I was gently chided recently by a fellow writer for being insufficiently polemical in my writing. My initial reaction: “right then.... here goes!” Before I knew it, I had shipped the entire Progressive establishment of the Western world off to a gulag. The whole damn academia-preaching, social justice-legislating, human rights-lawfaring and commissariat-regulating lot of them. That great cancerous legal/managerial Progressive Blob that has been growing inside the entrails of Western civilisation for many decades now…..all the millions of them. Then I mentally ran through the paucity of course-correcting options realistically available in a liberal democracy and reminded myself why I don’t go in for “What we, as a society, need to do is......” rhetoric.
Assuming we would be talking about staying within Western civilised norms, getting rid of The Blob would be a very big ask indeed. First off it would need a most uncharacteristically united and well-led governing political party with a legislative majority sufficiently robust to enable it to fast-track and steam-roller its legislative agenda. That agenda would be the rescinding of all the massive and labyrinthine ‘social justice’ and ‘human rights’ legislation that has been accumulating on the statute books for decades. [Yes I do realise some would argue that, in the US, the Trump administration is currently doing just that......but achieving it via executive rather than legislative means].
In any case, that would be the relatively easy bit. Then they would have to find a way to legislate away the contractual employment rights of vast numbers of Lefty sheep-dipped civil servants, teachers, academics and government lawyers plus rescind the appointments of most of the judiciary. Then they would have to somehow find a way to recruit (albeit only where necessary) better and wiser replacements. As my daughter used to say derisively in her teen years, Good luck with that.
virtue-signalling vanities our culture has mislabelled as an excess of caring
Nevertheless, in this essay I’m going to let off a bit of steam about that great cancerous Blob....about its bogus virtue-signalling vanities that our culture has mislabelled as an excess of caring and compassion. During the course of my lifetime, the worst censure these people have generally faced (at least until recently) is being viewed as a bit irritatingly ‘do-gooding’. Their psychological motivation has tended to be misdiagnosed as one of good intentions...if sometimes taken too far. But more often than not it is in fact nothing of the sort. It is more truly an amalgam of holier-than-thou narcissism, selective outrage and in-crowd groupthink.
These people – and they now number in the millions - have had an incredibly lucky run in recent decades, given the harm they have done. A large proportion of them are graduate professionals making a comfortable living from sucking (either directly or indirectly) on the public teat. All the while doing all they can to pick apart the culture that both sustains and funds them. It would be impossible to prove, of course, but I have read, down the years, reasonably plausible citings of evidence that real, personal acts of generosity is something actually more to be found amongst people who lean conservative Right than amongst Progressives.
The true essence of radical Progressivism was nailed a century ago in this Bertrand Russell observation: “If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.”
I would guess that many of my readers feel that - with the radical advent (the surprisingly successful advent) of ‘Trumpism’ – the ramparts of long-20th c. Progressivism have finally been breached. That the holier-than-thou clerisy who have dominated our politics these past decades are finally on the back foot.
I do, to an extent, share this view. But, in the euphoria currently to be found on much of the online Right, it is easy to forget that the feel-good-on-the-cheap, virtue-signalling mentality still seduces tens of millions of the Western, college-graduate middle class. For a real civilisational corner to be truly turned, they would somehow have to become personally ashamed of their former faux-moral posturing. They would find themselves personally facing a kind of informal court of public opinion. Something along the lines of when – in former times - grandchildren might have asked “so what did you do in the war Grandad?” Or now; in our 21st century:
What did you do in the summer of 2020 Grandad.....did you kneel?
What did you do in the summer of 2020 Grandad.....did you kneel?
Did you rule that convicted illegal immigrant rapists could stay in our country Grandad? Did you arrange for them to be put up in expensive hotels at taxpayer expense Grandad?
So Grandad.....was it you who used to make those tv ads showing our country as 50% black and 50% homosexual? Did you write those tv scripts where only white people could be baddies?
However unlikely any of this is, those of us who never did get on the hyper-Progressive bandwagon must be excused for occasional harbouring of dark thoughts on the need for some kind of retroactive atonement. (I am, of course, talking just of inchoate feelings; not any kind of political project). No sober person expects that there will in fact be any such atonement....save perhaps for some panicked mass-deletion of billions of embarrassing social media posts if the direction of the politico-cultural wind continues to blow to starboard Right.
What, for example, should happen to the City of Bristol bureaucrats who continue to insist that women be designated ‘people with ovaries’? May we pray that the day will come when they will lie awake at night tortured by self hate and the question of how they ever came to be such utter prats? Or should they be corralled in a darkened room and not let out until they have written “I must do better at noticing reality” in copper plate longhand a minimum of one million times? Should they be forced to undertake some particularly arduous Duke of Edinburgh Award? Or should they be made to wear Greta Thunberg plastic masks?
No?..... Well one can at least fantasise about a metaphorical pillory for such awful people. [The examples that follow are all of the UK Blob - probably the Western world’s worst case (per-capita). But the rest of the West is perhaps not so far behind (because they have had a similar fifty-plus years of ‘progressive’, middle class ‘higher education’.]
Into the stocks would go......All Those Lawfare Parasites: There is no better instance of the type than the lesser-spotted human rights lawyer. Lesser spotted because they typically live in secluded, tax-payer-funded, leafy suburbia, a whole social and cultural universe away from the despair-filled ghettos they ‘cleverly’ help to create.
As I wrote in a previous essay Contrary to the party political psycho-drama endlessly fed to the British public, real political agency in Britain – whichever political party is supposedly ‘in power’ – is massively and disproportionately in the hands of its huge high caste of lefty lawyers. In the mental universe they inhabit, being all ‘social justicey’ and cleverly subverting the seemingly atavistic concerns of rightist politicians and van-driving, non-graduate types is viewed as a rather fun (and highly lucrative) intellectual chess game. When you - from the vantage point of your multi-million pound dwelling place - are personally insulated from the adverse consequences of those social justicey ‘causes’ you champion, it may indeed seem all very professionally satisfying.
Examples of the type can be found doing morally-bankrupt gymnastics on Right to a Family Life clauses written back in 1950......a whole demographic universe away from the situation in the 21st c. Or extending ‘full solidarity’ to Irish rap group Kneecap proclaiming ‘Up Hamas! Or convincing a jury that ‘anyone who knew the full scale of the climate crisis would have consented to the damage’ done by Extinction Rebellion activists spraying red paint over the Treasury. Some of them become UK judges, such as the ones who:
· Allowed an Albanian criminal to escape deportation because his son dislikes the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”.
· ruled that a Pakistani previously jailed for child sex offences could stay in the UK because deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his children.
· Ensured that a Jamaican rapist avoided deportation on the grounds that he would not be eligible for witness protection in the Caribbean.
· suggested that the Tory party should be ‘dealt with as you would deal with the Nazis’.
‘Un-British’ as it may seem, it is necessary to confront the reality that the establishment ‘liberals’ who have long frustrated all attempts at a common sense immigration settlement are monstrous individuals. Not the more virtuous-than-thou people of their own narcissistic vanity. And not the well meaning-but-naive people of (until recently) popular imagination.
Personally insulated, as they typically are, from the adverse consequences of the ‘causes’ they champion, they are way more deserving of public opprobrium than the essentially decent, if politically out-of touch, Enoch Powell ever was.
Next into the stocks would go...... Over-Credentialled but Dim-Witted Lefty Bureaucrats: Civil Service bureaucracies are stuffed full of humanities graduates with final salary pension protections – oftentimes now ‘working’, ‘from home’ – to subvert and frustrate any elected government policies that displease them. According to one former Civil Service insider, the whole shebang of sclerotic modern UK governance is bedevilled by “a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited”.
By way of example in 2011 the UK Conservative government set up a counter-terrorism agency which they called Prevent. Now - bearing in mind that the UK Civil Service is stuffed full of Lefty ideologues - what might be the result? Yes; it decided that thinking any non-white people might be terrorists is ‘racist’ and what it needs to prevent is white people getting angry about Islamic jihad.
As for the upper echelons of the UK police bureaucracy; it is a salutary lesson in what happens when you combine a plodding intellect with a university ‘education’. In the words of one criminal barrister “My own experience of the senior ranks of the police......is that the Force has been more thoroughly captured by extreme progressive zealotry than any comparable institution. For evidence, peruse almost any of the College of Policing’s recent output.” Witness too, the chief constable who declined to release pictures of two escaped murderers fearing it might breach their human rights.
I am sure you could add many more instances to this catalogue of ‘human rights’ lawfare. Every Daily Mail reader will have read about such atrocities in spades.....the puzzle is why this has not led to a mass popular uprising long since. Frustratingly, if voters were asked to identify who they thought was messing with their democracy, most I suspect, would still pick either ‘politicians’ or ‘the rich’. Hardly any would zero in on the real power brokers - Lefty civil servants, dopey police chiefs and human rights lawyers. But what can realistically be done about this? I wrote here about the maddening intractability of the “ever-expanding, nannying bureaucracy and tsunami of ‘experts’. What was it Churchill might have said: “I have nothing to offer but bureaucracy and experts.” Why bother then, you might ask, to pick over aspects of modern life that you can’t do anything about? My answer – and I hope yours too – is that we can at least notice underlying trends in the zeitgeist...and call things by their right names”
Talking of calling things by their right names; into the stocks next would go...... A Large Proportion of the Mediaocracy. Some of the worst lesser-spotted monsters are the tv drama scriptwriter, producer and advertising ‘creative’. You never actually see them in the flesh but try to mentally conjure an image of the kind of people who would be sufficiently full of s*** to make this stuff – what they might look like? Then again maybe best not.
The television industry’s wilful reality-denying mentality is a long-standing bête noir of mine that I have already dissected at length a few years back in Non-Binary Sibling is Entertaining You. Like this: “‘gritty’ BBC/Netflix mini-series called Collateral by acclaimed (acclaimed by the BBC) writer David Hare. In it, illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’.”
I also wrote about advertising ‘creatives’ in All the Pretty Celebrities: “Few things can get your blood up like watching a string of commercials on British tv. The Britain depicted in tv ads has a statistically improbable number of people of black African ethnicity and a statistically improbable number of women who appear to lean towards the Sapphic passion. Such men as exist in this Britain – white, black or other - seem to be merely an embarrassment..... even to themselves.”
Awful people created all this nonsense... I’ll leave it there.
These nattering nabobs (term compliments of Spiro Agnew) are the essence of C.S.Lewis's claim that there is no greater scourge than those who believe in all their self-righteous guile that everything they do and foist upon the common man is for their own good. A pox on all of them, and even that is too good for them.
What is to be done?
I was reminded of an essay by N.S.Lyons:
"... when Hungary’s young right-wing Fidesz party faced its own entrenched leftist post-Communist “deep state” in the late 90s and early 2000s, it responded by pivoting to a brilliant strategy of parallel organizing. Understanding that Hungarian civic life had been systematically corrupted and destroyed by the Communists, and the people left atomized and dispirited, the party deliberately turned away from “high” politics and founded what it called the “Civic Circles” movement."
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-rights-future-must-be-parallel
You need not necessarily endorse the Fidesz party's politics to learn from their strategy.