Making Sense of the Last Three Decades and Brexit, by Russell Taylor.
It can, in fact, be traced to the socio-political assumptions of the post-Thatcherite 1990s, when a new, more compassionate form of liberal-left politics took hold. The basic set-up was thus: the working classes were cast in the role of childlike victims, providing feel-good fodder for members of the educated middle class, whose social concern and support for state remedies established their moral superiority, and provided them with plentiful jobs dedicated to the care and tutelage of the helpless masses — jobs that ordained them as society’s rightful leaders, while being sufficiently free of accountability to satisfy their sense of entitlement.
Big government, and ever more government:
Even those not in cushy public sector jobs benefited from the culture that blossomed around them — one in which credentialed people were well-rewarded and insulated against the whim of their inferiors, even (or especially) if they didn’t create anything of value. Whereas blue collar trades were increasingly seen as gauche and retrograde, professions that utilised certified planners and pontificators assumed an air of sophistication.
Before long, even businesses were overloaded with backroom meddlers cooking up problems to solve, enforcing government regulations and mimicking its paternalistic attitudes. The country was soon awash with ambitious mediocrities, enforcing compliance, ensuring diversity, drawing up guidelines, and doing other such ‘work’ that added sweet F.A. to the bottom line. …
“Enlightened” self-interest runs amok:
They were not, as they appeared to outsiders, a new aristocracy full of arrogant self-regard, but latter-day saints making the country a better place. They were like the man with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail, and considered their own interests indivisible from those of the country as a whole. They deserved to waft through comfortable lives, largely unaffected by the policies they supported, disconnected from the people they patronised, because they held the right credentials and the proper opinions. …
They attached themselves to any cause, from environmentalism to fighting obesity, for which more government could be recommended as a cure — for these causes highlighted the danger of too much freedom among the rabble, advanced the case for more power to the elite, and helped burnish their halos. …
The ABC News each night is their internal report card in Australia, presumably the BBC is like that in the UK:
Anyone who identified with the ruling class and parroted its beliefs could feel a part of it. They could enjoy a vicarious sense of power each time it upbraided the little people, and feel generous whenever it bestowed a gift on them at the taxpayer’s expense. Each time they guffawed at on-message comedians and approved of establishment-friendly art (oh so edgy and rebellious), they congratulated themselves for having escaped the herd and its reactionary ways, even if this didn’t put them among our brave new world’s philosopher-kings. …
University education has become indoctrination for mediocrities:
It’s no surprise that this phenomenon coincided with a sharp increase in the number of people going to university. After the Blair government sold a degree – any degree – as a golden pass to a better life, the number of graduates skyrocketed, and many emerged from university believing themselves members of an exclusive club, who should be exempt from the cut, thrust and toil endured by mere mortals. Such people were naturally receptive to a social structure that mirrored this assumption, and found a debt-fuelled economy and a bloated public sector on-hand offering all the makework jobs their egos could hope for.
Sound unsustainable? It was:
This entire, rotten state of affairs was underwritten by the productive members of society — those maligned and supposedly obsolescent folk who still made a living by meeting people’s freely-expressed needs. No one on the gravy train particularly cared that the spread of their own kind would eventually kill their golden goose. Nor did they imagine the productive would one day revolt against the people sucking them dry and telling them how to live. But that’s what happened.
It turned out the working classes were not content to play the victim. They didn’t want to be cared for, or instructed how to act and think; they wanted to shift for themselves. Nor did they see their designated enemies — the lower middle-class and traditional conservatives — as the greatest threat to their well-being. Their allegiance to old-fashioned institutions like family and nation, and their lack of fealty to the ruling elite, irked the latter, so they turned on them. If these ingrates refused to be grist to the elitist mill, they had no value. Worse, they were traitors to the revolution. …
Immigration to dilute the deplorables, and a coalition of the fringes to oppose meritocracy and white men:
As the disloyalty of the masses and the petit-bourgeoisie became evident, the ruling classes took Bertolt Brecht’s advice and decided to appoint a new people — one sufficiently alien to their own culture that its very presence would undermine it and blunt its stubborn attachment to self-determination. One, too, whose estrangement from the mainstream could be repurposed into a state of perpetual victimhood that could only be remedied by the intervention of the anointed and the suppression of the lower classes.
In fact, it wasn’t just one people that was chosen, but a coalition of marginalised groups, defined by their race, religion, gender and sexuality. Immigrants were shipped in wholesale and encouraged to cling to the beliefs of their homelands — all the better to cause friction, create grounds for their victim status, and dilute our own hated culture. All minorities, whether foreign-born or homegrown, were told dark tales about a bigoted population hellbent on oppressing them. Women, meanwhile, were fed the story of the patriarchy: a misogynist plot that conspires to keep them down. In every case, the plight of the victim was presented as proof of the evil men do when they are left to their own devices.
Cultural takeover:
During the years leading up to this change of tack, the ruling class had completed its march through the institutions, ensuring that whenever anyone turned on a TV, opened a newspaper or interacted with a public body, they would find a favourable impression of the establishment and its narrative, and a dim view of naysayers. Given this, and because establishment types had little meaningful contact with regular folk, they truly believed their opinions and their preeminence were the stuff of common sense – an assumption that only made their eventual rejection that much more shocking.
But Brexit was a rude shock, an unacceptably rude shock:
When the EU referendum took place, members of the ruling class knew this wasn’t just a vote for or against membership, but for or against their own supremacy. They were convinced of a Remain victory, because everyone they knew wanted to preserve things as they were, and understood that the alternative would turn back the clock to a time when status and success were awarded via the whim of less refined people: an unthinkable prospect.
When defeat came, the elitists struggled to conceal what they thought of the traitorous masses. By hindering their prospects of a gilded existence, the proles had also rejected the elitists’ holier-and-smarter-than-thou self-image. It followed, then, that these Brexiters were ignorant bigots, making their victory a blow against decency and good sense. Even their best attempts to avoid such accusations portrayed the electorate as idiots, who’d been duped into voting against their own interests. Condescension abounded.
In attempting to foil Brexit, the ruling class has been trying to get its hegemony back on track. Its increasing ‘wokeness’ is its way of delegitimising public opinion. Intersectionality — the cornerstone of progressive dogma — places more value on the wishes of designated victims than on those of the majority, and the leaders of progressive culture reserve the right to define victimhood as they see fit, perpetuating a narrative that identifies themselves as our only hope of a better tomorrow.
The new climate:
Because mainstream media is now the PR wing of the establishment, it decides which stories to publish and which to sit on (when it’s not simply lying, that is) thereby preserving the narrative and encouraging people to its way of thinking. …
Anyone who questions their motives or policies is portrayed as a bigot, a xenophobe, a fascist. Free speech has been reinterpreted as a licence for hate. Democracy itself has been recast as the right of politicians to follow their own consciences rather than the instructions of the electorate.
Make no mistake, the roots of this situation run deeper than the 2016 referendum, but its causes will never be addressed unless we get the Brexit we demanded and deserve.
hat-tip Chris
