THE LAST DITCH An Englishman returned after twenty years abroad blogs about liberty in Britain
Hating the haters
A language of lies

Winning the War on Error

For the first time in decades I am optimistic we can win the battle of ideas against statists in general (difficult) and Leftists in particular (beginning to look easy). It will involve a journey that Jeremy Corbyn will never make; from the cosy mutual warmth of opposition, where all policies are theoretical and all consequences are optimistically imaginary, to the harsher land of reality.

We must avoid Corbyn's main error and engage with both doubters and opponents. We are true democrats; enemies of violence and no revolutionaries. We accept we must win votes from people of all walks of life. Our younger folk must be careful what they say and write in actual and virtual public, for it will be used against them if they ever run for office.

When we have no TruLib™ candidates in an election we must needs compromise by engaging and working with anyone whose policies are less hostile to our principles. They may be Hannanite Conservatives, Lbertarian-wing Kippers, Gladstonian LibDems or even John Mortimer or Frank Field-type Labourites. Most of my Labour-voting family and friends up North hate being bossed around by snooty people with meaningless degrees as much as we could wish – and are more likely to do  something about it!

Voters for both Brexit and Trump transcended traditional divides of class, ethnicity and even sexual identity. If there is a single issue that unifies them, it is not ideological (though some ideologues will struggle with it more than us). It is really a matter of respect. They want their political "leaders" to stop condescending to them and taking them for granted. This is democracy. They are the demos. They want their supremacy acknowledged and their political servants to stop being uppity, distant and divorced from their everyday reality.

If your child's education is poor. If it takes you and your life partner's full-time effort to meet everyday expenses, you want your MP and your PM to be focussed on that, not on the "rights" of mongers of imaginary grievance. If you see a spoiled brat in college weeping, or a pop star bleating that all women are "in fear", because of the outcome of a free election, you expect your representatives to ignore them, or even laugh along with you, not take their fantasies seriously.

If I am right, this is therefore a dangerous historical tipping point. It's perfectly possible that the Left will be the first to figure this out. Watching them froth and rage at "ignorant, bigoted" proles like Empire Loyalist colonels of the 1950s I grant you it seems bloody unlikely at present, but it's a risk.

If we are to engage with the ordinary voters who have better things to do or needs too urgent to address than to have time to obsess about politics, we must speak to their concerns in their language. They have seen through the warped words of the Left at last and this gives us an advantage to be seized and exploited – or lost.

Reading like-minded blogs, I think we have learned at least one thing in the long dismal night of the Left. We understand better than most how they warp language itself to serve their ends. I will address that in my next posts.

Comments

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Tom

Those are good questions and valid doubts. But what Brexit and Trump have shown us is that the people are not cowed by the politically-correct. The Leftists have cried wolf so often they are no longer audible. It’s up to us now to be brave and speak out. Any day an SJW is NOT calling you a bad name is a day wasted - especially if there’s a voter nearby to hear him or her scream at you. We all need to be Milo in a modest way, because the more the people hear the would-be tyrants scream, the less they like them.

MikeR

But will we get change? Trump as president elect is already to be seen trimming all over the place as if himself being infected by the "blob."

Here, Theresa May is the blob's creature. Even if we do get properly out of the EU under May, which looks by no means to be a certainty, her policies and approaches are indistinguishable from those of New Labour, and the Cameron government she was part of from the beginning.

The common purposers are deeply embedded in all our institutions, media and education system. The statute book heaves with police state/subjective legislation to criminalize individuals for their likes, dislikes and personal opinions. May seems to still intend to launch the worst curbs on free speech we have seen in peacetime in the modern era through EDOs. We have just seen PC extremists using the powers of the Establishment to silence those who challenge modish identity politics, not those who pose any threat of violence/terror (the former is surely how May's EDOs will be used should they become a reality).

Certainly the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit in the teeth of the Establishment's opposition to it has been a sign that the forces of repression and control can be pushed back - but the smoke signals are by no means particularly favourable yet for the opponents of the totalitarians we've allowed to dominate our society and governance.

CherryPie

"Voters for both Brexit and Trump transcended traditional divides of class, ethnicity and even sexual identity. If there is a single issue that unifies them, it is not ideological (though some ideologues will struggle with it more than us). It is really a matter of respect. They want their political "leaders" to stop condescending to them and taking them for granted. This is democracy. They are the demos. They want their supremacy acknowledged and their political servants to stop being uppity, distant and divorced from their everyday reality."

That is my assessment of the situation too. People have voted for change because the political leaders have become disconnected with what the 'people' who elect them actually want!

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