If I can resist the temptation to hit the keyboard again – this will be my last post, after fifteen years. There is a time and a season for all things.
We’re in crisis times. The height of the Cold War might have matched them but I was a toddler or grubby-kneed kid at the time. We’ve lived in a blissful paradise in the post-Berlin Wall years. And we never doubted liberal democracy. But from our elevated heights we’ve looked down on other countries. Dictators and ideologues have seen their chance and fired up negative sentiment. They are calling the shots.
There is also a new and disturbing breed of doubters on the right of our own politics. They focus on a false dichotomy between liberalism and conservatism. Left matched against right is a better way of characterising differences of opinion. (We don’t have socialists in the manner we used to, but we do have wide sections of the population committed to social action.) Or engaged state versus small state.
Issues of immigration, race, gender, sovereignty, Empire and its legacy, all divide us. No liberal society or any part of it should seek to dictate their resolution. We must hold fast if we are to avoid the populism of a state-controlled media and courts (illiberal democracies as they are rightly characterised), and all that might follow.
As a good liberal I believe we will prevail again, with our freedoms to write and think and associate and vote intact. But any resolution will be well beyond my lifetime.
That’s driving my decision to bring this blog to an end. It was all, in those heady days fifteen years ago, about enhancing liberal democracy. It’s closer now to a behind-the-barricades defence.
A few final thoughts. All rather negative. But hang in there, if you can bear it, to the end.
Is there any optimism left in the world? Must we all now hunker down with our own private pleasures, treat wars in Gaza and Ukraine as on another planet, play wait-and-see with Trump, until the inauguration, and then wait-and-see what happens, and all the while acclimatise ourselves more and more to disaster, so that with each month that passes we hunker down yet further, retreating into rabbit holes?
Forget the geopolitical, you might say, what about the UK? We have farmers demonstrating over the introduction of inheritance tax on farmland above £1m in value, with Jeremy Clarkson a tub-thumping arch-hypocrite to the fore, and the Daily Mail et al stirring up their ancient readerships.
Surely, the government could have anticipated there’d be a furore?
Likewise on the Winter Fuel Allowance. Removing it within weeks of the election was a lousy idea. It has coloured everyone’s view of the new government.
So, yes, we can engage with our own home-grown politics. But it’s pretty bleak story. And then there are the climate-change talks in Baku, a fossil-fuel paradise, of all places. And I haven’t mentioned China.
How many more reasons for gloom? And yet, it’s always been like this, going back two centuries and more, bad times then good times then bad times. We’ve hung in there before. We have to now. Liberal democracy has been hard-won and it’s now in the gene pool of the world. Autocracies take many forms. Liberal democracy at its core has one simple core liberal message. One I’ve elaborated on it in this blog for fifteen years.
Keep the faith!
zenpolitics.me 