This is from Spiked. It is from the UK. I see the same thing in NZ. And in Canada. The Progressives or Leftists that were serious used to work in factories and for unions: now they work in the capital and commission opinion polls.
And that is that Labour has transformed from a party of the trade unions into a party of the metropolitan, largely London-based opinion-shaping set and new clerisy. A party that was born to represent working people’s interests is now little more than a kind of political safe haven for a new elite that feels cut off both from traditional politics and the masses. This is the real story of the 2015 General Election: the reduction of Labour to a middle-class machine, which speaks to a bigger and profound hollowing out, even death, of social democracy as we knew it.
The most revealing moments on TV and Twitter last night, as the exit-poll results were unveiled and the first results came in, involved the utter incomprehension of liberal observers and Labourites. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. ‘But the opinion polls said we would do well’, they all said, confirming that these politicos and observers no longer rub shoulders, or anything else, with the masses and have thus become completely reliant on opinion pollsters as a kind of conduit to the little people: modern-day tea-leaf-readers who might reveal what They are thinking. The Twitterati — the time-rich, mostly left-leaning set, consisting of cultural entrepreneurs, commentators and other people who don’t work with their hands and can therefore tweet all day — were especially dumbfounded by the results. Boiled down, their pained cry was: ‘But everyone I know voted Labour.’ They know nothing of the world beyond Twitter, the world outside the Guardianista colonies of London, out where people work rather than tweet.And that is that Labour has transformed from a party of the trade unions into a party of the metropolitan, largely London-based opinion-shaping set and new clerisy. A party that was born to represent working people’s interests is now little more than a kind of political safe haven for a new elite that feels cut off both from traditional politics and the masses. This is the real story of the 2015 General Election: the reduction of Labour to a middle-class machine, which speaks to a bigger and profound hollowing out, even death, of social democracy as we knew it.
Well, despite what some people think, the end of what the clerisy think social democracy is a good thing. For what I see as modern social democracy is evil: micromanaging the average citizen but finding their tipping points: moving entire areas of conversation into a post modern cone of silence, and in the USA incarcerating a large percentage of the adult male population,
If we had not hit peak liberalism before, we have now. The progressive experiment has been tried, found to be destructive, and the electorate does not want it.
Which is why in the USA and Canada progressive rely on the courts, and in the UK on Brussels. (Australia and NZ’s parliaments are jealous of their sovereignty).
My advice? Batten down the hatches. The times are historic. And Chulthu is not dead until stabbed through the heart with a spike of spent uranium, buried under reinforced concrete at the bottom of an abandoned mine, and has had its power cut off.
