The West's circular firing squad - or is it a daisy chain?

The broader pattern is this. The populist insurgency,  Farage, Hanson, Trump  is not a fake rebellion or an impostor movement. It is thirty years of accumulated frustration with a political and business class that has, through omission, ideology, or simple incompetence, presided over the managed decline of Western civilisation. The people driving that insurgency are frequently rough around the edges, occasionally wrong, and reliably impolite. They are also, on the big questions, more often right than the people scrutinising them.

The choice before the right's commentariat is not complicated. You can continue the tradition of the circular firing squad, demanding from your own insurgents a standard of intellectual courtesy you never required from the establishment that created the mess. Or you can do what the left does without apparent self-consciousness: pick a side, hold it, and pursue it with the relentlessness the moment requires.

The Enlightenment, someone once noted, was supposed to be a one-way door. It turns out it has a revolving function. The people best placed to hold it open are too busy linking up the daisy chain.