Political movements get into trouble because they are unable to find the will to shut out the most extreme fringes.
When the White House was in the hands of the (left wing) Democrats, other than perhaps Bill Maher, I can’t think of anyone on the Liberal/Left who was prepared speak out about the far-left lunatic fringe. Both Democrat politicians and their supporters among the media punditry became cheerleaders for a range of insane ideas. Think of them: gender-madness from puberty blockers to transmen in women’s sports, open borders, defunded police, identity politics and DEI, no-fault late-term abortions, looting-as-reparations, Queers for Palestine, and so on. There didn’t seem to be a fringe obsession on the far left that the mainstream were willing to call out. That’s why they lost.
Apparently they learned no lessons from the tribulations of the UK Labour Party when they went in that direction.
But the Tucker Carlsons and Darryl Coopers will prove to the the Cenk Uygurs, Mehdi Hassans, and Owen Joneses of the right, and just as disastrous. There is an important battle ahead to undo much of the madness inflicted on society by the crazy Left, but if there is to be any chance of success, there must be a cordon sanitaire thrown up between the mainstream Conservative/Right and the, frankly, neo-Nazis, historical revisionists, antisemites and conspiracy nuts on the far-right.
Courageously, the first salvo in this important battle was fired by Douglas Murray after he was virtually ambushed on Joe Rogan’s podcast by some ‘comic’ called Dave Smith, a defender of pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper and a vociferous critic if Israel and Ukraine, despite apparently knowing virtually nothing about either country or their histories. When challenged on ‘the facts’ by Murray, he dribbled something derisively about “experts”. The comic buffoon’s position seemed to be: “If you take the time to investigate, observe, gather information and establish facts, then you are an ‘expert’, and experts can’t be trusted… therefore the more effort you make to understand something, the less you should be listened to.”
The fringe far-right is shifting the very reasonable “Experts sometimes get things wrong” towards “Facts don’t mean nuthin’“, and it is very disturbing.
Ironically, the far-right seems to be rushing headlong into the same territory as the far-left, and inevitably it all ends at a similar place… screeching about Jews, and conspiracies, and ‘illegal wars’.
It’s depressing.
But if we are to return any sanity to politics, the first task is to keep the incontrovertibly insane at bay. With bargepole if necessary.
