“No one asked the people of the UK if we wanted our culture and way of life destroyed,” remarked British politician Janice Atkinson last year. Now her nation’s left-wing Labour Party has just been destroyed in the December 12th election because, as researcher Sumantra Maitra put it, the “woke” Left would not and will not “move right on culture and nationalism.”
To understand the magnitude of the conservatives’ victory, their biggest win since 1935, imagine “Kentucky voting for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the presidential election,” wrote Maitra. He elaborates, “For those who have no idea about the electoral map of the United Kingdom, the entire Midlands and North of England are traditional working-class Labour [liberal] voters since Margaret Thatcher broke the back of trade unionism in the 1980s.”
“These people were taught in their households, in no uncertain terms, that voting for posh urban southern Conservatives is a cardinal sin and they have more in common with the Scots north of the border than their fellow Englishmen down south,” Maitra continued.
In other words, if Britain’s December 12th result augurs a permanent shift, it’s tantamount to the South’s Democrat-to-Republican realignment decades ago in the United States. The reason is similar, too: The Left declared war on what had been its own culture.
Issuing an I-told-you-so last week was firefighter, lifelong Labour voter and union activist Paul Embery. Writing at UnHerd, he says that while the media were shocked at the conservative victory, it didn’t surprise those paying attention (as with Trump in 2016). For while the British working class had sounded alarm bells in a couple of recent years’ elections, he lamented,
the woke liberals and Toytown revolutionaries who now dominate the [Labour] party didn’t listen to us. They truly thought that ‘one more heave’ would bring victory. They believed that constantly hammering on about economic inequality would be enough to get Labour over the line. In doing so, they made a major miscalculation: they failed to grasp that working-class voters desire something more than just economic security; they want cultural security too.
They want politicians to respect their way of life, and their sense of place and belonging; to elevate real-world concepts such as work, family and community over nebulous constructs like ‘diversity’, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusivity’. By immersing itself in the destructive creed of identity politics and championing policies such as open borders, Labour placed itself on a completely different wavelength to millions across provincial Britain without whose support it simply could not win power. In the end, Labour was losing a cultural war that it didn’t even realise it was fighting.
In fact, the Left’s perspective and program is, abroad and here, to use one of its favorite words, offensive. Contrary to enlightened atheistic leftists’ supposition, people aren’t just objects, chemicals-and-water organic robots and cogs in an economic system that is somehow, magically, enhanced by “diversity.” Of course they want cultural security, even, perhaps, before economic security.
People don’t live in corporations, but countries; they don’t take pride in an economic system, but a civilization; they’re not defined by spreadsheet numbers, but a nation. Commentator Tucker Carlson expressed this reality very well, quoting both Maitra and Embery, in the Tuesday Fox News segment below.
Maitra understates the case when saying it’s hard for the Left to move right on culture and nationalism. Remember that people are driven by emotion, by passion, more than many think, and the Left has a deep, visceral, inbred contempt for all things Western. Call it the Zen of Being Wrong: They’re one with their misbegotten ideas.
Thus would I say to any somewhat traditional liberal voter — what I call an “ethnic Democrat/Labourite” (born into, not chosen) — the following to inspire thought:
“I commend you. Not everyone could reject all his grandparents’ values in deference to party.”
“What do you mean?” the person may ask.
“Well,” I’ll respond, “the party in days gone by never supported putting boys in girls’ bathrooms, prenatal infanticide on demand, hate-speech laws, open-borders cultural genocide, multiculturalism, attacks on Christianity, and identity politics. But it does today. Yet you stick with them, and not everyone could do that.”
It’s not just rhetorically but literally true that yesterday’s liberal is today’s conservative. Put simply, the only consistent definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” are, respectively, a desire to change the status quo and a desire to maintain it. Yet since liberals are the ones ever proposing cultural and political change — and since the conservatives over time ever capitulate — the liberals end up shaping tomorrow’s status quo.
And when “tomorrow” becomes today, what do they always call that liberal-born new status quo’s defenders?
Yes, “conservatives.”
Now maybe you know why G.K. Chesterton once noted that the “business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
In truth, though, the UK election was more like an electoral revolution. It’s also the kind of outcome the Left seeks to forestall via planned cultural destruction. If this smacks of overstatement, know that Andrew Neather, former aide to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, confessed in 2009 that the massive Third World immigration into the United Kingdom over the previous 15 years was designed to “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”
Imagine that, importing a foreign “army” to win power. What do you call people who thus contrive?
Right now in Britain they’re called losers. In the United States, though, they’re currently called leftists — and they’re busy replacing Americans who might care about their culture so that outcomes such as the UK’s are no longer possible here.
Photo: twinsterphoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written forThe Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
