So. We have had an election. We have voted the bastards out. There is now no need to go through the horrible process again until 2029. It would be nice to think that the success of Starmer's dull nice reasonable sensible party would mean that five years from now the Conservatives will try to outflank him by being even duller, even nicer, even more reasonable and even more sensible. But all the evidence is that their response to Starmer's nice part is go even further in the direction of being the complete bastard and nutter bastard party.
Someone on the American Twitter recently directed a question at LIBERALS:
Do you actually, personally know any conservatives? Do you really believe that they are as horrible as you say they are? Have you ever just taken the chance, sat down, and just talk with them? You might be surprised to find that they are actually human beings, just like you. You might even be surprised to find that they are exhausted and scared. You might even just discover that they're a lot like you after all.
Which is a nice bit of rhetoric. It's worth deconstructing, slightly. It is, of course, directed at conservatives, not at liberals: the Tweeter and the Tweetee are assumed to agree that LIBERALS don't believe that conservatives are human beings; that LIBERALS as a group don't think conservatives are anything like them; and the LIBERALS, as a point of principle, don't talk to conservatives. In the exact moment of saying "Liberals, don't demonise the other side" the other side is in fact demonising the liberals. They could have framed the question as "do you know any one with the opposite political views to yourself?" But they didn't.
Do you actually, personally know any conservatives? Do you really believe that they are as horrible as you say they are? Have you ever just taken the chance, sat down, and just talk with them? You might be surprised to find that they are actually human beings, just like you. You might even be surprised to find that they are exhausted and scared. You might even just discover that they're a lot like you after all.
Which is a nice bit of rhetoric. It's worth deconstructing, slightly. It is, of course, directed at conservatives, not at liberals: the Tweeter and the Tweetee are assumed to agree that LIBERALS don't believe that conservatives are human beings; that LIBERALS as a group don't think conservatives are anything like them; and the LIBERALS, as a point of principle, don't talk to conservatives. In the exact moment of saying "Liberals, don't demonise the other side" the other side is in fact demonising the liberals. They could have framed the question as "do you know any one with the opposite political views to yourself?" But they didn't.
But we long ago proved that most public conservatives utterances are a form of performance art; in which the actual views of conservatives are inverted and comedically attributed to liberals. Conservatives reallt do believe that everyone to the left of them politically are Stalinists and Communists; so they accuse the Left of saying that anyone they don't like is a Nazi. Conservatives are actively engaged in removing books they don't like from libraries, so they claim that the defining feature of the Left is that they don't allow freedom of speech. It's a fine old game.
Conservatives -- do you actually know any liberals? Do you really believe they are as mindless as you say they are? Have you ever taken the chance to sit down with a member of the woke mob, and just talked to them? You might find out that they are human beings just like you....
Another man on the internet once wrote that Sigmund Freud spoke of "the Nazism of small differences." Rather ironically this was a Freudian slip: what the great man actually talked about was "the narcissism of small differences". But either way, it is a good point. It's a terrible cliche to say that all the political parties are exactly the same and just as bad as one another. But it is also true that more similar two sides become, the more fervently they hate each other. I seem to recall Monty Python wrote a funny sketch around this point. Labour has moved further and further away from it's original left wing principles; they have in fact found more and more common ground with the Conservative Party. And they are understandably reluctant to admit this. I think this post-Brexit centre-right consensus makes the discourse more poisonous than it needs to be. I have an impression that in the olden days when there real, ideological differences between politicians, there was less need to resort to abuse. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn could afford to have a civilised debate about their massive ideological differences of opinion. David Cameron could at least be open about how much he despised Jeremy Corbyn.
Another man on the internet once wrote that Sigmund Freud spoke of "the Nazism of small differences." Rather ironically this was a Freudian slip: what the great man actually talked about was "the narcissism of small differences". But either way, it is a good point. It's a terrible cliche to say that all the political parties are exactly the same and just as bad as one another. But it is also true that more similar two sides become, the more fervently they hate each other. I seem to recall Monty Python wrote a funny sketch around this point. Labour has moved further and further away from it's original left wing principles; they have in fact found more and more common ground with the Conservative Party. And they are understandably reluctant to admit this. I think this post-Brexit centre-right consensus makes the discourse more poisonous than it needs to be. I have an impression that in the olden days when there real, ideological differences between politicians, there was less need to resort to abuse. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn could afford to have a civilised debate about their massive ideological differences of opinion. David Cameron could at least be open about how much he despised Jeremy Corbyn.
The Right of the Tory Party think that Sunak is woke; the left of the Labour Party think that Starmer is Tory Lite; literally everyone agrees that the Tories have made a shocking mess of everything. It's not an argument about ideology; it's and argument about competence, that the Tories were always going to lose. The two leaders spent six weeks pretending that they thought the other one was a monster whose election or re-election would instigate an apocalypse cover all the lands of Middle-earth in a second darkness. But under slightly different circumstances, they could very easily have been in the same party.