My Political Journey

Politics has always taken up a large part of my thinking. Though the mundane day-to-day politics has its place in my reading, most of the time I spend thinking about the deeper political questions. These questions, along with my own philosophical, economic, and social inquiries, have almost become all-consuming and have been a part of my personality ever since I really started thinking about them when I was thirteen.

Starting Out

A theme throughout my political (and intellectual) journey has been my grabbling with an inability to join a particularly political community, party, or movement, and the desire to be part of one. Even though I was young, my teenage years were spent not just reading or following politics, but also trying to construct my own. I wrote manifestos, designed party logos, and tried to put together policies that I conceived under my own political idealisms which I’d constructed. Naturally, these were entirely left-wing and utopian.

My left-wing orientation was influenced not just by being young thought. I was inspired by many anti-authoritarian stories, particularly Gandhi's anti-imperialist struggle against the British Empire in India as well as the story of Steve Biko in apartheid South Africa (both of which sparked my initial interest in geopolitics and global affairs). Domestically, I was in favor of a strong social state and adopted a radical anti-partisan (British) republican stance. I already knew I was instinctively anti-totalitarian as well as anti-racialist, and all ideology in general seemed to me to be the source of all evil. However, an idiosyncrasy I had—and which would become a theme in my later thought—was a belief in the nation as a political good.

The Brexit Turning Point

When the Brexit referendum came around, my position was that of the old Labour Party’s opposition to the common market back in the 1970s until the rise of New Labour. I opposed membership of the political union of the European Union and I believed that Britain’s destiny lay outside of Europe and in the wider world, as well as a natural left-wing dislike for elitism (influenced by the description of postdemocracy by Colin Croach, of which I saw the EU as the ultimate form). My position was to leave the EU and to join EFTA as the pragmatic alternative to a no-deal scenario. However, the crisis and failure of the Conservative Party to opt for this policy, and the subsequent parliamentary gridlock back in 2019, led me to give up entirely on UK politics (as well as the country in general) and since then I’ve concentrated my attention on Spanish politics.

Drifting Rightward​

While still in London, I found myself drifting more toward the right. Though not abandoning my humanitarian principles, my journey was deeply affected by the reaction of the mainstream British “regressive” left (as it was known at the time) to the result of the referendum. But I was starting to become more interested in (supply-side) economics and, as liberty and anti-totalitarianism had already been a major part of my early thinking, I found myself more influenced by libertarianism. Despite strong differences over foreign policy, libertarianism offered me a way of retaining my revolutionary stances when it came to social transformation while finding more realistic ways (economically speaking) of achieving it, and I remained a libertarian until my early twenties.

Overall, however, and as I experienced life for myself for the first time while living in Madrid, my perspective began shifting in terms of economics, and I was finding ways to justify more state involvement. As I learnt more about economics, I developed a more syncretic stance that supported individual initiative and free-market solutions, but complemented by state involvement in key sectors. This was mostly influenced by the contradiction I was beginning to experience between libertarianism and my view of the nation as an expression of the highest form of society, and there were important incompatibilities that rendered libertarianism more and more paradoxical for me. I was also becoming steadily more skeptical of capitalism as an internationalist force and drew a distinction between the free-market as a tool and capitalism as an ideology.

As with any ideology, the flaws in the logic and its reductionism were beginning to show the cracks for me, and so I found myself in a limbo between conservatism and the forms of socialism expressed in Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour.

Pilgrimage to Genoa

I discovered Mazzini completely by chance. While researching the origins of fascism in 1920s Italy, the name Giuseppe Mazzini was repeatedly mentioned as a major character in the Italian unification movement that had come to a head barely fifty years previously. In the interests of conducting a proper investigation, I read more about Mazzini and found an instant resonance with his political thought. It was like finally finding a missing piece that connected the logic between all my evolving political views and finally articulated in some way what I was trying to think about.

Mazzini synthesized democracy, liberty, and social action into a way I was struggling to before. By making the nation a political principle, he was able to put into words what my political thought was becoming: a nuanced mix between strong democratic values, left-wing economics, more conservative social policy, revolutionary, and with an emphasis on humanitarian action abroad. I read his works extensively to try and understand how he put it all together in an idiosyncratic doctrine that could define itself as a movement.

​In April 2019, I visited Italy and traveled to Genoa, where Mazzini had been born and where he was laid to rest in the Staglieno cemetery that overlooks the city. I went to visit the tomb that was at the highest point of the cemetery and paid my respects to the Italian revolutionary, as Woodrow Wilson had done on his own visit to the city in 1919.

Developing My Thought Further

​As well as validating many, Mazzini changed my political stances in some significant ways. I abandoned my strict opposition to the European Union and embraced a form of reformed Europeanism in the flavor of confederalism. I adapted my view towards liberty being the end of society and integrated the Mazzinian focus on duties. I embraced more left-wing macroeconomics. I was more comfortable expressing a belief in the nation, knowing that I could better defend myself from accusations of nationalism or fascism, and I felt more confident in expressing both pragmatic and humanitarian considerations over foreign policy. In short, I was starting to know how my values could be expressed politically. I was freeing myself from the typical contradictions in the restrictive political paradigm of socialism vs capitalism.

Recent Years

​I took the time, especially during the pandemic, to try and develop my Mazzinianism further and to make it more cohesive and update it for the modern day. I have tried various methods to try and publish it, but every book I tried to write or essay I tried to pen ultimately failed since I lacked a lot of historical, economic, and philosophical background to Mazzini’s ideas that ultimately eroded my confidence and led me to increasingly doubt myself and my own knowledge. This knowledge gap has made me be content only with thinking and not acting, using my need to read more or research more as an excuse for not actually doing something.

However, I am at a point where this excuse no longer holds and, while I still have significant gaps in what I know and there are many philosophers I haven’t read and history I don’t know about, I now know more or less what I think and how it comes together across other traditions and other political philosophies. This is as much a tool for my own development as for raising awareness of Mazzini.

The New Mazzinian and a New Angle

​As I mentioned above, the last essay I wrote was back in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My last three most recent essays on geopolitics were thoroughly researched but extremely time-consuming and put me off substantially from embarking on another from sheer lack of time. The objective with this site is to have a healthy mix of writing to publish, from descriptive to long-form essays, to short blog posts, to mini-essays, to even video essays or lecture series, so I avoid not taking more time over ideas I’m thinking about and not missing out on commenting on current news.

I hope you find this site of interest and you are welcome to contact me about anything either to comment on, criticize, or correct.