(Image: Private Media)

“Ride the tiger,” the esoteric right-wing philosopher Julius Evola advised his followers. The tiger in this case is both the surging modernity that threatens to annihilate a traditional worldview, but also the dark forces one conjures up to contest them.

There’s only one thing that happens, tiger-wise, should you slip off. It would appear to be happening to the right, across the Anglosphere at the moment, but in a manner distinctive to each polity.

In Australia, the official centre-right is coming apart before our eyes, aided by our distinctive political system, from both sides; in the United States, the tiger is roaring from the hard right; in the UK, a genuine decadence has set in. There is common cause beneath the three manifestations, but they are each taking on their distinctive cultural character.

To the British first, because it’s the most fun in a dark sort of way. You couldn’t make it up, as the tabloids say there, with UK PM Boris Johnson facing so many crises and leaks that they are starting to occlude each other. Johnson is facing the outbreak of the Omicron variant in the UK, with the knowledge that his credibility on COVID has long since been shredded after it was leaked, months ago, that he had said he was willing to see “the bodies pile up” rather than extend a new lockdown.

He had to anyway, and the remark was leaked around the time his sacked Rasputin Dominic Cummings began dishing the dirt on No. 10. The attempt to avoid lockdown had been an expression of his Manchester liberalism, a distinct British freedom-loving response to the disease, etc, which nevertheless yielded to the brute facts of epidemiology (also a British invention).

With the trio of a lockdown, a cancelled 2020 Christmas and bodies in piles, Johnson’s hapless bluster act — appealing to that British preference for amateurism, where professionalism is required — started to come apart. But this was just a prelude to Partygate, the scandal in which No. 10 staff were caught on camera in a practice press conference, joking about how they would spin against leaks about a 2020 Christmas party.

“It was just a business meeting,” No. 10 press flak Allegra Stratton is shown saying from the briefing lectern, to guffaws. Then: “Come on… This is being recorded.” More guffaws. At the time it was being recorded, 500 Brits a day were dying, and several newspapers have op-eds from people whose aged parent died on the day the alleged party took place. Heads rolled, most visibly that of Stratton — who sounds like she got the job by knowing someone named Tristan at Cambridge, despite being a distinguished correspondent, which you become by knowing someone named Tristan at Cambridge — giving a teary doorstop resignation, as BoJo gave the Commons a grovelling non-apology.

Labour leader Keir Starmer, a former prosecutor, hammered home the message of the Queen mourning Prince Philip in isolation while the Tories partied. The scandal has allowed Starmer to reposition Labour as the party of patriotism and the nation, while the Tories look like the gang from the Beano.

Amazingly, Partygate swept over another scandal, involving several leaks about the UK’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan — disastrous and actively negligent, as it turns out. Worst and most bizarre (and typical) of all — if that be possible — are suggestions that UK staff helped wacky former soldier and dog botherer Paul “Pen” Farthing evacuate a shelter full of Afghan street dogs in a military transport. This has been a scandal for months — now it is suggested Boris ordered official assistance after animal charities got in the ear of his young wife, Carrie, who is, inevitably, a known animal enthusiast.

The British passion for animals, and their animality towards humans, is well-established, but even so this has twinned with Partygate to paint a picture of real decadence, a real cakes-n-ponies ruling elite with an active hatred for the public whose bodies pile up.

It is of course a product of Brexit, which offered a fantasy future presided over by Johnson, a posh but one of the lads, showing the speccie technocrats that it wasn’t that difficult. This has essentially caved in on itself now. If the Tories can run to a full term, it may not be with Boris at the helm — despite the fact that they really have no one else.

In Australia, the tiger has taken a bite out of ScoMo’s leg, with the simultaneous fraying towards the right by the well-named Senator Alex Antic and co, the defection of Craig Kelly, the spoiler money of Clive Palmer’s UAP, and the final self-immolation of George Christensen (quite a task — he would burn for days like a tyre fire, but less appealing). For years, the Coalition has been playing to these extreme elements, secure in the knowledge that the preference system brings it back to the big party in the end, and that, in the last analysis, economics trumps culture. 

Now it no longer does, and that shift has sneaked up on the Australian right. For a quarter-century, from John Howard’s turn towards “political correctness” (man, memories: grunge, happy pants and PC), they have played this, and now it is finally getting up and walking around. The right’s disorganised flare-up is a response to an organised break-off at the centre, with the rise of the “Voices of” movement in dozens of electorates — a durable, rational recombination of centrist and community politics, with centre-right elements in some regions.

Paradoxically, it’s been ScoMo and Barnaby Joyce’s inability to hold off these challenges to the centre-right monolith that has prompted harder-right breakaways. Morrison has more political skills than he is given credit for, but the paradoxical nature of the preference system — it prevents breakaways, until a point where it actively encourages them — may turn a nip into a devouring.

It’s in the US where the tiger’s mouth yawns wide, as the Trump-inspired wing of the Republican Party devours what was once a party of government. Now it’s a party of pure power, its positions in key states flooded by Trumpers driving out remnant “civic” Republicans, putting themselves into key roles to refuse to certify election results they don’t like in 2024 — or 2022 for that matter.

Trump is still their figurehead, but that movement has gone far beyond him, with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert fomenting a movement to frame the Democrats as “communists”, publish fantasy animations of left-wing congresspersons being murdered and, now, do Christmas photos with the whole family loaded up with guns — after a school shooting.

This is a cult that has always been there — but with the passing of the Reagan formula of social conservatism and economic neoliberalism, the Republican “centre” has no means to resist its internal spread. The Republicans, as a party, have shrunk more than any in the Anglosphere — from being a quasi state-apparatus, they have become a fanatic rump as the Democrats have expanded and diversified. Yet the US system gives them parity, big-upping GOP fanaticism by the state-authorised two-party system.

This may well give the Democrats a 2024 victory, that they can then not get legitimated, plunging the US into chaos. This is the king tiger in the parade, as we trail behind. None of these forces can offer stable government, and they may well be serving as a finale to an era, which in turn serves as prelude to a period of boring technocracy. But what a roar there will be first!