In Defence of Winning Strategies
5th October 2024
The essential complaint of populists is that democracy is a noble ideal from which we have strayed. To be precise, it has been killed off by a hyper-progressive, self-serving, out-of-touch establishment—a betrayal that has occurred most of all at the expense of Europe’s native working-classes. In the 21st century, any conservative-minded counter-elite worth its salt must either act in the interests of these people or resign themselves to the only plausible alternative: indefinite left-wing political domination.
Bear in mind, too, that the Left of this century will be nothing like the Left of the last. The genuine heirs to Keir Hardie and Clement Atlee, well-represented by ‘Blue Labour’ figures like Lord Glasman in Britain and paleo-leftist parties like Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany, do not have demographic momentum on their side. The 21st century Left will consist of activists more inclined to condemn Winston Churchill as a racist, genocidal maniac than to smile at the thought of having served in his war cabinet, as Atlee himself did.
At least since Tony Blair, Britain’s former party of the proletariat has been consciously dependent on minority voting blocs, having ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial, ethnic, and religious grievance. Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for Blair, once had an unwise moment of candour in the Evening Standard, admitting that under New Labour mass immigration was partly “intended … to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”