The left’s reactionary turn – spiked

The cry that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are no longer meaningful political labels has been a feature of our yet-to-be named epoch, an era ushered in around 10 years ago – one marked by woke ideology, overclass detachment and populist insurrection. As author Michael Lind succinctly put it in his 2020 book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite: ‘The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and outsiders.’ Five years on, Andrew Doyle, author of The End of Woke, broadly agrees that ‘the terms “left” and “right” have lost much of their utility’.

Events in Britain in recent weeks appear to add weight to the argument that this simple, old division no longer makes sense. When UK prime minister Keir Starmer gave his ‘island of strangers’ speech last month, this suggested to many that he had moved to the right, or even that he was channeling the right-wing Enoch Powell. To compound the confusion, a fortnight later, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage pledged that his party would reverse Labour’s cuts to winter-fuel payments and end the two-child benefit cap.

It cannot be disputed that we live in convulsive times. But commentators have been heralding the end of ‘left’ and ‘right’ politics ever since the end of the Cold War, an era when most people understood these concepts because they could readily see which kind of country they lived in: either a capitalist democracy or a Communist one-party state. Yet still the terms persist. And they will continue to do so.

They have survived because we all intuitively know what they stand for. To be left-wing is to have an optimistic view of people and humanity, while to be a conservative is to be pessimistic and assume the worst in others. Taken to extremes, progressives believe humanity can be perfected, while conservatives maintain that to assume the best in others is positively dangerous. ‘Be Kind’ naivety will only let the worst specimens rise to power, they argue.

This is what made wokery such a quintessentially left cause, not merely because it was obviously a turbocharged form of political correctness. Some leftists, such as American philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the 2023 book Left Is Not Woke, have protested that woke is the antithesis of the old left belief in the Enlightenment values of universalism and progress. What the woke calls ‘anti-racism’, for instance, is really a reactionary sanctification of ethnic tribalism.

Yet many soft-brained leftists have been betraying Enlightenment beliefs in reason, universalism and progress long before woke arrived. Indeed, they’ve been doing so ever since they were seduced by that father of romantic primitivism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and later by that father of cultural relativism, Johann Gottfried Herder. Ultra-progressives, who hold that nurture can always trump nature, that humanity can be reconstructed, that ‘equity’ can be enforced, opponents silenced and the past abolished, have long been pushing for a utopian, Year Zero politics.

Words will always have general, fragile and provisional ties with the ideas they refer to, and ‘left’ and ‘right’ may themselves be linguistic hangovers from the French Revolution, but they also apply to eternal dispositions. Either you believe humans are foremost fallible or perfectible, selfish or altruistic, good or bad.

Woke may be dying, as Doyle’s book suggests or hopes. But the callow and foolish thinking that brought it about will never disappear.

Northern Ireland has never looked so normal

There once was a time when morning reports about ‘disturbances in Northern Ireland last night’ would have been met with boredom and incomprehension on this side of the Irish Sea. Not so much these days.

That reaction was particularly the case if its instigators had been protestants or loyalists calling themselves British. This is a tribe that the English have regarded mostly with bewilderment ever since protestantism ceased to be a component of Britishness here in the 19th century. It’s a misunderstanding that was gloriously encapsulated by Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter-ego, Ali G, when in 1999 he interviewed Sammy Wilson of the Democratic Unionist Party. When our idiot-savant yoof asked Wilson if he was Irish, he answered: ‘No, I’m British.’ To which came the reply: ‘So is you here on holiday?’

That was in the 1990s, a decade marked by stand-offs at Drumcree in Portadown, when the Orange Order was forever involved with confrontations with Republicans and the police over their determination to parade down the Garvaghy Road. The appearance and demeanour of the Orange Order epitomised everything the Brits in Britain found puzzling and frustrating about their namesakes in Ulster: anachronistic, belligerent, vaguely ridiculous, fiercely loyal to the Crown yet always seeming to be in revolt against it.

The scenes from Ballymena in North Antrim last week weren’t met with resignation this time, but with recognition. The sight of angry young men waving Union Flags, however terrifying, made perfect sense to many. It seemed to be horribly in keeping with our times. Ulster may not be as British as Finchley, as Margaret Thatcher once claimed, but these images might as well have been from a northern or coastal town in England.

Even more curiously, to judge by recent events and the mood south of the border, they will have looked familiar to many in the Republic of Ireland, too. Northern Ireland has never felt so normal.

How Frederick Forsyth forced us to suspend our disbelief

Frederick Forsyth, the thriller writer who died last week aged 86, was best-known for his 1971 debut novel, The Day of The Jackal. One of the most striking aspects of that book, about a plan to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, was that even before turning the first page, the reader knew the protagonist’s plan would fail. That’s because the story was set in 1963, and the former French president died of natural causes a year before the novel came out.

That Forsyth’s protagonist was a blank canvas, being single, with no background, barely any personality beyond his icy demeanour and clinical professionalism, and whose name was never revealed, was central to the novel’s success. The reader could put himself or herself in his shoes, and even want him to succeed. Even if we know the Jackal will fail, he and the other characters in the story don’t.

It was a masterclass in willing suspension of disbelief, a story defying reason and prior historical knowledge, working in much the same way films like The Longest Day and Apollo 13 have done. It’s why you can still re-read the novel, and why you can also enjoy it for the first time, even if you’ve never even heard of it. None of what I’ve written above here will spoil that.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.