As Ian Dunt and Otto English have demonstrated, who can construct an entire career out of not understanding and sharing your misunderstanding with other people who also don't understand.
To be fair, Ian Dunt is actually quite a reasonable commentator when he isn't tiresomely dunking on the right's lowest-hanging fruit. I place him significantly ahead of Otto English and James O'Brien, who are nothing more than culture warriors.
I agree there's a Jekyll and Hyde aspect to his writing. When he calms down he can be quite thoughtful at times. I think the main problem is the way he sets himself up as an arbiter of what is and isn't 'liberal', as though he's some kind of modern day J.S Mill. He also has an annoying habit of inserting pointless swear words in a 'sociology lecturer trying to be edgy' kind of way.
But isn't it the right wing framing of this issue itself that's at issue? The proposal isn't to just remove Churchill - who in any case AFAIK has only been on the most recent series of notes - out of spite, but to move from having iconic people on notes to iconic wildlife. This is being done partly because wildlife was the most popular option amongst people surveyedl. And indeed, a love of nature and the British countryside is something conservatives often lay claim to. So 'liberals' arent really feigning ignorance to point out the way this is being weaponised through misrepresented information...
Yet many liberals seemed incapable of understanding the symbolic importance of Churchill to conservatives. As I say in the piece, that’s quite a basic thing to misunderstand.
Maybe - or maybe it's frustration at a small number of people getting themselves in a froth over a half truth. The images on the bank notes change with every series anyway and have done so for decades, so I do think getting upset about it *is* quite silly and I don't think its a liberal pretention to say so. Or must we keep Churchill on the five quid note forever to avoid upsetting certain people's sensibilities?
Symbols are kind of silly but my point is that some liberals selectively understand the sensitivities around them. Think about the example in the article (the Pride zebra crossing); can you imagine how upset liberals would get?
Well…maybe (Im gay and a liberal and think pride crossings are a bit silly). But also there's been a massive reduction in rainbow-capitalism style corporate pride marketing over the last year or do, including corps withdrawing sponsorship deals which have led to several smaller city Pride parades going bankrupt and it's been met with barely a whimper from liberals, so maybe not…
I think it depends on context. Rotating out people for animals because of a survey probably wouldn't have attracted any attention in the 1990s or even the 2000s from conservatives nor liberals. But it's happening now in 2026, coming right in the middle of a major leftist assault on British history, values and pride. Attacking Churchill specifically is a standard hobbyhorse of the left - see how the supposedly moderate and diplomatic Obama was constantly removing Churchill's bust from the White House - and so even if it's merely an innocent coincidence in reality (dubious), it's obviously going to be interpreted as another prong in that cultural fight.
I think it’s quite possible liberals understand this just fine— “what [group x] privately understands to be true” and “what I see [group x] is saying on social media” are not the same thing.
This would be true even if everyone was posting on social media. It’s not surprising that the thing you’re most likely to see is someone sharing something that’s validating on the surface, but kind of dumb if you think about it— because it’s easy for people to share quickly in the second it feels very smart.
But that in turn means that loads of people gave up on social media. It’s pointless to have thoughtful and kind of boring takes on things if that’s the sort of thing which dominates on there. But *that* means there’s a selection effect towards making things worse, and *that* probably drives even more people away. It’s a positive feedback cycle; hurrah!
I don’t think we can know what any group of people think without some kind of rigorous methodology. That methodology is not looking at a self-selecting sample of people, who write a self-selecting sample of takes.
Substack and X essays are all social media though. The trend has been towards more thoughtful long form writing in recent years. Some of the most technical AI essays I read are on X, which is surprising, but there we go. Reach is reach.
Found this insightful. As an aside, I recently read freeden's very short introduction to ideology. My impression is he seems to regard ideologies as being very closely connected to political parties but i found this unpersuasive, especially since so many political decisions now seem to be taken based on decisions of the parties senior management, or based on external pressure groups, or a mixture of the two(i.e. the broader party is irrelevant in deciding what views are never contested: Peter Mair was right!). Would be interested to hear your views on how the perceived decline in the influence of party members has contributed to the decline of high liberalism
Thanks! If you can, do read Freeden’s Ideologies and Political Theory (1996); it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.
As you say, the fall in party identification/control has some quite curious implications for ideology. Historically, parties have been moderating influences and the loss of this influence is probably associated with the rise of populism etc.
I think you nail it when you say the misunderstandings are actually a deliberate attempt to slow down their enemies. It may be not entirely conscious in all of them, and so we could argue about how deliberate something semi-conscious can be, but it's intuitive that if an enemy can be derailed by making them argue over definitions or whatever then that's a temporary victory - a cheap and safe one, at that!
I'm developing a theory of leftism in which it's essentially just ancient instincts evolved during warlike tribal eras:
... and that essay contains a section on the use of words. I know you distinguish between many different shades of leftism and I don't, but I think there's some truth to the theory that applies to all of them in different degrees. And basically I argue their use of words is entirely tactical. Leftists don't think of words as tools to communicate true things. They think of them as bullets to be fired in tribal war. That's why hypocrisy is such a common attack by the right on the left, and why the left never care about such attacks. At some level they're thinking, "yes it was hypocritical but who cares? it was useful for us".
This pattern crops up all over leftist discourse:
- They constantly redefine words that have widely understood meanings like racism, justice, rights, gender.
- They advocate for positions and then invert them the next day (and by "they" I mean specific individuals do this, not amorphous groups).
- They demand adherence to rules that they then break without any apparent guilt or social consequence from their allies.
and of course
- They pretend to not understand something trivial or obvious.
All this is 100% consistent with a purely tactical use of words, in which the only value of them is to make other people do what you want. Such people assign a value of zero to honesty or clarity because trying to communicate that way to their enemies would just create a tactical disadvantage.
I get one doesn’t make a success of Substack by saying “Social media isn’t representative” but seriously….
Whilst I don’t doubt the weirdos on Bluesky may have responded with those takes towards Churchill, the idea they’re representative of ‘liberals’ is a total joke.
The vast majority of mocking was simply directed at the crude attempts to manufacture outrage over something where none was warranted.
If the removal of Churchill was due to a campaign to have him ‘canceled’ you might have point, but as the vast majority of comment pointed out it was simply part of a scheduled change, the same schedule that saw someone else replaced to put Churchill on the note.
Has there ever been a campaign by conservatives to have him over other candidates on there permanently?
Is Churchill’s Granddaughter a ‘liberal’ or ‘misunderstanding’ when she pointed out the family found the whole thing silly as they knew perfectly well it wasn’t permanent?
What this actual reveals beyond the utterly unrepresentative online worlds of social media is the British tendency to take the piss at crudely manufactured attempts to import the US tendency to turn everything into a culture war.
I am not a fan in the slightest of the ideology and project behind "raise the colours" but that some councils have gone to court to stop people from putting up UK flags (depicted in this article here, oddly described as English flags in the headline) shows one potential political pitfall with low liberal "understanding symbols but not through someone else's theory of mind," that "someone" being generic voters LabLibGreens may want/need to woo who might live in some less progressive council/be less progressive themselves, see this story not knowing the full context of why Labour/Greens etc are seeing the flag as divisive, then be flabbergasted why they do so. Maybe the Daily Mail has had stories on these local flag scuffles, but it's a testament to how broken the Twitter-to-newspaper pipeline is circa 2026 that there haven't been lots of right wing boosting of these sorts of stories. Ironically, something published in local papers that would be ideologically easily of utility to the online Twitter-addicted right is out of sight to many of them. Still, overall point is that low liberals might see the flag as a divisive symbol to themselves (and they would be correct about the intention of the campaigners behind it) but would not comprehend why random voters would probably perceive it as the opposite https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/25980160.raise-colours-given-formal-notice-stop-placing-england-flags
Also loved language of “crude and swaggering character” lol. But yes, the greatest marketing people in commercial advertising and politics have for better or worse acknowledged their own ethical biases vis-a-vis symbols as much as their targets been able to operate in a manner that is effective if not always traditionally moral (thinking of Frank Luntz and the like here)
Much of this 'misunderstanding' is directly related to the widening crevasse between liberal thought and the conventional cares of the average voter. Liberals can''t understand why people aren't more proactive about concerns like climate change or Palestine, but that's because there aren't Mexican laborers willing to do a Liberal's job for $7/hr, or a local councillor spending their tax dollars on commemorative plaques for DEI non-entities (or on removing statues of genuine local or national heroes - removing a statue of Churchill is the same as pulling down a statue of Washington or Lincoln).
My great fear is that the Dems will regain power without ever learning that lesson. That they will regain power and then immediately alienate everyone who switched away from Trump by going straight back to zero-sum politics. I suggest that Jonathan Pie's explanation of why Trump won in 2016 is still apposite - if you treat people with opposing viewpoints like enemies, how do you expect them to ever vote for you?
As Ian Dunt and Otto English have demonstrated, who can construct an entire career out of not understanding and sharing your misunderstanding with other people who also don't understand.
Hehe, what more can you say about those two?!?
The Midwit Industrial Complex is an extremely lucrative one. Just look at the career of James O'Brien.
To be fair, Ian Dunt is actually quite a reasonable commentator when he isn't tiresomely dunking on the right's lowest-hanging fruit. I place him significantly ahead of Otto English and James O'Brien, who are nothing more than culture warriors.
I agree there's a Jekyll and Hyde aspect to his writing. When he calms down he can be quite thoughtful at times. I think the main problem is the way he sets himself up as an arbiter of what is and isn't 'liberal', as though he's some kind of modern day J.S Mill. He also has an annoying habit of inserting pointless swear words in a 'sociology lecturer trying to be edgy' kind of way.
Yes, the swear words are annoying but that's an aesthetic thing. Annoying people can still be credible.
But isn't it the right wing framing of this issue itself that's at issue? The proposal isn't to just remove Churchill - who in any case AFAIK has only been on the most recent series of notes - out of spite, but to move from having iconic people on notes to iconic wildlife. This is being done partly because wildlife was the most popular option amongst people surveyedl. And indeed, a love of nature and the British countryside is something conservatives often lay claim to. So 'liberals' arent really feigning ignorance to point out the way this is being weaponised through misrepresented information...
Yet many liberals seemed incapable of understanding the symbolic importance of Churchill to conservatives. As I say in the piece, that’s quite a basic thing to misunderstand.
Not even just to conservatives. Being on the opposite side to the Nazis does wonders for a man's reputation.
Maybe - or maybe it's frustration at a small number of people getting themselves in a froth over a half truth. The images on the bank notes change with every series anyway and have done so for decades, so I do think getting upset about it *is* quite silly and I don't think its a liberal pretention to say so. Or must we keep Churchill on the five quid note forever to avoid upsetting certain people's sensibilities?
Symbols are kind of silly but my point is that some liberals selectively understand the sensitivities around them. Think about the example in the article (the Pride zebra crossing); can you imagine how upset liberals would get?
Well…maybe (Im gay and a liberal and think pride crossings are a bit silly). But also there's been a massive reduction in rainbow-capitalism style corporate pride marketing over the last year or do, including corps withdrawing sponsorship deals which have led to several smaller city Pride parades going bankrupt and it's been met with barely a whimper from liberals, so maybe not…
I think it depends on context. Rotating out people for animals because of a survey probably wouldn't have attracted any attention in the 1990s or even the 2000s from conservatives nor liberals. But it's happening now in 2026, coming right in the middle of a major leftist assault on British history, values and pride. Attacking Churchill specifically is a standard hobbyhorse of the left - see how the supposedly moderate and diplomatic Obama was constantly removing Churchill's bust from the White House - and so even if it's merely an innocent coincidence in reality (dubious), it's obviously going to be interpreted as another prong in that cultural fight.
I think it’s quite possible liberals understand this just fine— “what [group x] privately understands to be true” and “what I see [group x] is saying on social media” are not the same thing.
This would be true even if everyone was posting on social media. It’s not surprising that the thing you’re most likely to see is someone sharing something that’s validating on the surface, but kind of dumb if you think about it— because it’s easy for people to share quickly in the second it feels very smart.
But that in turn means that loads of people gave up on social media. It’s pointless to have thoughtful and kind of boring takes on things if that’s the sort of thing which dominates on there. But *that* means there’s a selection effect towards making things worse, and *that* probably drives even more people away. It’s a positive feedback cycle; hurrah!
I don’t think we can know what any group of people think without some kind of rigorous methodology. That methodology is not looking at a self-selecting sample of people, who write a self-selecting sample of takes.
Yes, true - one must be careful to generalize from social media. However, I do think that this is a broader issue.
Substack and X essays are all social media though. The trend has been towards more thoughtful long form writing in recent years. Some of the most technical AI essays I read are on X, which is surprising, but there we go. Reach is reach.
These last two pieces have been your best and I'm going to write about them on my stack, rather than comment about why here.
Thanks Mike - that’s really kind of you :-) Look forward to reading the pieces!
This tweet became a meme because of this exact issue:
https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
I think that, echoing the misinformation/disinformation duo, deliberate misunderstanding should be called disunderstanding.
I've just seen that in your note to this article you actually reference that tweet! :-D
Yeah, I wanted to hyperlink, but couldn't find the link to the original tweet - thanks for the reference :-)
Found this insightful. As an aside, I recently read freeden's very short introduction to ideology. My impression is he seems to regard ideologies as being very closely connected to political parties but i found this unpersuasive, especially since so many political decisions now seem to be taken based on decisions of the parties senior management, or based on external pressure groups, or a mixture of the two(i.e. the broader party is irrelevant in deciding what views are never contested: Peter Mair was right!). Would be interested to hear your views on how the perceived decline in the influence of party members has contributed to the decline of high liberalism
Thanks! If you can, do read Freeden’s Ideologies and Political Theory (1996); it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.
As you say, the fall in party identification/control has some quite curious implications for ideology. Historically, parties have been moderating influences and the loss of this influence is probably associated with the rise of populism etc.
I think you nail it when you say the misunderstandings are actually a deliberate attempt to slow down their enemies. It may be not entirely conscious in all of them, and so we could argue about how deliberate something semi-conscious can be, but it's intuitive that if an enemy can be derailed by making them argue over definitions or whatever then that's a temporary victory - a cheap and safe one, at that!
I'm developing a theory of leftism in which it's essentially just ancient instincts evolved during warlike tribal eras:
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/leftist-behavior-is-just-ancient
... and that essay contains a section on the use of words. I know you distinguish between many different shades of leftism and I don't, but I think there's some truth to the theory that applies to all of them in different degrees. And basically I argue their use of words is entirely tactical. Leftists don't think of words as tools to communicate true things. They think of them as bullets to be fired in tribal war. That's why hypocrisy is such a common attack by the right on the left, and why the left never care about such attacks. At some level they're thinking, "yes it was hypocritical but who cares? it was useful for us".
This pattern crops up all over leftist discourse:
- They constantly redefine words that have widely understood meanings like racism, justice, rights, gender.
- They advocate for positions and then invert them the next day (and by "they" I mean specific individuals do this, not amorphous groups).
- They demand adherence to rules that they then break without any apparent guilt or social consequence from their allies.
and of course
- They pretend to not understand something trivial or obvious.
All this is 100% consistent with a purely tactical use of words, in which the only value of them is to make other people do what you want. Such people assign a value of zero to honesty or clarity because trying to communicate that way to their enemies would just create a tactical disadvantage.
I get one doesn’t make a success of Substack by saying “Social media isn’t representative” but seriously….
Whilst I don’t doubt the weirdos on Bluesky may have responded with those takes towards Churchill, the idea they’re representative of ‘liberals’ is a total joke.
The vast majority of mocking was simply directed at the crude attempts to manufacture outrage over something where none was warranted.
If the removal of Churchill was due to a campaign to have him ‘canceled’ you might have point, but as the vast majority of comment pointed out it was simply part of a scheduled change, the same schedule that saw someone else replaced to put Churchill on the note.
Has there ever been a campaign by conservatives to have him over other candidates on there permanently?
Is Churchill’s Granddaughter a ‘liberal’ or ‘misunderstanding’ when she pointed out the family found the whole thing silly as they knew perfectly well it wasn’t permanent?
What this actual reveals beyond the utterly unrepresentative online worlds of social media is the British tendency to take the piss at crudely manufactured attempts to import the US tendency to turn everything into a culture war.
Long may it continue.
I am not a fan in the slightest of the ideology and project behind "raise the colours" but that some councils have gone to court to stop people from putting up UK flags (depicted in this article here, oddly described as English flags in the headline) shows one potential political pitfall with low liberal "understanding symbols but not through someone else's theory of mind," that "someone" being generic voters LabLibGreens may want/need to woo who might live in some less progressive council/be less progressive themselves, see this story not knowing the full context of why Labour/Greens etc are seeing the flag as divisive, then be flabbergasted why they do so. Maybe the Daily Mail has had stories on these local flag scuffles, but it's a testament to how broken the Twitter-to-newspaper pipeline is circa 2026 that there haven't been lots of right wing boosting of these sorts of stories. Ironically, something published in local papers that would be ideologically easily of utility to the online Twitter-addicted right is out of sight to many of them. Still, overall point is that low liberals might see the flag as a divisive symbol to themselves (and they would be correct about the intention of the campaigners behind it) but would not comprehend why random voters would probably perceive it as the opposite https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/25980160.raise-colours-given-formal-notice-stop-placing-england-flags
Yes, it’s a very curious phenomenon - they understand symbols in all other contexts!
Also loved language of “crude and swaggering character” lol. But yes, the greatest marketing people in commercial advertising and politics have for better or worse acknowledged their own ethical biases vis-a-vis symbols as much as their targets been able to operate in a manner that is effective if not always traditionally moral (thinking of Frank Luntz and the like here)
Much of this 'misunderstanding' is directly related to the widening crevasse between liberal thought and the conventional cares of the average voter. Liberals can''t understand why people aren't more proactive about concerns like climate change or Palestine, but that's because there aren't Mexican laborers willing to do a Liberal's job for $7/hr, or a local councillor spending their tax dollars on commemorative plaques for DEI non-entities (or on removing statues of genuine local or national heroes - removing a statue of Churchill is the same as pulling down a statue of Washington or Lincoln).
My great fear is that the Dems will regain power without ever learning that lesson. That they will regain power and then immediately alienate everyone who switched away from Trump by going straight back to zero-sum politics. I suggest that Jonathan Pie's explanation of why Trump won in 2016 is still apposite - if you treat people with opposing viewpoints like enemies, how do you expect them to ever vote for you?