When the left grumble about “populism”, what they really mean is that the right are tapping into the popular mood – and it’s driving the left crazy.
No matter how much they shout, finger-wag, hector and bully us, we hoi polloi just refuse to be told what to do by the left-elite. Trump, Brexit, Morrison, Bolsonaro, Orban, Johnson – across the Western world, the left-elite are being given the collective middle finger.
The parties of the right have triumphed in better reading the public mood and recasting their policies, even their identity to win.
The parties of the left have blown their brains out by squandering the public anger towards financial elites, compressed living standards and the alienation of working people who feel frustrated or betrayed — an ideal framing for left election victories. The left misread the times. Its world-historic failures have created the current opening for radical conservatives. Hillary Clinton and Bill Shorten expected to win; many of Corbyn’s backers believed he might pull off victory.
The left became consumed by ideological arrogance. It listened to its true believers and the liberal media.
The insular arrogance of the modern left has been nowhere better demonstrated than in the US, where the left has literally gathered to “scream helplessly at the sky”, while the left-dominated media watch on in mixed puzzlement and fury as their viewing numbers plummet.
Success in each case was built upon the left’s extremism. The left made two specific mistakes — it misread culture and it misread class. It embraced contemporary progressivism in its assault on traditional values and patriotic norms while its quest for individual self-expression spilling into gender, race and queer ideology only alienated the mainstream.
Its class campaigns were crude, old-fashioned and tired[…]
As Lauren Southern has written, Westerners are rediscovering the virtue of nationalism. Not, as the left would have it, jackbooted, goose-stepping, right-arm raising “fascism”, but the simple virtues of love of one’s country and countrymen – regardless of their race.
The lesson is that nationalism retains its power into the 21st century because people link individual self-interest with national self-interest. This is the golden bridge to conservatism’s revival. Its power lies in its validity: individual destiny is chained to national destiny.
This strikes at one of the foundations of progressivism — its distaste for nation-state loyalty and its belief that a civilised people will accept the logic of a globalised world (think trade, capital flows, climate change and people movement) and substitute enlightened internationalism for emotive nationalism. The elites misjudged their own countries and the bedrock power of location, community and nation in the way people interpreted their lives.
So where does this leave the left, seemingly unshakeably wedded to the ideology of globalism, open borders, capital-M Multiculturalism and mass immigration from the Global South?
Can parties of the left escape from their current crisis? Consider Corbyn’s response to defeat. He believes he won on the issues[…]This is progressive dogmatism at its worst.
So long as the left remain locked in an isolation ward of social media echo-chambers, legacy media incestuousness and inner-city insularity, they are doomed to irrelevance.
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