LeftWatch

General Election 2019: Results & Analysis Live Blog

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

General election 2019 - Boris Johnson - Jeremy Corbyn - Jo Swinson

 

13 December – 6:03AM

I  have mostly moved over to Twitter for the remainder of my election night results commentary, so for now will leave you with this:

 

In due course I will try to write something about what this election result means for Brexit, for the Union and for the future of conservatism – as the British political realignment takes another giant step forward.

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13 December – 2:22AM – Labour Civil War, #2

 

I’m inclined to agree that this is the best course of action from a Labour Party perspective (though notably it means contesting exactly the same new ground that the Tories are trying to claim as their own). However, the unrepentant centrists within Labour will doubtless try to use Corbyn’s failure to shoehorn their way back into power and influence, despite having learned nothing from their past failures.

I’ll say it again: Jeremy Corbyn’s tolerance of antisemitism, agnosticism on Brexit and overall bad leadership does not magically erase the past sins of the Labour centrists, who presided over the broken old political consensus which finally received its coup-de-grace with today’s general election.

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13 December – 1:50AM

Hot take analysis – Whither Scotland?

 

The SNP government in Holyrood has been a never-ending catalogue of incompetence and failure, yet in their eternal wisdom Scottish voters seem to have returned a huge caucus of SNP MPs to Westminster. This will only increase pressure for another independence referendum and cement Scotland’s position as a failing one-party member state of the UK.

I’m inclined to say that we should give Nicola Sturgeon her second Scottish referendum, even though it would be an unjustified repeat of 2014 pushed for by sore losers. This time, Scottish nationalists will have  to make the case for independence as a small country outside both the UK and the EU, plaintively applying for readmittance to the European Union on unfavorable terms. They would have to adopt the Euro and likely Schengen, which would create a whole host of delicious problems that would make the Northern Ireland Brexit issues look simple by comparison. Perhaps, unlike last time, the separatists would push for independence without publishing a plan of the kind which was so mercilessly dissected by the media and unionists in 2014, running instead on vague phrases and platitudes. Maybe they could print some lies on the side of a campaign bus.

I think that Scottish nationalists would lose another referendum by a wider margin than last time. Ultimately, the SNP has never been able to make a non-partisan case for independence. The whole thing is bound up closely in anti-Tory and anti-English hatred, and has never been an inclusive movement capable of taking onboard Scottish conservatives and others. Nicola Sturgeon’s entire schtick is that the UK is an evil right-wing dystopia that Scotland needs to escape, making it impossible for her to reach out to her centre-right countrymen. And assuming that the UK leaves the EU without suffering major economic disruption in the short term, Scottish independence well and truly becomes the reckless departure from the stable status quo, versus remaining in a closely integrated political union with the rest of the UK.

And let’s not forget the Russians! It’s clear that Vladimir Putin and all of our geopolitical foes would rejoice at the breakup of the UK, the diminishment of our union and the potential threat to the continuity of the UK’s nuclear deterrent (given that our ballistic submarine fleet are based in Faslane, Scotland). Why then should Scottish unionists or the rest of the UK accept a referendum loss, in the unlikely event that the nationalists win? Why would they not simply wage a campaign of obstruction, as Continuity Remainers did with Brexit? Why would they not scream “Russian interference!”, which will certainly be attempted in any referendum on behalf of the nationalists, even if it does not succeed in making a material difference? All of the anti-Brexit arguments and Continuity Remainer hysteria deployed by the SNP will be turned round 180 degrees and fired straight back at Nicola Sturgeon if she attempts to force Scotland out of the UK.

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13 December – 12:19AM

Hot take analysis – Whither identity politics?

The British progressive left have gone all-in on importing a US-style identity politics culture war into Britain, from embracing every last aspect of avant-garde gender theory to adopting awkward terms such as “people of color”, carefully noting their pronouns and generally bowing down to what comedian Dave Chapelle termed the “alphabet people”.

Doing so made perfect sense to urban progressives with international social networks, all of whom now speak a political language barely comprehensible to anyone else (or even their past selves from as little as a decade ago). But has this embrace of hardcore identity politics and the politics of perpetual victimhood also helped to sow the seeds of progressive defeat in this election?

Recall, Jo Swinson famously stumbled as she attempted to give a definition of “woman” in a radio interview the other day. She and her Liberal Democrat colleagues have gone all-in on progressive identity politics, with its painfully stilted nomenclature and unforgiving cancel culture. Now, multiple sources suggest that Jo Swinson is in danger of losing her seat.

Does all of this go some way to suggesting a “common sense” repudiation of divisive progressive identity politics in Britain? Perhaps. But one scarcely hopes to dream that this represents the high water mark of the identity politics movement, whose activists generally take defeat as a sign that they need to double down rather than question their direction.

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12 December – 11:58PM

Hot take analysis – Labour civil war

Okay, so what is likely to become of Labour, if the final result conforms anywhere close to the exit poll? Clearly it will spell the end for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but what comes next? Corbyn and his supporters have been working away for several years to broaden and cement their control of the Labour Party machinery and governing apparatus, in addition to which it seems unlikely that their defeated activists are likely to throw their hands up in the air and disown the hard-left platform on which they ran. So what prospects of Labour centrists retaking control of the party? And would this even be desirable?

From my perspective, it would be something of a tragedy if Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous election allowed discredited Labour centrists to retake the party and waltz back in to power and influence having really done nothing to earn the privilege in terms of having updated their thinking or atoned for their past sins which led to the rise of Corbyn in the first place. Yet there is a real chance that the British electorate’s rightful rejection of Jeremy Corbyn (likely due in no small part to horror at Corbynite antisemitism) will allow that ghastly band of Labour centrists and machine politicians – people who more than anyone represent the old pro-EU political consensus which has now been rejected in multiple elections – to claim vindication.

Already we see two competing narratives start to form as talking heads spin their stories on the news networks. One story (pushed by a stone-faced John McDonnell) is that Labour’s disastrous result is about their opposition to Brexit, pure and simple, and in no way a verdict of the party’s otherwise hard left turn:

 

But the other story is that the Brexit agnosticism / Remainerism preferred by the centrists is A-OK, and that Labour’s defeat rests entirely on Corbyn’s shoulders. Which of these stories gains the upper hand and becomes the Official Narrative will go a long way toward determining who takes over from Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, and the nature of opposition to Boris Johnson’s Conservative government.

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12 December – 11:35PM

Conservative Victory Catastrophization Watch, #2:

 

Until progressives and Continuity Remainers learn to at least hide their outright hatred for half the country (there’s no point expecting such extremists to ever actually think better of their fellow citizens, but at least they might try pretending) they will continue to suffer electoral setback after electoral setback – and ever see them coming until the votes are counted.

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12 December – 11:11PM

Conservative Victory Catastrophization Watch, #1:

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12 December – 11:07PM

A poll for you all to consider:

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12 December – 10:31PM

On economics and identity:

 

The old truism seems to be proved correct once again.

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12 December – 10:27PM

And now, a moment of schadenfreude

Gosh. It’s almost as though spending three years:

  • fighting a furious rearguard action against the result of a democratic referendum which everybody previously promised to respect
  • pretending that a very milquetoast, centrist Tory party was somehow analogous to the rise of Hitler and Nazism
  • repeatedly tolerating the cancer of antisemitism and allowing antisemites safe harbor in the Labour Party
  • embracing every virtue-signaling, low-intellect celebrity endorsement that Twitter could amplify
  • acting as though one has a monopoly on compassion, virtue and reason

are a terrible formula for electoral success. Who could possibly have predicted that embracing a campaign of being utterly insufferable might fail to persuade many of the same people whose votes you needed but just could stop insulting for three long years?

Continuity Remainers in Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP – enjoy the fruits of your labour. The frustration and sorrow you doubtless feel is richly, richly deserved.

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12 December – 10:00PM – EXIT POLL RELEASED

At some point you just need to pick a direction, set a course of action and follow through on it. If the exit poll is remotely correct and the Tories are heading for a majority of around 86, then Britain can take at least one step forward in a roughly discernible direction rather than shuffling round on the spot with our ankles tied together.

Also, it’s worth noting that political parties hardly ever successfully renew themselves while in government – partly because the biggest majority comes first time round, followed by a tacking back toward the centre as the majority is threatened and chipped away in subsequent elections. But while the Tories certainly have not shown any real policy ambition during the course of the election campaign, might a solid majority and the political assurance that it brings be the shot in the arm that they need?

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12 December – 9:43PM

We get the politicians we deserve

One of the themes of this election has been the unpalatable choice of leadership options – both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn being hugely flawed, often unlikeable and polarizing individuals. But rather than bemoaning the poor choice before us, maybe we need to look closer to home. We continue to reward these individuals with our votes, make excuses for their failings, believe the best of them in light of all available evidence to the contrary, and cheer them on with our social media accounts. But do we also effectively demand that politicians lie to us, before hypocritically complaining when they do so?

Paul Goldsmith advances the argument:

I will leave you with these two thoughts…imagine if Boris Johnson told millions of Leave voters the exact risks of both his deal and a possible No Deal Brexit over the next few years…imagine if Jeremy Corbyn told voters that it is very possible that people other than the top 5% of income earners would have to pay more tax, or future generations pay off more debt, to afford his policies…would they win elections? No.

We know this because the one time this was tried..by Theresa May in 2017, who, thinking she would win a massive majority, attempted to address some serious issues such as social care and tried to remove the ‘triple lock’ on pensions and refused to promise no tax rises. She lost the Conservatives’ majority.

Politicians lie because voters don’t want to hear the truth, and until we wake up to our responsibility for that, we deserve the politicians we get.

Many people in both the pro- and anti-Brexit camps have no interest in examining their simplistic “buccaneering Global Britain” or “friendship ‘n cooperation with Europe” tropes, choosing instead to believe that leaving the EU is an end in itself or that remaining in the EU by overruling the 2016 referendum result is okay because the EU is either fine or can be magically fixed on a whim, and that doing so will have no negative consequences.

Even those of us who claim to want smaller government tend to squeal a lot when the bits of government activity we actually like are suggested for a trim. And hardly anyone seems willing to peel back the embarrassing Cult of the NHS, that last remaining bastion of blinkered British exceptionalism, which insists that our healthcare service is the envy of the world (yet strangely not copied by any other nation on Earth) and also perpetually on the brink of collapse.

We demand exponential improvement across a whole range of areas, but are unwilling to tolerate any real disruption or change to achieve it. In these circumstances, do we not actively incentivize politicians to lie to us, telling us that we can have everything on our wish list for free, and that the only thing currently preventing us from having them is a lack of imagination or belief in whatever Utopian idea is being peddled?

Given all of this, it is probably fair to say that we have the politicians we deserve. And when the votes are all counted, I imagine that whoever we put into 10 Downing Street will also be richly deserved.

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12 December – 9:21PM

Prediction

Not much point in making a prediction at this point, other than to be proved laughably wrong in 40 minutes’ time, but if pressed I would predict a small-to-modest Tory majority, probably enough to get Boris Johnson’s Brexit “deal” over the line but with the tiresome rainbow alliance of progressive parties continuing to act as an effective obstruction to anything but the blandest and most non-controversial domestic legislation.

I hope I am wrong, and that the Tories secure a more robust working majority – not because I admire Boris Johnson or much like the present incarnation of the Conservative party (getting Brexit done and unleashing Britain’s potential is not a programme for government or an effective diagnosis of our national challenges) but because the alternative of another hung parliament and enfeebled minority or coalition government is worse. Britain has been drifting – on domestic policy, geopolitically and every other way – since 2016, and at some point it is necessary to stop arguing, pick a direction, commit to a course of action and let the consequences (rather than outrage on social media) shape the next steps.

Not that I expect it to happen happen, but if Jeremy Corbyn were to somehow become prime minister I believe that while it would be bad domestically and awful for our international standing and national security, the more radical parts of his domestic agenda (on taxation, nationalization and so forth) would be largely fought to a standstill by obstructive centrist forces fighting a rearguard action. Lord knows that they have honed their skills in this regard, doggedly holding up Brexit since 2016.

In such an unfortunate scenario, Labour’s appalling tolerance of antisemitism would likely continue unabated, and while this would be unimaginably worrying for Britain’s Jewish community and an appalling indictment of the Left in general, Labour’s anti-Jewish animus would likewise fail to translate into any kind of government policy thanks to the forces of restraint and moderation described above.

Anyhow, 30 minutes to go now. Let’s see just how wrong I am.

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12 December – 8:39PM

Welcome!

Welcome to this live blog of the 2019 UK winter general election results. Yes, for some inexplicable reason I have decided to come out of blogging semi-retirement to offer semi-partisan hot takes on developments as they occur tonight and tomorrow morning.

I’m sure I will quickly come to regret this decision and/or give up half way through. However, I intend to keep going for as long as things remain interesting and there are still issues and arguments to dissect, advance and rebut. If things die down on here, I’m probably still ranting away on Twitter @SamHooper.

Please feel free to share your thoughts using the Comments feature, by emailing me at semipartisansam@gmail.com or engaging with me on Twitter @SamHooper.

 

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Don’t Expect The Independent Group To Rescue Britain’s Broken Politics

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Antichrist - end of the world

Chuka Umunna? Former choirboy, but most definitely not the Messiah…

In my limited spare time since commencing law school, I have been attending a wonderful Bible study group for graduate students, organized by the university’s Catholic Student Center. Having plodded our way methodically through the New Testament, last week we reached the Book of Revelation and alighted on the topic of the Antichrist – antichrists being false prophets preaching a deceptive gospel, and also a specific figure cloaked in seeming holiness and authority, whose arrival would presage the second coming of Christ.

In other, totally unrelated news, British politics seems to have been roiled in my absence by the defection of eight Labour and three Conservative MPs from their respective parties to form a flashy new association called The Independent Group. In selecting a spokesperson for their group, the breakaway MPs nominated Chuka Umunna, the ex-Labour politician best known for describing himself as Britain’s Barack Obama. As we shall see, this was a revealing choice – elevating a man who models himself on the US president who promised hope and change, delivered the former in spades back in 2008 but so little of the latter by 2016 that the people elected Donald Trump as his successor.

The cast list of TIGgers (yes, they actually call themselves that) on the ex-Labour side is a veritable who’s who of frustrated New Labourite centrists whose slick career ambitions have been put into stasis since Jeremy Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour Party and wholesale rejection of the Blairite/Brownite technocratic tendency (though some credit must be given to MPs such as Luciana Berger, who also had cause to flee the appalling, metastasizing antisemitism within Corbyn’s hard left faction). On the ex-Tory side, we have the likes of Sarah Wollaston and Anna Soubry, politicians whom one would never have guessed to be conservative in the first place but for the fact that they campaigned wearing a blue rosette during general election season.

The TIGgers had a number of justifications for their decision to leave their former parties (though notably, none had the courage to call a by-election and allow their constituents to positively affirm their presence in Parliament under a new party affiliation). Those coming from the Labour Party repeatedly stressed the antisemitism continually exhibited by those close to Jeremy Corbyn and tolerated by the Labour leadership, though their claims that it was the deciding factor fail the credibility test since antisemitism on the hard left and ultra-progressive wings of the Labour Party is hardly a new and surprising issue. More telling is ex-Labour Mike Gapes’ bitter complaint that “the Labour leadership is complicit in facilitating Brexit” – the idea that the Labour Party might support a policy popular among the party’s traditional voter base being too much for him to comprehend. Meanwhile, ex-Tory MPs like Anna Soubry complained about prime minister Theresa May’s dogged approach to Brexit and what they called the party’s reliance on the Hard Brexit fundamentalist ERG group of MPs and a takeover of the party by “right-wing, hard line anti-EU” forces.

All of this was covered portentously and near-reverentially by a Westminster journalistic class who tend to jump at any opportunity to breathlessly report on personalities instead of policy (the details of Brexit still eluding many of them) and which is near-uniformly progressive in socio-economic ideology and stridently anti-Brexit in particular. Thus we were treated to gushing hot takes by the likes of ex-PM Tony Blair (“embrace the spirit of insurgency!“), a Guardian journalist overcome with admiration as these courageous rebels dined at Nando’s, The Scotsman (which swats away inconvenient observations such as the fact that “they have no vision, coherent policy platform or leader”) and readers of the hateful EU propaganda rag The New European, who are desperate for the TIGgers not to subject themselves to by-elections and the indignity of seeking democratic approval of their party betrayal.

Naturally, all of this praise has gone to the TIGgers’ heads, and what started as an act of pure political calculation has now become in their minds an almost heroic declaration of political independence and bold purpose. Hence self-aggrandizing pronouncements such as this:

Heidi Allen thinks that “the two big parties [are] demonstrating more and more every day that they are not up to the challenges facing our country”. This is the same Heidi Allen who campaigned under the Conservative Party banner without a whisper of complaint in 2015 and 2017, maneuvering hard to get that coveted initial constituency selection in the first place.

And here is The Independent Group’s London branch, acting as though it is an oasis of reason in a desert of conformist thinking:

You would think that a brand new political party – a group whose ranks are filled with MPs who had the supposed “courage” to quit their parties and risk the wrath of their constituents because of their overriding concern about the country’s direction – would be positively fizzing with alternative policy ideas and solutions to the national problems they quietly tracked for so long before making their big move. You would be wrong.

But that’s fine. Maybe TIG is understandably reticent to commit themselves by announcing headline policies at this early stage, while they are still trying to woo other potential defectors and grow in strength. We should, though, still be able to parse a sense of what this radical new party stands for by analyzing the famous speeches and policy initiatives of its star members, right? “Oh, Bob? He’s the one who wants to create a network of community colleges to retrain people whose old careers are under threat from globalization and automation.” “Rachel? Isn’t she the one who called for a national Apollo Program for education, criticizing Britain for shooting for the middle with education outcomes and exhorting us to catch up with world leaders like South Korea and Finland?” “Rupert has a great plan for constitutional reform to bring government closer to the people and make leaders more accountable”. “Ayesha actually had the courage to reject calls for her to post a public love-letter to the NHS on Valentine’s Day, saying that we need to stop deifying the healthcare service and look to other countries for examples of best practice”.

Again, tumbleweeds. The British political firmament as a whole is hardly blessed with a multitude of bold, original thinkers, and such figures certainly aren’t among the fabulous seven, the daring eleven or whatever number of forgettable non-entities currently comprise The Independent Group.

All of which is a great pity. As this blog has noted over and over and over and over and over and  over again, Britain has entered a period of political discontinuity – a time when the existing political settlement, with its narrow range of policy options, are no longer adequate to the challenges at hand. Such periods of discontinuity require politicians to think the previously unthinkable in terms of policy solutions, not to flee their former political parties in an outrage that people are actually starting to do so.

As described in the influential Stepping Stones report:

In normal times a majority is enough. The task of government is to steer a basically healthy socio-economic system past hazards which are primarily external, while ensuring that the system’s fabric is maintained and making improvements to it here and there.

But once the system itself starts to show signs of fatigue, instability, disintegration, then we start to talk of discontinuity. In discontinuity, solutions can only be found by breaking constraints which we had assumed were unbreakable. It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.

So what is The Independent Group’s grand unified theory for fixing Britain? Besides thwarting Brexit, they don’t have one. But they did roll out their very first policy initiative with tremendous fanfare:

Today we launched a petition calling for an end to the Government’s four-year freeze on working age benefits. Ending the freeze on working age benefits would lift 200,000 people – who are working, but struggling to make ends meet – out of poverty.

We believe that all policy should be evidence-based, especially when that policy affects some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

There’s no reason to persist with the final year of the freeze, especially when the past three years significantly exceeded the savings originally envisaged.

Is this the best that the courageous breakaway radical thinkers of British politics can do -a feel-good policy about relaxing benefit freezes? As part of a broader overhaul of welfare policy, this may indeed be a valid and “evidence-based” approach. But The Independent Group have not conducted any such broader review of the welfare system; they simply cherry-picked the low-hanging policy fruit designed to appeal to middle income swing voters, without any consideration of the knock-on effects on public finances, incentives to work or anything else. There’s certainly no bold leadership here, no telling difficult truths to the public about necessary trade-offs in public spending.

Indeed, The Independent Group will not be able to formulate meaningful policy on any number of issues, welfare included, being comprised of defector MPs from opposite parties with different views on the subject. If the party is to survive for any length of time, it would have to strike a balance between the ex-Labour and ex-Tory factions, and would likely produce policies almost identical to any government or opposition which sought to woo the same swing voters by meeting them where they are (rather than doing the much harder – but necessary – job of convincing them that they, too, need to update their thinking about what is both desirable and politically feasible).

Contra Heidi Allen’s complaint that the two main parties are “not up to the challenges facing our country”, The Independent Group exists precisely because the two main parties were captured by forces which seek to overturn the “old established politics” – Labour by the Corbynites with their faith in 1970s-style, red-blooded socialism and the Tories by the ultra free trade zealots of the ERG (though on non-Brexit matters, the Tory Party remains as uninspiringly centrist and authoritarian as it ever was – a fact which Anna Soubry and Sarah Wollaston should have valued, given the fact that they emblemize that sentiment within the party). The two big parties may not yet be responding to this period of discontinuity the right way, but both are shifting their thinking. It is The Independent Group who seek to stand athwart history, yelling “stop!”.

These are not People of Action, bristling at the stultifying ideological confines of their former parties. Rather, they are Captains of Inaction, career machine politicians who thrived on the Old Politics – that comforting bygone era when New Labour would be nanny statist and indulge centre-left interventionist tendencies as the Tories accused them of socialism on steroids, while the Tories would be ever so slightly less nanny statist and interventionist as Labour screamed that they were a libertarian Ayn Rand dystopian outfit made flesh.

However much they may strut and preen, the TIGger MPs are not frustrated free thinkers yearning to push the boundaries of the Overton Window in British politics or advocate for daring new solutions to the problems we face in the early 21st century – they are establishment refugees seeking a lifeboat to take them back to the New Labour, centrist consensus of the 1990s and 2000s. The root of their discontent is not the fact that British politics has become stale and conformist – their anger stems from the fact that the two main political parties have reacted to voter dissatisfaction by moving in direction which reduces their own personal influence (and/or hopes of future high office).

Pete North, welcoming what he sees as the death of centrism, puts it better than me:

Progressivism (whatever that actually means) has become a byword for sanitised cellophane wrapped politics which produces the androgynous clones like Chuka Umunna designed for maximum media inoffensiveness. Like Ken dolls one wonders if these people even possess genitalia. The political version of morning TV magazine show presenters. And as repellent as they are, these people don’t actually know anything.

This much has been made abundantly clear during the course of Brexit. They have no idea why we voted to leave, and no idea how we got where we are, or indeed how to get ourselves out of it. Instead of seeking to understand what is upon us, they have invested all of their energies into sweeping Brexit under the carpet with a view to going back to their consequence free normality where they soak up media attention but take on none of the responsibilities and obligations.

It is telling that the new Independent Group have elected to promote themselves on a handful of recycled populist slogans. They speak of a “different way of doing things” under the “ChangePolitics” hashtag, with all the self-awareness of a diarrhetic hippo. Chris Leslie in all seriousness went on BBC Question Time to tell us “The big political parties want to keep everything as it is” when this bunch are the very essence of the establishment – the rotting corpse of centrism.

Frustration with Britain’s dysfunctional politics is quite understandable, and the growing realization that something has broken beyond repair is encouraging to witness. But to see in the cast of The Independent Group anything resembling salvation from our problems is to put one’s faith in a false prophet.

The politicians who made headlines by flouncing out of their respective political parties aren’t preaching a bold new gospel which the country can get behind. They aren’t currently preaching a message of any kind at all, beyond a furious opposition to Brexit and the inchoate yearning for a return to the time when uttering bland platitudes about Tory heartlessness or Labour profligacy was all it took to sustain one’s political career. If anything, these are avowedly Old Testament politicians, furious with incomprehension that their message no longer resonates in New Testament Britain.

As a general rule of life, it it looks too good to be true, it probably is. The Independent Group doesn’t even manage to look good on cursory examination, but even if one finds oneself falling for their polished Twitter hashtags about changing politics, the point remains that given the rather pitiful raw material at their disposal, The Independent Group’s promise of political renewal is indeed too good to be true – no matter how strongly one wishes that Chuka Umunna and his unlikely gang were the real deal.

 

Antichrist

The Independent Group

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Leftist Shaming Of Conservative White Women Is Anti-Feminist

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

White women vote for Donald Trump - US midterms 2018

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Some women fail to vote for progressive candidates because they happen to be conservatives. Accusing them of acting against their own self-interest — or at the behest of the “white supremacist patriarchy” — is offensive, condescending and presupposes that women should vote based on a more limited palette of issues than men

The US midterms brought some results which were fairly encouraging for Democrats, but also a number of prominent disappointments – charismatic longshot Beto O’Rourke’s failure to unseat Senator Ted Cruz in Texas, the likely failure of Democrats to win senate and gubernatorial races in Florida and disappointment in Georgia.

And predictably enough, the crazy wing of the progressive left know exactly who to blame for these setbacks: traitorous white women who sucked up to their fascist overlords by voting for conservative candidates.

No, seriously:

You see, these white women voted for the “wrong” candidate. Because in the dystopian world inhabited by the Women’s March and others, there is only one allowable political opinion, and all women must vote in a bloc for that option. This might strike you as not being quite what the American founders intended, or what should happen in any healthy democracy for that matter – but nonetheless, the 59% of white women who voted for Ted Cruz are thought criminals, gender traitors and must be publicly shamed before being reeducated.

Telling an entire class of people that “there’s a lot of work to do, white women. A lot of learning. A lot of growing” is incredibly condescending. In fact, the language brings to mind the scolding comment a parent might make to a misbehaving child, not the kind of rhetoric which has ever persuaded a grown adult to change their mind on a given issue ever in the course of human history.

But it turns out that the Women’s March are positively respectful and restrained compared to some other activists:

Charming. Katie Herzog of The Stranger analyses the impetus behind these angry expressions of incomprehension:

While I understand the impulse to blame anonymous populations for our problems and defeats, it’s not hard to see why people bristle at this kind of message. Blaming white women for not electing Democrats is based on the false presumption that white women are a homogenous population, that we are all supposed to be allies for the great feminist cause.

[..] White women are not a monolith. We don’t all know each other. We don’t all go to the same church or yoga class. Some of us, in fact, don’t go to church or yoga at all. White women, like all populations, are a large, unwieldy group made up of individuals with an array of concerns and values, and less than half (48 percent) of white women lean Democratic. The fact that conservative women voted for Republican candidates should be no more surprising than the fact that liberal women voted for Dems, regardless of their race.

[..] As the election results in Missouri, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere show, plenty of white women reject the idea they should vote Democratic just because they are women. They don’t feel like “foot soldiers of the patriarchy,” as feminist Mona Eltahawy put it, and I’m guessing plenty of them don’t even believe in the patriarchy at all. They’re not going to change their votes because progressives they’ve never met think they have some kind of obligation to vote for Democrats because of their double-x chromosome.

Exactly so. Maybe, just maybe, some women voted Republican because they are more than the sum of their reproductive organs, the sexual harassment they may or may not have experienced, their alleged brainwashing by the patriarchy or any other identity politics wedge issues. Maybe, just maybe, the white women being so sanctimoniously lectured by  the woke brigade are human beings and American citizens who base their votes on a variety of factors, just the same as everyone else.

Yet the progressive identity politics brigade would have it be otherwise. Foreign policy, fiscal policy, education and trade? Not the concern of womenfolk, apparently. Civil liberties, free speech, science and innovation, religious freedom, church and state? Don’t worry your pretty little minds about any of those complicated issues, ladies, they’re above your pay grade. Just vote for the party that keeps banging on about your genitalia and reproductive organs.

We see exactly the same phenomenon in Britain, with the establishment Remainers trying to thwart Brexit increasingly resorting to panicked cries that leaving the European Union is a plot of the patriarchy designed to “hurt women”, and should thus be opposed on feminist grounds. Continuity Remainers (those who want to overturn or disregard the result of the 2016 referendum) arrive at this conclusion by creating a tenuous logical chain in which they assert without evidence that Britain’s attitudes and laws concerning women’s rights will revert to Victorian standards upon severance from Brussels, and that Brexit will inevitably lead to a recession which would decrease government tax revenues, which would automatically result in spending cuts which would automatically fall on those elements of the welfare state on which women disproportionately rely.

Again, there is zero expectation that women might support Brexit for the same reason that motivates male Leave voters, be it arguments about democracy, governance, self-determination or immigration. No, Remainers reduce women to the role of passive consumers of government services who should be expected to vote according to whatever they are told is in their material short-term interest rather than entertaining any highfalutin notions about what is best for the future of the country as a whole. This is an incredibly paternalistic argument – one, in fact, which would not have been out of place in Victorian society. But today we hear these sentiments openly and proudly expressed by leading politicians, celebrities and activists agitating to keep Britain a member of the European Union.

Given the degree to which the Republican Party has not only made its peace with Trumpism but (with very few exceptions) cravenly failed to stand up to or condemn the president’s worst excesses, I would have had trouble voting for any candidate with (R) next to their name this election cycle. But unlike the Women’s March and other prominent voices of progressive wokeness, I believe that the white women who did vote Republican in the midterms did so after engaging in the same kind of civic thought process as any other American citizen. I would not be so arrogant to assume that they are brainwashed by the patriarchy or seeking to lord their first-among-second-class-citizen status over women of other ethnicities.

Moreover, haranguing and abusing women for failing to vote the “correct” way its about as strategically sensible as a car salesman reacting to a wavering customer by running out of the showroom after them, yelling abuse and insults, and telling them to bone up on their automobile knowledge before daring to set foot in his dealership ever again.

Herzog goes on to explain the blatantly counterproductive nature of responding to the fact that conservative women vote for conservative candidates by shouting at them:

There are reasons not to blindly shout about “white women” when you’re pissed about the outcome of the election. For one, why the hell aren’t you shouting at white men? They vote for Republicans at even higher rates than white women. This women-blaming rhetoric reeks of misogyny, which may be ironic considering it comes primarily from progressive women. Regardless, it won’t fix anything. The way to win races is to actually appeal to voters (or to suppress them), and the only way to appeal to voters is to either try and change their opinion (and good luck with that) or to meet them where they already stand.

[..] Blaming and shaming conservative white women will not win elections. If Democrats want to win this population over, they need to find a message that actually appeals to them, and faraway progressives screaming “white women do better” is not it.

Yet this seems to be the primary strategy right now:

It’s hard to see how New York Magazine writer Hillary Kelly’s plan to “drive [her] ass down there next election and personally talk to as many of these fools as possible” can fail, given that she clearly intends to meet with them on a basis of mutual respect.

The mind struggles to comprehend how anybody – let alone people who consider themselves part of the cognitive and moral elite – could possibly still think, after all the evidence of 2016-2018, that haranguing people, criticizing and shaming them will somehow make them see the error of their ways and turn them into fellow woke progressives.

But self-flagellation has become such a big part of the required performative routine for the progressive left – witness the endless seminars and university courses popping up, focusing on how to deal with one’s “internalized white supremacy” – that the true believers have apparently forgotten that the rest of us are not whipped into waves of ecstasy by being told how evil, oppressive and stupid we are.

Intersectional identity politics ruins everything. It forces us to focus on what distinguishes and divides us from one another rather than that which unites us – which is slow-motion suicide in a multiethnic democracy like America. As an academic concept, intersectionality undoubtedly has its uses as an analytical framework, but for an increasing number of activists it has become the only lens through which they view the world. For these people, everything is now seen in terms of personal identity, and everyone is judged according to where they fall on the oppressor/oppressed matrix.

Strong electoral mandates, however, are won by building a positive and forward-looking vision which everyone can get behind regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And if you want to build that coalition, the very worst thing you can do is expend the bulk of your energy making well over half the country feel bad and/or guilty about inherent personal characteristics which they did not choose, cannot change and have no reason to apologize or be ashamed.

If progressives do not learn this lesson rapidly and disown the intersectional extremists who are willing to tear apart society’s fabric in the name of their ideology, they risk defeat after electoral defeat. And given their reckless behavior and toxic agenda this might be quite satisfying to behold, but for the fact that they will drag the entire country down with them.

 

UPDATE: 9 November

There is undoubtedly some validity to the claim that historically speaking, the feminist movement was largely led by heterosexual white women to the exclusion of gay women and ethnic minorities, and though this is hardly surprising given that white people were the majority, a degree of resentment is perhaps understandable. The solution is to be more inclusive in the future without fixating on past wrongs which cannot be changed. But recasting white women as Vichy-style collaborators in female oppression will only drive more and more women away from the movement; and meanwhile, the rest of the country looks on with revulsion while this most self-obsessed of revolutions busily eats its own.

 

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The Mainstream Media May Be The Worst Enemy Of The Resistance

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The hand-in-glove partnership between the mainstream media and the progressive “Resistance” may pay dividends in the midterms – but if so, it will likely also be their undoing in 2020

Here is CNN’s Don Lemon calling white men the greatest terrorist risk to the United States live on air last week – moments after sanctimoniously calling for an end to divisiveness or demonizing certain groups, and all without a hint of irony.

Don Lemon is not an Op-Ed contributor to CNN. He is not marketed as a fire-breathing Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham character; no, Don Lemon puts himself forward as a news anchor on a supposedly objective cable news network. And yet here he is, saying in the aftermath of the recent horrific mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh:

We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban – you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban. So what do we do about that?

This is the kind of social justice and identity politics bilge which just a few years ago was uttered only by screechy protesters on liberal arts college campuses as they protested about Halloween costumes or some other “genocidal” attack on their feelings. Yet now in 2018 these exact same sentiments, once the province of fringe lunatic academics in the pseudo-social sciences, now emerge from the mouth of one of America’s leading television news personalities.

Here is that same network’s star White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, goading the Trump administration with his sassy little take on the ability of the president to bring about sweeping constitutional changes to birthright citizenship by executive order:

 

You’ll note that no such tweets accompanied any of the sweeping Obama executive orders relating to immigration or any other matter, presumably because Acosta either agreed with them or just hadn’t read his pocket Constitution at that point.

And here is Jim Acosta again, tweeting the famous lines from the poem “The New Colossus” affixed to the Statue of Liberty, following a highly choreographed confrontation in the White House press briefing room last year in which the CNN White House Correspondent forgot for a moment that he is supposed to be a reporter and not a student activist:

 

Switching networks for a moment, here is the banner image recently used by the NBC news Twitter account – an image of the caravan of asylum seekers and economic migrants slowly working its way through Mexico toward the United States. This is about as firm a planting of one’s corporate or editorial flag in the sand as it is possible to make:

NBC news Twitter banner image - migrant caravan - journalistic bias

I am slowly giving up being angry at the way the mainstream and prestige media carry themselves like small- (and large-) D democratic heroes while utterly failing to cover the country on which they report with anything approaching objectivity, or make editorial decisions from any other perspective than that of the progressive elite. Now, my anger is giving way to fear.

If Democrats underperform in next week’s US midterm elections then it will largely be thanks to a huge negative assist from the establishment media, which has given an enormous motivational boost to conservatives of all stripes thanks to skewed and hyper-reactionary coverage of the very presidency their own greed for ratings helped to bring about. But this self-foot-shooting is actually the better scenario for the left and their media allies, compared to the alternative.

Though they don’t yet realize it, the nightmare scenario for the Left is that the love-in between the progressive “resistance” and the establishment media – a journalistic class which has been driven mad by Trump’s constant taunting into dropping their thin veneer of objectivity and revealing their true ideological colors –  actually works this midterm season, at a time when many conservatives and Trumpists do not show up to vote.

Why? Because a strong Democratic showing in the midterms will only encourage the prestige media in their collective mania, and lead to a doubling down on the various anti-conservative tactics – the bias, the gaslighting, the double standards and false equivalencies which mean most conservatives are forced to begin any argument proving they are not a Nazi while most progressives are allowed to commit the most egregious sins multiple times before their media halo begins to tarnish even slightly.

Two years of this unhinged and irresponsible reaction to the Trump presidency has succeeded in uniting even many Never Trump conservatives behind the administration and the GOP this midterm cycle. That may not be enough to prevent Democrats from making significant and encouraging gains in the midterms on Tuesday, but two more years of this behavior at an even greater level of intensity than we have thus far seen (and be assured: it will only get worse) may be all it takes to win Donald Trump a second term. You can bet that the president is counting on it.

Many nominal conservatives – myself included, though my political values are far from alignment with the Trumpian GOP – were almost as depressed by the victory of Donald Trump as were Democrats. Many felt that this was no longer a political party they recognized, or wanted to be associated with. But something odd happens when you realize that virtually the entire prestige US media has used the Trump presidency to jettison any remaining pretense of objectivity and openly plant their flag on the progressive side. Something odd happens when views which were entirely mainstream only a few years ago – views which were even espoused by darlings of the political Left – are now being used by leftist activists and sagely nodding network anchors to mark you out as a hate-filled extremist and enabler of fascism.

When that happens, suddenly the distasteful people on your side don’t seem quite so bad.  When that happens – and I’m not saying it’s necessarily right or praiseworthy – suddenly the idea of a president who can thwart and enrage your own political tormentors becomes a little bit more palatable. When that happens, in short, conservatives are more likely to hunker down, put their differences aside and march to the polling booths to re-elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.

And if that happens, given another mandate and with no more elections left to fight, the country will likely see what Trumpism can really do when it is unleashed and made angry by hysterical, partisan journalistic attacks – as if such attacks are even necessary given everything legitimately objectionable that the administration and the man are actually doing.

I don’t want that. I didn’t want Donald Trump to be president in 2016, and frustratingly I will become a US citizen a matter of days too late to vote for someone else in 2020. But just as I see governing elites stubbornly refusing to learn from the mistakes which brought the populist rebuffs of 2016 (good in the case of Brexit, much less so with Trump) now I see the journalistic class – who are very much part of that elite – almost engaging in a competition with the woke wing of the Democratic Party to see who can do more to usher in a Trump second term.

There will come a time, I am convinced, when we look back on the footage of Don Lemon slandering an entire ethnic group for being “dangerous” white males, Jim Acosta engaging in melodramatic activism in the White House briefing room and NBC News changing their Twitter image the way a tween might add a filter to her Snapchat and marvel that the supposedly serious, prestige media could ever have debased itself in such a way – and done so in a way which potentially wrought such harm on the country.

The problem is, if that day does not come before early 2019 then I don’t see there being sufficient time for a course correction prior to the 2020 general election. And currently there is zero sign of that epiphany dawning on the Don Lemons and Jim Acosta of this world, or their editors, or their paymasters. We are dealing with people who need to be smacked in the face with the consequences of their smug, self-satisfied, sanctimonious hectoring multiple times before the message sinks in – if at all.

And all of us must suffer for their selfish obstinacy.

 

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Lessons On Populism, From Bono

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

Fareed Zakaria - U2 Bono - populism Europe - Kiev

 

How to solve the “scourge” of European populism? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria makes a pilgrimage to Kiev, to consult with the geopolitical oracle known as Bono

Every now and then you read an article so astonishingly un-self aware, so counterproductive, so open to attack and ridicule on multiple fronts that it is difficult to know where to begin. The latest writer to evoke this strong reaction is Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s in-house intellectual and self-touted expert on international issues and foreign affairs.

The headline of Zakaria’s latest asinine column in the Washington Post? “I wanted to understand Europe’s populism. So I talked to Bono.”

Zakaria has apparently turned his formidable mind towards the rising backlash against years of technocratic supranational rule which favored delivering a stream of perks and opportunities to urban cognitive elites while leaving the rest of their citizens to face the vagaries of globalization, automation, outsourcing and supranationalism unsupervised, unrepresented and unprotected. Of course, Zakaria does not view the problem in these terms – he would doubtless describe it as a mass turning away from reason and rationality, and a refusal on the part of ordinary people to gratefully follow the course carefully laid out for them by their intellectual and moral betters.

And so when faced with a rise in “populism” around the world, Zakaria doesn’t engage in any personal introspection as to how he and his circle might have brought us to this moment. He certainly doesn’t reach out to any of the discredited technocrats and ask searching questions of leaders like Hillary Clinton, David Cameron or Tony Blair. No; Fareed Zakaria hopped on a plane to Kiev, where he hunkered down with U2 singer and Woman of the Year Bono, who – as we all know – is the premier global expert on the subject of populism, its causes and its cures.

Again, this is one of those articles where one can scarcely make it to the end of each paragraph without wanting to fly to Fareed Zakaria’s New York home for a personal one-on-one summit with the guy. I read the thing and just sat staring at the screen for a good five minutes, incredulous that anybody could show such supreme ignorance – and worse, lack of curiosity – about the other perspectives he pretends on his television show to care about.

From the top:

When confronting a challenging problem, it’s sometimes useful to listen to someone who looks at it from an entirely different angle. That’s why I found it fascinating to talk about the rise of populism and nativism with Bono last weekend at a summit in Kiev.

Naturally. I hop on a plane to see Bono at least once a month, whenever I am faced with a personal or geopolitical quandary, and I am sure that you do the same. The man is just a font of wisdom. And “different angle”? Bono believes in and champions exactly the same supranational, technocratic and remote system as Zakaria. The man waves an EU flag around on stage in his concerts, for heaven’s sake. Yet Zakaria has the nerve to portray traveling thousands of miles to hear his own opinions reflected back at him from an aging rock-star as a fearless search for alternative points of view.

The Irish singer-activist-philanthropist sees the same forces that we all do, particularly in Europe, but he zeroes in on something intangible yet essential. The only way to counter the dark, pessimistic vision being peddled by nationalists and extremists, Bono says, is to have an uplifting, positive vision. Homing in on the trouble in his part of the world, he told me, “Europe needs to go from being seen as a bore, a bureaucracy, a technical project, to being what it is: a grand, inspiring idea.”

And immediately the bias betrays itself. At a time when the European Union’s failures and the hubris of EU leaders are dooming entire generations of youth to chronic unemployment, when their incompetence at defending the union’s frontiers has led to an inward wave of illegal migration which no voters sanctioned and at a time when the entire European project stands either discredited or seriously questioned in a whole swathe of member states, Fareed Zakaria’s first thought isn’t whether some of the EU’s critics might have a point worth hearing. His first thought is how European elites can best double down on their vision and make their recalcitrant citizens realize the error of their ways and drop their inconvenient resistance to further political integration.

More:

To that end, Bono’s band, U2, has been choosing a moment during its concerts to unfurl — wait for it — the flag of the European Union.

How dreadfully original. He should do a duet with EU supergirl.

“Europe is a thought that needs to become a feeling,” Bono wrote in a recent op-ed in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. He is trying to give that feeling meaning. To him, Europe is about the ability of countries that were once warring to live in peace, for people of many different lands and languages to come together. “That idea of Europe deserves songs written about it, and big bright blue flags to be waved about,” he wrote.

This same tedious and over-simplistic point has been made by a thousand teenage left-wingers with the EU flag painted on their faces, not to mention legions of C-list cable news talking heads, yet when Bono says the same thing it becomes profound and original insight worthy of inclusion in a Washington Post feature article. Remarkable.

But here’s the bit where Zakaria’s powers of analysis really desert him:

Bono admits that Europe is a “hard sell” today. The continent is ablaze with populism. These forces have taken control in Hungary, Poland and Italy and are steadily gaining ground elsewhere, including Germany and Sweden. It seems that everywhere the fuel is the same: hostility toward strangers, foreigners, anyone who is different.

There is absolutely zero attempt here to distinguish between actual xenophobia and racism on the one hand, and legitimate concerns about a lack of democratic control over immigration or enforcement of the rule of law against illegal immigrants on the other. But of course in Zakaria’s mind there is no distinction to make. Merely objecting to massive expansions of inward immigration ushered in by governments without seeking popular consent is every bit as racist and worthy of condemnation as donning a white robe and lighting crosses on fire. Simply asking questions about the impact of high levels of migration on societal cohesiveness and public service provision is taken to be the sufficient mens rea to establish guilt.

And so Fareed Zakaria, ventriloquizing Bono the Philosopher King, doesn’t seek to dig into a hugely complex issue featuring a cast of thousands of actors and hundreds of policies and sub-policies. He doesn’t attempt to separate actual racism, prejudice and discrimination against people based on their national or ethnic background, from legitimate concerns about how the EU’s leaders and national leaders have stubbornly implemented their own view of the open, multicultural society without consulting let alone seeking the approval of those they nominally serve. They are all lumped together as “hostility toward strangers, foreigners, anyone who is different”, a blanket condemnation which allows people like Fareed Zakaria and the political masters for whom he covers to press ahead with their existing policies without feeling the need to justify themselves or win public approval. After all, one doesn’t need to make accommodation with racists.

Zakaria then goes on to paraphrase Francis Fukuyama:

The founders of the E.U., he argues, spent too much time building the technical aspects of the project — laws, rules, tariffs. They neglected to nurture an actual European identity, something people could believe in not for rational reasons but for emotional and idealistic ones.

This is one of only two perceptive points made in the entire article, and it comes courtesy of a third party. This is absolutely correct – the EU’s founders and subsequent leaders adopted an unapologetically antidemocratic “if we build it, they will come” approach to constructing their new European superstate. They figured that if only they could get all of the institutions set up and orchestrate enough power grabs from member states to Brussels, the entire project would be a fait accompli and ordinary people would simply have to make their peace with taking orders from elsewhere, and being represented by institutions to which they felt no allegiance and often barely recognized.

But Fareed Zakaria doesn’t pause to marvel at this slow-motion, silent coup or acknowledge that its opponents may have a point in at least raising concerns about it. He and Bono simply look forward to the time when the various peoples of Europe have been successfully re-educated and taught to love their new overlords:

According to the latest European Commission surveys, 71 percent of Poles say they feel attached to the E.U., more so than Germans or Spaniards, while 61 percent of Hungarians feel attached, outstripping the French, Swedes and Belgians. The problem is, it isn’t a deep, emotional bond — they are three to four times more likely to feel very attached to their own nation than to the E.U.

Apparently it is a problem that we do not feel attached to these institutions built largely without our consent, input or oversight. It is problematic, according to Bono and his acolyte Zakaria, that people object to vast new and powerful layers of government constructed at a geographic and political level that we naturally do not feel strong allegiance to because of entirely normal cultural and historic differences. It is something, goes this argument, that must be overcome or suppressed for the Greater Good.

Ordinarily I would enjoy sitting back and watching Fareed Zakaria’s smugness, moral certainty and profound lack of curiousness about people from outside his hermetically sealed intellectual bubble come back to bite him. But I cannot do so, because Zakaria’s loss and humiliation will be all of ours, too. None of us stand to benefit if the worst and harshest elements of the populist revolution take over our politics and trample over our imperfect but essential institutions. A proliferation of Viktor Orbans throughout Europe is not a price worth paying to see the smug self-satisfied smile wiped off Zakaria’s face.

And this is the frustrating thing. In the fight against racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism, we should be allies. But Zakaria will not engage in good faith with the opponents of technocratic, managerialist, supranationalism. He is unable or unwilling to distinguish between discomfort and disagreement with the direction and destination of European political union and “hostility toward strangers, foreigners, anyone who is different”. Because Fareed Zakaria and a hundred prominent journalists and politicians like him are incapable of distinguishing between legitimate criticism of the status quo and support for the worst elements of the populist revolution, they are able neither to call their own side to account for their failings, nor chart the kind of compromise we ultimately need to preserve the benefits of globalization and internationalism with the rightful demand of ordinary citizens for democratic control over their destinies.

This is the real conversation – and I have been saying this for years now – that we urgently need to be having. We need our smartest minds and those with social capital to come together to develop answers to these big questions. But instead, almost to a person, they would rather zip around the globe from Davos to Aspen to Kiev, commiserating with themselves, hobnobbing with aging rock stars, stroking their metaphorical beards and wondering why the rest of their fellow citizens stubbornly refuse to fall into line and get with the program.

Fareed Zakaria will no more learn about the origins of and solutions to populism from Bono than he will learn about bioethics from Justin Bieber. That he felt no sense of shame putting his name to this execrable article in the Washington Post leaves me with a feeling of profound frustration and despair.

But Zakaria is not alone – indeed, his article is emblematic of the cognitive bias which runs through the upper echelons of the corporate, cultural, educational, governmental and journalistic institutions which together set society’s direction of travel (and in the latter’s case, report back on the situation with a laughably false veneer of objectivity).  The only difference between Fareed Zakaria and the rest of them is that he was stupid enough to print what the rest of them think in private on the pages of the Washington Post.

Two years after Brexit, nearly two years after Trump and still the Smartest Guys In The Room™ exhibit no self-awareness, no introspection, no respect for opposing viewpoints and no new ideas beyond “more Europe, more technocracy, more unaccountable supranationalism, and if you don’t like it then there must be something wrong with you”.

Zakaria can commune with Bono all he wants, but it will not save them or us from the slow-motion collision with reality that the West is now experiencing. Yet he prattles on in the Washington Post oblivious to the danger because in Fareed Zakaria’s mind, he and the people he interviews cannot be wrong about anything, and theirs is the only valid perspective.

In the words of Evelyn Waugh, “They were too old and they didn’t know and they wouldn’t learn. That’s the truth.”

 

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