I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term ‘accelerationism’. It is generally used to describe a tendency on the left, though is increasingly heard on the right too.

The basic idea of accelerationism is that there are certain flaws in the societal structure which if pushed could bring things to their inevitable conclusion more quickly.

It is why there are so many people on the left of politics who say that sustainable government spending should be discouraged. It is not just because they are economically illiterate. What they really hope is that a speeded-up financial disaster will expose the ‘underlying contradictions of capitalism’, and we’ll all realise that Karl Marx was right and promptly vote for Zack Polanski or similar at the next election.

Such accelerationism is a tendency that conservatives usually have the sense to avoid, largely because conservative-minded people are more sceptical of the idea that things always fall out in a way that fits our own existing desires. A key insight of conservatism, since the French Revolution at least, is that there is always room for things to get worse – generally in ways that no one outside Beelzebub’s immediate family could have imagined.

Yet there is a right-wing version of accelerationism that has started to bubble up a little more volubly of late. This centres around the idea that our high immigration, stretched welfare state and societal........

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