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October 24, 2019 - 2:04pm
A magnificently provocative essay from John Gray in the New Statesman. It’s entitled ‘The closing of the conservative mind: politics and the art of war’. However, it’s the liberal mind that he’s really concerned about.
It’s not just that the liberal elite snobbishly pins the blame for the rise of populism on rabble rousers and voter ignorance (as opposed to any failures on their own part). That’s bad enough, but worse is a growing disregard for democracy itself:
Witness the sheer delight taken in Boris Johnson’s humiliation at the hands of the Supreme Court. Lady Hale’s famous brooch has literally become an icon — with spider emojis appearing all over Twitter. It’s an apt symbol of the entanglement of democracy in a thickening web of rules designed to constrain the actions of elected governments.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the now irrelevant prorogation controversy, Gray correctly identifies the real consequences of the judgement:
For legalistic liberals this is a feature not a bug. It’s also why they don’t care about the EU’s obvious democratic deficit — and why they’ve turned a blind eye to the thuggery of the Spanish police against Catalan protestors. All that counts is the inviolability of the systems that entrench liberal interests against an unreliable electorate.
There’s a lot more to Gray’s argument and I’d urge you to read the whole thing. But is the key proposition — that liberals are turning against democracy — really credible? Isn’t democracy an integral part of the liberal tradition?
Yes, but then so was nationalism. The great liberal movements of the 19th century, which rose up against the reactionary empires of the era, stood for nationhood as well as democracy.
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