While Ms. Parallax Brief was watching Lost DVDs yesterday evening, the Parallax Brief settled down to catch up on some of the political writing he had missed, but archived, over his New Year vacation, and read two paradigm-shifting Peter Hitchens essays, linked at the bottom of this blog.
The Parallax Brief had always assumed, as he assumes most sensible observers assume, that a combination of the Thatcher and Reagan years, and the collapse of, and exposure as fraudulent, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, had utterly destroyed socialism as a force (1) that had any traction in British politics and (2) to which anyone, from the general voting public through to public policy wonks, paid any heed.
Within this context, the Parallax Brief had always been puzzled, and, he is ashamed now to admit, slightly amused, by the sometimes hysterical assertions of the few hard, traditional conservatives at the Mail and the Telegraph, that Britain had become a socialist nation. But something Mr. Hitchens wrote in the first of his blog essays changed the Parallax Brief’s mind:
The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought — a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority — are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party…
The penny finally drops. It is now perfectly clear what Mr. Hitchens and his Daily Telegraph counterpart, Simon Heffer, object to.
And Hitchens is right — to an extent.
Most people associate socialism most with its economic branch: controlling the the economy’s commanding (more…)
The Parallax Brief has a guilty secret: he is addicted to American politics. He finds its intoxicating mix of lofty ideals, snarling populism, Congressional dilatants, breakneck pacing, and great statesmen utterly irresistible.
It’s amazing how much money that so-called fiscal conservatives are willing to lavish on the armed services. The Parallax Brief believes our armed forces are grossly underfunded and overstretched for Britain’s current foreign policy brief, but what always shocks him is the willingness of those who spend the vast majority of their time engaged in a monotonous, aggressive siege of what they see government largesse (that is, all government spending) to not only join him in being against military cutbacks, but to argue that any it’s wrong to even question MoD spending.
The Parallax Brief maintains that the only party that can stop the Conservative Party winning the next election is the Conservative Party. Labour has been in power too long, the economy is in too much of a mess, and its poll figures have stubbornly refused to budge for too long to imagine that Gordon Brown can work out a way to get himself back into 10 Downing Street next spring or summer.
The ongoing debacle over Lynn Truss’s prospective deselection by the Conservative Party South West Norfolk constituency association has descended into an unseemly, spiteful proxy for long held resentments between the traditionalists of what in America would be called the Conservative Party “base”, and the socially liberal modernisers at Tory HQ.
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