...Just as the Left has to reach an accommodation with its extreme wing in order to gain and keep power, so, in order to consolidate "our" recent wins, we on the Right need to embrace the likes of Paul Joseph Watson - because, in both cases, it's the "extreme" wings that are key to winning over young voters. And when it comes to attracting young voters, we anti-socialists are chronically disadvantaged.
By the time young Britons (or Americans) are eligible to vote for the first time, most of them will have spent up to 14 years being indoctrinated by left-wing teachers in the state school system. Many of them will also have undergone three years of indoctrination by left-wing lecturers at college. If their main source of news is the BBC or Sky, graduates will have been "encouraged" to view the world through left-wing goggles for at least seventeen years. Overcoming that much conditioning can't be easy. By the time they've reached their mid-twenties, I imagine the choice facing most educated Britons is whether to vote Labour, Green or LibDem, because Tory = Scum and UKIP = Fascist. Together, the three main left-wing UK parties gained 56% of the 18-24 age-group vote in 2015, compared to the 35% who voted Conservative or UKIP. Fortunately, the majority of young voters were too lazy or clueless to actually bother voting: if they hadn't been so apathetic, Cameron's slim majority would have disappeared. The message from America was equally clear - among voters aged 18-29, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 55% to 37%.
Inevitably, many of those young voters will turn right in later years as they gradually come to realise that utopian left-wing policies are invariably disastrous and that it's their earnings the state is redistributing. But if the Left is somehow able to energise a larger proportion of the politically-indoctrinated younger generation into voting next time round here, and in the US, the Right will be sunk. By 2020 (when elections are due to be held on both sides of the Atlantic) Trump might have proved a disaster, and Labour might have got itself a credible leader (unlikely, I know). But, whatever happens in the meantime, the Right is going to have to capture more of the youth vote in order to prevent an unholy alliance of global corporatist troughers and far-left fruit-loops being given yet another opportunity to hasten the demise of Judeo-Christian civilisation.
So how do we persuade more young folk to see things our way next time? Joseph Paul Watson's YouTube channel boasts more than 750,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched over 166,000,000 times, so he might have something to teach us:
I have never understood why young people haven't rebelled en masse against the boring, middle-aged, middle-class, do-gooding finger-waggers who've been hectoring them since they started going to school. What's wrong with kids these days? Where's their damned spunk! Er... let me rephrase that: Why aren't they revolting? Oh, damn. Well, you know what I'm getting at. Why are young people seemingly incapable of questioning the prevailing narrative, which is anti-patriotic, anti-capitalist, anti-business, pro-immigration, pro-EU, anti-American, anti-personal responsibility, pro-victimhood, pro-colonial guilt, anti-Tory, anti-UKIP, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-marriage, pro-welfare, pro-positive discrimination, pro-Big State, anti-police, anti-nuclear, anti-military, pro-Green, and pro-transgender? What sort of youngster, when being force-fed this sort of guff by some Guardian-reading virtue-signaller, wouldn't automatically feel the urge to sneer, "Says who, Teach?" I'm all for respecting one's elders - but not when they're spewing out this type of malign tosh.
What seems to be happening is that - instead of pushing in the opposite direction - youngsters have decided to "rebel" by embracing the prevailing orthodoxy so fervently that they have turned themselves into holy-rolling zealots (what Eric Hoffer called "True Believers"). You don't just disapprove of conservative statements by arguing with the person making them - you seek to deny people the right to make statements with which you disagree: you go even further, and demand the right not to hear statements with which you disagree. No platform! Safe space! Shut them up! Lock them up! Scream at them! Beat them them up! Kick them out! Kill the fascist monster!
So how do we deprogramme the poor things? Ideally, we would prevent teachers and lecturers from indoctrinating them - but that's not going to happen any time soon. Michael Gove started to address the problem, but the teachers all burst into tears, so Cameron sacked him. And if anyone can figure out a sure-fire way of preventing broadcasters from pumping out left-slanted news, dramas, comedy programmes and documentaries, please send me your answers on a postcard, because I really don't have a clue (since young folk are deserting traditional media in droves, this may not be such a problem in future). People like Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos (both Brits, by the way) are showing us oldsters the way.
The thing many young people really fear is being thought uncool, unhip, stupid, cowardly or conformist, and what they fear most of all is mockery. Watson and Yiannopoulos understand this: because they know that trying to reason calmly with gangs of self-righteous, intolerant, "educated" (i.e. brainwashed) young leftist bullies is pointless, so, instead, they drive them mad by pointing out just how pathetically uncool, unhip, stupid, cowardly and conformist they truly are - they mock them mercilessly. It isn't only libertarians using this approach: the far more traditionally conservative Ben Shapiro - who's the same age as Milo Yiannopoulos - also tours American college campuses, delivering eye-wateringly vicious tongue-lashings to junior SJWs. I may disagree with this trio about many things (well, not with Ben Shapiro, who's extremely sound), and I'm not suggesting that all political discourse should be conducted along these lines, but when it comes to dealing with gangs of young leftist bullies, I reckon it might be the only way.
My only real argument with Watson's theory that right-wing politics is the new Punk Rock is that Punk lasted for a very short time, wasn't all that popular, didn't reach all parts of the country, and pretty much disappeared without trace. I prefer to see right-wing politics as the equivalent of 1950s Rock 'n' Roll, a true mass movement which conquered the globe, changed popular music for ever, and whose legacy can be felt to this day. Either that or Disco, which is arguably the most successful musical genre of all time. But as I'm far keener on Rock 'n` Roll, I'll stick with that analogy.
Some young voters will turn right as soon as they leave college and realize they've been saddled with a huge chain around their necks while other graduates will have nothing to pay whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see The Yiannopoulos Privilege Grant has received over 30,000 applications " exclusively to white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female,queer and ethnic minority classmates."
Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter last year, and has subsequently written a book, "Dangerous", which is due to be published later this year. There were so many pre-orders for it after it was announced in December, it went straight to No. 1 on Amazon. Looking forward to reading it.
DeleteCurrently flipping through a copy of Don Camillo and his Flock, a 70 years older version of Mr Watson's work.
ReplyDeleteIs that the best of the Don Camillo series? Never read one, to be honest. One thing which has surprised me recently is the BBC daytime TV adaptation of Father Brown. How did that slip under the radar? Could be time for yet another Don Camillo adaptation!
DeleteI suspect it's as good as any other of his books, total sales 23 million. One short story after another, five pages, four, even three. Very light touch. There's a problem in the village. Peppone, the Communist mayor, can't solve it and Don Camillo can. Often after a chat with Jesus. Despite all the dialectical materialism of the Party, the Communists can't persuade others to give up their veneration for the Church and can't in the end give it up even themselves. That's it.
DeleteIt's about 50 years since I read a Father Brown story but as far as I remember they're all a bit more heavy-handed but they have the same shape, there's him and there's Flambeau, and Father Brown always wins.
"I'm very much not a libertarian - and I suspect you aren't either".
ReplyDeleteThere are a few of us libertarians who dig the blog, Scott. Not so much the Pintrest site but who knows, we may come around to that too.
That's very heartening to know, gogilesgo. We're on the same side - freedom and personal responsibility and all that. And if I were an American, I might be tempted. I've read Rothbard, revere Isabel Paterson's "The God of the Machine" and visit the Lew Rockwell site occasionally - but I'm too much of a traditional pro-police, pro-military, censorious social conservative to ever fully convert. Like a lot of right-wing conservatives, though, I get a real kick out of the way young libertarians are fighting their brainwashed contemporaries on the left's traditional turf, using the left's traditional weapons - and driving them totally nuts by doing so.
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