Following on from yesterday's post, I came across this article by Joseph Heath which explains a lot. Populism has been a significant driver of revolutionary change throughout history (the collapse of classic Maya civilization, the French Revolution, the far-right and far-left in early 1930s Germany, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, MAGA, etc) yet I've never been able to get my head around it till I saw Professor Heath's analysis. So in case that's useful for you to carry into 2026, have a read.

'You should read some history, sonny boy. Read about the Black Shirts and the Gestapo and concentration camps.'

'That's not the same thing as Lisa Treadgold. Hitler was a fiend. Lisa's just a very beautiful woman with strong opinions. Do you mind her being so beautiful?' Timothy asked innocently.

These words made Fanny so angry she stopped the car. 'Listen, dumbo,' she said, glaring. 'I realize I'm no oil painting, and I'm not rich, and I'm not famous, and no one wants my autograph--'

'And you smoke too much,' Timothy said cheekily, trying to make her smile. Really, he was quite afraid of her at that moment. She looked fierce.

'And I smoke too much,' Fanny agreed. 'But there's one thing I'll tell you, and it's this. Learn to be frightened. When you see some magic-type person, a public person, hogging the media to talk about bringing back the birch and hanging, it's time to get a little nervous. Because the person who gets beaten or hanged might turn out to be someone you know. You with me so far?'

Timothy said, 'Okay so far.'

'But when that sort of person talks about action groups and banded together brotherhoods of citizens and vigilantes, get terrified. Because the person who gets dragged away in the middle of the night for a flogging might turn out to be you. Yes, you. Simply because you're a decent, normal, pleasant, dim human being. The sort of person who just happens to get in the way of the bully boys and bully girls. Do you understand, Timothy?'

Nicholas Fisk's novel You Remember Me! was originally published in 1986 but has been forgotten where other kids/YA fantasies, less uncompromising, have endured. Too bad. In it, a TV star founds a right-wing populist political movement with promises to make the country great again. A generation raised on stories like that might not be making the mistake of putting people like this in power -- because, once they have it, they intend to hold onto it, and to do so they will uncaringly wreck the democratic institutions and regulations that have taken generations to set up.

Narcissists and plutocrats served by a coterie of sycophants and compliant dopes insincerely pandering to the electorate's sense of inadequacy with crude slogans... it's a stuck record and you'd think people would be fed up to the back teeth of it, but it seems that politics, like entertainment, just consists of the same old clichés endlessly recycled.

I'm not delusional; I realize there's no going back to 'normality' now. Western democracy is in its end-of-the-republic phase, authoritarian regimes are thriving, and the world is cooking its own goose. Still, track down a copy of Mr Fisk's book if you can find one. Or at least listen to the hosts of the Backlisted podcast discuss it with author Sam Leith. Or watch Asif Kapadia's new movie 2073. Too grim? Hey, it's less disheartening than watching the news. 

More about Elon Musk tomorrow, I'm sorry to say.

By the time you read this we've had the US presidential election, the bellwether of the direction the West is taking -- whether towards liberal & humanist values or a retreat into conspiracy theories, insular nationalism, and turkeys voting for Christmas. Not that the losing side turned out to exactly be paragons of incorruptible and dutiful good governance. One day maybe we'll appoint somebody who's fit to hold the office. (Other countries are doing better, but the overall liberty trend is downwards.)

You may have wondered what would happen if all the world's borders were open -- that is, the EU model of freedom of movement applied globally. According to one analysis it would make the planet nearly $80 trillion richer. That's ten thousand dollars a head if distributed evenly, so not to be sneezed at. Read about it in The Economist here (you can register to get free access to the article, or look at the archive.ph snapshot without the graphs here).

An additional benefit is we could stop spending money on war. The total cost of Putin's invasion of Ukraine to date, including reconstruction of Ukraine's damaged infrastructure, is now more than four times the entire amount spent on the Apollo programme after adjusting for inflation -- and before factoring in the spin-off tech benefits of the Moon landings. It's often said we shouldn't waste money on AI, or particle research, or space exploration, or whatever, until we've sorted out problems here on Earth. Well, start with national boundaries and then we can go to Mars and do the other things and still have trillions of dollars left to save the whale.

It happens I think the cultural benefits of full freedom of movement would be even greater than the financial ones. Intolerance thrives when people live in a racial and social bubble. The more you meet people from other walks of life the more you appreciate that our real identity is human, not national or religious or ethnic. And people from different societies bring different ways of looking at a problem. There are so many win-wins from international cooperation.

A criticism is that having open borders would be radically disruptive. So it would. But look at the inequality we have now, the division, the frothing hatred. When things build up to that kind of pressure you get wars and revolutions in which people are killed in the thousands or millions just for who they are. With the growing climate crisis the situation will only get worse. Isn't it worth looking for a soft revolution in how we live that could avoid all the atrocity and that after a decade or two of upheaval would yield a richer world for all?

It won't happen, of course. More likely the 21st century will go along the same lines as the 20th only with even more monstrous tech to fuel it all. There are plenty of dark clouds and few silver linings right at the moment. But don't let future generations say we never even tried. We only get a good future if we strive to bring it about. Here's Konstantin Kisin on that very point:

It's been seven years since the United Kingdom narrowly voted to leave the European Union, of which it had been a leading member since 1973. This is usually nowadays referred to as Britain's Brexity McBrexitface moment.

What happened next? Those who subscribe to the idea that stories emerge as a series of dominoes falling in a cascade of events will have been interested and sometimes surprised - but not very surprised. It was obvious that Britain's ruling party would drift ever rightwards, colonizing the appeal-to-worst-natures territory staked out by the crackpot "UK Independence Party". Also obvious was that in trying to implement a bad idea with no plan, the Conservatives would suffer continual upheavals, internecine struggles, and desperate intrigues culminating in the blackly comical farce of a government led Boris Johnson followed by the utter madness of Liz Truss's ideological cloud-cuckoo land. As Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC puts it in an in-depth retrospective analysis:

"Her spectacular crash and burn was the logical end point, perhaps, of six years of chaos when the Conservatives so often turned in on themselves - and turned on each other."

Nobody likes a smart aleck, so I won't say told you so, but a lot of that crazed political backstabbing is right there in Can You Brexit (Without Breaking Britain)? There's also the opportunity to see if a better solution might have been found -- probably, indeed, the kind of solution Britain will now stagger towards over the next decade via a series of patches and ad hoc agreements that leave it only slightly worse off than if the whole sorry nonsense had never happened. 

Brexit didn't have to be bungled. It would have been perfectly legitimate to interpret the referendum result as an endorsement of the kind of "soft" Brexit that had been peddled to the electorate by Brexit advocates like Michael Gove, who during the referendum campaign proposed an EEA model such as Norway and Iceland enjoy that would have kept Britain in the Single Market. Instead the ERG cadre of self-proclaimed "Spartans" warped the ruling party, making dedication to their extreme version of Brexit a test of ideological purity. And that's why the party ended up in the hands of a succession of incompetents, malcontents, chancers, nutcases and idiots until finally lurching back towards its current attempt to look like grown-up government.

Given that other once-serious governments might shortly be jumping into the moronic inferno of populism, gamers from all around the world might want to take a look at this book to see if there are lessons to be learned. See if you can navigate the storms of political infighting to deliver a solution to Brexit that actually works in the interests of the people of Britain rather than the string of ex-Prime Ministers now collecting a few hundred grand each time they get up and give an after-dinner speech. It's possible, but it takes a more responsible hand on the rudder than any of the UK's leading politicians were willing to apply.

• Amazon US or Barnes & Noble
• Amazon UK or Blackwell's
• Canadian edition here.