I write from England, where I just participated in a conference on “The Anglosphere and the Future of Liberty” (about which more in a future post). It’s been an intensely English few days: pubs, a trip to the Imperial War Museum with my 12-year-old son, and lunch at the Garrick Club ending with a delightful portion of sticky toffee pudding. But the recent election here of Ed Miliband as head of the Labour Party put me in mind of a very American poem, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost. A traveler stands at a fork in the road and ponders long and hard about which route to take. Finally he takes “the one less travelled by/And that has made all the difference.”
With the ascension of Ed Miliband, a Marxist who narrowly beat out his brother David for leadership of the party, the Labour Party has turned its back on the nannyish but pragmatic New Labour of Tony Blair and has taken a step back into the thuggish, anticapitalist militancy of the 1970s. Far from offering a “road not taken,” Ed Miliband — the son of one of the most poisonous far-left academics of the 1960s, Ralph Miliband — threatens to take his party, and with it part of the country, down that well-trod road to serfdom England managed largely to extricate itself from thanks to the reforms of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Reading Miliband’s platform, one has to give oneself a shake: is this newspaper really from September 2010 or has one somehow gotten hold of a paper from the 1960s or 1970s? Higher taxes “to reduce the deficit”; a cap on salaries :to narrow the gap between rich and poor”; the promise of “a living wage”; “a third to a half” of cabinet members to be women. It’s the same old sub-Marxist, redistributionist, politically correct playbook that extended England’s post-war poverty well into the 1970s and installed resentment at the center of social policy.
Back in the 1970s, England was a dysfunctional society, intimidated by imperious unions eager to barter the public weal for local advantage. Strikes were rampant, public services regularly disrupted, and economic growth a distant and unrealizable goal. Margaret Thatcher changed all that, but here we go again.
London’s prosperity is astonishing. But everywhere one turns plans are afoot to stymie it. Sitting in Kennedy airport last week waiting to board the plane to London, I read in the Telegraph about proposals of the Energy Secretary, Liberal Democrat Chris Huhne, to levy huge new “green” (air-sickness bag ready?) taxes on gasoline and airline tickets in order “to help low earners” and “free hundreds of thousands of people from income tax.” Is he insane? By taking those hundreds of thousands of people off the income tax rolls he transforms citizens into wards of the state who have no stake in responsible fiscal policy. Just a few days ago, Vince Cable, the anti-business Business Secretary — another Lib Dem member of David Cameron’s preposterous “coalition” — went on a rampage against bankers, greedy “capitalists,” etc.
The always percipient Janet Daley, writing in The Daily Telegraph noted that Tories were likely to rejoice in Ed Miliband’s ascension. So patently left-wing a leader would surely be easy to beat. No so fast, Ms. Daley cautioned. The anti-freedom sentiment that disgorged Miliband minor also coughed up Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, and the other ghoulish characters populating the Lib Dem side of David Cameron’s fragile government. Then, too, there is Mr. Cameron himself: a wet accommodationist who (as The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week) has quietly abandoned the Tory party’s principled stand against yet closer ties with that lumbering, sclerotic leviathan, the European Union. Underlying all this, Ms. Daley points out, is a smoldering suspicion of capitalism, which is also a rejection of capitalism’s chief prerequisite, freedom. This is something that the political elite seems to have great difficulty in getting its mind around: that capitalism is not a moral exercise, it is an engine for the production of wealth. “Although it ends in ‘ism’,” Ms. Daley observes, “capitalism is not a monolithic ideology but simply the human condition in economic form.”
That enabling truth is as promiscuously ignored in England as, alas, it is in the United States. The results are an extension everywhere of the stultifying dead hand of government intervention: more, and more onerous, rules and regulations, higher taxes, less personal freedom. We’ve been done this road before. Isn’t it time to side with Robert Frost and test the road not taken?
Roger, a while back I wrote a comment to you about an article you had written about Chris Buckley. In my comment I outlined why I believed there was a difference between liberals and leftists. I said that I loved liberals for their purity of heart. And that I had grown to detest leftism. Let me state today, now more than ever, leftism is not merely being wrong-headed about a number of issues of the day, I believe anyone who adopts a leftist platform to guide their “life platform” or “value guidance” or “moral compass”, is automatically… by definition ….lost.
There will be no Road Less Taken, it is simply a cessation of being self-ambulatory. It is a People Mover straight to Hell.
Post-modern leftism is the surrender of one’s basic humanity and power of reason over to a collective Grand Wizard, offering in return for one’s soul, the life of a drone cocooned in a hive where self-reflection and examination of one’s purpose, meaning, and worth is subjugated to a mindless protection and service of the hive itself.
The Grand Wizard makes all the decisions (or perhaps the fatted Queen) of what is right, wrong, good, bad, worthy, unworthy. And this hive no longer contains the relatively mild European drone, (classic liberal) it instead viciously attacks with little or no provocation anything and anyone who “disturbs” the nest.
They are permanently at war with those outside the nest. There is the constant hum of their own one note song, each singing precisely in time, meter, pitch with the other, drowning out all the other sounds of the world outside their cocoon. As such, they are incapable of processing or internalizing anything but one collective voice.
While one may marvel at the absolute fealty, the refusal to break ranks, the organizational mastery of the hive itself, it is a hexagonal prison where one makes one’s own cell, and renders a sentence against one’s own individualism, power of reason and rational thought, and walls off the influence of reason and rationality from the whole of the outside world.
One lives a life beyond hubris and enters a frame of mind of vicious and vile arrogance. Every innocent passerby is a threat to be bitten and stung, without regard to their innocent intent or the value of their contribution to the landscape outside the cocoon.
Roger, leftism is a feral swarm. It is out of control and has become a plague. It wreaks a path of destruction in its wake and it has devoured gentler, more useful species, rendering them extinct. The “liberal” being one of them. I fear the “moderate Democrat”, “center-leftist”, “southern Democrat” and, the standard “American Democrat” are on the endangered species list as well.
Our cousins across the pond are not immune from the plague and the pestilence. In fact, they are often the first victims. One may no longer simply come to the fork in the road and seek to choose the Road Less Travled, Roger. One must instead listen for the hum of hubris and hate and decide whether the next footfall fractures the ankle of freedom once and for all.
On another note, Roger, where rampant, unchecked leftism has gone careening off the path of righteousness, is evident in our very own DOJ, especially in the Civil Rights Division.
Watching this unfold, allows us to witness the destruction of morality and its replacement with such warped and twisted logic, vile arrogance, unfairness and inhumanity that it jars the senses and boggles the mind.
By now, those of us outside the swarm’s nest are fully aware of what J. Christian Adams, Christopher Coates and Hans Spakovsky have unveiled. We have a systemic dysfunctional and rabidly discriminatory fever swamp infesting our halls of justice. It is apparent that for some time, the leftist infiltration into the Civil Rights Division has left an indelible stain on the search for fundamental fairness protections for all Americans.
Whites, in general, are to be left outside in the cold. Jews, in particular are to be isolated and cut off from the rest.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/a-blind-eye-to-campus-anti-semitism–15510
What we have instead, is a selective prosecution, selective protection, selective investigation, selective demonization…all, “coincidentally” lining up precisely in lockstep with global leftism’s prejudices, prevarications and persecutions around the world.
The Israeli, the American Jew, the southern white American, and in general the non-leftist white Americans, especially faith-based folks…are to be cut off from the protections and “civil rights”, because the left has decided unilaterally that they are “unworthy”.
Moreover, the left has decided that they should be demonized instead. Slandered. Isolated. Shunned.
At first, I thought that leftists were calling anyone who disagreed with them “racist” because they had lost the argument on a more intellectual level and resorted to name calling as their final, desperate “trump card”.
I no longer believe that. I now believe it is a systemic disease of the soul, that leftists intentionally plant the notion in order to Marximize the impact. As it spreads the malignant slander against Israel and Jews in general, the utility of the combined efforts of Muslimization and Marximization of free market democracies around the globe, leftism has made a useful bedfellow.
At first blush, they could not be more different. Sharia iron-fisted imperatives aligned with Hollywood hedonism…. is a strange mating ritual. But they have the same enemy. Freedom and liberty of thought, reason and individuality. Anti-fascism and repugnance toward dictatorial thought prisons.
Chavez and Ahmadinejad are cut from the same cloth. William Ayers and Osama bin Laden are brothers of another mother.
What has been fascinating to watch and so disheartening to experience, is how our mass media apparatus has sealed off the information stream and intentionally strangled the truth out of BOTH our enemies. It has aided and abetted them at every turn. The disease in the DOJ, especially in the Civil Rights Division has been not only serially ignored, it has been hermetically sealed by the silent co-conspirators, the Journolista warriors for the left.
The Marximization of the press is no longer even seriously contested. It’s simply a fact.
The Muslimization is still in stealth mode and comes in more subtle variations. The refusal to name Bell, California robber barons as Democrats in 350 mass media reports, well…that’s now expected conspiratorial omission. To never mention that a plotter of mass murder on our soil is of Middle Eastern, radical Islamic background…that’s now also come to be expected conspiratorial omission.
But, the Ground Zero Mosque “debate”, whereby those who easily saw through the thinly-veiled “victory” dance in the end zone of ashes and rubble…being attacked as racist and evil…was an alarm bell that Marximization and Muslimization was in full “bloom” as a movement.
The lesser known story at the DOJ, Civil Rights Division, in Irvine, California…a hotbed of hate for the new bedfellows, isn’t even registering as a dog whistle. It’s outside of our range of hearing. Buried deeply by the co-conspirators in the mass media, crushed by the leftists in our own government, strangled and smothered out of existence.
We have three enemies of freedom, justice and liberty in our midst. And we slumber while they plot. Irvine, California is a wonderful place to live. Just don’t be caught being a Jew. There is no justice for you then. It’s not just in rural Mississippi any more. It’s not just southern, white, Christians who are no longer worthy of protection. To be laughed at, ridiculed and scorned.
Coming to a town near you…the stripping of your protections, ignoring your pleas for justice, “redistribution” of your piece of America. From our rotting halls of “justice”…bigotry and hate…aimed directly at you.
How do you explain Lynn Stuart, a Jew helping a moslem brotherhood leader to the point of risking jail? How do you explain a congregation of the riverside church to supporting her ,don’t they know that muslim brotherhood is burning coptic churches in Egypt? Yes they know but don’t care.The only explanation is our so called elite have a death wish and the jihadis are helping them to it. We have to make shoure they don’t take us along.
Roger,
Thanks for the sober analysis of the implications of a “Red Ed” led Labor Party.
Apparently the British may choose to go “back to our future”.
Gee, unsurprisingly, this morning’s New York Times allowed him to characterize himself as coming from the “center ground” of British politics and that he is repositioning himself as a “centrist politician.”
We should all beware….on both sides of the pond.
Roger, you wrote: “…“free hundreds of thousands of people from income tax.” Is he insane? By taking those hundreds of thousands of people off the income tax rolls he transforms citizens into wards of the state who have no stake in responsible fiscal policy.”
You mean, sorta like what we have here?
Black Bart, I was struck by the same sentences about changing taxpaying citizens into wards of the state. Contra Roger, it’s not insane from Labour’s perspective. Wards of the state are presumably one of the most loyal voter blocs Labour has. Mutatis mutandis, Obama is operating on the same “principle” here.
Harold Wilson tried to turn the United Kingdom into a caring and compassionate society but he only took partial control of the geedy corporate power structure, and this power structure roared back with a vengence in the 1970′s when they brought the Iron Lady to Downing Street.
She brought simles to the greedy Essex men when she enslaved the once proud trade unionists and merciless slaughtered those who refused to wear the shackes of corporate greed. She even stole the milk from the lunches of the working class children. If that wasn’t enough, the evil Milk Snatcher went on to commit a genocide in the South Atlantic to seize the fish stocks for her corporate toadies that was so egregious even the dumbed down Hitler Reagan demurred to support it.
In 1997 the British people tried to fight back against the forces of hate and greed when they elected Blair. However, he was soon browbeaten into submission by the Bush regime and his genocidal capitalist war machine and hence did nothing to free the people from the shackles of corporate oppression. Perhaps Miliband is a true fighter for compassion and social justice who can stand up to the American corporate was machine like Castro or Chavez.
Hey Throbbin Yobbin .You forgot Mao tse Tung ,Pol Pot ,Great Stalin, Kim Il Sung.What’s wrong?Didn”t you go to college?
You write that Ed Miliband ‘is a Marxist’. He’s not. He’s never claimed to be. And he’s never acted like one. Other than consanguinity, how exactly did you come to make this absurd and untrue statement? Being ‘a Marxist’ is a very real, fairly bad thing – it’s not a silly phrase to throw round like a 12 year old girl tweeting her feelings after an incorrect outcome for American Idol. It’s, moreover, something which is reasonably easy to discern as such, and, given its odiousness, it’s something which should be accurately and carefully charged. You’ve fallen woefully short here of the standards one might have hoped of you.