A week or so after Obama’s victory, I spoke to a colleague of mine in the United States. He was pleased with the result, but apprehensive.
“You have no idea of the tidal wave of insanity and hatred that is going to be unleashed, now. It will take a few months to get going, but it is coming”.
I was sceptical. Obama seemed to have the support of many moderate conservatives, and the goodwill of most people I knew of all political stripes. Of course, I was wrong.
The plight of Charles Johnson of the centre-right Little Green Footballs is a case in point. He is presently being attacked by a white supremacist blogger called Robert Stacey McCain, who in turn is being linked to approvingly and hosted by what I might once have thought of as the ‘mainstream US Right’. Well, if that’s the mainstream, the Right is lost.
We’ve been here before.
During the Bush years, the mainstream Left went absolutely bonkers. Or, more properly, the conspiracist preoccupations of the fringe Left infected the mainstream. The Democrats even started to look to bloggers for inspiration – despite the fact that, as any blogger knows, blogs attract loons as flames do moths. Now it is the turn of the Right. Demoralised by defeat, the moderates appear to have utterly lost control of their movement, which has become a caricature of its worst aspects: delivering up a cocktail of vicious preoccupations, from an extreme position on abortion, through to support for creationism, and right up to the promotion of racist fears.
That is the United States. But what about the United Kingdom.
For those of us who lived through the long years of Labour’s last twilight zone, during the Thatcher-Major years, the thought of the mainstream Left falling prey to the mad again is a depressing thought.
In the 80s, it was unilateral nuclear disarmament and ‘d’ya think that the Russians want war?’. The result of that was that Labour was out of power for almost two decades. The public, very sensibly, would not vote for us.
If the recent report, by the mainstream Left think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research – which suggests that the Muslim Brotherhood is the best partner for the West in the Middle East – is anything to go by, we’re headed right back there again.
These are the early signs of what is to come, when Labour loses power. Other depressing indicators include the decision of the decision of Compass to invite Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green Party, to speak at the Compass/Tribune No Turning Back rally at Labour conference this Sunday. While it is an excellent idea for Labour to adopt environmentalist policies (“let’s recycle more plastic bags”), to invite the leader of a rival political party to speak smacks of a desperate longing for the zany “grand progressive coalition of EVERYBODY” days that Labour left behind when it regained its confidence in the 1990s. And the Green Party! A movement whose activists nearly managed to push through 9/11 Trooferism at a recent party conference.
The British Left is going to be a rocky place to ride, over the next decade. Hold onto your hats, and prepare for the fight.
UPDATE
On the US Right, Andrew Murphy draws our attention to this:
“The other night, Glenn Beck, the rightwing USA tv star said that John McCain would have been worse for the country then Obama.
Kinda gives you an idea of how far of the deep end the Right has gone.
John McCain by the way has a lifetime conservtaive voting record of nearly 82%
