“People who believe in nothing, including themselves, will ultimately submit to anything.”
– Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal.
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Perusing the NMEâs sad, stuffy, small-c conservative freakout over this big change in British politics got me thinking: Brexit is actually the most rockânâroll thing to have happened in a generation. What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying âNoâ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels. It makes the student radicals of the 60s and even the anarchic punks of the 70s look like rank amateurs in comparison. Sure, those guys might have waved flowers against the Vietnam War or put safety pins through their snouts, but did they send the political class, the chattering class and the business elite into an existential tailspin by delivering a severe sucker punch to these peopleâs favourite institution? No, they didnât. Brexit did, though. July 26th, 2016 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Hillary Clinton believes government should make virtually every choice in your life. Education, healthcare, marriage, speech â all dictated out of Washington. But something powerful is happening. Weâve seen it in both parties. Weâve seen it in the United Kingdomâs unprecedented Brexit vote to leave the European Union. Voters are overwhelmingly rejecting big government. Thatâs a profound victory. People are fed up with politicians who donât listen to them, fed up with a corrupt system that benefits the elites, instead of working men and women. – Ted Cruz July 23rd, 2016 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
A major power centre has been challenged and almost by definition power centres have some control over the public narrative. For decades EU apologists have wielded their immense budget and nomination powers to promote people with the “right” attitude and projects with the “right” purpose. Simultaneously a highly skewed PR narrative has been dished out so incessantly (complimentary of unaware taxpayers) that numerous voters now confuse this narrative with the truth. This is why so many EU apologists genuinely seem to perceive the EU as a force for everything worthwhile, and every EU-critic as either dumb, a xenophobic throwback or misled by the PR-narrative of the other side. It is such a shame, though, that the term “metropolitan liberal” is used here. I like to think I am a liberal in the John Locke/Ludwig von Mises use of that fine word, and also glory in living in the greatest metropolis on earth – London. It is one of those terms that is in danger of becoming hackneyed. Stop it. July 22nd, 2016 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The statistical correlation between both age and relatively low levels of education, on the one hand, and a vote to leave on the other, was much remarked upon, not only in Britain but throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Age and lack of education were usually taken by commentators as a proxy for stupidity. The majority vote to leave was therefore a triumph of stupidity: for those who vote the right way in any election or referendum have opinions, while those who vote the wrong way have only prejudices. And only the young and educated know what the right way is. While age is certainly not a guarantee of political wisdom, the ever-increasing experience of life might be expected to conduce to it. But in the wake of the vote, there were even suggestions that the old should have no vote because they wouldnât have to live as long with the consequences of it. The reaction to the referendum exposed the fragility and shallowness of that each personâs vote should count for same. The relation between political wisdom and levels of education is far from straightforward. It was educated people who initiated and carried out the Terror in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution, and all the great joy that it brought to the Russian people, was the denouement of decades of propaganda and agitation by the educated elite. There was no shortage of educated people among the Nazi leadership. And the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were also relatively highly-educated, as it happens in France. The founder of Sendero Luminoso, who might have been the Pol Pot of Peru, was a professor of philosophy who wrote his doctoral thesis on Kant. July 21st, 2016 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
Comparisons have been made between the popular uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic â some of them lazy. Boris Johnson, the UK foreign secretary and leading Leave campaigner, and Mr Trump may have shaken up their respective establishments, but blond hair is one of the few things they have in common. Brexit and Trumpism are not one and the same. July 20th, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seumas Milne remains on the staff of the Guardian and Observer while Labour pays him to work as its director of strategy. As a colleague on leave, he has the right to be treated with a gentleness journalists would not usually extend to spin doctors who do not enjoy his advantages. I therefore write with the caution of a good corporate man and the cheeriness of a co-worker when I say Milne could not do a better job of keeping the Tories in power if rogue MI5 agents had groomed him at Winchester College, signed him up at Oxford University and instructed him to infiltrate and destroy the Labour party. July 17th, 2016 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” – British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, talking about Hillary Clinton back in 2007 This is going to be so good đ July 15th, 2016 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” â to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is â is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences. Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either. July 11th, 2016 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hereâs a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the âlack of diversityâ in comic books donât buy comic books. Theyâre interested in identity politics, not fun. When your customers â lifelong comic fans â pick up the latest issue to find a smorgasbord of irrelevant, hectoring social and pop culture commentary, they probably wonât buy the next issue. Not because theyâre sexists and racists, but because the stuff you are publishing sucks. – Charlie Nash at Breitbart. PS. I haven’t yet seen the latest Captain America film but it is on the list of ones I do want to see. Any recommendations? July 8th, 2016 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
OK, youâre angry. But ignore the vote and tanks could be on the streets. If you wanted to convulse the country with rioting on a revolutionary scale, to cause a lethal rupture between the governing class and the governed and even to provide the conditions for the rise of 21st-century fascism across Europe, hereâs what you do. After a referendum in which an unprecedented number of voters took part, and in which well over a million more people voted for change than for the status quo on our membership of the EU, you declare that the decision cannot be allowed to stand, chiefly on the grounds that the people were too stupid. – Dominic Lawson (article behind Times pay wall unfortunately). July 5th, 2016 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
This outpouring of anti-democratic sentiment, this unquestioned faith in the wisdom of the elite over the will of the people, did not begin with the Brexit vote. Through the rise of evidence-based policy and quangos, experts have crept into more and more areas of policymaking. And the sentiment that the masses are a bit thick, brainwashed by the media and stirred up by demagogues, has long greeted every General Election result that doesnât go the metropolitan eliteâs way. But the Brexit fallout has brought this long unspoken prejudice out of the bistros and into the streets. The idea that the people are effectively incapable of taking part in politics, that you need a PhD in European law to have an opinion on EU membership, is now being shouted from the rooftops and scrawled on placards. Left-wing Remain types, so long the sort who would pretend to speak on behalf of the little people, are now openly calling for elite rule. July 4th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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