Vulgar, Not Populist

Nick Cohen.

Spitting out the word "populism". Contrasting the common people to himself as one of the "intellectuals" (how vulgar is that?). Berating an Australian politician as "reactionary" for daring to take his Catholicism seriously. Failing to point out that that politician's views on the nature of marriage are also President Obama's. Attacking Russia for daring to exist at all. Demanding deference to those "qualified" only because each of them says that the others are, but who have this week been much exposed on the broadcast media as shrieking, hilariously insecure hysterics if anyone suggests the withdrawal of their meal tickets for life. And plenty more besides.

Dependence on foreign oil is denounced, but heaven forfend that the solution might include the vast resources of coal on which this island stands. That would be "populist". As would mentioning that the Gulf monarchies and especially Saudi Arabia, with the Israel Lobby, fund the politicians of whom Cohen approves. And as would opposition to the Iraq War that, with the Israel Lobby, the Gulf monarchies and especially Saudi Arabia ordered up, loudly cheered on by Nick Cohen. Not wanting wars is for the sort of proles, and indeed toffs, whose sons are sent off to be harvested in them. How very populist.

Cohen is right, if hardly original, to point out that opposition to abortion, to same-sex "marriage" and to the decadence of the media has been used to encourage the workers to vote against their own economic interests. But he either will not say or, far more probably, cannot see that the reality of the danger from Wall Street and the City does not lessen the reality of the danger from Holywood over there, or from the BBC in its present form over here, or from Murdoch everywhere, to use only one possible example.

Knowingly or unknowingly, what Cohen really fears is the emergence of a proper populist movement: economically social democratic, morally and socially conservative, patriotic. That would make very short shrift indeed of, among so very many other things, the idea that only the Nick Cohens of this country or this world should be allowed to receive proper wages, or to enjoy security of employment, or to travel, or to eat meat, or to have children.

Someone has attempted an obscene anonymous comment which, inter alia, asked what I knew about Anthropogenic Global Warming, population control, "free" market economics, the organisation of political science on a spectrum devised by Continental Marxists and not really applicable in practice even to their own countries, the entire sex education industry going back to Kinsey and his gang of psychopaths, embryonic stem cell "research", the historiography of science assumed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Biblical criticism, its underlying liberal theology, and that theology's underlying concept of the rational or empirical method as somehow existing apart from Augustinian illuminism as a whole, to name but a few.

The answer is, rather a lot. Know thine enemy. But absolutely nothing about any of them is worth knowing for its own sake. And we, who have already defeated the first one, are on the cusp of defeating the others. You, who doubtless know about one or two, possibly three, of them and about absolutely nothing else at all: what will then become of you?