At Unherd.com Aris Roussinos is talking about
the total intellectual collapse of Britain’s Conservative Party as a vehicle for Right-wing politics[,] squatting in office to no discernible purpose[.]
The die was already cast in the 1990s when Tony Blair took office. “Blair’s Human Rights Act enshrined progressivism into the state’s essence”. So wokism is now the official culture of Britain and you’d better not put your head above the parapet with “hateful” social media posts.
At American Mind, Carson Holloway notes how the left has curiously changed its spots in the US.
For most of the last two generations the American Left was disposed to be anti-war…
Today’s Left does not think this way. Witness the rush of practically every elected Democrat to support the Biden Administration’s proxy war in Ukraine.
Back in the day,
liberals deployed the term “McCarthyism” as a way of declaring out of bounds any suggestion that those who dissented from America’s Cold War policies were disloyal or unpatriotic.
Today, “labels like ‘Putin’s puppet’ and ‘Putin’s poodle’” are applied to “contemporary critics of the present administration’s policy in Ukraine.” Instead of paranoid suspicion of the CIA, the left is down with the “‘intelligence community’ who leak or manufacture claims intended to smear Trump or his allies.” Holloway thinks the difference is that liberals are no longer Christians, but conservatives are.
I don’t agree. I think that, back in the day, the left felt like outsiders, raiders assaulting the fortress of western culture. Thus for them the enemy was the old ways and old institutions. But today leftists instinctively feel that they are the defenders of the regime — their regime. This means that the left no longer feels itself storming the castle of the old ways, but defending the fortress that they have built over the last century.
On the other hand, conservatives of the old style are confused and demoralized. The Tories in Britain and the old “country club” Republican Party in the US just don’t know what to do.
I don’t quite know what is wrong with these two commentators, because the answer to the problem is obvious.
Here’s the current YouGov poll in Britain. It has Labour on 44%, Conservatives on 19% and Reform, the populist nationalist party, on 15%.
Here in the US we are a bit in front of the Brits, because the populist nationalist Trump has already taken over the Republican Party.
How to understand what is happening? I have written in the last week about how the GOP and the Tories in the last century have been the party of Mr. Brooke of Middlemarch. They were centered around the problem of the left “going too far.”
Today, obviously, the ordinary middle class is beyond the hesitation of Mr. Brooke. We experience the ruling class, in its woke version or its conservative Mr. Brooke version, as the problem. We understand that there can be no peace until the old conservatism is replaced and wokism is defeated
But, obviously, we have a problem, the problem of Gramsci’s famous “march through the institutions.” Wokism runs everything. That’s why our lefty friends are so relaxed about the intelligence community. It works for them now.
Is there any hope?
I think so. I think that the problem with our woke ruling class is that, as with any politics, it must have an enemy to fight. One enemy is the ordinary middle class; another enemy is the existential horror of climate change.
I think that climate change is the bridge too far. They would be better advised battling ghosts and monsters. But climate change is going to wreck the economy. Hello Stalin, hello Mao.
Here’s an idea. The wise ruler knows that the only thing that politics can do to the economy is to screw it up. Want to stay in power? Let the economy do its thing with the minimum of interference from the political sector.
But no ruler can keep his hands off the economy, because the first priority is to gift his friends and supporters with Ten Percent for the Big Guy. And so, from time to time, ordinary folk realize that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark. And pretty soon there is a regime change, hopefully without a butcher’s bill.