Your essay brought to mind an unlikely but illuminating parallel: Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937), his firsthand account of the Chinese Communists in Yan'an. It fits your argument uncomfortably well, and the discomfort is the interesting part.
Snow arrived expecting to find a ragged band of ideological fanatics. What he found instead looked a great deal like what you describe in wartime Britain — a population enduring extraordinary privation because they believed something worth preserving was at stake. Mao's soldiers were mostly peasants who for the first time felt the land, the community, the nation was genuinely theirs. They weren't fighting for a distant government or an abstract doctrine; they were fighting, as your French resistants were, for something immediate and inherited and felt. The Long March — a catastrophic military retreat by any objective measure — had been reframed as an epic of collective will, and it held because it attached to real grievances, not invented ones. A myth, as De Gaulle understood, doesn't need to be literally true to be socially functional.
The Nationalist side, meanwhile, exhibited almost every pathology you identify in the Third Republic: elite corruption, a governing class severed from ordinary life, factional paralysis, a political system that commanded formal authority while hemorrhaging legitimacy. Chiang Kai-shek had superior resources and international recognition, and it counted for very little in the end. Material capacity without social solidarity is a surprisingly fragile thing.
But here is the tension your essay raises that Snow's book sharpens rather than resolves. You argue, convincingly, that the solidarity which sustained Britain and the Resistance was essentially organic — pre-existing, rooted in common inheritance, not manufactured by governments whose attempts to manage popular morale you note were largely ineffective anyway. The reservoir had to already be there. The CCP's achievement, if we can call it that, was almost the opposite: they were deliberately constructing solidarity where little existed, through ideology, organisation, land reform, and — Snow was frank about this — considerable propaganda. It worked, at least in the short term and under conditions of extreme external pressure.
Which raises the uncomfortable question your essay leaves hanging. When the organic reservoir has been drained — and your account of forty years of neoliberal individualism, post-national elite ideology, and the deliberate dissolution of community is persuasive — can anything fill it artificially? Your implied answer seems to be no, or at least not through anything our current governments are capable of. The CCP example doesn't refute that, but it does suggest the question isn't purely rhetorical. Solidarity has been built from near-scratch before, under conditions of crisis, by people who understood what they were doing and meant it.
And this is where a very different kind of document becomes unexpectedly relevant. A draft constitutional text currently circulating on the Substack under the title Basic Law of the Commonwealth — seventh draft https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/basic-law-of-the-commonwealth-cfc , explicitly offered for deliberation rather than adoption — attempts something that might be read as the secular equivalent of what the CCP was attempting in Yan'an, but without the vanguard party and without the guns. It tries to name, with great precision, what a society would be for: the commons held in trust across generations, material security as a prior right rather than a market outcome, sortition as a defence against the capture of institutions, the rectification of language as a civic practice. It draws on Roman jurisprudence, Confucian philosophy, thermodynamics, and the Hebrew tradition of jubilee — the periodic constitutional reset of accumulated concentration. It is not a manifesto. It is an attempt to write down, carefully and honestly, the terms on which people might feel that something was genuinely theirs again.
You will note immediately what it lacks. There is no culture in it, no civilisation, no common past — the very reservoir you describe as essential. Its authors seem aware of this; the closing note speaks of conditions for "fire" rather than the fire itself. And you are right that this is a serious deficiency. No constitutional architecture, however honest its premises and however carefully designed against capture, can substitute for the shared inheritances that made it possible for a British factory worker in 1941 to endure rationing without being told why. That was not produced by a document. It was already there.
And yet. The Chinese Communists also lacked, in 1934, most of what your argument says is necessary. What they had was a convincing account of what had been stolen and what could be recovered — land, dignity, the sense that the country belonged to the people who worked it rather than to those who extracted from it. The Basic Law text makes a structurally similar argument: that the commons were not vacant at the time of enclosure, that private property in land traces to an original act of appropriation that no tradition it draws upon has ever successfully legitimated, and that recovering the commons is restoration, not confiscation. Whether one finds that argument persuasive or not, it is the kind of argument that can, in the right historical conditions, become the thing people feel they are fighting for. Not a hotel. A recovery. A restoration of something that was taken.
The difference, perhaps, is that the CCP were insurgents and this document addresses incumbents, or those who might become them. Insurgents can promise a future because they do not yet have to defend a present. Whether a constitutional vision of this kind — honest about its premises, explicit about its enemies, careful in its design — could earn the loyalty you describe as essential rather than simply demanding it, is an open question. But the attempt to name what was lost, and what might be recovered, is not nothing. It may be closer to the precondition for solidarity than anything our current governments are capable of articulating.
Who dies for a hotel? Nobody. But people have died, and endured, for the promise of something that didn't yet exist, if that promise was precise enough about what had been taken from them. Whether that offers any comfort for our current situation is another question entirely. The Basic Law text closes with a line that would not have been out of place in Yan'an, stripped of its ideology: the fire that animates a constitutional order cannot be written into law. But the conditions for that fire can be constitutionally demanded. Whether there is still enough left to ignite is what your essay, finally, is asking.
Yes, it was AI assisted. Some people don't have the talent Aurelien has. But the directions and the ideas and the connections were all mine, and if you have any comments to make against the substance of my post, please, feel free to elaborate. But just because someone uses the available tools, which ultimately "democratizes" the ability to engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue, doesn't necessarily makes it slop. While the style might not be to your taste, you have said nothing about the substance of my comments and the message I was trying to convey.
This is not a literary competition mister, but a discussion about the state of our societies. Aurelien usually offers little with respect to some light at the end of the tunnel opening in front of us. I personally think that something can be done and should be done and must be done. There were worst things that people overcame and as the creation, the universe came out of nothing, as much as the astrophysicists can tell us, I am sure we can conjure a new beginning out of the rubble of our existence. Life on earth has gone through several extinction level events. Came back stronger and just flourished on the ashes of the old...
In Frank Herbert's Dune universe, when Leto II Atreides asks Stilgar, "Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year?", it is not a casual remark. It is a loaded philosophical challenge regarding the evolution of Fremen culture and the true cost of progress.
The Surface Meaning
Literally, Leto II is pointing out how beautiful the younger generation of Fremen has become.
The Deeper Meaning
The Toll of Water: To Stilgar—a hardened Fremen deeply loyal to the austere, desert-dwelling traditions of old—their beauty actually signals the decay of Fremen culture. The new generation is "water-fat," a visible result of planetary ecological reforms that made Arrakis more hospitable. To Stilgar, this ease represents a loss of the grit and survivalist crisis that once defined his people.
The Argument over the Golden Path: For Leto II, this flourishing beauty represents the success of terraforming and a necessary evolution for humanity. It symbolizes a shift from a society defined merely by daily survival to one capable of long-term prosperity, aligning with Leto's acceptance of his role in guiding humanity toward the Golden Path.
The Flaw of Tradition: Through this simple question, Leto is gently dismantling Stilgar's reliance on rigid tradition. He uses the beauty of the youth to prove that the world is changing and that tradition alone is not an absolute guide for living in the present.
That might be the most percipient short summation of WW2 from the French and British perspectives that I have seen (speaking as a scholar) and accurate as to the current predicament. But let's not give in once more to the 'poison-gas scenario'. The world was always a caldera of conflicting needs, views and interests, with the idea of moral civilisation a tenuous crust overlying the boiling lava of barbarism. Stand by.
Your position on conscription is one I have come to agree with over recent months, moving from a position where I thought it might be No Bad Thing To Teach Young People Some Discipline, or something even necessary for national defence given the inability of Britain's armed forces to meet even grossly inadequate recruitment targets. There have been a few articles in the last couple of years to the effect that conscription is a solution looking for a problem so is unnecessary, without even taking account of the vast logistic difficulties you outlined in an essay a few months ago. Considering this article in conjunction with Youtube videos I have seen where interviewers ask young people of varied ethnic origin whether they would be willing to fight in the British armed forces, I've come to the conclusion that any attempt to reintroduce it would be likely to tear British society apart, most likely in violent fashion.
Though bias is probably inevitable in any such videos put together for commercial gain or to support a particular viewpoint, it seems clear that at least a large proportion of ethnically non-British young people would not comply with a conscription order as for these purposes they do not actually consider themselves to be British. Quite a number of apparently ethnically British people also stated that any such orders coming from a government that seemed to despise them, would not be legitimate. So I conclude that any attempt to reintroduce compulsory military service here would, if serious attempts were made to enforce compliance, quickly result in widespread civil disturbances bordering on low-level civil war, of the sort that Prof David Betz has been forecasting for the last year or so, which so far have showed little sign of materialising.
Where I live in southern England, a forecast of 15cm of snow is enough to cause people to strip supermarket shelves almost bare. I still have photos of my usual local supermarket a couple of days before the first Covid lockdown, showing about a dozen large areas of shelving completely empty. Since the Ukrainian attack on a college dorm a couple of weeks ago which, it is claimed, was carried out using drones supplied in kit form by NATO countries, there has been more talk online of possible Russian missile strikes against targets in Europe if something similar happens again. Indeed, a list of such targets has been widely circulated as most readers will be aware. It seems to me that the civil panic and chaos that would ensue should even one of those targets in Britain be hit, would be something to behold. Even a hit in somewhere like Latvia or Estonia might be enough. De facto martial law might well be on the cards and whether that would stop society and the economy completely coming apart, I think is doubtful. On the face of it, government, civil society and the mainstream media seem to be completely ignoring the possibility but I suggest wise readers should not.
Most of the population DID accept the Covid discourse coming from the governments although the case was by far less persuasive than the challenges in 1939. The media made the difference.
Indeed. The wages of neoliberalism are death, and “because markets” is no civilizational principle.
The most amusing delusion is that of “our betters” when they imagine that those of us among “the lower orders” would fight and die to defend their elite privileges. Perhaps they need reminding that the Morlocks EAT the Eloi … 🤨
A brief check shows that this is incorrect, "French units in contact with the Germans fought extremely well, inflicting casualties on the Germans as proportionately heavy as they later suffered at the hands of the Red Army." Per soldier, per day, Red Army inflicted significantly, by about 50%, heavier losses on Germans (0.574 vs.0.366 per 1000 soldiers per day). What does it make of the Aurelien point that soldiers were fighting not for political system or ideology but for their homes? As far as I know, Red Army officers were heavily indoctrinated, but the soldiers couldn’t care less for the ideology.
The math:
Germans killed and missing, during the battle of France, 43 days, 988/per day. The opposing force in direct contact (after subtracting Alpine and Maginot forces), 2,700,000. Killed or missing Germans, per 1000 French soldiers, per day = 0.366
Germans killed and missing during the first stage of Barbarossa June–Aug 1941 (71 days), 1453/day. The opposing force in direct contact 2,530,000. Killed or missing Germans, per 1000 Soviet soldiers, per day = 0.574
Your argument has its antecedent in the work on suicide by French Sociologist Emile Durkheim, published in 1897. Durkheim had noticed that the suicide rate in France had dropped markedly during times of war — a phenomenon which he attributed to the fact that otherwise atomised individuals, estranged from others in society, found a sense of belonging during wartime, when a strong sense of community prevailed; when a sense of ‘we are all in this together’ gave lonely, socially isolated individuals a feeling of belonging.
Durkheim deliberately contrasted his theory of anomie, or estrangement, with that of alienation posited by Karl Marx as an objective part of the human condition under capitalism, i. e. whether people felt it or not.
I generally agree with your post but believe Covid was a particularly bad example. In Europe it were precisely the most liberal countries with the least sense of common purpose i.e. France, GB and Germany where the rules were the most strict and followed the most. Countries more patriotic where you could still mobilize the general population in case of war i.e. Eastern Europe had much greater resistance. In Russia and Ukraine the authorities even gave up on trying to enforce mask wearing, vaccine taking a.s.o. after a while. Same in Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania et al. In Germany the difference between East and West Germany was palpable although East Germany is much less "liberalized" than West Germany. I believe the Covid scare worked precisely because Western societies are much more atomized.
"British morale in the War has been massively studied, and the conclusions have followed the usual Oedipal dialectical pattern of historical writing. First, wartime and postwar studies lauding the British spirit, then a short-lived “revisionist” school of younger historians sneering at ordinary people, and now, something of a consensus that the original picture—of a society which managed to endure a great deal of stress without actually cracking—is broadly accurate."
What you miss is the enduring ,unconscious cultural myth that requires time to generate a plausible response; the functional machinery is always there. The "consensus" is itself a counter-revisionist reassertion of a deliberately vague (the vagueness is necessary to its survival); but persistent dogmatic myth.
Interesting. Look at Ukraine and Iran for two recent examples.
"De Gaulle’s myth of “forty million résistants” was widely accepted because it was an exaggeration, rather than an invention, because it unified the country behind a positive message, and because it closed down a controversy which could have torn the country apart."
Ukraine has undergone a similar national mythologizing, pretending that full-blown Nazi collaborators and concentration camp guards were really western liberals, and that everyone speaks Ukrainian, even if they can't.
But the myths happen to be convenient, so they are defended passionately. And everyone forgets that their grandfathers fought for the Red Army and not the Waffen SS, that they celebrated Victory Day and not the birthday of some collaborator.
Your essay brought to mind an unlikely but illuminating parallel: Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (1937), his firsthand account of the Chinese Communists in Yan'an. It fits your argument uncomfortably well, and the discomfort is the interesting part.
Snow arrived expecting to find a ragged band of ideological fanatics. What he found instead looked a great deal like what you describe in wartime Britain — a population enduring extraordinary privation because they believed something worth preserving was at stake. Mao's soldiers were mostly peasants who for the first time felt the land, the community, the nation was genuinely theirs. They weren't fighting for a distant government or an abstract doctrine; they were fighting, as your French resistants were, for something immediate and inherited and felt. The Long March — a catastrophic military retreat by any objective measure — had been reframed as an epic of collective will, and it held because it attached to real grievances, not invented ones. A myth, as De Gaulle understood, doesn't need to be literally true to be socially functional.
The Nationalist side, meanwhile, exhibited almost every pathology you identify in the Third Republic: elite corruption, a governing class severed from ordinary life, factional paralysis, a political system that commanded formal authority while hemorrhaging legitimacy. Chiang Kai-shek had superior resources and international recognition, and it counted for very little in the end. Material capacity without social solidarity is a surprisingly fragile thing.
But here is the tension your essay raises that Snow's book sharpens rather than resolves. You argue, convincingly, that the solidarity which sustained Britain and the Resistance was essentially organic — pre-existing, rooted in common inheritance, not manufactured by governments whose attempts to manage popular morale you note were largely ineffective anyway. The reservoir had to already be there. The CCP's achievement, if we can call it that, was almost the opposite: they were deliberately constructing solidarity where little existed, through ideology, organisation, land reform, and — Snow was frank about this — considerable propaganda. It worked, at least in the short term and under conditions of extreme external pressure.
Which raises the uncomfortable question your essay leaves hanging. When the organic reservoir has been drained — and your account of forty years of neoliberal individualism, post-national elite ideology, and the deliberate dissolution of community is persuasive — can anything fill it artificially? Your implied answer seems to be no, or at least not through anything our current governments are capable of. The CCP example doesn't refute that, but it does suggest the question isn't purely rhetorical. Solidarity has been built from near-scratch before, under conditions of crisis, by people who understood what they were doing and meant it.
And this is where a very different kind of document becomes unexpectedly relevant. A draft constitutional text currently circulating on the Substack under the title Basic Law of the Commonwealth — seventh draft https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/basic-law-of-the-commonwealth-cfc , explicitly offered for deliberation rather than adoption — attempts something that might be read as the secular equivalent of what the CCP was attempting in Yan'an, but without the vanguard party and without the guns. It tries to name, with great precision, what a society would be for: the commons held in trust across generations, material security as a prior right rather than a market outcome, sortition as a defence against the capture of institutions, the rectification of language as a civic practice. It draws on Roman jurisprudence, Confucian philosophy, thermodynamics, and the Hebrew tradition of jubilee — the periodic constitutional reset of accumulated concentration. It is not a manifesto. It is an attempt to write down, carefully and honestly, the terms on which people might feel that something was genuinely theirs again.
You will note immediately what it lacks. There is no culture in it, no civilisation, no common past — the very reservoir you describe as essential. Its authors seem aware of this; the closing note speaks of conditions for "fire" rather than the fire itself. And you are right that this is a serious deficiency. No constitutional architecture, however honest its premises and however carefully designed against capture, can substitute for the shared inheritances that made it possible for a British factory worker in 1941 to endure rationing without being told why. That was not produced by a document. It was already there.
And yet. The Chinese Communists also lacked, in 1934, most of what your argument says is necessary. What they had was a convincing account of what had been stolen and what could be recovered — land, dignity, the sense that the country belonged to the people who worked it rather than to those who extracted from it. The Basic Law text makes a structurally similar argument: that the commons were not vacant at the time of enclosure, that private property in land traces to an original act of appropriation that no tradition it draws upon has ever successfully legitimated, and that recovering the commons is restoration, not confiscation. Whether one finds that argument persuasive or not, it is the kind of argument that can, in the right historical conditions, become the thing people feel they are fighting for. Not a hotel. A recovery. A restoration of something that was taken.
The difference, perhaps, is that the CCP were insurgents and this document addresses incumbents, or those who might become them. Insurgents can promise a future because they do not yet have to defend a present. Whether a constitutional vision of this kind — honest about its premises, explicit about its enemies, careful in its design — could earn the loyalty you describe as essential rather than simply demanding it, is an open question. But the attempt to name what was lost, and what might be recovered, is not nothing. It may be closer to the precondition for solidarity than anything our current governments are capable of articulating.
Who dies for a hotel? Nobody. But people have died, and endured, for the promise of something that didn't yet exist, if that promise was precise enough about what had been taken from them. Whether that offers any comfort for our current situation is another question entirely. The Basic Law text closes with a line that would not have been out of place in Yan'an, stripped of its ideology: the fire that animates a constitutional order cannot be written into law. But the conditions for that fire can be constitutionally demanded. Whether there is still enough left to ignite is what your essay, finally, is asking.
Please spare us AI-written comments. This one has all the signs of AI slop: em-dashes, "sharpens", glib phrasing, etc. etc.
Yes, it was AI assisted. Some people don't have the talent Aurelien has. But the directions and the ideas and the connections were all mine, and if you have any comments to make against the substance of my post, please, feel free to elaborate. But just because someone uses the available tools, which ultimately "democratizes" the ability to engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue, doesn't necessarily makes it slop. While the style might not be to your taste, you have said nothing about the substance of my comments and the message I was trying to convey.
This is not a literary competition mister, but a discussion about the state of our societies. Aurelien usually offers little with respect to some light at the end of the tunnel opening in front of us. I personally think that something can be done and should be done and must be done. There were worst things that people overcame and as the creation, the universe came out of nothing, as much as the astrophysicists can tell us, I am sure we can conjure a new beginning out of the rubble of our existence. Life on earth has gone through several extinction level events. Came back stronger and just flourished on the ashes of the old...
In Frank Herbert's Dune universe, when Leto II Atreides asks Stilgar, "Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year?", it is not a casual remark. It is a loaded philosophical challenge regarding the evolution of Fremen culture and the true cost of progress.
The Surface Meaning
Literally, Leto II is pointing out how beautiful the younger generation of Fremen has become.
The Deeper Meaning
The Toll of Water: To Stilgar—a hardened Fremen deeply loyal to the austere, desert-dwelling traditions of old—their beauty actually signals the decay of Fremen culture. The new generation is "water-fat," a visible result of planetary ecological reforms that made Arrakis more hospitable. To Stilgar, this ease represents a loss of the grit and survivalist crisis that once defined his people.
The Argument over the Golden Path: For Leto II, this flourishing beauty represents the success of terraforming and a necessary evolution for humanity. It symbolizes a shift from a society defined merely by daily survival to one capable of long-term prosperity, aligning with Leto's acceptance of his role in guiding humanity toward the Golden Path.
The Flaw of Tradition: Through this simple question, Leto is gently dismantling Stilgar's reliance on rigid tradition. He uses the beauty of the youth to prove that the world is changing and that tradition alone is not an absolute guide for living in the present.
Excellent response to an excellent essay
That might be the most percipient short summation of WW2 from the French and British perspectives that I have seen (speaking as a scholar) and accurate as to the current predicament. But let's not give in once more to the 'poison-gas scenario'. The world was always a caldera of conflicting needs, views and interests, with the idea of moral civilisation a tenuous crust overlying the boiling lava of barbarism. Stand by.
Boiling lava of barbarism? Maybe you should read The Dawn of everything: A New History of Humanity for a rebuttal to your opinion.
Your position on conscription is one I have come to agree with over recent months, moving from a position where I thought it might be No Bad Thing To Teach Young People Some Discipline, or something even necessary for national defence given the inability of Britain's armed forces to meet even grossly inadequate recruitment targets. There have been a few articles in the last couple of years to the effect that conscription is a solution looking for a problem so is unnecessary, without even taking account of the vast logistic difficulties you outlined in an essay a few months ago. Considering this article in conjunction with Youtube videos I have seen where interviewers ask young people of varied ethnic origin whether they would be willing to fight in the British armed forces, I've come to the conclusion that any attempt to reintroduce it would be likely to tear British society apart, most likely in violent fashion.
Though bias is probably inevitable in any such videos put together for commercial gain or to support a particular viewpoint, it seems clear that at least a large proportion of ethnically non-British young people would not comply with a conscription order as for these purposes they do not actually consider themselves to be British. Quite a number of apparently ethnically British people also stated that any such orders coming from a government that seemed to despise them, would not be legitimate. So I conclude that any attempt to reintroduce compulsory military service here would, if serious attempts were made to enforce compliance, quickly result in widespread civil disturbances bordering on low-level civil war, of the sort that Prof David Betz has been forecasting for the last year or so, which so far have showed little sign of materialising.
Where I live in southern England, a forecast of 15cm of snow is enough to cause people to strip supermarket shelves almost bare. I still have photos of my usual local supermarket a couple of days before the first Covid lockdown, showing about a dozen large areas of shelving completely empty. Since the Ukrainian attack on a college dorm a couple of weeks ago which, it is claimed, was carried out using drones supplied in kit form by NATO countries, there has been more talk online of possible Russian missile strikes against targets in Europe if something similar happens again. Indeed, a list of such targets has been widely circulated as most readers will be aware. It seems to me that the civil panic and chaos that would ensue should even one of those targets in Britain be hit, would be something to behold. Even a hit in somewhere like Latvia or Estonia might be enough. De facto martial law might well be on the cards and whether that would stop society and the economy completely coming apart, I think is doubtful. On the face of it, government, civil society and the mainstream media seem to be completely ignoring the possibility but I suggest wise readers should not.
Most of the population DID accept the Covid discourse coming from the governments although the case was by far less persuasive than the challenges in 1939. The media made the difference.
Indeed. The wages of neoliberalism are death, and “because markets” is no civilizational principle.
The most amusing delusion is that of “our betters” when they imagine that those of us among “the lower orders” would fight and die to defend their elite privileges. Perhaps they need reminding that the Morlocks EAT the Eloi … 🤨
A brief check shows that this is incorrect, "French units in contact with the Germans fought extremely well, inflicting casualties on the Germans as proportionately heavy as they later suffered at the hands of the Red Army." Per soldier, per day, Red Army inflicted significantly, by about 50%, heavier losses on Germans (0.574 vs.0.366 per 1000 soldiers per day). What does it make of the Aurelien point that soldiers were fighting not for political system or ideology but for their homes? As far as I know, Red Army officers were heavily indoctrinated, but the soldiers couldn’t care less for the ideology.
The math:
Germans killed and missing, during the battle of France, 43 days, 988/per day. The opposing force in direct contact (after subtracting Alpine and Maginot forces), 2,700,000. Killed or missing Germans, per 1000 French soldiers, per day = 0.366
Germans killed and missing during the first stage of Barbarossa June–Aug 1941 (71 days), 1453/day. The opposing force in direct contact 2,530,000. Killed or missing Germans, per 1000 Soviet soldiers, per day = 0.574
Your argument has its antecedent in the work on suicide by French Sociologist Emile Durkheim, published in 1897. Durkheim had noticed that the suicide rate in France had dropped markedly during times of war — a phenomenon which he attributed to the fact that otherwise atomised individuals, estranged from others in society, found a sense of belonging during wartime, when a strong sense of community prevailed; when a sense of ‘we are all in this together’ gave lonely, socially isolated individuals a feeling of belonging.
Durkheim deliberately contrasted his theory of anomie, or estrangement, with that of alienation posited by Karl Marx as an objective part of the human condition under capitalism, i. e. whether people felt it or not.
I generally agree with your post but believe Covid was a particularly bad example. In Europe it were precisely the most liberal countries with the least sense of common purpose i.e. France, GB and Germany where the rules were the most strict and followed the most. Countries more patriotic where you could still mobilize the general population in case of war i.e. Eastern Europe had much greater resistance. In Russia and Ukraine the authorities even gave up on trying to enforce mask wearing, vaccine taking a.s.o. after a while. Same in Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania et al. In Germany the difference between East and West Germany was palpable although East Germany is much less "liberalized" than West Germany. I believe the Covid scare worked precisely because Western societies are much more atomized.
"British morale in the War has been massively studied, and the conclusions have followed the usual Oedipal dialectical pattern of historical writing. First, wartime and postwar studies lauding the British spirit, then a short-lived “revisionist” school of younger historians sneering at ordinary people, and now, something of a consensus that the original picture—of a society which managed to endure a great deal of stress without actually cracking—is broadly accurate."
What you miss is the enduring ,unconscious cultural myth that requires time to generate a plausible response; the functional machinery is always there. The "consensus" is itself a counter-revisionist reassertion of a deliberately vague (the vagueness is necessary to its survival); but persistent dogmatic myth.
Interesting. Look at Ukraine and Iran for two recent examples.
"De Gaulle’s myth of “forty million résistants” was widely accepted because it was an exaggeration, rather than an invention, because it unified the country behind a positive message, and because it closed down a controversy which could have torn the country apart."
Ukraine has undergone a similar national mythologizing, pretending that full-blown Nazi collaborators and concentration camp guards were really western liberals, and that everyone speaks Ukrainian, even if they can't.
But the myths happen to be convenient, so they are defended passionately. And everyone forgets that their grandfathers fought for the Red Army and not the Waffen SS, that they celebrated Victory Day and not the birthday of some collaborator.