October 11, 2021 - 12:30pm
Why do the Conservatives keep on winning? This is how John Harris in The Guardian presents the question:
In answering it Harris draws upon a 2007 book by Drew Westen, The Political Brain, which argues that, in politics, emotion trumps reason. So while those wicked Tory deceivers like Boris Johnson manipulate our emotions by telling tall tales, “liberals and leftists tend to be unduly fixated with ‘policy debates, arguments [and] statistics’.”
The irony here is that this explanation is itself pure narrative — in fact, it’s a version of that most childish of stories: the other side only won because they weren’t playing fair.
Far from being laid low by an excess of clear-headed rationalism, the Left keeps on losing because it is lost within its own make-believe world. Of course, the Right also indulges in story-telling, spin and every conceivable shade of political BS — but there’s a special quality to the fantasies of the Left.
That’s because they’ve been developed not just into stories, but theories — ostensibly rational (but demonstrably false) accounts of how reality works. It begins with Marx who thought he could treat history like a science and thus provide a guide to the future. Unfortunately for his disciples, history had other ideas, especially in regard to the class struggle. The Left has struggled to explain the divergence between theory and reality ever since.
In more recent decades whole sections of the Left have switched to a different group of theories — the assortment of post-modern ideologies that fuelled the rise of woke politics.
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SubscribeI read that article and my main thoughts were:
Spot on. Was going to comment something similar but you beat me to it.
The left has for as long as time played on the emotional. They after all are “for the poor and downtrodden” – and only a monster would be against helping them right? Nowadays it’s every real and (largely) imagined victim group that receives their blessing. Only evil bigoted scum would vote otherwise surely?
I frankly CBA to read anything in the Graun anymore, but does he just conclude that the voters are essentially thick racist b45tards? That’s usually where the left ends up. I recall that odious little twerp Kinnock saying literally that after both the 1992 and 2015 GEs.
I slogged through 5 or 6 years of paying a subscription for the Graun on the basis that I wanted ‘balance’ to my natural subscription to the Torygraph, But I had to end it a couple of years ago for the relentless Britain bashing (and obviously for the poison dripped on any of us provincial thickos that voted leave).
Raphael Bleurgh
Hardly an election goes by without Labour telling us the NHS is in mortal danger should the electorate fail to return them. We’re told Boris is going to sell the NHS to Trump. Labour politicians were on TV crying because Boris described someone’s Commons speech as ‘humbug’. The Guardian constantly tries to paint the country as some dystopian wasteland where street urchins starve to death in the alleys.
That surfeit of rationality must be very well concealed behind all the hysterical cant.
The lack of self awareness of people on the left, who are clearly intelligent, is what perplexes me. They think they are rational – and then believe a woman isn’t a human female; that defunding the police will help black people; and the biggest self-delusion of all, that high immigration of unskilled people doesn’t depress the wages for unskilled roles.
I struggle to understand how the intelligentsia of Germany allowed Hitler to come about, and often even supported him once he was established. But seeing the intelligentsia of this country who struggled to stop Brexit and support woke revisions of history and culture, I think I can see how even clever people can delude themselves.
You echo my sentiments exactly. I wonder if it’s due to a lack of life experience rather than intelligence. Or perhaps too much media consumption? Someone once said that ‘a man who reads nothing but the news is worse off than a man who reads nothing at all.’
Emotions. The Left rarely include Renaissance People who combine the Soldier, Poet, Courtier, Explorer, etc. It is the combination of the adventurous spirit, intellect, imagination, toughness, practical skills, appreciaton of beauty, etc which comes from a wide experince of life. They largely lack people who have had to exhibit leadership, to make life or death decsions when exhausted when in their teens or twenties. Consequently, they they lack the people who have had to shoulder responsibility.
If one looks at the Leaders of the British Labour Party post WW2 how many volunteered for combat units and saw combat in the dark days of 1940 to early 1943? Not many. For those in combat up to 1943, we were fighting for survival and it requires a certain courage to fight not that that we we would win, that we would go down fighting. Those emergency workers who entered the Twin Towers probably knew they would die but it was a case of doing their duty,
The Labour Party is now a Party controlled by white collar public sector clerks with degrees who lack the breadth of experience to enable them to have a Renaissance outlook on life.Few have had their mettle tested by adversity.
I have many “liberal-luvvie” girlfriends, all of them ostensibly intelligent and holding good jobs. One in particular – a journalist – rails constantly and consistently about Brexit voters (and if we are anywhere even slightly salubrious even now she will say “I bet they all voted Brexit” – with the implication that working class white people are all knuckle-dragging loons).
I once asked her why she is so supportive of a crony-corporate crypto-f as ci st organisation – which i would have thought was alien to everything she thinks she stands for – but several years later I still haven’t had an answer.
Arguing with a “progressive” is like arguing with a 3 year old as to why they can’t have a lilac unicorn.
Andrew please educate yourself on the trauma those who identify as purple, mono horned Equus face everyday, your words are literally killing them.
Also death to THERF’s – Tri-horn Exclusionary Radical Filly’s. Everyone knows those who identify as having tri horns just have a Paraphilia where as those who identify as having mono horns are just born in the wrong body and must be believed, It’s The Science.
As I asked in another comment earlier today, what does “progressive” mean?
Like the term “liberal” before it, it is starting to resemble the inverse. Regressives…
I was discussing recently with a mate of mine how and why the word for certain things keeps changing. You can no longer say “n3gro” or “coloured people”, for example; you are required (this week) to say “people of colour” (unless you are the NAACP, of course). Likewise “liberal” has been rebadged as “progressive”, and so on.
In no case is the new label any more informative or descriptive than the old. These are simply arbitrary speech conventions, manufactured from whole cloth, so that certain people can take performative offence at any other word, like the Knights Who Say Ni when they hear the word ‘it’.
He expressed what I think is the rather sage view that this is inevitable, because the word for something is by purpose and definition associated with it. As the associations of ‘n3gro’ and ‘liberal’ are necessarily unpleasant, a new word is regularly needed so we all forget what we’re talking about here. Soon the new word is as contaminated by association as the old – and it all starts again.
It’s a form of linguistic inflation. Like countries that add noughts to their banknotes in times of hyperinflation and then in desparation change the currency’s name, leftists appropriate words and banish any vestige of original meaning from them. Then they hijack some other word in an attempt to convey the illusion of original thinking.
“Regressive”, by definition, is the opposite of “progressive”, so who are the “regressives” here?
Themselves, but they don’t realize it.
“Progressive” means following the Left’s theories which will lead the populace into the happy, well-fed, nirvana
As opposed to “regressive”?
‘Regressive’ is what actually happens: a miserable, dystopian hell-hole with constant surveillance and no food, fuel or toilet paper.
Oh, wait a minute …
The tone of your comment sounds like an American English citizen, more crude, as opposed to a British citizen, more polished.
Oooops!
Did I just commit a hate crime against a British citizen?
It’s always important to grap a term which puts you on the moral high ground; it doen’t need to actually mean anything, just so long as it sounds good and noble. Progressive – everyone likes progress it opposes regressives i.e. knuckle-draggers, it like right-to-lifers as opposed to no-right-to-lifers. Get your brand right and you’re half-way there.
They believe they are progressing toward a Socialist Nirvana. Unfortunately, before that a ruddy great cliff awaits them.
How many times can Marxism be reheated before even the left can’t swallow it?
John Harris is probably the only journo still worth reading at the Guardian.
At least he took the trouble to travel the length and breadth of Britain to ask people why so many of them voted for Brexit.
I agree. I bought the graun regularly for decades – I used to do a kind of round robin of broadsheets through the week, but it is now very far from the paper it once was and most of the writers there are unreadable. There are still a very small number of commentators on there worth reading, John Harris and Larry Elliott about the best of them. I have a lot of time for Harris’ journalism, but I agree with Peter Franklin, that piece was pure narrative fantasy – attempting to make unpalatable facts fit a line, seemingly because the discrepancy between peoples opinions as are as opposed to peoples opinions as should be is so maddeningly inexplicable, that there must be some ‘hidden variables’ that a sufficiently contorted left wing argument can somehow reveal. He may as well have shortened half of it to the words ‘the Tories, the Tories, the Tories’ for all the difference it would make to the meaning of the piece.
I used to like him a lot but he’s been sipping at the kool aid for the last couple of years. Maybe doing so is a prerequisite for staying at the G.
Leftwingers are far more obsessed with the minutiae of politics but the voters they have lost are not so obsessed and in fact are actively irritated by the incessant politicising of everything that comes from the left.
But analysts on the left completely miss this and think that the right works in the same way they do, and thus they’re always looking in the wrong place when seeking answers.
The left could (and will) lose more of their voters once their process of, and, accumulation of information increases.
Thankfully, the demagoguery, bickering and the ‘pot calling the kettle black’ is helping with the education of the ignorant.
Where has an entire comment thread gone? Don’t recall anything untoward in it other than an exchange on defining progressive/regressive politics.
I’ve just asked that question via “help and support”, perhaps hurty feelings counts as a category for flagging.
“Twitter, is that you?”
Your quote: narrative — in fact, it’s a version of that most childish of stories: the other side only won because they weren’t playing fair.
… and:
the Left must ask itself how it managed to ignore what was there all along. (end quote)
The pot doesn’t recognize the kettle.
Emotion always does trump reason, which is the slave of the passions.