with a watch to occasions in modern America. Like Cummings, Turchin sees patterns of collective violence operating on roughly 50-year cycles, pushed by standard immiseration, geopolitical instability in addition to what he calls “elite over-production” (consider downwardly cellular graduates) unable to search out work throughout the system.
Within the work of each Betz and Turchin, Cummings sees portents of a brand new age of violence, and mass dysfunction returning to the streets of British cities. “Contained in the intelligence companies, particular forces… bits of Whitehall, and people most related to discussions away from Westminster, there may be rising, although nonetheless tiny, dialogue of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for critical violence,” Cummings writes, “together with what would appear like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence [emphasis in original].”As this implies, a lot of essentially the most apocalyptic rhetoric in his latest missives is racial in tone. One a part of the insider-NPC consensus that Cummings pours most scorn on is the continuation of what he calls the “immigration Ponzi” – the usage of low-cost immigrant employees to shore up Britain’s flagging productiveness figures. This, for Cummings, will solely fire up discontent.
The risk that large-scale immigration poses to complicated societies has lengthy been a theme in Cummings’s writing. But up to now, dealing successfully with immigration was seen as a strategy to inoculate in opposition to the rise of extremism. By tackling the results of mass immigration early, in a rational and technocratic method, by stopping small-boat crossings and eradicating Britain from the European Conference on Human Rights for example, the rise of xenophobic populism and nationalism might be averted. As he wrote in 2023: “I believed (and stated earlier than the referendum) that taking again democratic management of immigration coverage would: kill off extremism right here, shift immigration from being the highest public precedence to a medium or low precedence, retire Farage/UKIP, and permit a greater immigration coverage just like the Australian factors system.”
That has seemingly modified in latest months. Now, he’s greater than ever aping essentially the most excessive rhetoric of the appropriate. His most up-to-date essay complains of the flood of immigration from “essentially the most barbaric locations on Earth”, of “immigration from the tribal areas most accountable for the grooming/rape gangs”, and “the unfold of these barbaric concepts… [being defended by] human rights legal guidelines designed to cease the return of totalitarianism in Europe”. His most up-to-date weblog, from July, goes even additional, claiming that, on the “grooming gangs”, “Tommy Robinson was extra proper than ‘the mainstream’”.
A part of this he blames on what, riffing on the net proper meme of the “Boriswave”, he calls the “2021-4 Boris-Carrie wave” (a periodisation that conveniently leaves out his personal time within the Johnson administration whereas shifting the blame on to his nice bête noire, Carrie Symonds). This, he believes, is resulting in a fierce backlash, a part of which could be seen within the return to prominence of Nigel Farage and, extra portentously, within the riots final summer time. There’s, he says a “spreading meme that our regime itself has turn into our enemy” and the “rising politicisation of white English nationalism”. The disaster is coming. Race warfare and civil battle are imminent. If solely we’d listened to Dom after we had the possibility.
[See also: Will Davies: Peter Turchin’s empty prophecies]
Many have detected shifts in Cummings’s beliefs earlier than this level. In 2019, Harry Lambert famous for the New Statesman that whereas Cummings’s short-lived Noughties suppose tank, the New Frontiers Basis, was decidedly Hayekian in its coverage proposals – freer commerce, much less regulation, decrease taxes, privatisation – one thing started to vary after the referendum. Someday round 2016, Lambert noticed, his financial outlook moved from “neoliberal to populist”: arguing for reductions in govt pay, for example, and in opposition to the concept Brexit was merely a revolt in opposition to an overbearing establishment and for a smaller state.
There’s little doubt that the referendum signalled a change of emphasis in his thought, however to say that it was a part of a transfer away from neoliberalism is to oversell it. Even at this time, Cummings continues to advocate for the classically neoliberal insurance policies of decrease taxation and a smaller state. He nonetheless sings from the identical hymn sheet, even when the music has gained in pitch and depth. He might have led the official marketing campaign for Brexit beneath the impeccably populist slogan of “Take again management”, and his deep aversion to the political and media elites strike equally populist chords. However there may be little substantive to distinguish the broad swathe of his thought from his neoliberal friends. Somewhat than utilizing a plebiscite like Brexit to present voice to the unheard and excluded, its goal was to pressure by means of what amounted to completely neoliberal insurance policies.
Brexit, he wrote in 2021, was an try “to throw a spanner within the works of this ‘regular’ and provide an opportunity for regime change”. It was to be an “icebreaker of the revolution”, a strategy to break with “Insider typical knowledge”. What the perfect world after the revolution could be, he has stated, is “rather more Hayek for 95-99% of the economic system, rather more Lee Kwan Yew for 1-5%”. The reference to the previous prime minister of Singapore right here is instructive. He has lengthy been enamoured with the Singaporean chief, with a superb chunk of his early writing on Substack from 2021 notes taken from Lee’s From Third World to First, his political memoir-cum-handbook for state growth first revealed in 2000. And Singapore has lately turn into one thing of the neoliberal mannequin du jour. Maybe it is because, in a world the place borders are hardening and unrest fomenting, the nation’s marriage of free markets with social authoritarianism appears a extra real looking guess than, say, the extra libertarian regime of pre-handover Hong Kong. Allied with this can be a pessimism in regards to the energy of democracies to get issues accomplished. Lee’s “Singapore mannequin” pioneered a profitable merger of a authorized and financial regime beneficial to worldwide capital with extreme restrictions on political freedom. The ruling Folks’s Motion Celebration, till not too long ago led by Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, has been in energy constantly since 1959, heading up a de facto one-party state.
It’s “enthusing to examine somebody who a) can suppose long-term and combine coverage, politics, communication and the ‘complicated coordination’ wanted to show concepts into actuality, after which b) really relentlessly implements a virtuous circle of insurance policies that works over the long-term”, Cummings has written. The energetic suppression of democracy, unsurprisingly, will get far much less consideration. And on this, we will see a sure overlap between his work and that of Curtis Yarvin, the pc engineer and newbie political theorist beloved of many within the Trump regime. Very like Cummings, Yarvin thinks that authorities paperwork ought to be gutted. And each are deeply sceptical in regards to the skill of democracies to impact lasting change. Very like Yarvin, the figures that Cummings is most impressed by are CEOs and enterprise leaders, alongside nice males like Bismarck and Lee, not democratic leaders. For each, governments ought to study from the top-down decision-making of tech start-ups, led by visionaries and engineers unencumbered by standard scrutiny, not the opposite means round. One set is curious about motion, in getting exhausting issues accomplished; the opposite, merely staying in energy.
The Vote Go away revolution that Cummings masterminded throughout the Brexit referendum, and which he tried to carry again into energy whereas adviser to Boris Johnson between July 2019 and November 2020, was in fact a failure. No everlasting modifications to the state or the civil service had been enacted, and few of Cummings’s insurance policies stay. And whereas a lot of his latest writing could be learn as a mirrored image on his ill-fated time in authorities, it’s exhausting to disclaim the reality in a lot of what he says. The civil service and the state bureaucracies are deeply conservative establishments, and far of the political and media class are blind if not fully blind to the deep properly of discontent within the nation. Most of us work ever-longer hours for ever-less pay, whereas the wealthy lap the cream off the highest. Maybe essentially the most seen symbols of British decline are the degradation of the general public sphere after a decade and a half of austerity, and the brutal hollowing out of local-authority budgets. Immigration has undoubtedly contributed to this admixture, and offers straightforward scapegoats for declining public companies and a decaying public realm.
Nor are his anti-democratic impulses alien to the nation at massive. As latest polling by Hope not Hate revealed, 40 per cent of British individuals would like a “sturdy and decisive chief who has the authority to override or ignore parliament” to a liberal democracy. The sclerotic nature of parliamentary democracy is just accentuated by the media-obsessed short-termism that Cummings so pungently anatomises. That very same ballot additionally famous that this political and cultural pessimism is driving the rise of Reform and the exhausting proper; when the state so visibly fails to cope with the issues most individuals face it’s straightforward to see why outsider forces attraction.
It’s not simply Cummings who has hardened his rhetoric. There was a sweeping radicalisation of the British proper over the previous yr and a bit. Concepts as soon as deemed anathema, or at the least to not be aired publicly, are actually brazenly debated and declared. If there’s a governing historic scheme underpinning this new proper it’s that Britain is reliving one thing just like the Seventies, though now relatively than the over-mighty commerce unions fettering the facility of British capital it’s the bureaucratic straitjacket of the “Blairite consensus”. For a lot of them, 1997 represents a basic break in British historical past, with the ruling post-New Labour regime constituted by an online of authorized and regulatory our bodies that has trapped the nation in a stultifying embrace, making it unimaginable to train its correct sovereignty as a nation-state. Such a authorized and bureaucratic matrix is typified for the brand new proper by the European Conference on Human Rights and the Equality Act, therefore the fixed calls to abolish them. With this mental context in thoughts, we will group Cummings with everybody from Rupert Lowe to Robert Jenrick, all the way down to the grottiest denizens of Substack and X. It helps explains why Cummings can forged his lot in with those that just a few years in the past he expended a lot power attempting to disavow, comparable to Nigel Farage, with whom he has been assembly since earlier than Christmas.
But it appears virtually too apparent to say that a lot of what Cummings advocates will solely deepen the disaster. Social and financial disaster, atomisation and state failure haven’t occurred despite Britain’s neoliberal financial mannequin, however due to it. Going tougher and sooner down this path, with even much less democratic oversight, will solely make issues worse. Cummings has by no means been a conservative within the strict sense. It’s not for him the craving for stability and the established order. He’s extra of a revolutionary, whilst some have famous a wierd form of neo-Leninism: carry on the pounding gales of artistic destruction so we would renew ourselves once more. However as his latest output reveals, such themes are reaching new heights. On this, he has as soon as once more proven that he’s a thinker of the current second. England has a fever – and so does Dominic Cummings.
[See also: The prophet of the new right]