Addressing a gathering of European nationalists on 9 June, France’s Marine Le Pen said the EU migration and asylum pact was ‘a deal with the devil to flood Europe with migrants, dilute the population and wipe out European culture’. Even if this is not the motivation behind the pact, her comment rings true on the consequences of the levels of immigration from cultures not just alien, but actively hostile, to core European values.

Police actions on an almost daily basis ask the British white working class to denigrate its culture, values and identity and celebrate those of immigrants. Yet violence on the streets of Los Angeles or Ballymena in Northern Ireland blows up the ‘diversity is strength’ narrative and portends the risk of race riots.

The Telegraph’s Janet Daley believes the very concept of the democratic nation state is ‘now in terminal crisis’. Regional and global integrationist impulses contribute to the crisis by whittling away national sovereignty, either against the wishes of voters as documented in opinion polls and general elections, or, in a weaker claim, without their consent.

On mass immigration, Western voters are sending a clear message to elites that they don’t want to import third-world pathologies of slums, sectarian conflict, violent street crime, rape, and degraded public health and educational infrastructure. They’d rather preserve their own heritage, culture, civic order and good governance.

To phrase it so is to highlight the extent to which citizens inside supposedly sovereign borders have become subject to norms and rules promulgated by supranational, regional, and international organisations across an increasingly broad range of issues.

The latter set standards of state and individual conduct, establish targets to be met, institute penalties for non-compliance and require financial transfers from taxpayers to international bodies and bureaucrats for the privilege.

The gravest threat to the theory and practice of democracy by sovereign states is not the rise of populism with wannabe fascists and neo-Nazis as their seductive tribunes, but national and international technocratic elites who disdain the ‘deplorables’.

The European Project was conceived to create a dense web of institutional firewalls against the possibility of a dangerously volatile public mood again putting murderous criminals in positions of power on the continent. Elected politicians would be subject to oversight and veto by enlightened technocrats.

The noble project has been corrupted into enforcing the virtue-signalling dictates of Brussels autocrats on recalcitrant member states and citizens: cancelling electoral outcomes they dislike in Romania, weaponising lawfare against populist leaders in Germany and France to pre-empt their being voted into power, overturning government decisions on immigration by deploying EU conventions and courts.

The biggest foreseeable strategic threat to Western democracies comes from China’s rise as an economic and military power. The world trading order has underwritten the shift in industrial might as the engine-room of modern warfare from the West to China. ‘Free’ trade has rewarded ‘everywhere’ elites while its prescriptions have immiserated the ‘nowhere’ folks and eroded the West’s manufacturing strengths.

Climate change policies have inflicted hardship mostly on Western populations without solving the climate crisis – if there is one. As the costs of climate fanaticism bite, public support plummets for policies that impoverish Westerners, make not the slightest difference to global emissions, but enrich and empower China which contributes the most to them.

The net zero project ratchets up fear using dubious alarmist computer models whose predictions of precisely timetabled doom have consistently fallen flat, without altering nature’s cyclical climate patterns.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has imposed a false moral equivalence between victim and perpetrator in indicting both Hamas and Israeli leaders. It doubly overreached in that Israel is not an ICC state party, and the court violated its own constitutional requirement of complementarity since Israel does investigate allegations of war crimes, prosecute suspects, and punish the guilty. In response, the US has imposed sanctions on ICC judges.

The recently adopted pandemic accords shift the balance of decision-making on pandemic prevention, preparation and response from states to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Some of the worst features of the equivalent of the world administrative state were created by powerful Western countries when they controlled the agenda and institutions of the UN. Now, the US and the West are losing their dominance over global governance institutions, we have witnessed disenchantment and buyer’s remorse with climate alarmism, and institutions like the IPCC, ICC and WHO.

To compound the gathering crisis of democracy, parliamentary representation and government composition have gone off at tangents from voter preferences in many Western countries (see Merz in Germany and the ‘loveless landslides’ for Starmer and Albanese), and there’s been deepening disenchantment with democracy itself. One major reason for voter disenchantment is no matter who they vote for, the blob – the network of mighty quangocrats, technocrats, activist NGOs and unelected and unaccountable judges – always wins.

In consequence, and explaining the rise of the new right dedicated to rolling back the age of ‘endarkenment’ (Rod Dreher), ‘reactionary’ views are firming on fossil fuels, gender wars, immigration and, in an increasingly darkening world, national security. The old left-right divide is passé. The new divide is between the international technocratic elite in alliance with national elites, against the interests, values and policy preferences of national populations. This came to a head during the pandemic years that pitted the laptop class against the working class, enriching the former but making the latter poorer.

The ‘lanyard class’ refers to the officious, rules- and process-obsessed professional cadre of managerial elites who run the national public sector and international secretariats. Over the last decade they have completed their long march through the educational, legal, media, financial, corporate and international institutions. They have become the favoured medium through which to signal rainbow-coloured virtue on climate, race, gender identity, immigration and justice for Palestinians. This elite class of technocrats networks seamlessly across sovereign borders to advance their corporate self-interest, even against the wishes of their electorates. If politics is downstream of culture, arguably citizens are rebelling against the lanyard class by swimming upstream to cleanse their culture of the corrupting influence of social, economic and managerial ‘regressives’.

The basic predicate on which the democratic state rests is that citizens should be able to elect the people who make and enforce the laws and regulations that govern them. Parliamentarians and political executives should in turn be responsive and accountable to the people. Political parties and serious leaders need to forge a new consensus with the public: find the sweet spot between inward-looking nationalism and sovereignty-destroying globalism.