The illusion of choice

By Pete North - January 8, 2021

When Johnson took office I had a face like I was sucking lemons. It wasn’t so much the oaf himself. I had already resigned myself to it after an interminably boring leadership contest. What really stuck in the craw was the gongs and sinecures handed out to some of the most inane people imaginable who are in no way competent enough to run British affairs at this crucial time.

That’s the shit thing about our two-tribe “democracy”. You can’t vote to drain the swamp. All you can do with a vote is rotate the pondlife. It would be nice to rid ourselves of Johnson and his cronies, along with all the behind the scenes string pullers, lobbyists and party donors but I don’t imagine for a nanosecond that the alternative would be any better.

After all, if we held an election tomorrow and Labour won, as bad as the Labour freakshow presently is, Starmer would no doubt make house room for all the NGOcracy and progressive think tankery in all the advisory roles which in many ways is even worse. As bad as the Tory “free trade” brigade are, the technocratic wonks who dominate the field are every bit as prone to groupthink and naivety and could do as much damage.

America is much the same. Though few are genuinely sorry to see Trump go, what you get with Biden is the same corruption but with added gaslighting. The left just have a more emollient façade where the media is concerned. In its own subtle ways the Democrats are far more authoritarian than Trump ever was, only they don’t have to be directly authoritarian since the tech giants will largely do their bidding for them (in the name of preventing another Trump catastrophe).

That, I think, is going to result in an even bigger blowback. It is entirely possible to sanitise the mainstream platforms. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can clean things up to ensure only polite society gets a voice, but that’s only going to make things worse.

The aggressive banning of right wing accounts from Twitter may make Twitter function better as a space for journalists and politicos to chat among themselves, but all it ultimately succeeds in is creating a sense of victimisation. The alternative platform, Parler, only exists because of Twitter’s arbitrary and unfair banning policy.

More to the point, those who constantly fret about Twitter will end up looking as daft as those who constantly rail against Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids long after they have ceased to wield any serious influence. You can displace the alternative stream of discourse but you can’t crush it. Nature finds a way. I recognise that trolls and cranks need to be weeded out but when you widen that definition to anyone who disagrees with you, you create the very monster you see before you. Twitter played midwife.

What we’ll now see is a raft of regulation directed at the Twitter based on trends identified in 2016, while the memes are shared across a decentralised network the politicians are completely oblivious to. They’re fighting a moving target.

Though Trump maybe departing the White House and the GOP has to rebuild its own credibility, the culture war will continue to rage and the Democrats will exacerbate it. The battery of resentment that put Trump where he is will recharge. If then the right finds someone who isn’t a narcissistic fantasist to lead their cause, we’ll see 2016 all over again.

If anyone thinks Trump’s departure means the healing begins they are sorely mistaken. Over the years we have seen a disintegration of loser’s consent on both sides of the Atlantic. Here in the UK the left take to the streets of Westminster to protest the Tories winning an election, all manner of elaborate conspiracy theories were spread about the referendum, while Hilary Clinton wasn’t far off launching her own voter fraud crusade in 2016. Meanwhile the American left did little to disavow itself of the BLM violence designed to further delegitimise the Trump presidency.

It seems to me that while both sides claim to respect democracy, they each have a contempt for it and spend their whole time in office undermining it. It has been less acute here in the UK as more and more policy have been locked away at EU level to ensure that even if conservatives do win, there is little they can do. The EU is a manifestation of that contempt for democracy by design.

Now that we’ve left the EU, though, Johnson has done a great deal to undermine and neuter parliamentary scrutiny (for what little use it is) and though HM opposition may object, that’s exactly what they’d do in his position.

The west, it seems, is regressing to a state of winner-takes-all tribalism, where genuine manifestations of democracy are throttled at birth. New parties can’t break into the game without a multimillionaire playboy backer.

Though we have the likes of Anne Applebaum sternly warning us about the threat the right poses to democracy on either side of the Atlantic, what she means is that the progressive monopoly on power in the institutions is threatened. This, though, is only a facsimile of democracy where voters get to choose which band of corporate gangsters they prefer holding the levers of power. There’s no real choice in it.

But then the lady has something of a point. The problem with the free-speechists of recent years is that the reason they want it is to continue pumping bile and conspiracy theories into the debate based on their own misapprehensions and bigotry. When they succeed nothing is made better because of it.

That’s the dilemma I keep grappling with. The Speccie and Telegraph were entirely free to promote their no-deal brexit crapola, and their misapprehensions about “free trade” and having been partially successful, we’re now looking at shortages and price rises. How does that help?

The empty headed rants of Delingpole, O’Neill, Julia Dunning-Kruger et al utterly poisoned the Brexit debate – people who famously know absolutely nothing about trade but continue to make completely unfounded assertions which people believe because the titles who publish them have prestige.

We always talk about holding politicians to account but strangely we never hold these blowhard “journalists” to account and they never have to accept any responsibility for what they’ve done – and in most cases they have more power over the debate than politicians. Particularly in America where Rush Limbaugh tacitly endorses political violence. If he were a Muslim, he’d be in jail.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were even interested in the outcome, but they have no policies or ideas with which to replace what they tear down. They just just broadcast their ignorance to anyone who will listen, get bored and move on and leave everyone else to clean up the mess. It’s understandable if moderates are increasingly leaning toward curated public debate because free-speechists don’t actually contribute anything. They’re just nihilistic wreckers in it for themselves doing whatever they can to make the private school fees for their offspring.

By that definition these people are not journalists – nor are they even political activists or participants in our democracy. They are parasites feeding off it. And we’re supposed to put up with it in the name of free speech while we all pay a terrible price for it?

But then of course if we did cut the right wing blowhards out of the loop the left wing blowhards rule the roost and then we end up with male rapists put in female prisons and perfectly healthy young women on testosterone pills and lopping off their breasts, while woke Academics get to work rewriting history and purging our culture.

So you either have a choice to pick a side, play the game and live with being a hypocrite, (something I’m disinclined to do) or simply record the slow inexorable death of the democratic west and do your best to survive it.