This is a provocative thread, and it's roughly parallel with ideas I've been kicking around for a while. https://twitter.com/JohnWest_JAWS/status/1273763212756946947

That said, I disagree with the claim that it's not a right-wing thing. It *is*. It's definitely a hard right phenomenon.

For example, see this thread (which is not evidence for my claim, but is evidence that I made the claim): https://twitter.com/IBrasso/status/1167909478181658624

There is a parallel in other areas of the current culture-wars, too: https://twitter.com/IBrasso/status/1168810920203751424

But my big disagreement lies with this part of the thread: https://twitter.com/JohnWest_JAWS/status/1273897703492259847

I think that's naive - it's in parallel with the kind of Hollywood blockbuster in which the supervillain is never motivated by politics or anything like that: it always boils down to money. Hollywood struggles with anything other than material ends. It doesn't do ideology.

But the current mess is entirely ideology. None of what we see at the moment makes sense without a particular view of what constitutes the Good Life.

None of what we see in politics at the moment is easily explicable if you understand it in terms of following the money, and this is because anyone who is genuinely interested in that takes a long-term view of investment.

When more or less every economist and financier says that Brexit was daft, and when even BP has sworn to go carbon-neutral, that should give you an idea of the way the wind's blowing.

Our governments are choosing another path entirely.

Their path is one of rampant individualism. This will certainly make some people very rich. But that's a side-effect. Peter Thiel's wealth is not ever going to be in doubt. (In fact, his preferred world makes it less secure.)

No: it's not money that's driving this. It's a kind of libertarianism gone psychotic.

You can be right-of-centre without that - and I agree that right-of-centre politics needn't be a threat. A soft right may even be useful to keep the left's feet on the ground.

All the same, what we're seeing is clearly a right-of-centre phenomenon - it's a hard right thing.

And it's winning.

And because it rests on a view of what it is to be human, that's the only way it can really be engaged with.

The problem is that it's psychotic - and so it's not clear what engagement will look like.