Richard Seymour

They've never left Oxbridge, genuinely.

This is the, this is the mentality that is generated by a particular class of politician that goes from Eaton to a PPE degree in Oxford to being a civil servant or a special advisor and then given a safe seat, like Richmond, the Richard Seymour.

So, so this would also suggest that all of the people within these departments are not expected to actually be meaningfully challenged or just, you know, told what to do.

This is your job, so therefore you do it.

And so this is kind of based on the sense that, you know, at the moment, the populist right have not only co-opted a lot of people who feel, you know, hugely badly treated by the kind of neoliberal project, the Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton, Blair project as it's spilled out, But, you know, the populist right has also kind of managed to, you know, formulate a sense of community, particularly amongst, you know, white people, downwardly mobile white people, and explain their kind of downward mobility and their economic stresses by offering them this kind of solidarity, exclusive solidarity with each other.

But Richard Seymour, the critical theorist, also observes that there's also a kind of a joyousness to the current project of the populist right in that, you know, it ranges from transgressing and trolling kind of liberal sensibilities to a kind of sadomasochistic politics of taking pleasure in other people's suffering.

And so there's something kind of going on there that's more than just about grievance.

There's a kind of a project and there's a kind of celebration of a kind of particular kind of world making, exclusive kind of world making, which, you know, is obviously, I think, really problematic and really dangerous.