Is Anybody Happy Right Now ?
And if we could make the radical progressives happy would they stop tearing everything down?
I was listening to a podcast this morning about a new book out in America (Americans seem to publish a lot of books, that speak so much to what is going on in society and politics at the moment). This book is called Liberal Misery and it is by Eddie Scarry, an author and commentator I have not come across before. It is discussed in the Federalist Radio Hour Podcast, which I highly recommend.
The discussion was interesting and I totally take Scarry’s point that at heart a lot of liberals (by which we mean radical progressives) are unhappy. Religious belief has been diminishing in the west since the Enlightenment and commentators point out that a lack of religious belief can result in anxiety and a sense of aimlessness. Matthias Desmet has highlighted the emptiness of many jobs, initially written about by David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs. The radical progressives seem to have responded to these challenges by being permanently dissatisfied with their society and on a constant search for new, radical causes to champion. Still, I would argue that over the last two years, since the start of the ‘scamdemic’ conservatives have struggled at least as hard as liberals to be happy.
In fact during the two years and more of madness I suspect many radicals were quite happy. They quickly realised that most conservatives hated restrictions: on their movements, their ability to run their business, their right to go to church, and, finally, their bodily autonomy. For this reason as much as any other, I think, liberals threw themselves into these restrictions. Although some of the rules adversely affected their lives too, they enjoyed too much piously adhering to Fauci’s most outlandish recommendations (‘double-masking’ anybody?!) and attacking, either in person, or on social-media, any ‘deplorables’ who did not do the ‘enlightened’, ‘scientific’, ‘socially responsible’ thing.
So, whilst I would agree with the thesis in general that liberal progressives are largely motivated by their inability to find goodness and happiness in the world, I would caveat that the recent horrifying assaults on democracy and freedom in so-called ‘Western democracies’ have probably done more to make them happy than anything in the last few years, and that conservatives are now struggling day-by-day to find the happiness and optimism that until recently has been our natural state.
I have always been a conservative and a news junkie and at times I have had cause to be worried about the state of politics and the state of society. I was deeply suspicious of Blair’s globalist politics and I remember well his ambitions for an ID card in the 90s. I was horrified by 9/11, but I was equally concerned about the ensuing Iraq war which seemed to be born of lies.
In the twenty-first century I have been concerned by encroaching trans ideology, and dismayed at the power being ceded to the EU and the resulting decreasing sovereignty of the UK. Finally I was frightened and angered by the response to the so-called pandemic that saw hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money wasted on a massively over-blown reaction to a minimally dangerous virus.
The two years following the unprecedented moment when Johnson shut down the UK in March 2020 has been a litany of one terrifying event after another. This may seem an exaggeration, but the implications of some of these events really are terrifying. From Trudeau shutting down law-abiding citizens’ bank accounts because they exercised their right to peaceful protest, to European nations mandating vaccines to work or even go to the supermarket, to the absolute deafness of all governments and public health agencies to the concerns of a huge swathe of highly qualified scientists and doctors who warned about the harms of lockdown, and the harms of the vaccines themselves.
These have been frightening times, and I think there is a certain wilfulness on the part of American conservative commentators to see themselves as the happy ones, the contented ones, whilst it is only the liberals who are miserable. I understand what is at the bottom of this assertion. It is in the nature of conservatives to be happy with life as it is. We are conservative, we like things to stay the same, we like progress to be slow, to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. By the same token we are likely to find our happiness in the simple things of life our marriage, our children if we have them, walking our dog, being in nature, perhaps in the age-old pursuits of hunting and fishing. In short we don’t want to bother anyone and we like to be left alone.
Three years ago perhaps it would be simple to characterise the leftists as chronically dissatisfied, miserable, and destructive, and right-wingers/conservatives as contented, politically moderate, more able to live-and-let-live, but now this is not the case. Conservatives are now fully aware of the incredibly destructive turn Western society has taken while we have been telling ourselves it would all work out and common sense would prevail.
We are scared, we are unhappy, and we are angry. We are angry that our children are under assault from the physically and psychologically devastating trans ideology. We are angry that having religious faith, being married and raising children, being law-abiding, owning our homes, and maybe running our own businesses now makes us enemies of the state. Because what the state wants more than anything is control and people with family support and assets are not easy to control.
Conservatives are having to contend with being portrayed as surplus to requirements: domestic terrorists disturbing school-boards with their ‘extremist’ demands that they know what is being taught to their children; Nazis for wanting to defend their own and their family’s bodies from unwanted and unnecessary pharmaceutical products, and for wanting to protect unborn children from being murdered just days before, or even on the day of, birth.
It is a shock for conservatives to wake up to the fact that their government, and the state apparatus, has finally become so totalitarian that they, believers in freedom, autonomy, and responsible citizenship are the enemy. This is a hard pill for conservatives to swallow, when their lives often have really been about minding their own business. A Mary Whitehouse, campaigning vociferously against morally suspect content on television, a Nigel Farage campaigning against EU membership and uncontrolled immigration, are the exception not the rule among conservatives. It took a lot of effort, and some considerable help from the snooty, insulting Remainers, to get the Brexit movement off the ground, conservatives just aren’t that into rocking-the-boat.
Until recently the leftist politics of the UK has remained, ironically, quite conservative. Left-wing politics has been the politics of the working-class, the unions, the fight to preserve and increase benefits for the poor. Of course there was a Marxist element, the criticism of the owners of the means of production, the suspicion of capitalism, but many working-class Labour voters owned or wanted to own their own house, many of them also owned their own businesses. The typical working-class Labour supporter did not want globalism. The new kind of metropolitan, globalist, public-private-partnership, ‘third way’ Labour politics brought in by Blair was not their politics. Brexit proved this. The landslide victory of Boris Johnson rocket-boosted by first time Conservative voters all over the country, but most astonishingly in Labour strongholds of the north, showed the globalist, nominally left-wing, elites that the jig was up. The people were not with them, the working-class had woken up to the scam and the conservatives, the capitalists, were realising that globalism was incredibly destructive to their nation, their society, their traditions, their beliefs, and that access to global markets was not a fair trade-off.
This is populism: when the conservatives and the working-classes realise, whether consciously or unconsciously, that it is more important to fight against the elites than it is to fight each other. This is the phenomenon that elite, globalist governments all over the world in this moment are trying to destroy, by using controversial identity politics to try to tear apart this natural alliance of the people against the one percent.
This one percent is composed of the overly influential billionaires, the asset management firms, globalist politicians, media company CEOs. If being on the left is characterised by a scepticism of capitalism I think any honest conservative has to join in that scepticism. Capitalism has been allowed to run amok. Anti-trust laws have not been enforced appropriately, lobbying in America especially is a massive problem, but corruption is everywhere. In the UK public health officials held shares in the pharmaceutical companies that made vaccines, and politicians gave favourable treatment to their associates’ PPE companies. The President of the European Commission has a far too cosy relationship with the CEO of Pfizer, is married to the director of a pharmaceutical company, and somehow lost texts exchanged with the Pfizer CEO, stymying an investigation by the EU Ombudsman into vaccine procurement.
The division seems to be more ‘ordinary people’ vs. ‘the elite’. I am fine with that. I do not think Google, Facebook, Twitter, should have the kind of inordinate wealth and power that they have. For a start, whilst purporting to be entertainment for us, the ordinary users, they are in fact primarily massive data gathering machines that then share that data with governments, security agencies, and the like. The sooner we all wake up to this the better. I do not think it is good for democracy or society that billionaires run trusts and foundations that work together to increase their own wealth whilst simultaneously massively influencing everything from public health, to national fossil fuel policies.
So the right and left understanding of politics has had its day, although many are struggling to let this conceptual framework go, even as some of the most talented and influential former liberals, such as Dave Rubin, change sides and hugely strengthen the populist cause. It may be that until we can break out of the right/left conception of politics into the populace/elites conception we will make limited progress at holding the craziness of the liberal progressives back.
It may be that it is only at that moment when the chino-wearing independent coffee-shop owner and the purple-haired baggage handler at the airport realise they are on the same side against the elite that is trying to drive them both into serfdom that the greatest progress will be made.
In the meanwhile perhaps conservatives should make efforts to make liberals happy. I do not know how. Perhaps we need some kind of outreach programme for raging progressives that lures them away from demonstrations to peaceful country cabins for a week of rage detoxification. This is fanciful, of course. If you set up your stall at an Antifa ‘rally’ or pro-abortion demonstration you are more likely to end up wearing your table as a necklace than convince even one person to take a deep breath and try to see the other point of view.
However human communication and connection is powerful. Many of these people are caught in an echo-chamber and even hearing a different point of view, if put tactfully, can be the very first step to acknowledging that their view is not the only one, and may not even be correct. Many radicals seem to be immature, petulant, lost teens trapped in adult bodies. I know from experience with my own kids that even if they try to shout me down and tell me I am stupid if I persist in expressing a coherent thought, they will go away and think about it, and nine times out of ten they will come back later and either pretend that was what they thought all along (annoying) or admit that I may have a point.
One of the things that characterises society at the moment is that there seems to be no ‘grown ups’ in the room. We are allowing the craziest of excesses: Drag Queen Story Hour, government appointees talking blatantly about their sexuality on social media (there was a time when I thought it was undignified for a politician to have a Twitter account - those were the days!) and nobody is calling ‘time’. Just like kids who do not have boundaries, what some of these desperately unhappy liberals may really need (and want) are some rules.
When everything is relative, when everything is allowed there is very little satisfaction in rebelling. Everybody wants to feel a little rebellious. Everybody wants to feel as if there is a worthwhile struggle out there and that they are making a contribution, but the radical progressives have fallen into a groove of rebellion-as-lifestyle and as society gives ground, whether they truly want to or not, radicals must push for ever more extreme concessions. They will never stop, they do not know how else to fill their lives, so we, the grown-ups whether on the right or the left, must stop it.
Just like teens who are finally given boundaries, most radicals will be happier with some limits to fight against. Maybe they can be persuaded to turn their attention from pushing for trans ideology to be taught in schools, to fighting for Big Tech and Big Pharma to be subject to more constraints on their power and wealth. Who knows? There are worthwhile causes out there, I am sure the radical progressives will find one eventually.
So our mission, those of us who want to return to at least a semblance of the society that we knew and loved, some sense of right and wrong, some rules of acceptable behaviour, some morality or even values like honesty, consideration for others, moral courage, is to make the liberals happy. We can do that by giving them some boundaries, drawing a line, patiently but firmly. Grownups listen to kids but they pushback against ideas that are illogical or immoral. It’s time for the progressives to grow up. Who knows, they might just be happier.