Throughout the West, the working and traditional middle class – shopkeepers, small property owners, artisans – are moving towards conservative and even reactionary candidates. In contrast, the old parties of the left in the US, Australia, the UK and across Europe, have embraced the postmodern cultural agenda and lost their old constituencies. Overall, eastern Europe, and its conservative working and middle classes, are now the right’s bulwark against the cultural influence of progressives.

As the retreat from our Western heritage and the collapse of literacy continues, we are reprising the cultural behaviours of the Middle Ages. As late as the mid-15th century, literacy rates in Europe were quite low – five per cent overall in England, though substantially higher in cities and in the more urbanised societies of the Netherlands and Italy. Few women were literate. This changed dramatically after the introduction of the printing press, especially in the cities of northern Europe. By 1650, about half the British population could read. Literacy in the Netherlands soared to about 85 per cent by 1750…

Today’s cultural creators sharing and expressing the concerns of the clerisy, have lost touch with much of the mass market. Television audiences for shows like the Academy Awards have been declining. Increasingly prizes rarely go to quality films with broad popularity, such as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, or even The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Instead, award-winning films, sometimes fine movies in themselves, are largely chosen for their appeal to insiders. At the same time, Hollywood makes most of its money from cartoonish superhero movies, suited to a post-literate audience.