“As to the base people who conduct these newspapers, though they deserve to be knocked on the head and left on the highways or on commons for the carrion-crows to eat, they are not worthy of my vengeance; it is their infamous setters-on and backers-on that call for my vengeance; and on these I inflict it whenever I can, and rejoice when I see it inflicted by others…it is not the stick, but the hand that wields it, that the sensible dog always bites.” - William Cobbett, 18 December 18301
We live in a time of perpetual elite failure, particularly among those who are meant to be our thought leaders and who seem to maintain their positions despite being wrong just about all the time. Such “luminaries” as Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen notwithstanding, this class is still given far too much credence both by policy makers and the public. The list of devastating elite failures is too long to give exhaustively, but they have been drastically and harmfully wrong about major issues such as covid, global warming, trade, and foreign policy. To the extent they ever own their failures, besides those who occasionally turn against their class, it is simply to say that they had benevolent intentions and meant well. The great irony, of course, is that any idiot can have good intentions- which they don’t- but we’re meant to listen to them because their expertise would cause them to be right and thus “I was coming from a place of well-meaning ignorance” is not much of an excuse. On top of all of this, of course, they have utter disdain for us plebs, and it is our intransigence they usually blame for their failures. The reality is that the public rarely does worse than experts, and your grandmother, assuming she doesn’t watch CNN all day, is more likely than “expert consensus” to be correct about any number of life’s most pressing matters.
Elite failure periodically leads to counter-cultural movements, some of which, like the hippies, get assimilated into an even dumber establishment than the one they supplanted, or in other instances parts of their program become mainstream, usually while leaving behind anything good there had been about it. In our own time the idiots in charge, on all sides, getting everything wrong has given us the rise of the New Right, a loose political movement primarily led by anonymous internet users rejecting the conventions our corrupt and ridiculous society has forced on them. The New Right is something like libertarianism but with class consciousness [particularly opposition to the power of financial interests,] traditional values, nationalism, manly virtue, and peak physical fitness. It is also a rejection of the “classical liberalism” that has crippled those on the right as they speak of “norms” and “equality” while dealing with an opponent that gleefully breaks any precedent while trampling on us. Others may describe it differently, but my description gets you in the right neighborhood. It is a place for people who want to win better lives for ourselves and our children instead of meeting the definition of American conservatism that is “letting your enemies educate your children and then writing National Review articles about how you’re losing the culture war.”
The New Right is an incredible group of weirdos and extremists, many of whom should be nowhere near political power in their current form. It is a place of great intellectual ferment, creativity, and humor. If you like to discuss ideas without restriction and find humor and kinship as you navigate a failing Clown World, you are blessed to live in the time of these people. From the brilliant schizoposting [or at times Fedposting] of Catgirl Kulak, the sagacious anthropology of Kunley Drukpa, the hilariously controversial satire of cartoonist Emily Youcis, or the political wisdom- distilled to the strength of everclear- of Auron MacIntyre, and everything in-between, the New Right is always thought-provoking, often exasperating, and endlessly entertaining.
Though this is indeed a new movement in American politics, it has a precursor, and an important one: the largely forgotten English journalist William Cobbett, the publisher of the Political Register, the world’s first major opposition newspaper. Once imprisoned, twice exiled, and a lifetime of sticking it to the man, Cobbett was just like us, only better, as you will see: a “RETVRN” traditionalist, a health weirdo, a Romebro, a hater of the banks and big industries, a lover of bloodsports, a brutal satirist, and too dispositionally oppositional to live if he could not spend that life insulting the moron rulers who have too much power over the public.
My purpose here was not to write a biography of Cobbett, it was to tell of his opposition to the potato as a staple crop for the poor, however as few these days know of his legend and he is profoundly interesting, I couldn’t resist telling his story. I have decided to split this into two parts, partially for my own convenience but more importantly as I think there is value in publishing them separately. Part 1 is the history of William Cobbett, while Part 2 is on his heroic efforts to break the elite consensus on the retarded and deadly policy of replacing wheat bread with the potato as the staple food for the poor- the 19th century version of “you will eat the bugs!”
Part 1: The Forgotten Father of Alternative Media
I myself only happened to discover Cobbett from reading the delightful little 1970’s text Farming for Self-Sufficiency by John and Sally Seymour, which uses Cobbett’s Cottage Economy as the source of epigraphs for most chapters. I have only found time to barely scratch the surface of his work, having read but one collection titled Cobbett’s Country Book: even on that topic he shows his tremendous range in raging against the status quo2. One could spend a lifetime trying to get through Cobbett’s writing. He is said to have been the most prolific English author of the first half of the 19th century, having written perhaps 15 million words in his career [for comparison, most English translations of War and Peace are a little under 600,000 words.] He has been admired by such diverse figures as Karl Marx [who called him “the finest pamphleteer England ever produced,” for which it must be noted, Thomas Paine is the competition,] G.K. Chesterton [who wrote a short biography of his many adventures,] the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams3 [who found Cobbett’s transition from a Tory to a radical to be astounding,] and one of our own contemporaries, the famed libertarian farmer Joel Salatin [who brought his book on gardening in America back into publication after a gap of 150 years.] Anyone who embraces anti-establishment politics will find much to praise in Cobbett’s work, though certainly also much to disagree with, the inevitable result of a 40-plus year career of raving against the powers that be. Though largely forgotten, Cobbett’s lasting contributions include introducing the concept of a “red herring” [he described using a salted fish while training hunting dogs, so that they don’t let a distraction throw them off the scent,] and the saying “You don’t know what you can do till you try.”
There is no one reason for Cobbett’s current obscurity4, but despite his attack on just about everything which laid the foundation of modern consumer capitalist society, it may have turned out that his chief enemy was was Melvil Dewey: the practice of sorting non-fiction by topic is a nightmare for Cobbett’s incredibly varied work. To find his texts, many of them out of print, at a used book store one needs to check perhaps six sections. As well as his prodigious work on the homestead economy, Cobbett wrote a polemic against the Democrat-Republican Party [he twice took exile in America, more on that soon,] a guide to English grammar, a history of England’s Parliament since the Norman Conquest, the records of every treason trial since the Norman Conquest, the first major text on gardening in America, a diary of life in America, a book of advice to young men [and incidentally to young women] wherein he opposed Malthus on population control, a collection of essays on the rights of the poor, a history of the Protestant Reformation in England, a biography of President Andrew Jackson, and a travel book about conditions in rural southern England. Of these, only the last, Rural Rides, where he went around on a literal high-horse inspecting country living, remains in print by a major publisher, though many others are available in those crappy auto-print editions you can get on Amazon.
For all of that, Cobbett was by a wide margin the most famous for his Political Register, the world’s first great opposition newspaper. It is crucial to note that this was not an opposition paper in the sense that The Washington Post considers itself opposition to Trump while fully supporting the rest of the establishment. Instead, Cobbett was something more like Alex Jones but with the wit and prose talent of H. L. Mencken. At other times Cobbett reminds me of Old Man Waterfall from Futurama, the most passionate and devoted patriot who nevertheless must always upset his countrymen with his contrarian views:
One way or another, the government so feared his newspaper that they increased stamp taxes on newspapers until it was unaffordable to the working class, its target audience. Cobbett responded by making a new edition that only contained his editorials and thus didn’t constitute a newspaper, and sold it for two pence, half the stamp tax on newspapers. He reached a circulation of 40,000 subscribers, huge for the time, and you have to bear in mind many subscribers likely would have been publicans or other people who shared it with a wider audience. His opponents called his paper “Two-Penny Trash,” a designation that Cobbett embraced. Later, of course, the taxes were expanded to cover his editorial-only edition in an effort to shut him down.
Cobbett lived a life of many strange adventures, which I can hardly do justice in this space. Born to a poor farmer in 1763, after a childhood of toil he joined the infantry, where he was stationed in Canada, marrying an America-born woman he met there. In an act which one could say began the rest of his life, shortly after discharge his animosity towards officers caused him to write a pamphlet called The Soldier’s Friend against the mistreatment and low pay of the enlisted men in the British military. Fearing prosecution, he fled to Revolutionary France where he developed French language skills he intended to use for employment. He ultimately left for America also fearing the political situation in France; in America he taught Frenchmen the English language, but was radicalized by their anti-British sentiments, leading him to begin his regular political writing. He created quite the stir when he opened a bookstore in the then-capital Philadelphia and placed a huge portrait of King George III in the window [Cobbett was always loyal to the crown, but was a relentless enemy of Parliament.] It is said they considered deporting him under the Alien Enemies Act, though he had been a partisan of President John Adams5 and the Federalist Party, then in power [Adams represented the Anglophile side in the under-appreciated Anglophile-Francophile rivalry that has commonly impacted American history; Cobbett, at the time an enormous France hawk, turned against Adams for making a deal with France.] He left America after being convicted of libel for accusing the Founding Father Dr. Benjamin Rush of killing his patients with excessive bloodletting6, though not before spending some time making a full-time job of attacking Rush, under the sponsorship of Alexander Hamilton.
His good graces at home restored by his time as a pro-British agitator in America, Cobbett returned to England in 1800. There was interest in his commentary on the politics of the newly independent United States, and Cobbett began publishing the Political Register in 1802 after selling his share in a different unsuccessful publication he had helped start. However, after some years he again ran into trouble, and was convicted of criminal libel for his writing opposing an instance of the flogging of militiamen. He spent almost two years in NewGate prison, where he was inexplicably allowed to continue the writing that put him there, including a pamphlet against paper money. In 1817, again facing imminent prosecution and a government about to suspend habeas corpus, Cobbett again fled to America, this time a famous man. He lived on a farm in New England and wrote his book on gardening in America, as well as writing a diary of life in America that he published. Despite his love for his home, he was deeply impressed by the impact that living in a free and just society had on the character of New Englanders, as well as the ability of Americans to hold their booze without becoming a quarrelsome rabble. Before returning home, he took his most inexplicable action and dug up the remains of Thomas Paine with the intention of giving them a heroic repatriation to England, but for some reason never actually reburied them, and they were not found among his effects upon his death: they have never since been positively identified.7
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It was upon this return that Cobbett embarked on his “rural rides,” in large part to examine the impact of paper money, industrialization, and empire on the common man of England. In 1830 he was indicted, as ever, for “seditious libel” for allegedly encouraging what were known as the Swing Riots, a peasant uprising against, among other things, threshing machines that were putting men out of work; this time he was acquitted. A perennial political candidate and staunch opponent of the system of Parliament involving what were known as “Rotten Burroughs8,” Cobbett was finally elected to Parliament as an old man in 1832, following the passage of that year’s major Parliamentary Reform bill; it is said that by then his faculties were already impaired with age. Regardless, he was in office to oppose the change from the “Old Poor Law” to “New Poor Law,” which he claimed took away the last rights of the peasantry and thus dissolved their obligation of allegiance.
Cobbett died on his farm in 1835, following a short illness. He was by then one of the most famous Englishmen of his era, and certainly among the most controversial. He had lived his life like a bull in a China shop, though I’m sure he would tell you that China was an unnecessary and effeminate foreign luxury that was ruining Britain and putting good English tradesmen out of work9. He had spent over 40 years writing brutally sardonic polemics against the most powerful people in society and had made enemies out of most of his contemporaries who were prominent enough for you to have heard of them, such as Pitt the Younger, William Wilberforce, Robert Jenkinson, and Thomas Malthus.10 Cobbett’s oldest daughter and long-time secretary continued to publishing his work after his death and herself wrote a book about home economics, while his sons, one of whom became an MP, started a Manchester law firm which survived until it was bought out following a spectacular failure in 2013 [it seems to be the case that the Australian branch still exists under the name Cobbetts, due to anti-trust regulators “de-merging” it.] Overall, not a bad legacy for a poor farmer’s son who spent his life antagonizing just about everyone who might have been able to help him get ahead.
Regarding his political views, 10 years ago perhaps one would have called Cobbett a populist proto-libertarian, for lack of better vocabulary. Really, he always defied classification, until now, that is: William Cobbett’s views are New Right, with remarkable specificity. Here is an inexhaustive list of various things William Cobbett believed in:
He called the marriage of political and capital power, which would now be called “the Establishment,” THE THING, and it was one of the most common targets of his attacks. [I often just call them “they.”]
He blamed attacks against him from the mainstream media as being on behalf of “Loan-mongers and stock-jobbers and Jews.”
He strongly opposed to paper money and supported returning to the gold standard [he later softened on this stance.]
He was a government transparency activist, collecting and printing Parliamentary debates when it was illegal to do so.
He hated “experts” of all kinds, including those who want to apply “science” to agriculture, and most of all those who promoted a potato diet.
He was an anti-vaxxer, in fact the most prominent opponent of the original major smallpox vaccine.
He considered food additives to be poisonous drugs.
He was a big advocate of bacon as the finest form of meat. One of his most famous sayings is, “A couple of flitches of bacon are worth 50,000 Methodist sermons and religious tracts.” Cobbett’s ideal working man’s breakfast was bread, bacon, and beer.
Despite being something of an advocate for giving women a better status in society, he felt that, “Every woman, high or low, ought to know how to make bread. If she do not, she is unworthy of trust and confidence: and indeed, a mere burden upon the community.” Cobbett was also an enormous advocate of home brewing.
He was a bitter opponent of the Corn Laws, which created a steep protective tariff on wheat. He viewed them as serving to impoverish the peasantry and concentrate power in the hands of big agribusiness, and, of course, give preference to the potato.
He was an opponent of mass industrialization on the grounds it was bad for the human spirit, and, as with everything else, enriched financiers.
He opposed the institution of slavery, while simultaneously being quite racist [more on that soon.]
He was a supporter of Catholic Emancipation who was constantly seeking to expose England’s historic crimes against Catholics, something which is still a sensitive topic in Britain.
He opposed schools and “Unschooled” his children, as we would call it now, even refusing to instruct them in reading and writing but boasting about how well they learned it on their own.
He refused to hire anyone on his farm who lived within 50 miles of London or within 20 miles of any major industrial city. He also refused to hire anyone who had near relation who was a “tax-eater of any sort.”
He was pro-natalist in the era of Malthus.
He was a proponent of the moral value of blood sports, including a game called “single-stick” where you try to beat the other person on the head until the loser bleeds an inch from his temples.
He went on and on about his traditional life, wife, children, and homestead, but actually supported himself through writing, and in a sense was one of the first “lifestyle influencers.”
Was this guy not absolutely one of us?
It might seem like many of these views would be standard in the early 1800’s, but at the time all of the “very serious people” wanted the British to “get with the program” and go work for a big corporation that would give them wages in paper money they would then spend on potatoes and pub beer, or better yet tea, and of course get their smallpox vaccination and have a small family to avoid an apocalyptic future of mass starvation [ultimately caused in Ireland by those very potatoes!]
Speaking of tea, some of his views were even more eccentric, such as his fierce hatred of the practice of tea drinking, which had been introduced during his lifetime. As with everything, he went on about this at such length that it is hard to decide on the best quote out of so many good ones, but his view was that for men tea drinking led them for a debauched life ending at the gallows while teaching your daughter to prepare tea in turn prepared her only for the brothel, or at best would make her “a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her.” He also hated the cost of tea, claiming you could soon drink your wholesome beer out of silver cups from the savings if you quit tea. His most famous quote on the subject is as follows,
“I view the tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.”
In Cobbett’s view, once children are old enough to work [so perhaps age 6] you should give them beer instead of tea, as it will cause them to grow up to be strong and of good moral character. Of course he is talking about hearty, low-alcohol home brew, and not stronger, mass-produced public house beer, which he says too often contains poisonous drugs; I am unaware of his views on liquor, besides that he banned rum on his farm, as it was a product of slavery, but he advocated “perfect sobriety.”
On top of all of this, and I bring this up not for apologetics nor to have a “reckoning,” but simply because it’s on brand: Cobbett was very racist and anti-Semitic, even by the stands of the early 19th century. It must be said though, that as some say, “I’m not racist, I hate everyone,” he really did write this way all the time. It’s also true that though he was opposed to the institution of slavery, he hated the leading abolitionist, William Wilberforce, for good reasons, including his support of the Corn Laws and a potato diet, but more importantly simply for being a wealthy, bleeding heart, hypocrite lib who didn’t care about the condition of white factory workers in England while constantly demanding people cry for the slaves- if they were arguing on modern Twitter there is a 100% chance Cobbett would post that brain heatmap showing liberals have more “outgroup empathy.” His most extreme racist statements tend to be in context of diatribes against politicians or activists he was riling the public against for various other reasons.
Overall, Cobbett’s opposition to slavery, which grew stronger with age, had less to do with any genuine concern for the well-being of Africans, and more to do with his hatred of the institution as one that concentrated power among wealthy financiers and created unfair competition for England’s smallholders, similar to how Oregon was founded as a free and all-white state, or how racists can be some of the most consistently anti-war people because they don’t go for the argument that if you care about the well-being of Iraqis you should bomb them and invade their country. Still, with Cobbett’s flair and brutality, his racist rants make for entertaining reading, such as the following,
“That the Negroes are a race of beings inferior to white men I do not take upon me to assert; for black is as good a colour as white; and the Baboon may, for any thing I know or care, be higher in the scale of nature than man. Certainly the Negroes are of a different sort from the Whites. An almost complete absence of the reasoning faculties, a sort of dog-like grin, and a ya-ya-ya laugh, when spoken to, may be, for any thing that I know, marks of superiority. . .I am, therefore, not presumptuous enough to take upon me to assert, that the Blacks are not the superior beings; but I deny all equality. They are a different race; and for Whites to mix with them is not a bit less odious than the mixing with those creatures which, unjustly apparently, we call beasts.”
Regarding the Jews, it should be noted that the Jewish community in England was pretty small, fairly new, and primarily engaged in trades which Cobbett detested regardless of who did them. Here is one quote of many anti-Semitic comments he made during his career when he asked readers,
“To produce a Jew who ever dug, who went to the plough, or who ever made his own coat or his own shoes, or who did anything at all, except get all the money he could from the pockets of the people.”
One imagines he would have held a substantially higher opinion of the Jews of the Russian Empire who tended to live in small farming communities, but he had a negative view of anyone who worked in finance. Cobbett also hated Quakers, whom he viewed as only arising due to the financial system the Jews put in place,
“There is that numerous sect, the Quakers. This sect arose in England: they were engendered by the Jewish system of usury. Till excises and loanmongering began, these vermin were never heard of in England. They seem to have been hatched by that fraudulent system, as maggots are bred by putrid meat, or as the flounders come in the livers of rotten sheep. The base vermin do not pretend to work : all they talk about is dealing ; and the government, in place of making laws that would put them in the stocks, or cause them to be whipped at the cart's tail, really seem anxious to encourage them and to increase their numbers.”
While there is much to disagree with, as a polemicist Cobbett was second to none and that is entertaining content, simultaneously awful, incisive, and thought-provoking.
It is undeniable that if William Cobbett were alive today, he would be among the best shitposters and best Substackers out there. He did have a low tolerance for attacks by anonymous parties, but one has to imagine if he could read The New Right Poast he would be delighted by all the great content from reactionary dissidents so close to his own views [and anyway, using a long-term pseudonym, which Cobbett himself did in America, is quite a bit different from sending unsigned hate mail or being one of those 0 follower accounts making asinine replies.] On the other hand, as a man who was prosecuted for his inflammatory speech on multiple occasions, and twice chose exile, he perhaps would still take a dim view of men who do not want to stake their fortune on their skill as an extremist asshole and instead choose to hide their views in such a way that they can blend into a corrupt mainstream society.
So much for my short biography on one of my favorite historical figures: the peerless and prolific pamphleteer, polemicist, and provocateur William Cobbett.
For Part 2, the story which made me decide to write this whole thing: William Cobbett vs. the Potato.
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Incredibly, this is in defense of his farm, which was being libeled in the press.
This essay has many fewer links than my usual writing. Everything included is either from Cobbett’s Country Book, 1974 Ed. Richard Ingrams, searching Rural Rides on the Internet Archive, or simply from Wikipedia and other easily searchable sources.
It is amusing that one of the founders of Cultural Marxism and by extension “Wokeness” was so willing to overlook Cobbett’s racism. Perhaps there is more to Raymond Williams than we realize.
In 2022, a 200th anniversary event celebrating Rural Rides was cancelled at the demand of Jewish groups over Cobbett’s anti-Semitism. It seems the group putting it on knew nothing about him and read the book for the first time upon receiving the complaint. They discovered it is full of lines like “the fact is the Jew-system has swept all the little gentry, the small farmers, and the domestic manufacturers away” and “some tax-eater, or some blaspheming Jew, or some still more base and wicked loan-mongering robber.” However, Cobbett had already been obscure for around a century by that time, and was not, in general, “cancelled” over racism.
John Adams was himself known for making up ludicrous slanders against his political enemies, so much so that at times it confuses our historical understanding of figures of his era.
George Washington happened to die on the second day of the trial, following prodigious bleeding by doctors. Cobbett, of course, wasted no time in attributing his death to Rush’s teachings.
Cobbett had brutally attacked Paine as a traitor in the 1790’s when he was still alive, but had came around to greatly admiring him. This insane story about the remains of Paine is universally agreed to be true.
“Rotten Buroughs” are memorably satirized on the third season of Blackadder, where he runs Baldrick for office with the slogan “A rotten candidate for a rotten borough.” In short, seats in the House of Commons hadn’t been reapportioned for hundreds of years, and a “rotten borough” was one that had been mostly depopulated in the intervening time, so perhaps a few families, entirely controlled by the landlord, had their own MP who would be his lackey. Some newer cities might have tens of thousands of people and no MP at all. It bears mentioning that on occasion the Lord chose a great man: Edmund Burke spent all but one term of his 30 year Parliamentary career in rotten boroughs; Pitt the Elder also got his start this way.
I didn’t go looking for it, but I rate the chances that he made this exact argument in Political Register at around 90%.
Of these, with Malthus, an aloof academic, Cobbett’s fierce disagreement remained largely ideological, despite his tendency to attack a man’s character. Amusingly, in an essay about how he has raised the finest sow in England, Cobbett says that the sow has taken to reading Malthus and, thus corrupted, refuses to breed.
To my great shame I only discovered while writing part two that William Cobbett once used the pseudonym "Dick Retort", which is all the more proof he is definitely one of us.
This was a fun read