IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.

It’s a cliché that modern political Right parties appeal to ‘traditional values’, yet have members who fail to display those actual values in behaviour. That's just hypocrisy; the sexual mores campaigner who has affairs, the drinking, smoking, anti-drugs activist, and so on. But actually displayed disinhibition like Babet's is at a different order of behaviour: the irony is people like Babet behave the way they do precisely because of a lack of shame—the result of valuelessness.

It was always the political Right's critique of the sexual revolution of the 1960s onward, and of feminism, and of modern life generally, that it led to disinhibition and a breakdown of traditional structures and hierarchies---and anti-social behaviour. What Senator Babet lacks, because there is so obviously nobody in his life that he respects to say, hey mate, how about just shutting the fuck up, is in fact the traditional male role models who display ‘traditional virtues’, of inhibition and dignity, and his puerile, obscene, hatefulness is a symptom. It's anomie! It's precisely what the moral majority who swept the 1980s were fixated on!

If it were me, I’d consider it a shameful thing in its own right to have nobody in my life to who I could look up to model my behaviour or police it, and call out my social breaches. I've often used the example of the Beastie Boys, who made perhaps the 20th century's most cartoonishly sexist rap record, were indeed called out by their peers, and who did indeed clean up their act, of the power of social norms to improve people. But hey that’s just me, out here on the political Left, with my odd ideas about social norms!

The irony to appreciate is that we've had a secular shift in our culture war. It's the political Left which is the defender of institutions, of the inheritances of the past, of strict mores of behaviour (especially those to do with sex), of the value and importance of family, and of marriage, while it's the political Right that has embraced chaos and impulsivity. Or as Fintan O'Toole observes:

“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.

And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses.

David Sessions, ‘Against Bernie Would Have Won’, The Point, 7 November 2024

Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.

Zadie Smith, ‘The Dream of the Raised Arm, 5 December 2024

For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

James Meek, ‘What are you willing to do’, London Review of Books, 26 May 2022

But the real danger might be that Trump and Republicans loyal to him cheat and lie their way to a victory that is accepted by Congress, federal power passes to an autocrat, and, after a period of mass protest, most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy. If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one.

AMERICA IS A WEIRD society, in the full sense of the notion of weirdness. It is large, diverse, dynamic, but those are just cliches that everyone from Tocqueville on has observed. What it truly is is weird, in that its society doesn’t necessarily obey sensible or regular laws. Compare: anyone who has ever gone doorknocking for a political campaign in Australia will know that the spectrum of things that people believe is extraordinary, and well, well beyond the boundaries of what’s sensible or supportable by evidence, sometimes even what’s tolerable, but mostly there’s a lot of weird shit. If you start talking to people in unstructured conversations, you’re going to get very strange ideas bubbling up. People in Australian electorates are weirder than we think, maybe weirder than we can think. As odd as Australia can be, America is magnitudes stranger.

There’s a well-recognised and very old overlap between esotericism and the extreme Right, which, since the American extreme right is now simply the Right, is also now common. Donald Trump launched his official 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, the city that was the site of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege, a cause celebre of the 1990s paranoid right. For anyone with memory of the time that’s a brutally unsubtle statement, and an implied endorsement not only of the violent affect, but also of the conspiratoria that grew up around it (and that of Ruby Ridge), which, not coincidentally, came to fixate on the Clinton family. The American political Right has gone all-in in its approach to media of, in Steve Bannon’s words, ‘flooding the zone with shit’; meaning of course information that’s untrue or unfalsifiable, racist, misogynist, and hateful, but mostly tending toward some kind of occult or weird conspiracy. Since we now have so few common sources of media and so many unreliable social ones, it’s easy spread for the strange and the eerie. RFK believes in raw milk. Tucker Carlson believes in demons. Well, why not?

The Left also has a forgotten tradition of this weirdness. It’s not just in the occult features of anarchism, but also in the quasi-scientific scientific-socialisms of the twentieth century, that all seemed to develop into personality cults, in the mischief-centric Situationist movement of very serious bullshit, and the slapstick gags of the Yippies, Reichian sexual liberationism, New Religious Movements, funny-money fixations like MMT, and, I am sorry to say, variants of the same tedious anti-semitism that crop up whenever someone thinks too hard about capitalism without proper adult supervision. In the later twentieth century the centre-left moved away from all of this towards a sensible, official, liberalism of order, of Fukuyaman institutionalism, of—-and I spit at the words—-‘evidence based policy’. If the American election in 2024 is anything, it’s a popular vote against order and for chaos. For weirdness.

Things are going to be extraordinarily bad, for our American friends and for the world. They’re going to be violent and nasty. But they’re also going to be very, very weird.

BUILDING DESIGN SHARES A lot of similarity to the spread of memes on the internet. A successful configuration that resonates with people’s experience of the world, or to the experiences of some group of them, will reproduce itself in self-similar ways. Designs that become popular are that way because they respond to specific needs and desires, and carry symbolic meaning, not because they are intrinsically good. Surviving designs, like memes, don’t last because people like them, they survive because they’ve outlasted other worse ones.

In Australian inner cities there is a specific memetic house design that became popular in the 19th century and has stayed that way: terrace blocks of houses, each one with a short verandah, a front door to a side corridor, a front window to a room, with a flight of something less than a dozen stairs up to the entrance, and the kitchen set at the very back. They’re of one, two, and more rarely three storeys. Depending on topography and budget, style and taste and age, that’s a design meme that’s stamped out suburb across suburb, in variations so small, when you get to them, they just don’t matter.

That short flight of stairs does a few things really well. First of all, it keeps water from coming in when it rains, and blown debris from piling up around the door when it’s windy. Second, that height is an allowance for space underneath the house, to insulate: if you’ve ever lived in a house where the floor joists lie straight on the dirt, you know how cold and mouldy it is. Lastly, and most importantly, it’s height that gives privacy and light, so that someone in the front room can see easily onto the street, but someone on the street can’t easily see someone in bed in the front room, and that front gets more sunlight than the street does. It’s a very old, traditional form that has been desirable and meaningful for a long time; and the principle of raising a living-area floor to a higher level is ancient. They work.

Here’s the problem though: the terrace design-meme, while very humane and recognisable, is horribly inaccessible. In the picture above, the residents have added their own ramps for what’s most likely access for a stroller or pram, another memetic design solution you see people add everywhere, in every variation of designed ramps, planks, boards, every kind of improvised solution.

It’s extraordinarily hard to reconcile the design requirements to be private, to be dense, and to allow street-grade access, without changing some fundamental things about what makes the terrace design terrace-y. You could add a much larger front garden, or add a wall at the front. You could reconfigure the house simply not to have a front window, or have a front door extremely set back to a side, or front the street with a roller door garage. You could design the main access from a rear lane. All these things in fact have been done and are done, against huge resistance from neighbours and Council, since all of them alter the terrace form from what it is to something else. Eventually, in fact, what you do is invent the car-centric suburbs, and lose, in gaining functional accessibility, the communal benefits of terraces.

No wonder people just shove ramps in.

DEAR EDITORS,
“WHY IS Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.

Letters to the Editor: The Cheapo Stuff Wins (Nplusone)