Know thy Enemy: the New Clerisy

Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. 

Edmund Burke

The twin pillars of the Liberal-Left Establishment are propaganda and censorship: the lies to which we must assent and the truth that we must not speak. They fear an agenda they do not control. They shun a debate they fear they will lose.

But the Liberal-Left love to preen themselves on their supposed intellectual superiority. They revel in paradoxes and shun common sense. They think it makes them enlightened and profound, the intrepid seekers of counterintuitive answers to questions that have confounded inferior minds, mired in the pedestrian and conventional. But it's really just symptomatic of the fact that they're ready to believe anything that fits their agenda. They hate simple (and obvious) solutions to "complex" problems, equating "simple" with "easy" when simple solutions are often the most arduous and demanding. That's why they love to equivocate and prevaricate, manufacturing easy and comforting reasons why the common sense solution won't work, and why the convoluted and factitious obfuscations they favour will.

The Liberal-Left are driven by paranoia and a self-dramatising sense of martyrdom and victimhood. They love to indulge in hysterical masochistic fantasies of oppression by the Right in media products like the Handmaiden’s Tale or Bushwick, but the reality is they’ve been the oppressors for decades.

Control is their objective, loss of it their nightmare. Hence the panic of Liberal-Left big tech as they realise they no longer dictate or control the political agenda on social media. The rush to censorship is a testimony to their loss of nerve.

The Liberal-Left Establishment control education, particularly higher education. The purpose of a modern university is the continuous replication of a would-be Liberal-Left clerisy in its own self-image, each member warranted to parrot reliably uniform PC views, a class of self-identifying “thinking people” who’ve been told what “thinking people” should think. Anyone who questions this indoctrination flunks the course. And anyone who fails to conform to type is ostracised, excluded, censored or de-platformed.

Profound hypocrisy lies at the heart of the Liberal-Left mindset, to which a twisted sense of self-hatred and a misplaced guilt complex are fundamental. But despite the handwringing, their contrition is insincere because they are determined that the rest of us should be made to suffer for their self-indulgent guilt trip. As the new clerisy, they get to superintend the ritual self-flagellation of our society without partaking of it themselves. Ours are the burdens and the sacrifice, the groans and the lamentations, theirs the wild ecstatic dithyrambs of atonement and redemption, the intoxicating thrill of phoney moral edification.

Equality and diversity are the gospel of the new clerisy - except, of course, when they might backfire on their own privileged position. That's why they love to pose as enlightened social arbiters, the liberators of the oppressed, and the champions of the downtrodden. Affirmative action seldom seems to weaken the stranglehold of wealthy, well-connected Liberal-Lefties on positions of power or prestige, but it's always the indignant stock response to the rest of us when we complain about having to pay more for a worse service, or for the dubious privilege of making it harder for our children to get good jobs or university places.

The new clerisy are the high priests and prophets of political correctness, or the imperative to ignore, skirt around, downplay, suppress or deny an obvious truth, and to call for sanctions against those who refuse (or simply forget) to do so, because it’s “offensive” to an officially privileged minority. But for all the self-righteous lip-service to equality, political correctness is an esoteric doctrine, designed to confer phoney moral superiority on a self-regarding elite, and anathema and degradation on the (non-minority) plebs. Confecting charges of racism has become a sinister parlour game played risk-free by self-important Liberal-Lefties with the stakes of the livelihoods, liberty and reputations of ordinary people.

This game becomes more sinister still when played in the politics of our public institutions. As Roger Scruton says:

"… political correctness causes people not merely to disguise their beliefs but to refuse to act on them, to accuse others who confess to them, and in general to go along with policies that have been forced on the British people by minority groups of activists."

The ubiquity of the corrupting culture of political correctness explains the systematic cover-up, collusion and active conspiracy of the professionals and public officials who should have exercised a duty of care and served the public interest over Muslim grooming and other scandals. And it's also why the same bureaucrats, whose negligence and perversity made these scandals possible, have been allowed to reinvent themselves as the solution to the problem they created and why virtually nobody has been, or ever will be, held to account for their egregious failure.

But like it or not, the Liberal-Left Establishment are our political masters and political correctness is the official state dogma. When one contrasts the energy, quiet efficiency, continuity and unity of purpose through changes in government with which the Establishment prosecutes its woke agendas with its apparent impotence to deliver anything we voted for, one starts to take conspiracy theories seriously.

But as Roger Scruton says, conservatives are united by a love for and a desire to protect those very things - our culture, our country, our countryside, the family, the truth - that the Liberal-Left hate and wish to subvert, corrupt or destroy. And it is upon the sure foundation of this common bond that we must build our resistance to the tyranny of the New Establishment.