Breaking: UK Prime Minister David Cameron is a human being. That was the big story over the weekend, when we discovered that the PM spends his Sundays singing karaoke, playing tennis, and drinking wine over lunch. Big whoop, as the Americans say. But our politics being a 24-hour scrape to the bottom of the barrel, you can easily find a politician willing to criticize him for it. Step forward Ed Balls, who admitted that even though politicians have the right to a day of rest, he always suspected that Cameron “is not on top of the issues” come Monday morning. Of course not. He’s probably still drunk after Sunday lunch, trying to deaden the pain of his tennis elbow.

At the root of this story is a misplaced faith that politicians can and should run the world. They try to, and sometimes they succeed. But it’s never a good thing and they ought to be encouraged to take all the downtime they can get. They are the one part of the public sector for which I would happily grant a three day week and retirement at 45.

Within the West, there are two visions of the democratic leader. The first, which used to be the preserve of the Left, is the tireless reformer. He isn’t just a cog in the machinery of government, he is a piston – driving the dreadnought forever forward. Chug, chug, chug. Work, reform, and public duty are synonymous. If one task is completed, discover another. This must be done repeatedly and steadfastly, forever and ever and ever … until the machine breaks.

The second model, which was how the Right used to regard its role in government, is to be the defender of the constitution – the upholder of tradition. Within the executive, this means enforcing the law. Within the legislature, that means critiquing the way the executive does its job; new laws should be kept to a minimum. The power of the state ought be as small as possible, and so it follows that politicians should do as little as possible. That doesn’t mean they don’t work assiduously or lend their energies to moral causes (there will always be a cat up a tree to rescue). But if they understand both the constitutional and practical limits of what government can do, they’ll find their weekends are long and happy.

As the Right in Anglo-Saxon societies slowly came to accept the welfare state, so they accepted the Left’s vision of the dedicated politician. Hence, the uneasiness that the Conservative Party has shown about rumors of their PM’s idleness testifies to their own commitment to the reformist, bureaucratic ideology. That’s a pity because some of the best leaders of our time maintained a full private self. Churchill would receive war reports in bed, downing an afternoon breakfast of cold champagne. Harold Macmillan read long novels and tended to his publishing empire. Even Jim Callaghan insisted on spending as much time as possible on his farm. Callaghan was perhaps Britain’s most authentically working-class Prime Minister, yet he affected the leisure pursuits of the faded gentry.

Then there are the great (or admirably adequate) men whose personalities embodied the principle of limited government. Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge was actually a hard worker, but his famous quietness articulated simplicity and intellectual efficiency. As the years go by, we’re also more and more aware of quite how much Reagan thought and read about big ideas. But he too encouraged the press to believe he avoided hard work less it killed him. 

The current fuss about Cameron’s supposed laissez-faire attitude is thus a blend of old-fashioned roundhead Puritanism and modern big-state nannyism. It’s the kind of get-go, whizz-bang, rationalized, super-secular, highly-educated, technologically-progressive, arid nonsense that forces ministers to fill the empty hours of a Whitehall lunch break with silly ideas like parenting classes or minimum alcohol prices. It raises the quantity of legislation, but rarely the quality. The cost goes up, naturally.

So take as much time over your Sunday lunches as you wish, Prime Minister. Some of us are arcane enough to desire a leader who does little more than uphold the constitution, defend the realm, and go salmon-fishing for the other 360 days of the year. Chillax, dude.

_ So, Britain finds itself “isolated within Europe”. I’ve never been happier. For all the problems in our world – recession, war, riots, the album sales of One Direction – I end this year with a greater sense of hope in the future than I’ve had in a long time. Britain has regained a little bit of her independence. From self-governance flows ambition – and the bride of ambition is hope.

There’s always a temptation for Eurosceptics to say, “I don’t hate Europe, I just dislike the European Union.” Conservative MEP Dan Hannan (made famous in the US by Glenn Beck) does it all the time. Whenever he’s interviewed, Hannan will say something like, “I speak fluent French, Spanish, and Ukrainian; I married an Albanian chicken farmer; I holiday regularly in Latvia; and I never say no to a plate of paella.” Tony Benn (an old fashioned socialist Eurosceptic) will tell anyone who’ll listen that he’s a “passionate European”. Both men insist that it’s the undemocratic structures of the EU that have alienated them from the enterprise, not the culture of the continent itself. In reality, the two phenomena are inseparable. The EU is undemocratic because it is a European construct. The British are not European, and that’s why we don’t like it.

Of course, like Britain itself, I am a little bit European. I am of Dutch, French, and Irish extraction. My language and thought owes much to the continent. I prefer European movies to Anglo-Saxon cinema (I’ve spent a happy week rediscovering Fassbinder and Visconti), and then there’s the delights of German beer, Italian opera, Russian literature, and whatever it is that the Swiss do. I once spent a happy Christmas in Vienna, watching Bellini at the State Opera – directly behind a huge man with steel-tipped shoes that he tap-tap-tapped on the marble floor.

But there is a fundamental difference between the Brits and the Europeans. I sensed it during a televised discussion I took part in this week. Most of the continental speakers made the same, idealistic point: that it would have been wise to sign the latest European treaty because it was good for Europe. I reiterated that I don’t care about Europe – whatever you define it as – I care about what is good for my own country. Diplomacy is supposed to be governed by self-interest: economic negotiations especially so. Interestingly, the only two guests who agreed with me were from the outskirts of the continent: Finland and Bulgaria.

The point of democracy is to represent the people who elect you. The MP for Woking is duty bound to represent the interests of Woking and Woking alone – not Andalusia or the mountain folk of Carpathia. Yet there is an attitude within the Eurozone that a noble goal beyond the process of democracy calls us to sacrifice sovereignty and material wealth for a higher cause: the blessed United States of Europe. The MP for Woking should, say the true believers, sacrifice his constituents’ interests for the benefit of a wider ideological project. This is what my opponents seemed to be saying. “It is bad for me,” I’d argue. “Ah,” they’d reply, “But it is good for Europe.”

These contrasting attitudes towards political representation are the product of two different cultures. In Britain we’ve made a fetish of the individual; we loathe anything collective and worship eccentricity. Since the 16th century (arguably before), we’ve jealously guarded our sovereignty – going so far as to rewrite the Bible and build a national church so that we can dispense with Popes. That everyone deserves to be tried by their peers, or that a man is innocent until proven guilty, has dominated English law far longer than the imported notion of “universal human rights”. If the American legal and political systems seem close to our own then that is because the American Revolution was fundamentally a civil war between Britons. Consider that the intellectual father of British Toryism, Edmund Burke, actually supported the revolutionaries.

The single aim of foreign policy from the late 16th century on was to engage in European affairs only in so far as it protected our interests elsewhere. Our eye was on the globe, where our commercial interests have lain ever since. Railways through Africa, banks in Hong Kong, dams across the Amazon – this empire of goods made us rich in the 19th century. With the rise of India and China, it is in the developing world that our future lies. As an old sun sets in the West, a new one rises in the East. This is not, as the Europeans think, a doomsday scenario. It is a challenge.

But Europe’s instinct is to protect. It believes that by clubbing together, it can create a trading superpower to challenge America and defend itself against the globalized greed of the emerging nations. Combine that narcissism with a history of collectivism of the statist kind and you have a recipe for something very unEnglish. The guiding principle of Western European history in the last 300 years has been centralization. The French Revolution abolished local governments, created a national conscript army, and terrified the continent with its dreams of egalite. The Italian Risorgimento crafted an artificial Italy out of a patchwork of republics and monarchies. The Prussian state first cultivated a German Empire and then the domination of Mitteleuropa. The result of all of this is a culture that leans towards bureaucratic authoritarianism. The idea that the problems of an entire continent can be solved around a boardroom table appeals to the European mind. Of course, it contradicts the English belief that diversity is strength. One might argue that this is reflected in our rather more successful experiment in multiculturalism. The British obsess about how obsessed we are with immigration but, in fact, where is the British electoral equivalent of the French Front Nationale or the Hungarian Jobbik?

The British Labour Party is arguing that David Cameron could have negotiated harder, gained bigger concessions, and signed the new treaty. But Cameron’s use of the veto was inevitable. It was inevitable because the French and Germans didn’t want to negotiate, and the offer they put on the table would have led inexorably to the crippling of our finance sector and the stagnation of our economy. But it was also inevitable because Britain is not a culturally European country. The single market suited our passion for free trade, but we have no interest in joining a centralized, bureaucratic unitary state. And we not interested in serving the interests of some future utopia – a metric land of milk and honey. It is enough for us to govern ourselves, and to do so as lightly as possible.

The bus stop I use in Los Angeles has a large poster of a chap in his underwear. I think it’s supposed to be advertising his briefs, but the object of the picture is clearly the man himself. The image is disturbing. Not only is the model being objectified like a prime cut of beef, but he has been blown up so large that his anatomically perfect body looks freakish. Each rib is as thick as my arm. West Hollywood is full of homoerotica of this sort; a sensuality so aggressive that it borders on Hitlerian. Confronted by images of thrusting masculinity in every shop window, I feel soiled just buying a pint of milk. West Hollywood is Pornotopia.

Back home, in Great Britain, there’s a discussion going on about whether or not to force internet providers to put filters on porn sites. Prime Minister David Cameron’s modest proposal was denounced by “conservative” commentators as injurious to liberty. The government cannot and should not legislate morality, they cried. I am confused as to why such people use the label conservative to describe themselves. The single purpose of conservatism is to protect what is good about the traditional order. The internet is a threat to the traditional order and so it is not our friend. The North Koreans understand that, even if we do not.

Government can legislate morality and it does. Aside from murder and theft, it also outlaws things that can be consensual – like incest and polygamy. Against this regulation of the sexual code, critics often argue that whatever the government prohibits instantly becomes fashionable. The fact that arrests for public drunkenness actually increased under Prohibition is often cited as evidence that state censorship of this kind never works. The argument is redundant on two counts. A) Morality takes its authority from something other than popular sentiment. B) There are plenty of instances in which something has been outlawed and the public hasn’t reacted with civil disobedience. Florida recently banned sex with animals. By this logic, are we to expect a sudden spike in assaults on chickens? Are Floridians really that bloody minded?

Internet pornography is an obvious example of how permitting one variety of perversion invariably leads to greater and more terrible crimes. The internet turned pedophilia from a private sin into an organized crime. It put people in touch with each other who would never have otherwise met, allowing them to pool resources and share victims. It gave predators access to kids through forums. It also used mainstream porn as a gateway drug. By introducing younger and younger models into erotica, it blurred the lines between childhood and adulthood. People who previously would never have had access to material by which to test their inclinations were now goaded into more and more depravity (“If you enjoyed that, you’ll love this…”). Its the expansiveness of the internet that makes it so ripe for regulating.

When I was a child, getting access to filth was bloody hard work. The best source was The Daily Sport, a silly old rag that featured saucy stories. America could have dropped a bomb on China, and The Sport would have run with the headline, “Six in a Barracks Sexy Sex Shock!” Beyond The Sport, there were one or two books in the school library that covered the sexual cycle in terms of the birds and the bees (with the occasional reference to the behavior of monkeys). I also recall a sex education video that featured a family playing Frisbee in the nude. I'll never play Frisbee again.

All of this contact with nudity was fleeting and furtive. The joy was less in the seeing than the getting. Nowadays, all a child has to do to access some muck is to log on to the family computer. Within seconds they can see videos of whips, goats, origami and tantric projection – the whole T&A. “O brave new world that has such people in’t!” It is madness to suggest that this environmental pollution should not be subject to regulation. We shall never expunge the natural curiosity of the young, but we can at least make sure that the messages they get about sex are healthy ones.

I would go one step further and suggest that it’s time to give back to local authorities the power to outlaw the sale of pornography altogether. Like heroin, porn has been proven to be addictive. Back in 2004, medical witnesses told the Senate Commerce Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee that there was no doubt that it can lead to physical dependence. Sexual activity releases hormones that provide a short term high. If that high is not associated with ordinary, socialized sexual activity, then it becomes internalized and unhealthy. Mary Anne Layden of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today. The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors.”

Given how potentially dangerous it can be, it’s astonishing how weakly pornography is regulated across the Western world. It is even more astonishing considering the West’s supposed commitment to human rights. The porn industry is an unpleasant sector that often mistreats its workers. Innocents are dragged off the street with an offer of "modelling work" and then intimidated into more. Inevitably, rates of venereal disease are high. To quote one official report, “In September 2009, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 2,396 cases of Chlamydia, 1,389 cases of gonorrhea, and five syphilis cases among porn performers. It was also reported that Chlamydia and gonorrhea prevalence in porn performers is ten times higher than that of Los Angeles County 20-24 year olds and five times higher than that of one of Los Angeles County’s highest risk populations.” 

On an existential level, pornography objectifies human beings, reducing them to the status of commodities. There is no need to engage with them as real people because the sexual stimulus is entirely one sided. This encourages the viewer to regard the subject as less than human. Of course, all of us like to be objectified on some level – to be told that we are handsome or pretty. But for us to benefit, we have to have some degree of personal exchange with the spectator. Pornography lends distance and alienation.

That objectification has lethal consequences. Porn addiction is a common trait among serial killers. The murderer Ted Bundy detailed his experiences thus: “I would keep looking for more explicit, more graphic kinds of materials … until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far. You reach that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.” This is not to suggest that pornography conditions the madman’s mind. But, as with latent pedophilia, it normalizes and feeds perverse desires. It reduces humanity to fresh meat. It becomes easy to disassociate sex from mutual pleasure, violence from pain.

The profusion of legalized porn reflects so many paradoxes about 21st century society. We are supposedly an epoch that respects the personhood of women, and yet we objectify them. Gays are trying to build stable families, and yet they are ghettoized by a culture that stresses fetish and permissiveness. We assiduously protect the virginity of children, but we take away their emotional innocence as soon as possible. Most bizarrely of all, we have a conservative movement that prioritizes the freedoms of business over the health of society as a whole. Give me a conservative presidential candidate who values the souls of the vulnerable over the bottom dollar and there you will find my vote.

I’m finally leaving America. My visa has expired and they’re kicking me out. I’ve spent my last few days in Washington DC, drunk as a skunk. I was collected from the airport by The Contractor (my mysterious friend who supplies various military regimes with “things they need”), driven to the Capital Grill and pumped full of T-bone and red wine. We had a furious but friendly debate about whether or not slavery is immoral (I think it is). All of this was a welcome switch from Los Angeles, where I lived on a diet of liberalism, lentils, and a once-in-a-blue-moon Mojito. I’ve always found Washington to be a fun place. The average worker ant is boring and aggressive (all those Republican boys in their blazers and cargo pants pushing they way through the Metro), but the old lags who hang around the National Press Club and the bar at the Bombay are fantastic.

In late July, however, Washington is physically unbearable. In past times, the city emptied at June and everyone went home for fourth months to cool their hands against buckets of ice. Nowadays they have to stay and endure this horrible wet heat. Los Angeles was scorching but dry, so the skin had room to breathe. Washington is humid and sticky, like eating a curry in the bath. People are dying of this weather. It accords with the apocalyptic mood that has descended over the capital. I’ve been away three months and it feels like three decades of revolution. The Murdoch Empire is on its knees, Amy Winehouse is dead, some lunatic killed scores of people in Norway, Michele Bachmann declared for the presidency, and San Francisco tried to ban goldfish. America’s budget default creeps closer. All we need now is a whore on a ten-headed dragon to ride into town and we know we’re finished (and that’s probably already happened on this season’s True Blood).

Yet I leave America feeling strangely optimistic. If they count their blessings carefully enough, America and the world should feel happier than they do. Consider the following.

1. The American economy is still fundamentally strong. Growth and profits are back up, although they haven’t been shared in jobs increases. This shouldn’t really surprise us. Like the production shock of the early 1980s, a lot of the recent recovery has been about resizing and stripping bad assets. No one actually wants the banks to return to their profligate ways, so it’s inevitable that capital is a little tighter than it once was. But that’s not a problem so long as we continue to innovate. I know that all TED seems to showcase right now is “Al Gore’s Electronic Flower Pots”, but the beauty of the free enterprise system is its ability to not only dig itself out of a hole but also invent a cybernetic shovel with which to do it. Something’s around the corner and I suspect it’s the energy market.

2. China’s getting fatter. Almost mystical powers of economic productivity are projected onto China. But as she gets richer, she also develops many of the same social problems that the West has – smoothing down the competitive edge between our two markets. It’s estimated that somewhere in the region of 25 percent of the Middle Kingdom’s subjects are now porkers. Not only does that have a deleterious effect on the quality of their labor force, but it demonstrates that those hard-working devils are turning into lazy-ass consumers too. Ergo, MacDonalds now has now committed itself to opening a new store everyday within the next four years. That’s to compete with the Colonel’s tally of 3,200 stores across the country. The cost will be measured in increased demands for health and social services, forcing China to replicate the welfare states that are now bankrupting the West. In 50 years time, the Chinese will owe us money.

3. In a revolution, no one’s safe. In the past, disorder tended to create new orders that would last a little while longer than the last. Nowadays, chaos follows chaos in quick succession. No sooner had the expenses scandal crippled Gordon Brown and helped elect David Cameron, the Murdoch scandal had knee-capped Cameron and possibly opened the door to Ed Miliband. Likewise, the Tea Party revolution is being eaten alive by its own radicalism at the moment – destroying the credibility of the congressional Republican leadership and catapulting the country towards bankruptcy. That might not seem like a reason to be happy, but it is nice to know that Western democracy is proving more sensitive to public tastes than it once did. In the past few months, the people are destroyed two venerable parties – the Canadian Liberals and Fianna Fail of Ireland. It’s likely that they will strike the deathblow of Gaullism in the next French presidential elections. All have been eclipsed by radical parties on the left and right (Irish Labor, Canadian New Democrats, French National Front). The center will not hold. For those of us driven by ideas, it’s an exciting time to be alive. We have finally emerged from the centrist abyss of the 1990s; ideology is back.

I return to a UK in turmoil. What is unusual is that there is no obvious winner from all the political disaster. Labour theoretically leads the Conservatives, but Ed Miliband is widely seen as a bad leader. The Liberal Democrats have extinguished themselves as a party. There is some hope in the bizarre collection of libertarians, disgruntled socialists, Sedevanticists, and golfing fanatics who make up the United Kingdom Independence Party, but they are hamstrung by the First Past the Post voting system that makes it tough for minority parties to break through.

In contrast, the American party system seems fairly stable and alive. What Britain did in the last ten years – consciously and systematically – was kill off all internal party opposition. That’s strangled new ideas and left large swathes of the country without representation. There are no young voices in Britain that are definitively liberal or conservative, whereas the Americans have charismatic lobbies working on both sides. It may seem odd to see the deficit crisis as anything but a crisis, but it does highlight the fact that the US still trades in ideas and philosophies of government. I regret having to leave that debate for the rather more tepid one in Britain, which, despite all its anxieties, still obsesses about emptying the bins and cleaning up dogs’ mess.