The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

We’ve bathed in the poisonous filth of identity politics for so long, that some of us have become contaminated. The temptation to use it against its proponents when their inconsistencies become obvious is hard to resist.

Melanie Phillips recently wrote an excellent article in the Sunday Times here (behind a paywall, alas). It highlights the real dangers of over-reaction and points out some of the people who are the worst examples.

Speaking of MAGA, she says;

A section of this movement has gone down a poisonous rabbit hole. Led by the media personality Tucker Carlson, its followers are conspiracy theorists who believe that a “great replacement” of white people is under way in America, that Hitler was right and the Jews are trying to drag the US against its interests into foreign wars in the Middle East. Culturally appropriate variations of this thinking pop up in Britain on the wilder shores of both the Tory party and Reform. Despite strenuous attempts by Farage to eject such individuals from the party, some Reform election candidates have previously shared on social media material defending Hitler, suggested the environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg is “controlled” by “Rothschild handlers” and compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Even more depressing in my view, is the loss to our cause of Candace Owens. She was sound a couple of years ago. She was my best hope for a future POTUS capable of finally killing off identity politics. Sadly she’s now lost to the oldest identarian hatred of all – anti-semitism. Of course, the fact that zealots go off at tangents or take reasonable arguments too far doesn’t devalue the arguments, let alone Reason itself. However it blurs the lines of debate.

Core Western values – as expounded manfully by my hero the original and best Tom Paine – are based on Reason (with a capital “R”) and submission to Law (with a capital “L”). Tom said Law was the only king for a free people. That just left the problem of how to make a Law based on Reason, which would be broadly acceptable to the majority.

Our modern civilisation arose (so my legal history professor told me long ago) from the move from status to contract. In the feudal Middle Ages, your rights depended upon who you were. In the modern world, apart from the “self-evident” truths of Natural Law, they depended on the contracts you made. The horror of Post-Modernism is an attempt to make rights depend on status again, but with a new set of nobles. Or as they’re now known – people with “protected characteristics”.

The fact that Western academia has come down so hard for status of late has led to an inevitable reaction. If you denounce, for example, men as intrinsically foul, don’t be surprised if some, in anger, are inclined to fight supremacist fire with fire. It doesn’t invalidate the rational arguments of the resistance, of course, but the Left’s propagandists will gleefully pounce on any convenient smear to besmirch us all.

The key person to cling to in the coming turmoil is Dr Martin Luther King. His “I have a dream” speech is widely (and rightly) admired across the political spectrum. He’s the least controversial exponent of Western values in modern history, and he can’t be dismissed as a post-modern untermensch. Calm voices on the right need to keep telling our less-enlightened brethren to focus on content of character not identity in their campaigning. We must be careful not to become the very thing we rightly fear and resist.