Harm's Way

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

The Politics and Culture of Decline

by Theodore Dalrymple

Ivan R. Dee, 246 pp., $26

The British sociologist Frank Furedi has hailed the victory of Barack Obama last November as meaning "the disintegration of silent-majority populism" in America. In other words, Richard Nixon's "silent majority" is now not only a minority but more silent than ever.

I have my doubts about the truth of this diagnosis of American politics, but it is much more true of Britain since the watershed victory of New Labour in the 1997 election--with what results you may discover in the writings of Theodore Dalrymple. That is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a recently retired prison doctor who, for more than 30 years, has spoken up for the ever more silent minority of Britons opposed to the liberal-progressive and multicultural consensus--and is one of the few such voices still able to make itself heard as he warns of a moral and social breakdown in Britain that the rest of the media and the government collude in hiding from general view.

His new book, when compared with such hard-hitting earlier works as Life at the Bottom and Our Culture, What's Left of It is a more relaxed and reflective collection of essays on literature, history, and culture as well as politics--a demonstration of his considerable range of reference as well as a polemic. He is also a sort of anthologist, like all the best essayists and men of letters, with a wide store of reading to draw on. This book includes essays on Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Ibsen, Arthur Koestler, J. G. Ballard, and Anthony Burgess, but he often applies his literary insights to the social problems that are always intersecting with the cultural ones, just as they do in real life.