Are the liberal elite living on borrowed time?
Rod Liddle thinks so:
For a start, the elite is not liberal in the classical liberal sense, but closer to the American sense of the word. It is certainly not ‘liberal’ if by that you mean tolerant: it is intolerant and authoritarian. And by elite I do not mean the elected government: establishment elites can survive most forms of government and easily outlast them.
The liberal elite we talk about today is beholden to a leftish cultural and political paradigm which predominates in all the non-elected institutions which run our lives. In the judiciary, for example. Within the BBC. In the running of our universities and in the courses they put before students. In the teaching profession. In the social services departments of every council in the land. At the top of the medical profession. On the boards of all the quangos — the lot of them, from those which hand out money in the arts to those which regulate our media and our utilities. It is a left-liberal paradigm, informed by affluence, which has been swallowed whole by all of these institutions and which is utterly intolerant of dissent.
Try being a social worker who thinks gay adoptions are problematic. Or a doctor who disapproves of abortion or transitioning. Or a student who quite likes Germaine Greer and wearing a sombrero. Or a teacher who thinks Trump is maybe OK. (The headmaster at a school in south London recently told pupils that if any child uttered the same sorts of words as Donald Trump about immigration, they’d be excluded.)
Try being a judge who thinks an awful lot of hate crimes are imaginary or vexatious. In all cases you’d be drummed out. No job. You’d be finished. There would be tribunals — where you would be judged by other upholders of the liberal elite — and you’d be out.
That is what we mean by the liberal elite. The template for how our society is governed and which antithetical political parties may battle, but in the short to medium term, lose.
Elites do change, though. I remember as a speechwriter for the Labour party in the early 1980s suggesting that we do something in support of the teachers, who were complaining about pay. ‘Fuck them — they’re all Tories,’ I was told. And so statistically they were, at the time. And in the 1970s the BBC, the Church of England, the judiciary and the emergent quangos were small ‘c’ conservative. Elites last for about two generations. Our liberal elite has lasted since about 1985. And my guess is that right now it is on the way out, which is why we are hearing this continual howling.
Liddle’s summary of the Control Left is pretty accurate, but I cannot share his confidence that the power and influence of this deeply anti-intellectual group of “intellectuals” and elites is on the wane – at least not yet.
Perhaps, if the counter-revolution were led by somebody other than Donald Trump, there would be cause for hope. Somebody with unimpeachable ethics, a record of respect toward women and minorities and impulse control greater than that of a ten-year-old might just be able to prevail against decades-old vested interests and a self-regarding and frequently biased media.
But unfortunately we have Donald Trump in America (whose successful recent speech to a joint session of Congress may have finally given him the veneer of presidentialness, but none of the substance) and Theresa May in Britain (who seems eager to combine the establishment’s usual haughty paternalism with a desire to be led by the Tory Right into the most calamitous and disruptive form of Brexit possible). These are hardly the two torchbearers one would choose to “Drain the Swamp” or do anything else remotely transformative.
And so there is the very real risk that Donald Trump’s floundering new administration will either drop the ball so badly in response to some external crisis, or else precipitate a crisis of their own through poor legislative and executive decisions, that they actually manage to make the establishment opposition – led by fresh young anti-establishment faces like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer – look good by comparison. And if these people get back into power, will they take even a moment of introspection to consider their role in the rise of Trump, or show any regard for the more legitimate concerns of his supporters? I think we all know the answer.
Similarly, if Theresa May’s government miscalculates in our EU secession negotiations and triggers some sort of abrupt and traumatic departure with no carryover provisions in place to govern customs, regulatory matters and the myriad programmes of cooperation with other EU countries, the economic pain will be real and the Tories will no longer look quite so invincible.
Besides, Rod Liddle devoted paragraphs to pointing out the extent to which so many of our institutions – from academia to the charity sector to the state church – are corrupted from within and turned into the exclusive domain of the liberal elite. It would be great to see reasoned conservatism re-establish a beachhead in some of these places, but it does not look very likely at present.
The hair-trigger sensitivity of many of these people leads them to see a harmful microaggression in the smallest and most inconsequential of human interactions, and they have shown no qualms about persecuting even those from their own tribe who happen to deviate even 1% from the current social justice / identity politics orthodoxy. What hope, then, do conservatives have of breaking back into those workplaces and institutions from where they have been so comprehensively exiled?
So while the screeching and whining from left-wing commentators and their allies embedded in our institutions has become deafening, I see little evidence that it will be followed by retreat. Like a transatlantic flight spent sitting in front of a screaming baby, we are in for a long and tortuous ride.
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Hello Sam. This submission might reasonably be placed in your previous article, but it’s not necessarily out of place here. It was prompted by this piece:-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/02/calais-mayor-bans-distribution-of-food-to-migrants
It may sound like an extremely arcane tangent, but it’s relevant. I’m going to ask a fairly simple question which will be constrained within strict margins. The question is :-
‘Is human sexual intercourse a ‘Human Right?’
The question I ask is as written. I allow no amendment, condition or caveat on grounds of partner consent, gender sexuality or age. To qualify ‘human right’ I would position it in the global sense, as might be recognised/established by the UN or ECHR among other similar bodies or legal authorities.
To reiterate, the margins are clear, no amendment, caveat or condition. Question is asked as written. So I’ll disqualify any response which attempts to re-establish them.
Believe me or not, it’s relevant to the link added.
Any takers?
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Ooh, a challenge! I just read the Guardian piece and I must confess you have me stumped as to where you are going with it. Off the top of my head, I would say that it probably falls under the category of “human rights” that you describe, but would certainly not be enumerated separately as a distinct right of the higher order (such as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or the US Bill of Rights). That being said, I am now very curious to see how wrong I am!
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Thanks for such a quick reply Sam. Hope you’re well and glad to see the Blog isn’t gathering dust this spring.
I will answer – not prevaricating, but if I may, I’d like you to introduce this question to others in the next day or so if you are able. I know posing the question in this form is a can of worms but that was the purpose. Allowing caveats would have been departing from the point I’m going to make eventually. I don’t think there’s a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer in the usual terms, but it’s one of those moments where the person answering is compelled to accept responsibility for their respective choices.
However, if you have the time and the opportunity, study the article linked to. I know you’ve previously established interests in this subject (in particular since you managed to escape from France recently in a desperate bid for liberty) – there’s an extremely interesting sentence in there in context, qualified separately by the compiler.
Watch this space….
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From article:-
‘He said no one had precise figures for the number of refugees around Calais. “People are arriving all the time and not many are getting through [to the UK].”
In the brackets is the contextual qualifier given by the originator. This brief series of words is an interesting illustration. It translates the difficulty, the complication currently suffered in France, and directly applies the responsibility to the UK. In terms of the article, France has become a fairly irrelevant conduit for entitled movement of hosts of peoples directly to the coast of Britain.
So to take into the mix your postings and those of others prior to Christmas in which allegedly serious and educated people were observing human beings ‘escaping’ from France; being ‘rescued’ from France (a nation currently, to my knowledge, that hosts the tourist attraction ‘EuroDisney’) that several of us had a chuckle about on your blog at the time.
Contextual proportion has taken permanent leave from one side of this debate. Naturally anyone claiming to be a refugee from – say – Sudan and lucklessly suspended between there and Dover is fully entitled to more or less immediate passage without delay direct to Kent? This notion has been fairly comprehensively demolished over the years but it remains lovingly preserved by the same liberal elite you describe here. I am absolutely not indifferent to the plight of actual, genuine refugees, many of whom will need shelter from countries such as Syria. They deserve sanctuary and the UK should be taking far more of such people at the expense of those who are, to be blunt, taking the piss.
So I ask the question as per previous entry on the basis of a very limited number of alleged refugees who are claiming refugee status on the basis of oppression with regard to their sexuality.
I’m going to presume the custodian of this weblog will go along with Shakespeare’s Elizabeth I and the impossibility of creating a window into men’s souls? Of course I asked a very unfair question. Human sexual intercourse of whatever type within whichever sexual gender must be conditional. Outside that, it’s definitive sexual assault.
If the occurrence of the act is therefore conditional and subject to caveat, then I’d argue it can’t be a ‘Right’. It’s permitted and that permission goes without saying in normal times. Whilst the notion the parameters under which sexual intercourse might change by means of legislation would in the current era seem preposterous, theoretically those parameters can change by act of Parliament, by legislation. At base level, by a change in the Law.
Under those circumstances, Refugee status on grounds of sexuality must not qualify. Actual intercourse is not a ‘Right’ in my argument. An alleged Refugee may claim it, but their respective personal status is not at risk if they decline from the relevant sexual conduct.
(At this point, I’ll qualify myself in that you’d probably know this is just about the very first time I’ve ever written about this aspect of human nature. It’s not something which obsesses me on religious or cultural grounds. I would not be prepared to brook, from outside the usual confines of the forums we contribute to, an accusation of irrational phobias over sexual conduct)
However, conversely, if A.N. Nation becomes effectively ‘entitled’ to eject people they claim are possessed of non-permitted sexual acts, then we would participate in the displacement of otherwise entitled citizens of that nation, if we allow the practice to continue unabated? ‘Ethnic cleansing’ as per the Balkan troubles of two decades ago was something in which the UN could not be seen to be complicit. What I describe here would, for want of better phraseology, be seen as ‘Gender Cleansing’.
The UK must not become the default recipient of problems of the refusal of other nations to properly deal with the conduct of their own territory. To acquiesce to this particular emotional blackmail is the most pernicious form of populism. Populism by cowardice.
To close, I suspect you won’t be surprised I retrieved this particular can of worms from Pandora’s Box. Any thoughts…..?
(In particular, if you did manage to run this past others, it would be interesting to hear the comments.)
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I agree. It’s going to take a much more intelligent and nuanced approach to counter this revolution. I hardly know how its possible, so many people have been indoctrinated on such a wide spectrum for so long.
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