The Triumph of the Left

We're All Marxists Now

In his book, The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens describes and and seeks to explain how there is no longer any substantial ideological debates in the UK.  Rather there is an ideological consensus, shared by both "left" and "right".  That consensus is nurtured in the bosoms and minds of an elitist few who now dominate the Labour and Conservative parties.

Hitchens illustrates this situation by contrasting the UK with Russia.

Russia is no longer an ideological state, externally or internally.  It no longer seeks global power, and in some ways is less interested in the minds of its citizens than are "Western" countries which demand increasing obedience to the formulas of political correctness.  In Russia you may hold what private opinions you like.  Just do not challenge the state.  In Britain, your private opinions may be reported to the authorities and get you into trouble, even if you believe your actions are part of normal life and you have not wish to challenge the state.  This paradox is one of the most alarming facts about the modern world, and is unfortunately too little understood.  . . .

Here as everywhere else in the formerly anti-Marxist "West", the supposedly beaten Left have become the establishment.  The Left and their utopian ideas dominate the civil service, the arts, broadcasting, the academy, the bench of bishops, the courts and the police.

They now censor (and censure) speech and thought, through the formulas of political correctness.  They place narrower limits on the speech and writing of others than the Lord Chamberlain ever did on the London stage.  At the same time they dispense with any rules that might get in their own way.  A liberal will defend to the death your right to disagree with her.  Disagree with her, and she will call the police. [Peter Hitchens, The Broken Compass: How Left and Right Lost Their Meaning (London: Continuum, , 2009) p. viii, ix.]

The same realities hold true in New Zealand--with one major difference.
  New Zealand has never had a functioning right wing.  It was settled by European migrants (mainly British) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Marxism and the secularism were emerging as the major intellectual tsunamis of the age.  Consequently, "right wing" in New Zealand from the early days of European settlement denoted little more than an ideological supplicant clinging to the knees of Beatrice and Sidney Webb.

The allegedly "conservative" National Party always, when it returns to the treasury benches, seeks to build upon and finesse left wing ideological platforms enacted by the Labour Party.  It calls this "holding the centre", but in reality this is an indictment of the electorate at large.  The electorate in New Zealand has forever been a community of socialists without doctrines.  Its god and sole saviour is the secular state. 

John Locke, were he living today, would be aghast.  All of which illustrates the maxim that when a society banishes the Lord Jesus Christ the centre cannot hold. Idolatry and its attendant demons return with a vengeance and in the wake comes oppression and tyranny.  Jesus said, if a demon is cast out of a house, and if the house is left in a neutral, religious vacuum, the demons will return seven fold.  The West is in the early phases of the seven fold diabolical return.  It will not be pretty to watch.