Questions are now being asked openly with respect to the future of the Left and Leftism. Often in Western democratic structures, there is a pendulum effect. The Left gets elected, dramatic steps are taken towards a more statist society and economy, with all its promise of the secular Paradise to come. Then folk, having been over-promised yet finding the delivery underwhelming, retreat to the Right or the Centre. The Left is turfed out of government. The centre-Right is re-elected.
Then the pendulum effect arrears to stop. The Left withers on the vine. There is no swing back. The Left is shut out of political power for a long, long time. In the UK, for example, Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected as leader of the Labour Party by the vote of the party members (not sitting MP's). Yet, the popular support of that Party is lessening by the day, it seems. Pundits are speculating that the Labour Party is now so radically Left, so generally unpopular, it has become unelectable.
In New Zealand, Labour's popular support has withered and withered.
There is no way that it can hope to garner enough votes to control the Parliament outright. It has to rely now upon the hope of a dog's-breakfast-coalition of disaffected minorities: the Greens, NZ First, the Maori Party, and whatever additional grievance parties spring up come election time.
Rodney Hide has characterised the state of the Labour Party as follows:
What ails the left? They lack puff and policy. They were once vibrant, challenging and full of ideas. The right were the dreary, backward-looking ones. The left now suffer from closed minds and moral smugness. They are moribund and backward-looking.We suspect that Hide is on to something here. Before the advent of social media there was little opportunity for the Left to voice their views. Now, in the Twitterverse they get to speak out, but end up speaking to one another. More often than not they write as rabid dogs. Each nasty piece of invective incites their increasingly isolated audience to respond in kind. Yet each serves to buoy the other, until the moral outrage and high dudgeon provides such an overwhelming confirmation bias they cannot conceive that the rest of the world is not like them. And when they discover just the hint of a demurral they explode in fury and disgust. Social media has worked to isolate them into a self-righteous, angry, self-confirming, extremist sect.
They run from ideas. Opposing philosophies distress them. They pillory dissenters as stupid or immoral and often both. There's no debating or explaining, just abuse for those who step outside received wisdom.
The left have taken to social media with gusto. It only takes 140 characters to abuse and attack. They fill Twitter and blogs with their righteousness and smugness, puffed up by their own perceived moral and intellectual superiority. There's no allowance that a person with a differing view might offer an opportunity to learn and to strengthen your ideas and perhaps, just perhaps, to change them. That's never allowed as a possibility.
Their minds are closed and they gasp and take offence at any idea or opinion different to their own. Indeed, ganging up against dissenters on social media is what binds them. Their attacks on others proves to them their correctness and superiority. The left are puzzled about why they're politically marginalised but never trouble themselves to listen to those who have turned away from them. They look down on them and despise them.
In the United States, which is working through the grinding processes of a Presidential election, some are saying this is the most critical election the Democrats have faced in a long, long time. If Clinton were to lose, the Left, according to some, would fragment and become an extremist, un-electable sect. It would likely lose control of the Presidency, and of one or both houses of Congress, for a long, long time.
In other words, it is being suggested that the Democratic Party is risking the same kind of alienation from the electorate that has occurred in the UK and NZ.
What is the significance, if any, for the people of the Covenant of Christ? One thing stands out: the secular centre Right is less likely to force its radical agenda down the throats of the community. It does not have the same messianic fever that is found amongst the Left which increasingly insists upon compulsion, law, courts, fines, and imprisonment to reify its holy utopia.
Under the centre Right we are less likely to be punished for being Christians. We are more likely to be left in peace. And that is most significant.
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. [I Timothy 2: 1-2]
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