If there were a contest to pick the best-connected conservative in the Anglosphere, John O’Sullivan would win easily. He was, for a time, Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter. He edited National Review for almost a decade. Conrad Black sought him out to help found and edit Toronto’s National Post newspaper. He held senior editorial positions on both the London Times and the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He was the Vice-President and Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe for a few years. In Australia, O’Sullivan guest-edited the leading conservative monthly magazine Quadrant for two years. For the past decade or so he has run the Danube Institute in Budapest (where I am an occasional visiting fellow) which aims to bring conservative perspectives (and not just those from the Anglosphere) to the whole array of social, economic, legal, and political issues in today’s world.

　　The man has even coined a “law.” O’Sullivan’s law (sometimes dubiously attributed to Robert Conquest) states, “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will, over time, become left-wing.” That seems right to me. But why? I tend to think it’s just a contingent empirical generalisation about our own times and the current dominance of leftist orthodoxy. More backbone and more willingness to resist and change will come. My guess is that O’Sullivan is at least as optimistic as I am on that front. But that’s just a guess.

　　What isn’t a guess is that John O’Sullivan has been a leading conservative intellectual for more than four decades. Better still he has known, debated, and learnt from many of the leading thinkers in the English-speaking world over that time. The recently-published, Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here, is a collection of O’Sullivan’s essays on public affairs dating from 1985 to 2023. They first appeared in such outlets as The Claremont Review of Books, Quadrant, National Review, The Critic, Conservative Home, The Hungarian Review, and The New Criterion. The author has picked out forty-one of his essays from over a dozen different publications and four decades and put them together into this book. He tells us in the preface that there has been a small amount of cutting for length but that wherever he originally made predictions about the future those predictions were left as originally published. All of us win some and lose some.

　　The topics covered in this collection are myriad. None were selected to make a single political or moral point. But a theme does emerge. As O’Sullivan himself tells the reader in the preface, the essays converge on the point that “the revolution of ‘Wokeness’ that currently assaults us is not a complete novelty but a fusion of earlier ‘movements’ rooted in similar or related ideological beliefs and often, alas, fallacies.”

　　In other words, he’s seen it before and he knows how it ends. There is even a delightful foreword by Rod Dreher, noting amongst other things how “many writers can inform and enlighten, but few can do so while also entertaining. John O’Sullivan can.” Being put into that Mark Steyn-like company is high praise indeed. And this book deserves it. It makes for excellent reading whether it be essays on the post-Cold War world, on illiberal democracy, on Thatcher, on Reagan, on Churchill, on cultural revolutions, on dead people of note, or those of much less note such as Hugh Hefner. There is commentary on Brexit from a man who was a Brexiteer before the word had ever been coined, or before anyone loathing the anti-democratic constraints of the supra-national European Union had dared to dream Britain might one day escape. He covers totalitarians, populism, Cardinal Mindszenty, and America today. The breadth of knowledge will delight you. The humour and optimism will fortify and strengthen you. The insights will intrigue and refresh you.

　　A small sampling of the gems in this superb book will hopefully suffice to give the flavor. There is an essay on global governance versus national democracy (originally written as a review of a John Fonte book). On the side of the former, you have the academy, the media, the lawyerly caste, the corporate world, the foreign policy establishment, and a wider circle of political elites and bureaucracies. Thinkers and scholars and think tank types “who adopt a hostile attitude—or even a sceptical one—to its doctrines are in a distinct minority. And because academic tenure and research funding follow intellectual orthodoxy, they even resemble an endangered species in the academy.”

　　O’Sullivan places great weight on love of country, individual liberty and gradual, measured reform, but always with a prima facie attachment to the inherited customs and practices that happen to exist.

　　O’Sullivan traces out how the attack on national sovereignty proceeds. He shows how difficult it can be (especially outside the United States) to stand up to international law. Or vote the European Commission out of office. How the elites run the courts and the NGOs. “In short, global governance is yet another attempt (the third one since 1917 by [O’Sullivan’s] counting) to sell elite rule in democratic disguise – in this case, very light disguise.” Read the whole thing and you’ll have a much better grasp of how the attack on national sovereignty and the voters’ democratic input works.

　　Or delight in this comparison O’Sullivan makes between two former Conservative Prime Ministers of Britain, Maggie Thatcher and David Cameron.O’Sullivan explains that contemporary moderates or “wets” in the Tory party have argued that Thatcher was a “modernizer” but then so too is Cameron and his government.

　　This argument is essentially a semantic game: modernization is an empty concept that needs filling with content before it can be assessed. Thatcher’s modernization consisted of sound money, ending exchange rate control, cutting taxes, building up defence, privatization, etc. Cameron’s modernization consists of same-sex marriage, “ring-fencing” foreign aid, sharply cutting defence, allowing the UK financial sector to be regulated by Brussels, etc, etc. They are not quite the same thing.

　　Ouch! Worse still, the general point applies to so many of today’s right-of-centre politicians across the Anglosphere (though less so in Europe of late).

　　Or enjoy O’Sullivan’s examinations of liberal democracy in various chapters throughout the book. This term or concept is a slippery one, much like the label “populism.” O’Sullivan sees today’s political battles revolving around differing manifestations of illiberal democracy on the one side and undemocratic liberalism (or, for British readers, progressivism) on the other. If forced to choose it seems clear that O’Sullivan is with the democrats. The latter camp tends towards being utopian, historicist (it believes itself to be “on the right side of history”), overly demanding of conformity, not adverse to social engineering, and apt to succumb to the temptation to become “an all-encompassing ideology, which behind a veil of tolerance brooks little or no disagreement.”

　　On a less serious note, one of my favourite essays was O’Sullivan’s remembrance of Robert Conquest. After reading my introduction it will not surprise readers to learn that the two men shared a London apartment for some time and that O’Sullivan was the man who introduced Conquest to Thatcher. The whole eulogy to Conquest is enchanting and a joy to read. But what I hadn’t known was that the Robert Conquest, who had written so powerfully on Stalin and his purges and thuggery, was also a satirist, critic, poet, soldier, and a world-class limerickist. How did I get this far in life without having read this instantly memorable classic example of the last of those talents?

　　There was a great Marxist called Lenin,

　　Who did two or three million men in.

　　That’s a lot to have done in

　　But where he did one in

　　That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

　　Priceless tidbits like this make a serious book fun, and at times funny. There are memorable bon mots such as “sugared propaganda” and “racist anti-racist”). He quotes Thatcher’s riposte “Reactionary? Well, there’s a lot to react against.” And he comes back regularly to the erosion of democracy by global bodies, NGOs, the courts, and supposed “expert” bodies. In one of the most recent of his essays, from 2022, O’Sullivan diagnoses the problem in terms of:

　　the growth of judicial power that overrides popular majorities and executive authority … the spread of effectively independent administrative bureaucracies … restrictions on free speech and academic freedom in universities, the expansion of the concept of “hate speech” and, most sinister of all, the selective enforcement of the criminal law.

　　I suppose, in conclusion, you could say that this book oozes an underlying commitment to the virtues and attitudes of the sceptical Scottish Enlightenment, rather than the radical French variant. O’Sullivan places great weight on love of country, individual liberty, and gradual, measured reform, but always with a prima facie attachment to the inherited customs and practices that happen to exist. He brings a deep scepticism to utopian projects, idealistic plans, and ideologies of perfection. This is in keeping with the thinking of David Hume and Adam Smith, not the French Enlightenment thinking of Rousseau. Indeed, it is variants of the latter sort of utopian thinking that have played a big part in giving us the revolution of “Wokeness” that currently assaults us and whose tenets and effects this book dissects and argues against in such an insightful yet entertaining way. I recommend the book wholeheartedly.