Free market capitalism – mass production for the benefit of the masses; entrepreneurs set loose to bring their intellectual power to bear in the service of the most urgent of the as yet unmet needs of the largest number of people; creation unleashed; the just use of naturally/lawfully acquired resources.

What does such a system produce?

It’s actually a bad question, tantamount to asking what kinds of stories result from giving a man a pen and paper: it depends who does the producing and who does the demanding. Capitalism produces whatever people demand.

This seems more satisfying than it actually is, because think about it for a second: the well-mannered, intellectually curious people of 1900, who recognised plenty of ‘high culture’ references and aspired to be more like their betters, somehow demanded, in tiny incremental steps, a world in which getting smashed in front of “The X Factor” before seeing what can be found on Tinder constitutes a good night in, and a party of fifty-somethings singing the birthday song in a posh restaurant eating hamburger with a ‘side order’ of fries and onion rings exemplifies a good night out?

Of course not, say the libertarians: the government intervened! When the government imposed a minimum age requirement on alcohol, of course it made everyone get tattoos and stagger around puking in the gutter; of course when the government instituted the state pension, it made people stop reading books!

There may even be a grain of truth to some version of that way of thinking, but can it really explain the lurch from working-class amateur symphony orchestras in every Yorkshire town to choirs singing Abba songs in élite grammar schools? Does it really account for the transformation of elegant prose hand-written letters to a loved one into “c u l8r m8 do u want food bring in” texts? It’s hard to really see how. We live in a world saturated with brain-enhancing content free at the point of use: if libraries were available in the past, they’re available a million times over today – want to read the entire poetic works of Michael Drayton, you don’t even have to set foot outside your front door – stay, stay sweet time!

So if not the government, am I saying that capitalism has somehow produced these effects? How on Earth could capitalism do that? Capitalism is just the voluntary trade between consenting people – there’s no harm in that surely. It produces whatever people demand, and this is a neutrally valenced concept: bad people demand bad things, stupid people demand stupid things and civilised people demand civilised things.

Hmmm, it just doesn’t smell right does it?

I must direct the reader’s attention to a hidden assumption at the heart of capitalism: the equality of all men. Literally “all men were created equal”.

Imagine two worlds:

In the first, everyone has the same capacities at birth, and natural rights, including property rights, are non-negotiable, 100% protected by the law of the land. (I won’t insist that you imagine this place as being the land of the American Revolution as conceived by the founders, but that’s how I’m imagining it.)

In the second, people vary wildly: some are so inept they can barely look after themselves – all their decisions are horrifically misguided; some are brilliant and tend to produce everything that’s truly remarkable, while the vast masses of the population fall inbetween: a quarter are very dumb but not clinically retarded, while another quarter are adequately competent, can look after themselves quite well but rarely have an original thought or comprehend anything on a level beyond the immediate and superficial. Here too, everyone’s natural rights, including property rights, are non-negotiable, 100% protected by the law of the land. (I won’t insist that you imagine this place as being the land of Real Existing America but that’s how I’m imagining it – the America of the Revolution but as it actually was, not as it was held to be by the founders. No “all men created equal” here. The reader is of course at liberty to declare either – or both – of these fictional worlds ‘Marxist’ if they so desire.)

What happens to the culture in each of these worlds? In the first, nothing much happens at all – the culture is what it is: if they’re highly refined people with calm, attractive tastes then that’s how it stays – only with ever-increasing amounts of productivity and wealth. If they’re a bit rough round the edges, that’s how it stays – hard working, hard drinking, perhaps hard shagging, but with ever-increasing amounts of productivity and wealth.

In the second, the most talented are tasked with running everything, but here’s the catch: they have to run it on behalf of the demands of the largest number of people – those between IQ 85 and 115, which is half the population. They must also serve their peers and the clinically retarded, in roughly equal measure: ok perhaps not entirely equal – their peers will likely have more wherewithal, and motivation, to purchase goods and services, but numerically, and assuming a good or service can only be consumed once (say a book, a concert, a meal) they’re broadly equal categories. So 25% in the service of their most talented peers and 75% in the service of the rest, Pareto’s 80% herd. What happens to the culture? It approximates the herd.

OK this is no biggie: it’s a small change for the worse but it certainly couldn’t account for a shift from Caravaggio and Palestrina to Damien Hirst and Cornelius Cardew! (Edit: more like posters of dragons and elves, and Billie Eilish.)

What if reproduction depends, at least in part, in fitting in with the culture of a society? Not the most unreasonable claim: in a world in which everyone can write and add up, if you can’t you just look really dumb; in a world in which no-one can, it looks as if you’re trying to prove something, to buy tickets on yourself. So every generation is a slow iteration of selection-for-the-Pareto-herd. Oops.

As the perceived value of the most talented declines, the overall standards of society match them – and the free market is obliged to reflect that in the goods and services (the culture) it produces. Double oops.

If I’m right, it’s not that there’s something about capitalism that favours crass, stupid things over refinement and good taste; it’s that refinement and good taste are, and always will be, élite characteristics. The difference between a free market society respecting property rights – mass production for the benefit of the masses – and a hierarchical, autocratic society of deference and place-knowing, is that in the latter the tastes of the élite are projected onto the whole of society, which proceeds to try – imperfectly – to imitate and emulate them.

There will always be poor, stupid, drunken, incompetent people and this is not the end of the world. There will always be legitimate and valuable roles for poor, stupid, drunken and incompetent people and in a healthy society, in my personal opinion, those people are deserving of a good deal of dignity and material comfort and should not be in any wise mistreated by those who legitimately have more privileged characteristics or are descended from those who did.

The problem with the free market capitalist dream is that it inadvertently elevates those people to the position of culture-shapers!

In vision one above – the American Revolution complete with human equality – this feature is completely absent so there’s nothing to worry about, which is why libertarian theorists never feel any need to address it.

In vision two above – the American Revolution complete with human reality – the most urgent of the as yet unmet needs of the largest number of people will always tend to drag down the standards held in common by society, by sheer force of numbers. A small part of the proverbial bell curve is responsible for providing, but demand comes from the entire bell curve, only a small part of which has any taste or refinement at all.

It takes a long time, but in the end it’s entirely possible – inevitable actually – to transition from the world of the Medicis to the world of the Bushes, the Trumps and the Kardashians. Mass production by the talented élite in the service of the wants and tastes of their inferior peers: not a neutral cultural recipe but a disastrous one.

Ayn Rand sold herself out. She managed to convince herself that since America was not the Soviet Union, she must therefore be a capitalist. As she ran out of ideas for novels, she turned more and more to ‘philosophy’ – specifically the philosophy that nothing matters but the individual will: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

I would however strongly recommend that anyone who’s only read snippets, or perhaps “Atlas Shrugged” alone, has a look at “The Fountainhead”. The synopsis is well-known: an architect makes a name for himself as an uncompromising autiste and secures a series of impressive private contracts before hitting the jackpot: a government job!

His enemy the evil left-wing journalist (as bad in her day as in Metternich’s, or ours) sabotages the project and uglifies the entire design, so the hero demolishes it with TNT lol

But here’s the thing: if Howard Roark had been a capitalist, he would simply have done whatever the paying customer wanted; who needs culture when you can serve the most urgent of the as yet unmet needs of the largest number of people!

No, Roark was no capitalist: he was an intellectual, an élitist, a snob. He knew a thing or two about aesthetics and he knew a thing or two about will, and that was what defined him: artistic integrity flying in the face of popular consumer consensus.

Does he take it too far? Does he fall prey to his individualism?

Perhaps, but then a fish out of water is always going to choke. In better times, he would have been at worst a Bach or a Beethoven in his obnoxium and at best a Haydn or Schubert. (I mean best and worst in terms of personality, not of output necessarily.)

One of the most tragic aspects of leaden ages is that golden men are transformed into selfish egomaniacs before going extinct. (Who would the modern Bach be? Henze? Tippett? How about someone living? How about not.)

From the very beginning, many people predicted that supermarkets (Walmart etc) would be the death of the corner shop (the ‘Mom and Pop Shop’): first they’d use economies of scale to undercut, then they’re wait it out and when the competition had been ‘price gouged’ and ‘loss leadered’ into oblivion, boom! Up the prices go.

It never happened. From the 50s to the 60s, virtually no change. On to the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, still no change: corner shops doing just fine, supermarkets also doing fine – niches emerging: cheap bulk stuff from the supermarket, perishables and small quantities from the corner shop, propped up by government functions and off licence/tobacco stuff.

Then something changed……. suddenly in the mid-2010s the corner shops began to close – around a third of them simply vanished but with the others something even weirder happened: they all became part of a small number of chains… and these chains almost always had links to the supermarkets.

How on Earth did they do it? It’s not as if the supermarkets suddenly slashed their prices further in 2012: quite the contrary – things pushed on as normal but if any market shares were changing it was normal supermarkets vs discount supermarkets (which is a complicated topic that I may revisit), so whatever had happened it most certainly was not ‘price gouging’.

No, what happened was that the supermarkets realised that regulation had been their friend all along. Any time a safety feature became mandatory, it was easier for them to implement than it was for the corner shops.

It’s possible that they cottoned on to this after the fact, but the readiness of the supermarkets to sweep up the corner shops makes this seem (to me anyway) unlikely.

No, what happened was the entire industry was hit by one regulation after another: age verification for anyone who looked under 25 while trying to buy something limited to 18 and over; steel shutters to hide tobacco products; mandatory workplace pensions; a new ‘living wage’ (this is the UK I’m writing about but I wouldn’t be surprised if similar things had happened across the west in the same time period) for the over-25s (coincidentally the same age as the new more paranoid verification for alcohol/tobacco), and so on, and on.

The sheer cost of putting up steel shutters AND paying your part-time workers an additional 5-10% over a few years was just too much for the corner shops – but not the supermarkets – to bear.

This is not a libertarian article. I am not saying that the silly government killed the goose that laid the golden egg. I am definitely not saying that well-meaning special snowflakes made life unbearable for normal people and hard-working people lost their businesses as a result.

I’m saying that corporate capitalism conspired with the cynical shills they fund to pass laws nobody believed in to address problems nobody wanted to solve (eg. lung cancer or teenage alcoholism) in a blatant power grab carefully designed to destroy an enemy they’d wanted gone for half a century. I’m saying that the potent alliance of large-scale companies with enough money to focus on ideology and raw power, and politicians disconnected from any sense of nationhood, of responsibility, or of pride in their position: is enough to plan the economy for the benefit of a shrinking élite that gets richer every year.

It’s not that capitalism rules the world: they’d failed for half a century to destroy even tiny little subsistence-level family businesses. It’s that capitalism has become, in our time, a potent member of a vicious anti-human coalition that includes the worst kinds of communists, anarchists, anti-civilisational nihilists, wilful degenerates and outright Satanists.

It’s World War Two all over again: nationalism and loyalty to actual people on the one hand, and on the other an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists determined to level the world in the name of the rights of the individual.

We live in a society in which gambling is so mainstream that a man can walk into a high street shop with his wages in his hand and go home with nothing for his children to eat for the month and nobody does anything to interfere.

The most the state will ever do is to place restrictions on particular machines with regard to how rapidly they can take someone’s money, or to insist on nannying initiatives to wag fingers at customers while doing everything they ask.

What we need, in my humble opinion, is a wide swathe of swinging bans. Anything that can be shown to be producing degenerate – that is to say socially harmful, destructive, ugly and anti-civilisational – effects should simply be closed down completely: no recommendations, no appeals, no regulations, just a simple order to cease and desist all business activity.

Not just gambling dens, prostitution rings, abortion clinics, pornography, smut, envy-driven economic resentment, anti-white blood libels, drinking establishments that regularly produce violent disorderly conduct, and things like that, but also the things that impoverish low agency subjects: expensive junk food chain restaurants, ‘experiences’, foreign recreational travel, video games; and also the things that harm our environment: again air travel, but also private swimming pools – the most antisocial concept imaginable, outdoor lighting/heating, fireworks (these are also unsafe – you get the picture); the list could go on for a very long time.

Add to this list broad categories of activity which are inherently antisocial such as almost all night work, almost all overtime, almost all replacement of perfectly working things (flooring, kitchens, etc.).

This is a vision of a society without much work to do. Isn’t that a good thing? We seem to have a nasty habit of making complications for ourselves that do us harm. How about a strong leader, a Great Man, stop us from doing that, so that our human nature instincts instead lead us to create complications for ourselves that produce greatness: a new age of literature, music, sculpture, dance, cookery, art and sporting achievement.

The trouble, I’m always told, with laws of prohibition, is that they backfire: prohibit alcohol, you get the Mob; prohibit prostitution, you get rape.

Laws aren’t perfect. There’s a prohibition on murder already – and rape. These crimes still happen. Should we repeal the laws?

The real problem with the prohibition of alcohol was that nobody wanted it. I think in the case of marijuana, with a little bit of cultural engineering in the form of strict censorship of the media, things could be different. (And heck why not revisit alcohol in the future if needs be: ironically in 2019 the argument for alcohol prohibition is far stronger than it ever was in the 1920s.)

Since nobody wanted the prohibition of alcohol (and the culture hadn’t been properly prepared to demand it), nobody enforced it. This is actually a weak conclusion. They could have been made to enforce it. (It’s funny how much can be solved by a strong, powerful state ready to commit violent repressive acts if not obeyed to the letter of the law, no appeals process granted.)

But what about people’s human rights? Isn’t it an inviolable principle of human existence that we own our bodies and can use them how we see fit? Isn’t it our own business and nobody else’s whether we gamble away our wages, save nothing but blow a day’s labour on one toxic meal, or take our meagre temporary savings overseas to consume with foreigners?

Only if you’re a liberal! Only if you think it’s self-evident (how else could anyone justify such claims!) that all men were created equal!

Once you realise that we’re fallen beings, that we’re all in this together, that what we do affects our neighbour, and that we owe it to our neighbour to be better than we are, it all makes sense: the best, the fittest, the brightest, move to the top of society and then ensure that those whose natural tendency is to move to the bottom of society are lifted up as best as can be – not economically with rights but no obligations, but on the contrary by having the burden of decision-making alleviated to the maximum. Responsibilities are earned and cherished: it’s a great thing to be a free man but it’s not for every man.

My favourite conservative canard is that if only government could be made to run like a business, everything would be so much better: a bit of private sector discipline would do away with their notorious incompetence and their frustrating tendency to waste resources handed to them.

It sounds so plausible: we see government bureaucracies mired in scandal after scandal, endlessly making mistakes and squandering public money – socialism’s great til you run out of other people’s money, and all that.

In my libertarian days, I had a critique of this pro-business mindset. My gripe was that what gets called privatisation is nothing of the sort: if it’s still funded through taxation then it doesn’t matter whether the name badge says “department of” or “plc” – the link’s still broken between getting paid and pleasing the consumer. If you’re Acme Inc running the Department of Motor Vehicles, you’ve still got no incentive to provide value or even to efficiently manage the resources you’re given, because your ‘customers’ are obliged to trade with you no matter what. Not only are you a monopoly but you’re a coercive monopoly so they can’t ‘vote with their feet’. The solution is not to have private firms do the work – ultimately almost all of the work of government is done by private firms in any case: they use private computers, private pens, private paperclips, private chairs and private ceiling tiles (libertarians tend not to over-think this, or they’d notice that private firms aren’t so pure either, using as they do public infrastructure, the wages of public servants, the freedom of those kept through taxes, etc. etc.) – rather the solution is to fully privatise the service, have people pay for it themselves, either as they go, or on an agreed plan, or through various types of insurance. Once that link’s re-established, even if there’s no competition (another conservative canard, that competition changes anything: it doesn’t) the consumers will be able to divert resources away from the poorly performing institution towards some other use, thereby shaping its behaviour in prosocial directions.

What absolute garbage! Sure it might work, though there are certainly no guarantees – plenty of ‘inexplicably’ rubbish private companies exist. The deeper problem though is that even this libertarian solution still swallows whole the conservative canard that government bureaucracies are wasteful and inefficient: far from it! Their task is to maximise revenue, just like any other business. The goal of their staff is no different to the goals of private sector staff: to be promoted and to be paid as much as possible for as little as possible while deriving personal satisfaction from their work. Government workers are massively overpaid, underworked, self-indulgent, egotistical and lazy. They’re very good at getting things right first time that get them paid, but strangely indifferent to their performance when doing poorly means they get paid and re-paid over and over.

It’s not a mystery – they’re maximising their efficiency at getting paid, not their efficiency at irrelevant stuff that doesn’t get them paid! Sure, having key performance targets does tend to point them vaguely in the direction of public service but there are always good, defensible ways to ‘prove’ that they’re doing everything they can to please the public when coincidentally it still looks just like bloat and waste and self-serving greed. The fact it’s so justifiable, so resistant to the endless ‘investigations’ and ‘reforms’, and so absolutely robust in the face of attempts to change it, is just proof of how efficient it really is!

Like I said, full privatisation – as opposed to tax-funded out-sourcing – might make things work differently: but the problem with that is that it disadvantages the end-users. It either undermines the progressive nature of the provision (everyone pays the same, instead of more highly taxed people paying for everything and untaxed people paying for nothing), in which case a minority gains and a majority loses (I’m putting that as neutrally as possible, libertarians!) or else it makes it actually insecure and unguaranteed for many people. (Another problem with free-floating prices is that they adjust! If large numbers of people simply stopped buying say access to clean water, then the prices of the other things they’d begin spending their money on would adjust to absorb it all, leaving many people out of luck if they change their mind about their need for access to clean water. Whoops! Happened with the family wage – women enter the labour market, household income doubles, prices adjust, and here we are.)

An alternative solution, tried and tested throughout history, is for the people who ostensibly rule the nation (and any public functions it performs) to actually rule it: to lay down the law with an iron fist – your goal is no longer to maximise your own gains but rather to serve me or suffer the consequences.

In a sense this is what happens in the private sector ‘labour market’: please me or I fire you. At the level of investors and managers, the public and private sectors behave very differently, but at the level of individual employees, they’re identical: please your manager or get fired.

It really is as simple as that: if government bureaucrats were terrified of their masters, and if their masters were terrified of the nation itself (in the form of an autocratic ruler or even of a direct democracy ‘mass of the people’) and, crucially, the nation itself was working in the interests of the people who constitute it, then the problem would simply disappear in the form of incompetent lazy selfish greedy people leaving the building in disgrace.

It’s not an economic problem: it’s an authority problem. We’re too liberal. We need to be fundamentally and foundationally illiberal.

The death of the nation-state has always been baked into the free market cake.

It’s not necessarily obvious because people on the right are often patriotic in their attitudes, but its inevitability becomes obvious on closer inspection. Let’s take a few examples of decent defences of capitalism.

1. Any resources flowing to the owners of capital will need to be put to work, because there’s only so much consumption a person can do. If Harry saves his money, it ultimately puts machines in factories (or something equally useful) which benefits the whole of society, whether it’s lower prices for the greater quantity of goods produced, or higher wages arising from the greater productivity of the workers using the new machines. Far from being an anti-social effect, resources held by rich capitalists are the most prosocial form of resource allocation: it’s consumption that’s selfish and ultimately destructive – even distortive of the economy.

Unpacking this a little, the claim is that since the capitalist cannot possibly consume a million dollars a year himself, once he’s supported his staff, his family and his luxurious lifestyle, he’s guaranteed to have some left over, and if he wants to stay rich he’d better invest it. Any kind of investment imaginable involves his funding, directly or indirectly, the productive efforts of others, and insofar as his investments are wise, the mutual benefit of trade is the result, thereby increasing the happiness of the world.

I’m trying to give capitalism as much support as I can muster. I predict that austere Austrian economists might insist that they (and by extension libertarians and capitalists) aren’t really claiming that global happiness increased: there’s no way of measuring utility. They’ll instead insist on the more moderate claim that the most urgent of the as yet unmet needs of the largest number of people are met. This amounts to the same thing but it’s worth adding the nuance in case it turns into a dead end later.

An intensification of the argument from happiness/utility would be that even in cases where the investments turned out to be unwise, human knowledge would have still increased, existing practices would be re-affirmed and the (ordinal, if needs be) utility of the consumption funded by the investment was of a superior kind (higher priority in the ordinal ranking of wants) for the recipients than that of the investor had he just kept the money.

Here’s the snag: this Utopian vision has no place for the nation-state. At no point did I assert that the capitalist in my town would invest in my town. For the small businessman, he might, but the small businessman exists in all types of social order, from hard-nosed communism (in the form of a functionary, but in practice doing the same thing for the same reasons, broadly speaking) to feudal monarchy. For the investor (and small businessmen will probably also be investors, at least some of the time), there’s nothing to say he will invest locally and in fact it’s highly unlikely that he will. Let’s be honest, under capitalism even if you have a stake in a private pension scheme, chances are their ‘play it safe’ portfolio will include FAANG stocks, US treasuries and probably the biggest long-standing machine makers in Italy or zip fastener firms in Japan. You might live in Greece but chances are you’ll own ARM Holdings or Lloyds.

Taken to its logical conclusion, what this means is that the wherewithal to command goods and services flows out of ‘somewhere’ and into ‘anywhere’ any time resources are held by a capitalist beyond that which he can himself use in his own business or directly consume. That may be a fine thing if you happen to be connected to ascendant firms in prosperous and strengthening countries, but what if you’re in a pariah country like Hungary? It could well be that a side-effect of owning capital, even in a tiny form like a private pension, is that resources flow away from your compatriots just when they’re needed, and into the hands of those who seek to twist your collective arm.

This is not nothing, and even if the ‘problem’ is just economic – say a downturn in established industries – the free flow of capital without consideration of borders will usually make things worse: your local steel industry, say, may be less ‘efficient’ than its British counterpart (I chose not to use China because it’s such a loaded example – my examples here are not intended to work on account of their reflection or not of reality) so at just the time that jobs are already under threat, capital flows away from those businesses, raising their costs and reducing their reach. Worse, as capital leaves the country, the deflationary effect on prices will exacerbate the pain of debt, making temporary and prudent borrowing an option that’s just not on the table. Far from being a ‘smoothing’ influence, the markets actually exaggerate prevailing trends, and these trends may very well take the form of ruined human lives.

The problem here is that local governments, and for that matter local well-wishers in industry and society at large, are utterly impotent to resist these destructive waves of capital outflow on the one hand and decline in productive activity on the other. The only way to escape the punishment of comparative productivity is to homogenise and hedge. Thus, just as the nation-state feels weak, its nature is actually diluted and it becomes weak.

2. The division of labour occurs at the level of nations as well as at the level of individuals. Once a country, like Germany, builds a tradition of fine chemistry, or like Egypt fine textiles, the strength that comes from that tradition helps them maintain a comparative advantage, keeping the industry localised. Support fields spring up that tend to support the main industry and insofar as foreign interests have the intention of out-competing the vested interest, they’ll find it just as easy to support it as to compete directly on a like-for-like basis (the famous “Apple uses glass screens made for Android phones” or whatever it is).

This even sounds ancient. It’s completely obvious that in 2019, the ability of global corporations (the clue’s in the name) to relocate entire work teams, build factories from scratch and literally ship finished machines across borders is extremely high. So long as there’s basic reliable electricity and road infrastructure, they’re good to go, and even these are potentially negotiable so long as the savings made from paying lower wages offset them. It’s a total no-brainer: of course once the technology and capital’s there to move industry to cheaper locales, the incentive’s already there, and if people have become accustomed to seeing themselves as denizens of the world rather than of a particular place (by for example receiving approval for travelling widely) then it’s not difficult to persuade them to come and live somewhere exotic for a year or two while the new facility’s set up. Worse, as industrial habits become fragmented by this very process, it accelerates because in the absence of those habits, there’s no natural opposition to the idea of moving the facility: there’s no visceral rebellion to the idea of taking the jobs of the industrial workers if you yourself are an intellectual adviser – on the contrary you’ll be flattered that entire other countries want your advice and you’ll feel like you’re doing a service to workers far poorer than any you’ve ever met.

3. Investors see the firms they own, especially foreign-based ones, in a highly abstract way. This prevents local chauvinism from holding back innovation by drawing from the broadest possible knowledge-base.

Yes. It also means they’ll be naturally drawn to all forms of efficiency, including the efficiency that comes from standardising and homogenising across locales: if my McDonald’s shares are going to do well, the local outlets had better stick to what we know works. Sure there may need to be some experimentation and local variation, but the core mechanisms, procedures and guiding principles are most efficient when they remain the same.

Once a large portion of a nation’s industry operates in this way, there’s no longer so much to differentiate the culture of that nation from the culture of any other nation where the same corporations operate. This in turn means that resistance to transfers of influence or the imposition of standardised ways of living between one place and another is greatly diluted: on what grounds can I complain that the French are bringing their silly ways here if in fact three quarters of my culture is indistinguishable from theirs to start with?

Left-liberals may see this as a desirable state of affairs, according to taste, but most right-wingers with a patriotic bent ought to find it at least somewhat problematic.

As time goes by, all of these factors will continue to grind on, until any attachment to the former state of the nation will be seen increasingly as quaint and old-fashioned. At that point, there really are no defences left, and note that explicit and candid multiculturalism, open borders philosophy and xenophilia is in no wise requisite for the production of this outcome. It’s an inevitable outcome flowing inexorably from the structure of market capitalism itself.

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