Sheryl Mcintosh's Blog: The rapid demise of LIberalism

In watching the disgrace that is the demonstrations outside the Labour HQ tomorrow justifying anti-semitism and seeing how the moderate Labour types are doing nothing, I felt sadness.

The same sadness that I feel when I view the Government actions on Brexit where they are unable to follow any road other than the muddle through middle - the road to nowhere.

Why does this tell me that liberalism failed? Well when I was a young man, I studied and believed in neo-liberalism. It had after all just finished off the communist threat without a major world war. Something of a first for the 20th century.

But liberalism was also in the West, a move of the overton window to the centre-right. Left wing Marxism and social democratic ideas were co-opted in small amounts into the State, but Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl were confident to promote free markets and free countries.

In the 1990's in the UK, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton fought back from the left by basically being centre right politicians, but from the centre left and re-infecting the US and UK with a limited amount of Marxist thinking.

Liberalism - freedom of people to worship, to consume with options generated by markets, freedom to vote, to own property and to speak freely is everywhere imperilled by the spread of Marxist ideology. Marxism denies gods, limits consumption, agitates against property ownership and finally denies free speech if it is critical of Marxist ideology.

In truth, Blair and Clinton were not trying in any way to destroy liberalism - after all much of it appealed to them personally. But what has come since is deeply troubling.

Firstly in 2008 we had a huge recession, caused in the main by untrammelled use of Capital by big banks and weak or complicit Governments (complicit in the UK for tax revenues). here the freedom to consume and the use of markets was challenged - both because incomes fell and because markets could be seen to have failed.

In the UK from 2003 liberalism has been undermined too by mass immigration. Much of what is now the craziness of political correctness is derived from the beginnings of identity politics. Blair was keen on immigration for cultural and political reasons. He decried those opposed as racist - so began in a formal way the launch of identity politics into Western life. Now, the freedom to speak freely was undermined and the freedom to vote was also undermined by a lack of alternatives who opposed immigration. This in turn had been a side effect of the growth of the EU which pushed the mass immigration agenda and itself was totally undemocratic. There was not way to oppose politically the Liberal elite.

Finally, the last shibboleth, the freedom to worship was challenged in the West by the rapid rise of Islam due to immigration and its idiotic Middle Eastern policies which appeased the spread of Wahhabism by Saudi Arabia whilst at the same time attacking secular Iraq and funding radical groups which would become Al-Qaeda and ISIS in later decades. Political Islam cannot work inside a Liberal democracy they are competing not complimentary ideologies, much as Marxism cannot be aligned with Liberalism.

So by the mid-2010's we had reached a point where all the key elements of Liberalism were discredited. So we saw a rejection of the 'liberalist' centre across the West and the rise of two new competing ideologies to replace it. The first a populist explosion, based on trying to redeem the benefits of liberalism from its failure - in the UK, UKIP railed against immigration and restrictions on freedom of speech. In the US, Trump railed against speech restrictions but also the legacy economic damage of 2008. On the Left, Marxism discovered that identity politics was a like for like replacement for the core principle of class warfare. With this update to Leninist thought in place, a new attack from the Left could begin - if by accident with Jeremy Corbyn and by design with Bernie Saunders.

So now, here we are in 2018 and all I read are rubbish hand-wringing stories about the Labour Moderates and Tory remainers and their respective woes. Their day is done, there is nothing to go back to as they betrayed and destroyed their core value proposition. The new right and left will fight it out for the political future - but the idea that stupid people will somehow realise how wrong they are and come home to the 'centre.'

They won't, the centre did not hold and now does not exist - even as the successors thrash out their new positions so inadequately in public.