"Why do non-leftists vote
Labour Democrat?",
he asks. For once I'm not using the cutesy crossing-out to register irony: what he writes applies with equal force on both sides of the Atlantic.
What keeps most non-leftist Democrats voting Democrat has been the spectacularly effective saturation of virtually all media and all educational institutions with the message that the Right is mean-spirited and dangerous. People are fed the message “Danger on the Right” - and virtually never “Danger on the Left,” despite the Left’s far bloodier record.
Indeed - do our kids get taught about the enslavement of whole peoples and the genocides of those acting in the name of socialism? Not a chance - all they get taught is the African slave trade and the Nazis.
That is why nearly all leftist reactions to conservatives are to avoid argument and smear them as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, or bigoted. It is almost impossible to come up with the name of a leading conservative whom the dominant media have not dismissed as one or more of these, and usually as a buffoon as well. In effect, the left says, and has been saying for 100 years, “You may not agree with us, but our opponents are evil.”
The rest is more particularly applicable to the US experience, but his comment on blacks voting Democrat apply,
mutatis mutandis, to the sad city and northern voters in the UK who vote tribally for a party that has spat in their faces: the leftists have ruined the cities they govern, and ruined the public schools they control, yet still their victims vote for them because they think they have no choice.
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We can add the Republic of Ireland to the list of those who vote for their oppressors and tyrants because they feel there is no choice.
ReplyDeleteThis process is not so much because of branding the opposition as evil though, the process is facilitated by a staggering lack of thought on the part of the electorate and an astonishing complicity in the oppositions regular practice of shooting itself in the foot with the family blunderbuss.
Can you really blame such a government for lying and stealing from such a willing victim?
No, I can't. Sheep that only bleat get shagged.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't apply 'equally' on both sides of the Atlantic. The American swing vote of independents tends to vote Democratic, not because they are 'brainwashed' by the leftists but because they tend to fear the Right more - when they are thinking clearly which is not as often as one would like.
ReplyDeletePrager is a phoney. He repeats the old notion that the US media are all 'liberal.' Anyone in America who would believe this would be refuted by their own daily viewing habits. I grant you that nationally, there is a 'liberal media culture', but the media are owned by big corporations and look at what an easy ride they gave GW until his final days.
In fact almost the opposite of your thesis is true;in the US, although the American Left would like to be an honest dominant Socialist State with all the attendant flaws and fallacies of the British one, they are unable to be so because the entire economy is dominated by large corporations and because the American people are inherently centrist.
Although the US Congress seems at present to be
riddled with corruption from special interest funding, American blacks and Hispanics know that the Republican Party is not Conservative in the British sense but largely a pretender to 'family values,' and patriotic virtues which are continually exposed as false in the tawdrier sorts of media.
And then there is the recent financial difficulty brought on ,not only by deregulation but by any notion of responsibility in those administering the regulations which were still operational and relevant.
One might remember that Franklin Roosevelt, that scion of the Patroon landowners of the Hudson Valley, rescued the American democracy by
creating Social Security and, eventually, enlisting in the great anti-Fascist war. He was not really a leftist at all, although you might say that Eleanor was.
In England and in America there are two struggling democracies, both trying to apply basic principles in order to recover some former integrity in both local and national government. But the principal enemy to this integrity in America is the Right (the Left would like to be) and in England, the Left.
There is absolutely no justification for saying that the situations are the same because, right now, they ain't.
I guess you're right. The comparison is strained because I temporarily forgot how sanctimonious both 'left' AND 'right' are in the States, whereas it's heavily concentrated on the 'left' over here. As you know, were it not for the fact that I lived in Ron Paul's district in Texas I could never have voted FOR anyone in my life.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the bit I quoted from Prager's article about the knee-jerk, broad-brush slander the lefties hurl indiscriminately at their opponents IS equally valid on both sides of the Atlantic. And it inclines me to prefer their opponents, regardless.
ReplyDelete