If you are on the Left, and not angered by people like this academic, then you are not on the Left. You are part of a class that is on board with the extension of the corporate form. And you need to know, and be made it own it and own up to it. Any pretensions at Leftism end right here.
"Same demographic..."
This is the demographic who make things, grow things, build things, transport things... The people upon whose labour society depends, whose labour has been exploited by the parasite class throughout the decades. Socialists used to be very vocal on these things. This is the demographic with a productive orientation to the world, a demographic that is socially useful. And honest and healthy. Unlike the demographic who make their living by sneering at them. The parasite class.
White working class men were heroes when emptying bins, delivering food, working in distribution during Covid lockdowns, whilst others worked from home or lived off furlough. Now, white working class men are deemed thick and uneducated again, just as they were with Brexit. Oh, our sneering classes!
Clever people in bubbles affirming and reaffirming their preferences and prejudices without looking out of the window to see the wider world.
We are witnessing the new class war, and the old political terms no longer apply in the same way as they once did.
I could paper the walls with the certificates I have, both academic and vocational, degrees, City&Guilds, College of Teachers, all kinds. The only bit of paper I have framed and on display is of one the letters of notification I received when working through Lockdown. “essential worker,” “one of a limited number of essential staff members” given the “status of key worker.”
My finest hour, when my status as “local hero” was confirmed. Keeping people connected, door-to-door.
Another letter adds that I “perform a service essential to society.”
I doubt that the clever people sneering at the “uneducated” working classes today can say the same.
How on Earth Leftist politics allowed these people to come to occupy leading positions and have dominant voices beggars belief. The lesson ought to have been learned during Covid.
“Clearly, these new jobs would not replace the old ones, and nor should they. Get rid of all the cleaners, rubbish collectors, bus drivers, supermarket checkout staff and secretaries, for example, and society will very quickly grind to a halt. On the other hand, if we woke up one morning to find that all the highly paid advertising executives, management consultants, and private equity directors had disappeared, [and add Hollywood celebrities, multi-millionaire singers, and academic-activists, lawyer-activists, media class, politicians etc] society would go on much as it did before: in a lot of cases, probably quite a bit better. So, to begin with, workers need to reclaim a sense of pride and social worth. Doing so would be a big step forward in making the case that the wages and conditions of low-paid jobs must be improved in order to reflect the importance they have in all our lives.”
This is a quote from the book with which Owen Jones made his name in 2011, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. The demonization continues, with anti-working class prejudice being the most acceptable form of discrimination in modern society, almost obligatory in forming the ideological foundation of an exploitative society. The Left once knew this. It now joins in the discrimination, now the working class has started to assert its independence from those who once purported to represent and defend it, but now patently does neither.
The existential threat to democracy that wins in a democratic landslide.
Told you so. But the mainstream liberal left isn't going to get it any more now than they did in 2016 or 2017 or 2019. No matter how many times this sort of thing happens, they always double-down on their delusions and call the electorate racist troglodytes. And then, once more, act shocked and surprised when they lose. How on Earth can the clever people, the educated people, People Like Us, lose at all, let alone keep losing. Must be the stupid people. Must be democracy. Down with both. And it’s all Trump’s fault. We can laugh at the delusions, but these people are dangerous and constitute a real threat to freedom and democracy.
With respect to People Like Us, I shall quote a letter sent to the Financial Times in the aftermath of Brexit in 2017.
Sir, Your pages overflow with predictions of disaster brought on by the Brexit/Trump axis. Leaving aside the depressing and repetitive pointlessness of this mass guesswork, its underlying assumption — that things were better when People Like Us were in charge — is at best dubious, at worst delusional. Under PLU rule, we have two failed wars and the Middle East in flames, China expansionist, Europe enfeebled, America ineffective and Russia resurgent. At home, we have banking crises, stagnant median incomes, uncontrolled borders, record indebtedness, profiteering by the "professional" classes, and general social polarisation. This is the Eden from which the rude and licentious electorates have expelled us?
Face it. We FT readers had our decades in charge and we blew it for everyone but us. Time for us to do what we've been telling the rest of them to do for years, and suck it up. Or go forth and earn the respect that regains power. (Keith Craig, London SW7, UK).
The problem is that People Like Us never go forth and do anything, they carry on seeking their own way, expecting to get it, knowing that it is the right way for them, and caring not a joy at the damage it does to others. Ordinary folk should know and accept their place.
Commiserations to the liberals who, despite ample warning since 2016, have not only failed to address the concerns of ‘ordinary’ people but doubled-down on the policies giving rise to those concerns: ‘woke’ nonsense and a divisive identity politics, rising crime and disorder, mass immigration, rising taxes, declining services, endless relentless chaos. That they are shocked and outraged when they lose an election indicates the extent to which they care nothing for democracy – they are autocrats who presume that People Like Us should rule. This is what happens. It’s time to look in the mirror. It was time to look in the mirror in 2016. Instead, blame was squarely laid at the door of stupid, racist, ‘uneducated’ people. That it’s the same reaction now as it was then indicates that we are dealing not with plain and simple bigotry but class instinct and class interest. Such liberals are members of a new class, a fraction of corporate class, their moralising in public serving as a cover for their material interests. Policies which ‘ordinary’ people see as plainly deleterious to social and economic health, community cohesion, and national security serve the material interests of this new class. It’s class struggle, and the ‘educated’ are seeking a privileged social position in the body politic. Rather than accept defeat, they will prefer to bring the curtain down on democracy.
‘Ordinary’ people, those wedded to place and bounded in their communities, do not want open borders, are not soft on crime, dislike high taxes when tax revenues go to anything and anyone other than things serving the public good. They don’t want rule by quangos, experts, and ngo’s, either, nor restrictions on free speech, the forever wars waged by the ruling class, nor the sexualisation of children. They don’t like to be called Fascists and ‘far right,’ either, for raising their voices in defence of their compatriots. The only people who haven’t realised the bleeding obvious on this are the people who run our institutions.
I hate to call these people ‘Left.’ I will persist in pointing out that, detached from the working class, such people are liberals and progressives riding the latest wave of capitalist development. The appeal of socialism to them lies in the institutional form detached from the democratic content. They see socialism as a vehicle of control, regulation, and governance, with People Like Us in charge and issuing the orders. This ‘Left’ has gone too far and played all its cards. They have stoked division and caused destruction. They present themselves – and are presented – as elites, but these people are best seen as constituting a class. They are not very bright, for all of the emphasis they place on education and certification. Education, like ethics, is a cover for their material interests. They earn their money and power from their social position and, of course, prefer to conceal those material motives behind a virtuous and benign public image.
What is striking about these ‘elites’ is how predictably stupid and incompetent they are, and how little they learn by way of disastrous experience.
Someone with a modicum of intelligence would have understood that calling people racists, fascists, Nazis and ‘garbage’ would have been a bad campaign strategy. Not least because it has been done before, done over and again, and not worked. But, no, rather than learn from experience, they double-down and do it all the more. Which, again, should tell us that we are not talking about actual politics here, but the assertion of class interest, a class interest which is deemed non-negotiable. People Like Us insist on having their way and brook no opposition.
This self-righteous, identity-driven moralizing is exactly why these liberals will keep losing – and keep on going in the wrong, divisive, directions when they do win. But rather than take advice and change their behaviour (which is the definition of learning), they will prefer to bring the curtain down on free speech and democracy. The anti-democratic mentality is in plain view. The electorate were abused before and during the election, and the abuse continues after the electorate. If people don’t vote for you, the problem lies with you and not the people. Those who blame electorates are plainly anti-democratic. The irony is that these were the people who repeated the line that Donald Trump constitutes an ‘existential threat to democracy.’ The irony is lost on them. Trump wins by a landslide, and the voters are damned for being ‘uneducated.’ And racist, fascist, misogynist ‘garbage’ to boot. Abusing the electorate is not the greatest campaign strategy in the world. Which goes to underline that this ‘elite’ is not an elite at all, merely a class of people seeking to get their own way, presuming others will comply and obey, without needing to be persuaded.
If this is a ‘Left’ then it is a cultural and corporate Left, which is to say ‘progressives’ who are firmly embedded in the corporate form and utterly detached from the members of the demos (the existential threat to democracy is real, and it is coming from the midwit managerialists, who are prospective apparatchiks within the decidedly authoritarian corporate form).
It is worth noting that far more “billionaires” backed Harris than they did Trump, 83 of them. Harris raised almost 50% more money. The same thing happened with Obama. And still Leftists and liberals think of themselves as plucky outsiders fighting the system. They are an incorporated Left, establishment to the core. Hence the contempt they have for working class people.
Is anybody in the political/media/academy/activist class in any kind of touch with ‘ordinary’ people?
We are told that ‘ordinary’ people don’t exist by miscellaneous members of the political/media/academy/activist class. Not in their world, evidently. But they do exist. I have lived amongst them and worked with them my entire life. And 72,669,664 of them just voted for Trump, giving him 295 seats and counting to Harris’ 226. Trump, the existential threat to democracy, has just won with a landslide. "Trump won because he represents the views of the ordinary working bloke. The very person those left wing parties were set up to represent - but no longer do." (Rod Liddle). And they still don't get it. They still don't think that ordinary working blokes exist. We might have expected that this would have caused some self-reflection on the part of people who called it so badly, but no, they have doubled-down on the insults and abuse. Ordinary people don't exist in their world, and don't count. They simply don’t see any contradiction in defending democracy against existential threats whilst abusing the bulk of the demos.
By this stage I have tired of issuing warnings and saying "I told you so." The "new class" is not for persuading. Its members don’t learn because they don’t listen, and they don’t listen because they think they know all that there is to know – they know their own interests and that’s all that matters to them. The “new class” reserves to itself the right to organise and order the world from above and from without. Its members cannot accept that others may have other views, and that to have other views is perfectly legitimate in a democracy. Democracy is constituted by alternative and rival platforms, or is not a democracy at all. They cannot accept that individual members of the demos not only retain their inner 'yeses' and 'noes' - the stuff of conscience - but actually exercise them. The hysteria when this happens indicates something very clearly - the sense of entitlement and privilege.
Politics is dissensus, dialogue, disagreement. There is a new class among us who want only monologue. Large swathes of public life are being removed from parliamentary scrutiny and democratic control. There is a deliberate and systematic de-democratisation underway. And the loathing of members of the demos whenever they dare raise their voice against People Like Us is all part of it. There is indeed an existential threat to democracy, and it is posed by those who sought to project all threats on Donald Trump, inventing a monster so as to draw public attention away from their machinations.
I’ve written on it at length over the years.
It’s all in here.
And here.
And elsewhere.
But my audience is not the clever people who know better.
It’s the people I spent my life living amongst and working with. The people who make, move, build, and grow things and who look after people, the people constantly abused for being ‘uneducated,’ the people who keep your society functioning and who kept their constant abusers alive during Lockdown. And they don't need to be told, because they already know, and have been telling their governments since ever. (There is nothing going wrong in the world today that 'ordinary' people haven't been drawing attention to for decades, only to be ignored or abused. And to indicate just how detched liberals and progressives are, they persist in sharing a meme containing the Orwell quote on how easy it is to control the people by beer, football, gambling. I have news for the sneering liberals and progressives - they are the ones who are conformist and under control).
I’ve still never heard a Taylor Swift song. And it seems her views don’t carry anything like the sway the media bubbles think they do. Not when people are facing myriad crises, suffering the consequences of principles and policies others advance at no cost to themselves from a safe distance.
The current president Joe Biden called Donald Trump’s supporters ‘garbage.’ That’s over seventy million people, the bulk of the electorate. The political class despises the people it is supposed to serve. It is working for other priorities, as should be clear in the way our countries are imploding within. Governments have ceased to govern.
I've spent a lifetime trying to get this point across, only to find too many people wedded to political concepts and divisions that are empty. It might be one reason why political rhetoric is now so violent and extreme, with people shouting loudly over one another in the attempt to reassure themselves that their voices do actually count for something. People prefer hurling abuse at monsters to actually analysing the situation. The corporate form has engulfed all sides in politics. Each accuses the other of being an existential threat to democracy, all miss that democracy is being eclipsed by the very game they play. I've given up on social media. For all I have posted over the years, people carry on with the empty labels.
We are looking at a corporatocracy so effective, so advanced and fine-tuned, that many of its citizens still call it a democracy, still vote as if their votes count, still speak as if their voices will be heard, and rally behind the forces which pose ‘existential threats to democracy’ having been persuaded by said forces that others constitute the threat to democracy. But, every so often, there is a revolt, dismissed as ‘populism.’
I keep writing. But it would appear that people live in their own circles, and take their bearings from what others in those circles say. Or don’t say. Some things simply don’t exist, if they can’t be blamed on others. Everything is outsourced. Nobody owns anything with respect to costs and consequences – other than the poor benighted common folk who, in being place-bound and dependent on wage labour, cannot but pay the price of others’ principles.
The gushing praise for Kamala Harris since her nomination was proof that The Emperor’s New Clothes tells a truth about human nature. Harris was manifestly unfit for high office, or any office, yet the ‘elites’ pretended that she was because of the political and social cost of truth-telling. They are cowards, and so are many others, complicit in the decline of our nations and unravelling of our societies. They think more of what their friends and colleagues would think should they speak out of turn, and so parrot errant nonsense, and maybe convince themselves that it all makes perfect sense. Group think corrupts the mind and weakens the spine.
Socialism? I would prefer not to waste time on this one. These mass media cretins don't know their political arses from their elbows. They specialise in peddling lies or, more charitably, political terms void of content and meaning. Let’s call it unconscious lying. Or delusion. The socialism they refer to, whether as friends or foes, is a technocratic neoliberalism. It fails consistently, it is rejected consistently by ‘populists,’ and we live in hope that it may one day be run out of town at the point of a pitchfork. It seems that that is what it will take. Because these people refuse to listen and learn. They are out to impose their views, replacing democracy with an overt authoritarianism.
The mentality has compromised the environmental movement, too (although this didn’t take much, given that the misanthropy that has stalked ecology since its incipience has never been too far below the surface).
“It’s time for ordinary people to step up, organise and make change happen,” say Just Stop Oil.
They just did, in their millions, a bleedingly obvious fact to which liberals are oblivious. The ‘ordinary’ people went out and voted in such numbers as to deliver a landslide for Donald Trump. Oh, and it’s the ‘ordinary’ people who always have to clean up the mess made by these pampered, puerile vandals.
Shot, convicted, threatened with prison, and branded a fascist, and still Donald Trump is the people’s choice.
The shock and outrage is worth noting and worth explaining. Trump’s win can hardly have been a surprise. Trump did win the presidency before. And when he lost, he didn’t lose by much. It was entirely possible that he would win again, not least because Biden had been decrepit and Harris is utterly vacuous. It was obvious that Trump had a chance. The fact that ‘the elites’ are so shocked indicates the extent to which they think that they and their views and interests are the only ones. That a Trump win was deemed impossible is not mere wishful thinking, it is an assertion of political ownership and entitlement on the part of a class who think only their interests are legitimate. They simply cannot countenance other views and other interests. Their mentality is thoroughly anti-democratic.
“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.” (William F. Buckley, Jr.)
These people are utterly deluded, yes, but most of all they are autocratic. They are aristocratic in the sense that they avoid debate, refuse to be questioned, and resist being held to account. But they are not real aristocrats, in that they are the worst rather than the best: a kakistocracy.
These people have been hating and abusing since Brexit and before and are tone deaf. They offer clear evidence of how group think rots the mind. The encouraging thing is that people are no longer paying them attention and are acting to end their nonsense.
What we are seeing here is the complete failure of the liberal elites to understand their own country, report on their country, or appreciate their country. They have nothing in common with the people, know nothing of them, would prefer to hear nothing of them, and turn to abuse and repression whenever the people raise their voices. We have seen it in Britain, Canada, France.
And can we once and for all put an end to these constant references to Nazism and Fascism. To wheel out the darkest times in human history just to peddle a politics of fear, smear opponents, and gain a political advantage is a politics so low as to be an anti-politics. Not only are the analogies and inferences completely wrong, such cynical politics is grossly offensive to the memory of those who knew what actual Nazism and Fascism was and fought those very things. Cheap and nasty. It comes as a surprise to see the people who fall for it, people who think themselves educated and intelligent. They are bigots. One of the five modules I studied for my BA (Hons) in History was Twentieth Century European Politics. I delivered a decent paper on Fascism. I studied Fascism closely, and learned to be leery of generalisations and applications. I researched deeply and studied hard, only to see people throw the term ‘fascism’ around liberally at anybody they don’t agree with. ‘Communism’ likewise.
The same with respect to celebrities. The endorsement of celebrities is all show and zero substance. I value film stars for the roles they play in the movies; pop stars for their ability to knock out a decent tune. I don’t look to any of them to tell me what to think or how to vote. My reaction to seeing any celebrity pontificating on any subject is to consider how pompous and self-important they are. Their views are no more relevant than any other member of the citizen body. How telling that the voices of ‘ordinary’ citizens are so easily overlooked, when not being derided, when the media class fawns over the endorsements of some name or another.
It seems that the views of Lady Gaga are not as important as she thinks they are. Nobody votes for politicians because some song and dance man or woman or Hollywood celebrity or show pony said so. The whole celebrity class have made themselves look ridiculous in the past few years, not only in being so out of touch, but in being so hypocritical, doing precisely what they tell ‘the little people’ not to do. They are not to be taken seriously. Their judgements are unerring in their inaccuracy.
If you seriously believe that Harris lost because of misogyny or racism, then you are a fool who has learned nothing. These people learn nothing for the simple reason they already think they know all that there is to know – they are experts by way of nothing but their own preferences, prejudices, and material interests. In the olden days, when socialism meant something, and politics was on nodding terms with the working class, we used to call this class struggle. The class struggle is alive and well and is being waged from above and from without by a class remote from the working class. It’s the same parasitism: people helping themselves to the labour of others – wage theft – whilst nurturing resentment against those they know they ultimately depend upon, for all that they despise them.
Wake up from wokeness and listen to what your compatriots are telling you: they are done with the censorship, the gaslighting, the race-baiting, the gender woo, the environmentalist cult and control, the thought-policing, the newspeak, the identity politics, the high taxes and no borders.
Enough by this stage is clearly more than enough.
And then we get the abuse of the ‘uneducated.’
Like some academic with a degree in “post-performative gender woo in 13th century unicorn land” is better equipped to make a political decision than a bloke who can build, plumb, and wire an entire house.
Having been on the receiving end of abuse from the ‘educated’ for decades now, ‘ordinary’ folk are entitled to hurl some back. It might be better to just reclaim labour power and reorganise it socially, cutting out the parasites, but here goes.
In The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), George Orwell notes that ‘Socialism,’ draws towards it ‘with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England.’ Cranks with a taste for margins and minorities, then. Orwell extends his tirade against such ‘cranks’ to include ‘vegetarians with wilting beards,’ the ‘outer-suburban creeping Jesus’ eager to begin his yoga exercises, and ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat.’ They are ‘progressives,’ not socialists. They are bourgeois rather than Left, joyless heirs of the Jacobins. They loathe the working class, and always have done.
These are the sandal-wearing vegetarian, now vegan, creeps and cretins who sat on their idle backsides ordering quinoa from Waitrose, hate-tweeting all day, wearing masks for safety and insisting all fell into compliance, whilst allowing themselves to be jabbed endlessly with who knows what, insisting that all be jabbed too, on pain of exclusion, whilst the working classes worked their backsides off for the entire pandemic to feed them. Permit the intemperate language. Be sure that I do indeed mean to offend. Despite being at the ‘at risk’ category, owing to chronic illness, and despite being offered sick leave, I chose to work through the Lockdown, working door-to-door, being a familiar face in the community, keeping people connected, letting people know they were not alone. I have many certificates of many kinds, degrees, City & Guilds, College of Teachers. The letters of notification which identify me as an “essential” and “key” worker performing a valuable social service are the only ones I have framed and on display at home.
As for the ‘educated,’ they are no great shakes. They are now displaying the same condescending arrogance as when Trump won in 2017, the same arrogance they exhibited over Brexit too.
The election is constitutes a firm rejection of what these mainstream parties have become, the left-of-centre parties in this respect. They are elitist, authoritarian, condescending, misandrist parties filled with ideologues who don't care one jot about the working class.
Some people are genuinely shocked that liberals and ‘progressives’ are so deluded that they do not realize that their smug condescending arrogance is precisely what alienates former supporters and turns them to vote for Trump. They really do believe that their view is the only view and everyone else is uneducated scum, subhuman filth to be discarded. This gives a good indication of what members of the ‘new class’ think of ‘ordinary’ people, which is something that should be born in mind when the issue of Assisted Dying crops up. They will promise all the usual safeguards, knowing they will be ineffective. They will be more than happy to dispose of the despised. They have done precisely nothing to further the cause of assisted living, and everything to render such living well-nigh impossible for millions.
These people have no concept of what it takes to do a real job and even less of what it takes to make a nation cohesive and successful. They don’t live in the society of others, they live in an abstract world mediated by connections that transcend place. They are very much members of a global corporate class. Their moralising is a public cover for their material interests.
This is what happens when you call ordinary people bigots and racists, when you tell them they are stupid, when you laugh at their traditions and sense of family.
This is what happens when you change the meaning of words and you silence those who disagree with you. In the end, despite all your efforts to stop them … the people will decide. It’s called democracy, the very thing that those who think they already know better don’t care for. Truth is non-negotiable after all. Why dialogue with others when you already know the truth?
Pay attention politicians, ideologues, and activists because the people can see you. This is not Left versus Right, those terms are void of content and meaning. This is not even quite elites versus masses, establishment versus people, although that is how it pans out in public. It is class war.
Millions have rejected unbridled liberalisation and globalisation and have given a mandate for border control, trade protection and re-industrialisation. These are sensible policies, which should have been enacted in the 1990s, only for Clinton and the Democrats and Blair and Labour to press the pedal down hard in precisely the other direction. That should tell you that there is nothing accidental or mistaken about the political events of the age, they are attuned to the societal dynamics of the corporate form. That is why, no matter how often these neoliberal technocrats are checked by ‘populists,’ they keep coming back, imposing policies they know to be unpopular.
Ordinary decent people in all Western nations are sick to the back teeth of the way liberalisation and globalisation are ruining their way of life, destroying social cohesion, undermining the rule of law. People protest to politicians, and nothing is done, for the very reason that the political class –and the media and academy class, supported by the footsoldiers in the activist class – are working for the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. I said so in my economics masters in 1995, and I will continue to say so. I make no apologies for repetition when I am right, but too many people are absorbed in lies, delusions, and hypocrisies.
Dems: "Why did we lose?"
The Electorate: "Too much identity politics, and you won't listen to us."
Dems: "Shut up, it was obviously the cishetero Latinx and male African-American's misogynoir and rejection of intersectional transgender policies that are to blame."
People are sick of identity politics and woke woo infecting all parts of big government and big business, and being extended over the whole of society. And they are sick of being told that they are a bigot if they argue against men invading women’s spaces and sports. And they cleave to biological reality, and social reality, and reality as such, as against those who believe in the power of language to invert and invent.
People are sick of the endless of waves of unchecked and undocumented fighting age males flooding across the border - not knowing who they are, or what their true objectives may be.
They’re sick of a high tax, low-productivity, low-growth economics that is designed to prop up bloated and inefficient Government bureaucracies and big business. They know that mass immigration is a cheap labour strategy which politicians and business rely on in place of a genuine industrial strategy and policy. These governments abandoned training, skills, and investment decades ago, despite being warned of the deleterious economic and social consequences. They opted for a cheap labour strategy, presided over the decline of the nation’s economic profile, deskilled the working class, deindustrialised their communities, and broke the spirit and work ethic of the indigenous people. And now we have to suffer the ill-educated young snots pouring out of the destroyed universities telling us we need migrant labour to do the jobs British people can’t and won’t do. The neoliberals created the problem in the first place, to bring about a ‘free’ global market. We criticised is at competitive downsizing in the 1990s, before Clinton and Blair made it Leftist orthodoxy. And still neoliberalism prevails, the working class on the receiving end as ever.
The people are sick of career politicians with zero real world experience being promoted far beyond their meagre abilities.
They are sick of diversity, equity and inclusion, and sick of being labelled ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’ for having views that contradict the official narrative. Alternate platforms are entirely legitimate in a democracy. Those who seek to deny them are not democrats. Plainly.
Despising the bulk of your own countries’ population is not a good idea. Calling people scum, garbage, fascist and Nazi is not adult behaviour.
I would hope that everyone shocked and outraged might take the opportunity, as they didn’t in 2016, 2017, and 2019, to ask themselves what the ‘othered’ other half of the population believe and why they believe it. But it is easier to presume stupidity, ignorance, and worse – it saves liberals and progressives from engaging in the self-reflection that may lead them into discovering that they are not nearly as clever as they take themselves to be. We would hope that they would stop believing that only they are right and everyone else should be despised.
But it’s not going to happen.
The legacy media, as well as our political elite, reside in an echo chamber. They are not a reliable or credible source of truth anymore, their agenda has been completely exposed.
Here and there, one or two get the message, and seem to express it in half-hearted form, as if feeling duty-bound. For now. It is amusing to see highly educated liberal commentators say things like “you know, people just want to be treated with respect” or “they want strong borders” as though they’re sharing profound insights when, in fact, they’re just stating what is obvious to everybody else
They're quoting what most ‘ordinary’ folks have been saying for about a decade and think it's some sort of revelation.
I'm increasingly convinced that mad progressive overreach combined with the alienating effects it has had on vast swathes of the population is in the process of creating a ‘populist’ backlash that a lot of nodding-dog liberals and progressives, thinking themselves Leftists, are going to regret. I expect many of them to say, in a decade or more, however long it takes, to claim that they never went along with the culture war nonsense. Indeed, they can now be found repeatedly saying that the culture war doesn’t exist and is merely a right wing invention. When it has been time to stand up and speak out, they have been silent.
The Patrician speaking about the Plebs.
‘Educated’ doesn’t mean smart or worldly. Look at Starmer. There is not an ounce of common sense or empathy between his ears. Or intelligence.
They call people thick and stupid and one ‘ist’ or another or all of them together, and then express outrage when those people say up yours. But they never learn. It’s the nature of arrogance. And entitlement.
People who see the working class as uneducated are clueless (and often useless). They were happy for all those less educated white men to run around during Covid building stuff, farming, keeping the shops and factories going, driving lorries and delivering their food, taking care of the needy, ill, and vulnerable, whilst they sat on their ignoble behinds hate-tweeting all day. But they weren’t happy, or appreciative – that’s how a master class expects a servant class to behave. It’s pointless pointing out the hypocrisies: this is class war. They see workers as servants, to be kept around insofar as they are useful and exploitable. The working class who are in need of help and support are considered a burden, of no use, to be disposed of. Assisted Dying.
These are the same uneducated white men that beat an actual Fascism in the 1940’s, the pretend fascism of the liberals in the present day. They go around shouting ‘No pasarán’ at locals protesting the latest outrage to their community as if they are fighting the Battle of Cable Street. These liberals would be crying in a corner back in the ‘30w and ‘40s, begging for real men – and real women (can they even define one?) to come and save them.
Yet another academic who confuses education with wisdom, intelligence and life experience
These academics of the Left loved the uneducated white men when they formed the core of left parties throughout the West, and when they seemed to be the vehicles through which the socialist paradise would be achieved. They turned to hate them when they realised that the actual working class were not as their revolutionary textbooks said they were.
We should know that a university education doesn't exempt the educated from being complete idiots.
The educated think they are better than the ‘ordinary’ people but wouldn't last a day trying to do any of the jobs they think beneath them. Pure class snobbery. How these people are classed as Left is one for Leftists to explain.
Enough. I’ve wasted more than enough time and energy on issues that are plain to ‘ordinary’ and ‘uneducated’ folk. You really don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind is blowing.
‘People don’t realize how hard it is to speak the truth, to a world full of people that don’t realize they’re living a lie.’ (Edward Snowden).
Progressives are actually regressive in their determination to reopen healed wounds from the past and set people fighting over old wars.
New Class
They have overreached, they have never really engaged with the electorate. Instead, they live in their own world, in their own bubbles, talking to one another in their own circles. The levels of stupidity we see are the product a) of a commitment to shared material interests, grace of belonging to the same class, occupying the same social position and b) group think. We could see them as tribal. They will fall out with people over politics, saying that if someone is a Trump supporter or a Republican (or UKIP or Reform or Conservative), they can never be my friend. ‘I have lost friends over this,’ is a cry that has been repeated since 2017, with those crying making it clear that it is the other person’s fault for not being progressive. That’s not a very useful attitude to take into politics. That attitude divides the body politic into friends and enemies, making the job of mediation in politics well night impossible.
Their idea of legitimate political agents – now that they have abandoned the working class – is some not-for-profit body funded by George Soros and some executive director who got a degree in grievance and victimhood studies at some destroyed university, and is being paid $300-500 a year. These are the people who are considered spokespersons for any group or identity, the whatever community. And the reality is that there is no community and most people can’t be categorised in this way.
The members of this new class never meet nor engage with the country they live in. They live in another world, a world so remote that it may as well be another planet. They have removed themselves from society so as to be better able to order and organise it from above in the Empyrean Heights they occupy. They are members of a new class in a new class structure, akin to feudal lords in control of the serfs. This is the classless class, the class that dare not speak its name, lest it lose its claims to neutral expertise in the service of all humanity. The members of this class recognise one another immediately, and share backgrounds, worldviews, interests, forming a tight elite. They have credentialed their way to the top of every social institution, using these to advance their material interests. They have no connection with the ‘ordinary’ members of the social world. They look upon working class people travelling to work in a white van with contempt. They have no idea of how the vast majority of working class people, even middle class people, live. And they don’t want to know. They don’t think they need to know. They don’t care for ‘ordinary’ people and their concerns, and they don’t care about democracy. They see democracy as an infringement on their own liberties, and they see others as threats to their material interests.
The result is a politics in which working class voters have been abandoned by an increasingly liberal and progressive ‘Left,’ shorn of its social and democratic commitments and priorities, and becoming increasingly oligarchical and autocratic. At this point we see the divide between the educated and the uneducated opening up. The credentialed seek to cover their traces with respect to the abandonment of working class people by condemning them as ‘uneducated.’ The ‘uneducated’ could easily hit back by pointing to their skills and training, which would seem to be far more socially useful than many of the dubious degrees and dubious colleges earned by the educated. The credentials of the credentialed ‘elite’ can be somewhat suspect. The ‘uneducated’ in this sense is merely another, sneering, derogatory way of saying blue collar – working class. It is plain class snobbery on the part of a class out to secure its material interests, seeing the working class as its class enemy. Any Leftist who retains a commitment to socialism and democracy, and can’t see how the liberal and progressive ‘Left’ is diametrically opposed to both, is a fool holding onto outmoded definitions. The ‘populist’ revolt that is resisted and stigmatised by the new class is the working class attempting to assert its class interests against its class enemy. It is demanding that the issues it raises to be taken seriously and addressed in politics – issues of trade, finance, immigration, multiculturalism, globalisation from which the new class benefits materially. Just as the new class is the classless class that dare not speak its name, so it hides its material interests with respect to all these issues behind an overt moralism. They present themselves as the virtuous angels seeking nothing but the human betterment, when in truth they gain a very definite material benefit from all these issues. It’s class war, and the remarkable thing is that many supposed Leftists are on the wrong side. All we can do is ask people to look into reality as it actually exists. But it won’t happen. The members of the new class are not only comfortably off, they live at some safe distance from the society of others. Which is to say, they don’t live remotely close to reality and don’t suffer from the issues others suffer from. They don’t live anywhere close to working class communities. The working class don’t exist on their planet, and they rather resent the intrusion of rude and uncouth voices in the political world, which they think belongs to them and should serve its interests. They are not committed to place, either in the sense of locality or nationality, and think so little of citizenship that they will give it away to anyone. They don’t believe in borders for the reason that, living in their own secluded world, they are safe and have no need of them. They are a privileged and entitled class, akin to the old Second Estate in France. Unlike the old aristocracy, they are unwilling to put their lives on the line or risk something of themselves. They like to lead at a safe distance and rule by remote control. They benefit greatly from cheap labour. Not only are they not very bright, they are also gutless.
There is a political realignment underway, with the working class abandoning the parties and politics that abandoned them long ago. Trump has forged a new working class coalition, and this really galls the left liberals and progressive who, for as much as they despise the working class and hold it in contempt, think ordinary people should remain with them, in acceptance of their subordinate position. Back in the 1990s Clinton and Blair acted directly contrary to the interests of its working class constituency, on the assumption that working people had nowhere else to go. Unfortunately, too many members of the working class did indeed ‘suck it up’ and stayed. Working class autonomy is key. It galls the members of the new class to see the working class move away, and ‘populism’ arise as a result. Trump has built a multiracial coalition of ordinary people and poor people. They think they own those people, consider those people as subordinate to them, and incapable of any existence that is independent of them.
Ordinary People
I’m out of words on this. I’ll end with this passage from Matt Goodwin on ‘ordinary people.’ We keep being told be educated people who know better than the rest of us that ‘ordinary people’ don’t exist, just as ‘populism’ is just some chimera spirited up by the ‘far right.’ I find it hard to comprehend, seeing as I have lived amongst ‘ordinary people’ and worked serving them in my local community, street by street. I see them easily enough, and hear their concerns, and wonder why the well-educated can’t. (Clue, they live far away, and keep their circles tight).
The aftermath of the 2024 presidential election has had ‘lots of people on the liberal left wondering what on Earth has happened and how on Earth Trump is stronger in 2024 than he was in either 2016 or 2020. The answer is that this is what happens when you ignore what ordinary people have been saying, thinking, and feeling for much of the last decade; this is what happens when you give them the opposite of what they asked for; this is what happens when you lose control of the borders, when you stuff record levels of illegal migration and legal migration, taxation, regulation, woke ideology, soft on crime policies down their throats. This is what happens when you talk endlessly about threats to democracy whilst at the same time berating anybody that does not share your view as a Nazi, as a fascist, as a piece of garbage while talking about changing the rules of the Supreme Court, staging a coup against the incumbent President Biden and replacing him with somebody who had no public mandate at all. This is what happens when you talk endlessly about persecuting and prosecuting the former President, keeping Donald Trump tied up in legal cases and law cases, trying to keep him off the campaign trail while using your friends in Big Tech to try and restrict and suppress or shut down the public square and the national conversation. This is what happens when you subject the working class to assault on two sides at the same time, when you invest heavily in hyper-globalisation, allowing big companies to offshore their jobs to places like China and elsewhere in Asia while also ushering in record levels of illegal migration undermining the working class in Western economies in order to satisfy the moral righteousness among the liberal left [and, most of all, satisfy the material interests of this fraction of the corporate class – the morality is a cover, a pain-free, cost-free virtue, for which others pay the price]. And this is what happens, ultimately, when the people who dominate the institutions in our society, the people who dominate the universities, the schools, the creative industries, the cultural institutions, lose touch with the people who live in that society, when they tell ordinary people that you can’t be proud of the country that you call your home, when they tell the people that you should be embarrassed about the legacy of history or you should repudiate your shared identity and your sense of values. Ordinary people don’t think like this, they don’t share the values of radical woke progressives who dominate the big cities and the college towns. Ordinary people want a very different kind of politics from that which the Left has been offering them for much of the last decade [and longer]. This is obvious to many ordinary people. In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of the 2024 Presidential election in the aftermath has been watching liberal commentators say these things as if they are profound insights, like ‘voters want to be treated with respect,’ ‘voters want strong borders,’ ‘voters want controlled and lower levels of immigration,’ as if they are profound insights when to most ordinary people they are statements of the bleeding obvious.
That’s where we are. We have got a radicalising Left that has lost touch with the country, which hopefully in the aftermath of this election will now look at itself in the mirror [it won’t and it didn’t in 2016 2017 or 2019] and will actually understand that what they are offering ordinary people is not what those people want [it’s a new class, a fraction of corporate capital, and it’s not for persuading, only checking and challenging. It’s the same people who told working class people ‘there is no alternative’ in the 1980s and that globalisation is the only game in town in the 1990s. Working class people paid the price, and complained, and were ignored. It’s class war.]
That’s why Donald Trump is back in the Whitehouse, that’s why he is stronger than ever, that’s why the political realignment is continuing, and that’s why, nearly a decade on from those initial revolts in 2016 today’s liberal left, the liberal graduate class, the people who dominate most of the institutions in our society, the group think, the censorship industrial complex, why they look as lost as they have ever been before.’
I think 'ordinary' people exist. If they didn’t, the liberal left would be a lot happier today than they are.
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