Nick Cohen has given up on Labour:
The half-educated fanatics are in control now. I do not see how in conscience I can stay with their movement or vote for their party. I am not going to pretend the next time I meet Owen Jones or those Labour politicians who serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet that we are still members of the same happy family. There are differences that cannot and should not be smoothed over.
I realise now what I should have known years ago. The causes I most care about — secularism, freedom of speech, universal human rights — are not their causes. Whatever they pretend, when the crunch comes, they will always put sectarian unity first, and find reasons to be elsewhere.
Pro tip, Nick: They never were their causes. They’re not in the U.S., either. Leftists are not, and never have been, liberals.
[Update a while later]
It’s all enough to make the few traditional leftists among us want to pull their hair out. The broad alliance of cultural Left and corporate Right, which questions none of our economics, has triumphed in our politics—or at least had until Donald Trump came along to question “settled” issues such as mass, often illegal, immigration. The cultural Left favors this because it gradually dissolves the traditional culture, which they despise, while the corporate Right favors it for the cheap labor. Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist, as well as something any Social Justice Warrior can live with.
Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist.For more than a generation we have sorely lacked mainstream contributions from social democrats who seek to make our society better, not destroy it. There ought to be no illusions about what the cultural Left seeks: a full revolution of our society and its history, which they see as benighted by irredeemable racism, sexism, and Old Think. Their opponents are objectively evil and on the “wrong side of history,” as Obama himself has assured us, and they must disappear. “Error has no rights,” the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican formulation, has oddly been adapted by our postmodern Left.
As communists once predicted the state itself would wither away, resulting in complete human freedom and progress, the New Left expects that all traditional societal arrangements will wither away, thereby allowing full human freedom and progress. One offered discipline and order and sometimes gulags; the other offers sexual liberty, anti-racism, and iPhones.
But no purpose.
Reading the article, I get the impression that “Tory, Tory, Tory!” is the Brit-Left equivalent of American “liberals'” use of “Racist, racist, racist!” or the Stupid Left’s use of “Fascist, fascist, fascist!” when encountering pro-freedom dissent. Anything to avoid the effort of rational counter-argument.
“Postmodern capitalism is a least as revolutionary a force as anything cooked up by any Marxist.” No, Marxism isn’t revolutionary at all. Even in theory it’s a secular religion brooking no compromise, in practice it’s old-fashioned tyranny taken to greater extremes than ever.
The thing any lefty who uses their head and opens their eyes might notice that their prescriptions are almost always first tried out in the EU.
And they have almost always failed.
And even though they failed the Lib-Dem-Soccies continue to want to try them. This has been true for, cradle to grave welfare/social programs, single payer health care, open borders, and a host of other prescriptions. The EU has had to backtrack on these things and the Lib-Dem_Soccies plow on ahead regardless. And yes the EU nations are starting to backtrack on single payer health care.
I know I know some of you love to point to Scandinavia as socialist Paradises but they too are crumbling under the weight of their folly.
And now, we see the oft-predicted outcome of open borders – one by one the borders are snapping shut. But not before riots and mayhem.
“Cascading Border Closures Rock Europe”
For decades Conservatism has lectured libs on the folly of most massive government programs and how they are rife with unintended consequences and how you cannot see the future so you make any change very slowly and very incrementally.
Lib-Dem-Soccies always figured they knew better. They still do.
They know nothing. And what they think they know is dangerous.
Witness Europe.
And yet what do Lib-Dem-Soccies in the US want?
Open borders.
Such deadheadedness in the face of actual experience is breathtaking.
You cannot bring tens of millions of people from There to Here all at once without turning Here into There.
Two hundred years ago, even one hundred years ago, There was northern and western Europe, cultures very much like our own, and by and large those people grasped that it behooved them to learn English when as part of making a new start in an English-speaking nation, and so there was little disruption.
Now There is an assortment of the most noisome, corrupt, backward, lawless, ultraviolent Third World pestholes. The results have been immediate, obvious, predicted, and predictable.
Is noticing this “racist?” Is it “racist” to notice that water is wet and the sun rises in the east? Is noticing that this is coincidentally tremendously beneficial to certain powerful groups, who loathe our society and yearn to “fundamentally transform” it, a “conspiracy theory?”