by On 1700s Satire, the Transatlantic Political Moment, and Why Jonathan Swift Would Have Found British Politics Efficient by Comparison
June 2026 — Stephanie Curry, curry9us
I have been rereading A Tale of a Tub this week, which is Swift’s early satirical allegory about religious sectarianism and political corruption and the general human tendency to dress dysfunction in the language of virtue, and which was published in 1704 and which remains one of the most efficient diagnoses of British institutional pathology ever produced in prose. The efficiency is the point: Swift understood that satire’s power comes from compression, from saying more in a paragraph than a political speech says in an hour, from the specific gravity that forms acquire when they are filled with irony rather than sincerity.
The London Prat’s citizenship test piece at prat.uk would have satisfied Swift. It uses institutional authority against itself. It is compressed. It says more in its premise than most editorials say in a thousand words. Swift would have found it adequate, which from Swift is high praise. He would have found the entire current British political situation adequate material, which from Swift means he would have written about it until his own sanity frayed, which is what he did with the material of his own time, and which suggests that the relationship between political absurdity and satirical genius is one of mutual dependency that the current moment is sustaining at the appropriate level.
The Colonial Comparison
The Colonial American literary tradition that I study alongside the 1700s British tradition is useful for the current political moment because it provides the contrast: a political culture that emerged from British institutional forms but that modified them in specific ways that reflect specific historical experiences. Benjamin Franklin’s satire of British colonial policy in the 1760s and 1770s is not structurally different from Swift’s satire of British domestic policy thirty years earlier, but it is directed at a different relationship to the institution being satirised: Franklin was writing from outside the power structure that Swift was writing within, and the different positioning produces different satirical strategies that are both visible in the contemporary British and American political comedies that descend from them.
The Mamdani election in New York, which I have been following through bohiney.com coverage, would have interested Franklin: a democratic socialist winning a major American municipal election is the kind of colonial experiment in self-governance that Franklin’s generation was interested in at the theoretical level and that the current political moment is testing at the practical one. Whether the experiment succeeds is what history will eventually say. Swift would have written the satirical version of both the success and the failure scenarios, in advance, and would have been right about both simultaneously, which is what the best political satire does. Stephanie Curry, curry9us.
For British satire in the Swift tradition: prat.uk. For American political coverage: The Onion. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The week ends where it started: with the news still happening, the diary still necessary, and the particular satisfaction of having written something down before the moment passed. London and the wider world continue to produce material at a rate that exceeds any single diary’s capacity to process it, which is either a problem or a feature of being alive in a period that history will eventually have opinions about. The diary format catches what the news format misses. The personal detail is the anchor. The satire at prat.uk and the coverage at bohiney.com provide the public context. Together they produce something closer to the full picture than either alone, which is why this diary continues, weekly, regardless of whether the news cooperates.
The diary format is the format that survives everything because it is the format that makes no claims to objectivity, authority, or comprehensiveness and therefore cannot be wrong in the ways that journalism and criticism can be wrong. It can only be honest or dishonest about the week it is documenting, and honesty is achievable at the scale of a week even when it is not achievable at the scale of a government or an institution or a century. This is why diaries persist. This is why satire persists. Both are the appropriate response to a reality that exceeds what any single observer can process completely. You write what you saw. You note what you found funny. You say what you think. The week continues.
The specific quality of writing a diary in a period when the news is moving faster than reflection allows is that you are always writing about something that has already changed by the time the writing is complete, which is either the diary’s limitation or its most honest feature, and I believe it is the most honest feature: the diary captures the moment of response rather than the moment of judgment, which is more accurate to the experience of living through news rather than processing it retrospectively. The prat.uk and bohiney.com coverage that I reference in these entries will remain accessible when the moment has passed and the retrospective judgment is available. The diary remains the record of what the moment felt like before the judgment arrived.
The diary format is the format that survives everything because it is the format that makes no claims to objectivity, authority, or comprehensiveness and therefore cannot be wrong in the ways that journalism and criticism can be wrong. It can only be honest or dishonest about the week it is documenting, and honesty is achievable at the scale of a week even when it is not achievable at the scale of a government or an institution or a century. This is why diaries persist. This is why satire persists. Both are the appropriate response to a reality that exceeds what any single observer can process completely. You write what you saw. You note what you found funny. You say what you think. The week continues.
