In Rotherham, evidence of organised child abuse by Muslim gangs is deliberately ignored by Labour authorities and the police, resulting in more than 1,400 victims over a sixteen year period.
In Ferguson, Missouri, the police shooting of a young black man is reported as a racist act, symptomatic of a broader culture of discrimination. When locals respond by looting and vandalising, their actions are described as ‘understandable’.
In Britain a few years earlier, a similar situation plays out. Unrest flares up in cities across the country. Shops are ransacked, people mugged and property destroyed. According to some, these are not the actions of lawless hooligans, but expressions of inchoate rage against an unjust society.
In New York, two airliners hijacked by Islamic terrorists are flown into the World Trade Centre, killing thousands. The dust has barely settled before some commentators start describing it as payback for decades of Western oppression.
In each case (and on many others occasions besides), the liberal establishment has given the benefit of the doubt to the bad guys, and treated the forces of civilised order with suspicion or contempt. When they haven’t explicitly sided with evil against good, they have made good accountable for evil’s actions, and tried to draw a moral equivalence between the two.
In a more culturally assured era, this kind of contrariness would have been laughed off by conservatives, but memories of those days are fast-fading. Maggie and Ronnie have long since left the building, to be replaced by a parade of craven technocrats and interchangeable Euro-lefties, whose natural instinct is to make everything our fault. When such attitudes represent mainstream opinion, and the only opposition comes Tory ‘wets’ and statist RINOs, they are no longer a laughing matter.
Today’s liberal-leftists do not necessarily hold the same beliefs as the criminals and madmen they give comfort to, but they share their contempt for Western culture, and see nothing in it worth saving – hence all the Year Zero millennialists thrown up by the modern age. Whether they use the language of Cool Britannia or Hope and Change, their message is the same: everything that went before us is rotten. We must tear it down and start again.
This resentment is often thought to stem from an aversion to the inequalities inherent in free societies; but this is to get things the wrong way around. Leftists are blithely indifferent to human suffering when it happens on their own watch – as events in Rotherham demonstrate – and are happy to tolerate hierarchies, as long as they are on top of them. For them, inequality is merely a symptom of the wrong people being in charge, and proof of the need for new management. Until the last conservative is brought to heel and the last core Western liberty is outlawed, inequality and injustice will be deemed to stalk the land.
When terrorists and criminals threaten our way of life, all right-thinking people recognise them as the villains of the piece, but leftists cannot bring themselves to jump to such reductive conclusions. Instinctive moral judgements, if right, render their supposedly deeper insight irrelevant. They have no desire to defend a society that indulges such stupidity and affords them so little respect, so they automatically side with its enemies. And nothing gives them greater pleasure than showcasing their compassion by defending a maligned group against the pitchfork-wielding mob.
This is why leftists are forever trying to present human existence as a puzzle that only they can solve, and why they attack anything that whiffs of patriotism, self-interest or self-determination: because they want to de-legitimise any authority other than their own.
The Left wants to fix society to favour the ‘right’ people, instead of the knuckle-dragging masses and the false prophets of big business. Recent events, however, suggest that all it has produced is a suicidal culture full of division and paranoia, that is unwilling to do what’s best, and is unable to defend itself against those who wish us harm.