Credit where it’s due, the Long March through the Institutions has been one of the most staggeringly successful ideological campaigns in modern history. Less than half a century since Marxists Herbert Marcuse and Rudi Dutschke hit on the strategy of white-anting the institutions of liberal Western democracy from within, the Marxist takeover is almost total.
Not just in the obvious institutions of academia and the arts, but the supposedly impregnable bastions of ‘repressive state apparatus’ (to use the Marxists’ own term) from the police and military, to the judiciary and big business and the churches. If you need proof, just look at police dutifully ‘taking the knee’ at BLM protests, or grovelling to armed Muslim mobs at the same time as they arrest non-Muslims over social media posts. Or consider fatuous bishops prating that ‘we are all Muslims’ while wearing rainbow cassocks.
But is the Long March about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
The progressive moment is over – at least for now.
This past year showed that the progressive politics that dominated most industrialised countries over the past two decades or more is shifting to the right, fuelled by working-class anxieties over the economy and immigration, and growing fatigue with issues from climate change to identity politics.
As I wrote late last year, has the Long March left conquered the ivory towers only to find them empty and windblown? The peasants have skipped off to the greener pastures of the internet, with its memes and blogs. Worse for the Long Marchers, the peasants have lots of torches and pitchforks and they’re ready to use them.
Brexit, the first Trump administration, the Voice referendum in Australia: those were the first to burn down. The Voice was widely hailed as the first direct referendum on Woke identity politics. It was a humiliating defeat for the left, but they didn’t learn from it.
The second Trump victory may well prove to be the first real sapping of the ivory towers.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House is the most dramatic and important example – but it is far from the only one.
Across Europe, where economic growth has largely stalled, conservatives and populist right-wing parties are making unprecedented gains. Three-quarters of governments in the European Union are either led by a right-of-centre party or are ruled by a coalition that includes at least one.
The shift is set to continue.
Javier Milei has put a rocket under the moribund economy of Argentina, long under the dead hand of Peronism. Justin Trudeau is gone in Canada and Emmanuel Macron is staggering along on his last legs. Austria has just got a right-libertarian chancellor, whose Freedom Party won the largest slice of the vote at the last election, and Germany’s left-wing government is floundering. In Australia, the trajectory of the far-left Albanese government is all down, down, while centre-right Peter Dutton’s coalition not only rises in the polls, but dominates the political agenda.
Is this all just the normal swing of the political pendulum, or is something bigger afoot? The mainstream media’s incessant shrieking about ‘far-right populism’ suggests they have good reason to be worried.
In country after country, many working-class voters – especially those outside the biggest cities – are signalling the same thing: They mistrust the establishment – from academics to bankers to traditional politicians – and feel these elites are out of touch and don’t care about people like them.
The Long March may not be as well known to general voters as to we political tragics of the centre-right, but voters aren’t dumb, either. They may not know what it is, but they can sniff something deeply unpleasant stuck to the heel of democracy – and they’re sick of it getting in the carpet.
Years of increased migration and trade, coupled with low economic growth, have led to a backlash and a rise in nationalism, where people want more of a sense of control, political analysts say. The rise of social media has exacerbated divisions and led to an upsurge in antiestablishment parties.
“It’s a broad shift that goes across countries,” said Ruy Teixeira, a lifelong Democrat who now works for the centre-right American Enterprise Institute think tank. “Working-class people are just pissed off – about immigration, about all the culture war stuff, and the relatively poor economic performance that has shaped the working-class experience in the 21st century.” While one of the two establishment parties won in the US, the Republicans have largely been taken over by the insurgent figure of Trump, who clearly has a mandate from voters to shake things up, said Teixeira. He said he doesn’t see either the left or conventional right easily recapturing Trump’s populist, multiracial working-class majority.
Mass migration – legal and illegal – from the Middle East and Africa has been the last straw. Despite years of promises to the contrary, both sides of the political establishment have overseen a growing tsunami of immigration that is wreaking havoc on not just cost-of-living and housing, but threatening to obliterate what remains of the Western culture that the Long March left has so assiduously taken the wrecking ball to for decades.
The wake-up call over immigration has sharpened voters’ attention on the rest of the left’s dearest political nostrums.
The rapid reshuffling of voters’ priorities in the past few years has made issues associated with the centre-left – such as climate change, social justice and identity politics – seem less relevant, said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy for Political Education in Tutzing, Germany. That could mean governments become more concerned with national rather than international priorities, reducing co-operation in areas from security to the environment.
“It turns out people [in the West] value their own jobs more than whether some islands are going to sink into the ocean,” she said.
Well, no shit.
The fact that the mainstream media can’t even see how far left they have slid – branding ‘social justice’ and identity politics as ‘centre-left’ is the dead giveaway – shows how much they, too, have become just another lickspittle of the Long March establishment voters have so grown to hate.
For American voters, millions of illegals flooding across the southern border was the catalyst for the Trump electoral revolution. In the UK, the re-lit bonfire over Muslim child-rape gangs may well be the match that burns down the six-month-old Starmer government.
In Australia, it was clearly the Voice referendum that twigged voters that they could fight back against the ‘progressive’ assault on everything they’ve long held dear. The question now is, will the Albanese government cling to a minority government, or will it be a Trump-style bloodbath downunder, this year?
