I’ve had a few brushes recently with people who’ve shifted, politically, from positions well to my left to positions well to my right. There’s some useful discussion (and some not so useful) of this and related phenomena in this Crooked Timber comments thread following up a post by Chris Bertram about Nick Cohen, a recent exemplar of the left-right shift. I’m taking points from various commenters with whom I agreed, without acknowledging them: read the thread and you can see who has said what.
A couple of things have struck me about this process. One is that, even though the shift from radical left to neoconservativism or neoliberalism is rarely instantaneous, and appears in some ways to be a smooth transition, there doesn’t usually seem to be any intermediate stage at which people in this process hold a position similar to my own (social democratic in domestic policy, internationalist in foreign policy and reluctant to support war except as a last resort). Rather, what seems to happen is that leftist modes of critique are used, increasingly, to defend rightwing policy positions.
An obvious example is the way in which ex-Marxists seize on largely incoherent notions of ‘the new class’ and ‘elites’ (typically defined in cultural terms rather than with any analysis of economic or political power) as a way of attacking their former allies. Eventually, this kind of thing is often abandoned in favour of traditional conservative or free-market rhetoric, but by this time, the shift in political position is usually complete.
The other is that, although people change their opinions, they generally don’t change the confidence with which they express them or their attitudes to those who disagree. If they were thoughtful and sceptical as leftists, they generally remain so. If they regarded all who disagreed with their leftwing shibboleths as fools or knaves, they will take exactly the same view of those who disagree with them when they begin spouting rightwing shibboleths instead.
This is disappointing in two respects. First, having been (on your own assessment) badly wrong once, ought to inculcate some sense that it is possible you might be wrong again. I don’t think this ought to reduce you to agnostic inertia, but it’s surely a good reason for humility[1].
This ought to be true collectively rather than individually. I’m always stunned when people (particularly those old enough to remember the postwar boom) advance free-market economic arguments with the air of someone stating matters of scientifically proven fact. The same arguments were regarded as hopelessly exploded fallacies in the heyday of Keynesianism, refuted not only in theoretical terms but by the brute fact of the Great Depression. Experience since the 1970s suggested that Keynesians were premature in their triumph, but this ought to have produced humility about the limits of economic knowledge rather than new round of triumphalism from the neoliberal side.
Second, while the left may not have the winning argument on every issue, there are plenty of left arguments that are strong enough that the right typically ignores them rather than confronting them head-on. For example, anyone who’s looked hard at a left analysis of the way the media stereotype groups like the unemployed ought to be immune to simple-minded claims about leftwing media bias (Keith Windschuttle’s book Unemployment was very good on this point). Yet lots of ex-leftists seem to forget things they once knew, and espouse arguments they could formerly refute. (The same is true, in reverse, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen so many examples of the process).
fn1. I know I don’t always practice what I preach in this respect, and some modes of argument like opinion columns don’t allow for equivocation, but I do try to acknowledge that there are people who’ve thought carefully and well about the issue and come to the opposite conclusion.
UpdateJason Soon has more and points to an earlier piece by Paul Norton
John Quiggin 
Are any of the converts worth listening to, able to synthesise their views and bring something new to the table, or merely using their former views as a platform for their legitimacy?
Are the conversions by the “thoughtful and sceptical” less extreme then those made by fools and knaves, bedazzled by their new certainty?
Ahh, the zealous convert syndrome.
I venture to speculate that this syndrome is partly a result of guilt and embarassment. While these people, mostly baby-boomers (boy am I beginning to sound like Pau Watson) were living it up in their free-love hippie communes, the rest of us moderate centre-left/centre-right/centrist people were already paying our fair share of taxes right out of uni. They’re well aware of that fact and their cognitive dissonance forces them towards over-compensation.
It’s a bum wrap on Cohen. Just because he points out a few home truths about some left wingers – not all, not most, but some – doesn’t make him a right winger. Those home truths are that some left wingers do think that Bush is a greater evil than Al Zarqawi, and the Republican Party a greater evil than Al Qaeda and its offshoots. This is just plain ridiculous, and shows a total lack of perspective by those who make it, but it’s a view you can read consistently in Green Left Weekly and sometimes in more mainstream media as well.
It’s also possible to make a principled left wing case as Cohen does for the war based on humanitarian principles. That case might prove to be wrong, because the humanitarian cost of the war + occupation + future oppression by Islamic government will be worse than if Saddam had stayed in power, but you can still make the case without having crossed to the dark side.
Having got that off my chest, the general point about left to right converts is quite correct. These people are pathetic, in the literal sense. And, what’s more, despite their pandering, they are rarely if ever completely accepted by life long Tories, who look upon them with contempt, and consider them to be useful idiots, perhaps, or more often, just idiots.
Dave, I wasn’t referring to Cohen’s position on Iraq as much as things like
which implies that he had never (when he held these positions himself) given them any real thought.
“Those home truths are that some left wingers do think that Bush is a greater evil than Al Zarqawi, and the Republican Party a greater evil than Al Qaeda and its offshoots. This is just plain ridiculous, and shows a total lack of perspective by those who make it”
I don’t want to look like I subscribe to these “plain ridiculous” home truths (in fact I disagree), but there are perfectly reasonable arguments to support them. Consider the power of the state (any state) – it has an army, air force and navy, a budget of at least hundreds of millions up to hundreds of billions, weapons including tanks, multi-tonne bombs, possibly nuclear warheads. The conventional forces are supported by intelligence-gathering agencies and apparatuses for using proxy forces.
Therefore the potential for evil by a nation-state is certainly greater than any retail terrorist on the planet.
Bush is certainly responsible for many deaths – how many and how were innocent is debatable, but either category is thousands at the very least.
And the Republican Party, being much older than al-Qaeda, is far ahead in that kind of arithmetic.
You are right in that perspective is what it hinges on – the perspective of families of those killed in the World Trade Centre will be different from the Iraqi civilian whose family is killed by a cluster bomb on their wedding; the man saved from Hussein’s death squads will see the Republicans differently to the widow of the man killed by Nicaraguan death squads.
Is there a lack of perspective by the left-wingers, or a lack of being able to appreciate a different perspective on your part?
I think Cohen’s point is that middle class left wingers have a tendency to believe their own bullshit, are reluctant to subject their cherished beliefs to criticism, react very badly when confronted with criticism, and use a system of self-referential beliefs and institutions as a kind of force field to deflect that criticism.
This strikes me as being largely true, though of course there are many honourable exceptions.
It is also true of many right wingers, whose stock-in-trade debating tactic with the left is to accuse the left of bad faith and self-serving hypocrisy, and to deny that the left a legitimate role in any serious debate. This was true of Thatcherites in Britain in the 80s, a point Cohen himself makes, and, it’s particularly true of left to right converts. I believe this is so because they do not have confidence in their own (new) beliefs.
John, You’re right that “leftist modes of critique are used, increasingly, to defend rightwing policy positions”. The idea of a new class is an excellent example of that.
But I wonder how much people’s views actually change. Perhaps some thinkers find that the political boundaries shift around them.
For example, many of the neoconservative Public Interest crowd were supporters of New Deal liberalism. Roosevelt is famous for saying:
“continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole our relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
If you quoted Roosevelt in 1935 the right wingers would have gone for your throat. If you quote him today they’ll put their arms around you and welcome into the conservative movement.
The liberal left shifted during the 1960s. People started talking about welfare benefits without strings attached – guaranteed minimum incomes. I think that some old fashioned New Deal liberals found themselves closer to Nixon than to Democrats like McGovern.
There’s a certain kind of bitterness people develop when they are attacked by people they once thought of as their friends.
Fatfingers, it’sl a matter of degree, and when you are talking about Nicaraguan death squads and their sponsors, the differences are admittedly narrowed considerably.
However I would still put it to you that the average Republican operative is a cut above the average al Qaeda operative.
And while Bush is indeed responsible for many thousands of innocent deaths, they are the result of stupidity and callous indifference, rather than him ordering people to be murdered. It’s an important difference. And it’s hard to believe that things would have been a whole lot different if President Gore or President Kerry had been running the show, so you can’t really lay the blame for it all on the inherent evilness of the Republican Party.
Like I said, it’s a question of perspective.
jquiggin Says: August 8th, 2005 at 6:16 pm
Cohen’s facile criticism of the supposed incoherence of social democratic thinking indicates a complete ignorance of the Enlightenment’s libertarian-egalitarian tradition, from Tom Paine to John Rawls. This school sythesised the Enlightement ideologies of personal liberty and political equity into the institutions of the liberal democratic state.
Mill, I believe a “halfway competent political philosopher”, gave the best answer to that question.
Personal actions were primarily self-regarding and therefore presumptively free from political intervention since the indvidual was the best judge of his utility.
Professional relations were primarily other-regarding and were fair game for political intervention on grounds of social utility.
John,
You make the whole left->right process sound so negative. In truth it is a wonderful time of revelation and personal growth. Imagine finding out that you had been wrong about almost everything for so many years, then realising that the truth was right under your nose the whole time. Humbling, uplifting, and deeply moving. That’s what it’s like.
Also, could people stop calling liberals ‘conservatives’. That is really insulting.
Dave, perhaps you should read Juan Cole’s very brief pictorial history lesson.
And, it would seem, very biased too, Joe. You really are proving John’s point.
[…] I don’t know whether John Quiggin read this thread on Catallaxy before he wrote his latest post on zealous converts from left to right (and to be fair I should reserve my opinion on whether Bob Catley fits this mould as I haven’t read enough of his work [1]) but he makes some very good observations. For instance, the common thread of ‘hyper confidence in one’s opinions’ that characterises such types: … although people change their opinions, they generally don’t change the confidence with which they express them or their attitudes to those who disagree. If they were thoughtful and sceptical as leftists, they generally remain so. If they regarded all who disagreed with their leftwing shibboleths as fools or knaves, they will take exactly the same view of those who disagree with them when they begin spouting rightwing shibboleths instead. […]
‘Also, could people stop calling liberals ‘conservatives’. That is really insulting.”
Joe, as I said in the post, conversion can be either in the direction of neoconservatism or of neoliberalism (where the “neo” can roughly be translated as “ex-left or influenced by same”). In recent years, it’s neoconservatives who’ve been the big gainers: neoliberalism is, I think, a waning force.
The ideological conversation is hopelessly confused by misleading or irrelevant concepts.
The counterposition of liberals with conservatives, common in the US, is apples to oranges. It implies that a liberal could never be conservative, which is silly since most left liberals want nothing more than to hang onto what they have got, politically speaking.
In ideological terms the (libertarian-egalitarian) liberal believes in the moral value of individual autonomy. This is properly antagonistic to the communitarian who believes in the moral value of social authority.
Conservatism is conversant with constructivism. These values represent polar attitudes to the utility of politically mandated changes to social institutions.
Dave Ricardo said: “And while Bush is indeed responsible for many thousands of innocent deaths, they are the result of stupidity and callous indifference, rather than him ordering people to be murdered. It’s an important difference.”
Actually I’d prefer to be murdered by someone deliberately rather than as the result of someone’s stupidity. After all, stupid people are everywhere and are hard to avoid while murderers are comparatively rare.
Jack correctly points to Mill as refuting (150 years in advance) Cohen’s newly discovered objection to left liberalism.
I attribute the great depression largely to two things:-
1. Churchill returned Great Britian (and most of the commonwealth) to the gold standard in 1925. However his choice of price level was very deflationary and remained so for more than a decade.
2. The USA initiated a protectionist trade war. The laws had not yet passed by the time of the stock market crash but the markets correctly concluded that the debate was over and that the laws would pass and that industry was about to be screwed.
In Germany we could also add that reparation payments were an excessive tax ensuring economic misery. And the printing press churning out new currency did not help much.
The great depression does not require a Keynesian explaination.
~~~
In terms of moving from left to right.
I was truely left wing when I was 16. By about 22 I called myself right wing. These days I call myself libertarian even though I have believed in the rights of women, drug users, taxpayers and homosexuals since I was about 18. I have probably used the libertarian term for about 5 years.
I was always amazed in the 1980s and early 1990s at how “right-wing” was used almost universally as a derogatory term. Even people I knew who were “right-wing” avoided accepting the label. These days the terms “socialist” or “left-wing” is out of fashion. Which is no bad thing in my view. However it means that people sometimes refuse to accept the label that best describes their worldview.
I suspect that the average aussie does not subscribe to any political label for themself. They just support or reject certain political personalities. And even then its based on what their friends think.
Terje got in first, I wanted to say that anyone who claims that the Great Depression represented the failure of free markets needs to list the countries that were practicing free trade at the time. Last time I made this inquiry on this list there were no takers.
That’s the most pathetic thing that I’ve ever seen you post, Rafe. It’s the exact mirror of the “communism works, but Russia and China just didn’t do it right” bullshit that was popular thirty or forty years ago.
SJ, it is OK to argue that there were no free market economies before, during, or after the Depression – there weren’t. It is also OK to argue that Russia and China distorted, adulterated and eviscerated socialism/communism – they did.
D. Ricardo, Bush has personally ordered the death of people as governor of Texas. He, as Commander-in-Chief, has responsibility for deaths caused by wars of his making. But I repeat, I am not blaming “it all on the inherent evilness of the Republican Party”. I believe they have done evil things, but nothing and no-one is inherently evil. As for the average party hack being “a cut above” the average jihadist, you have to judge on results, and the RP has killed, deliberately and with forethought, more than AQ has (and yes, the Democrats as well).
The canonical self-portrait of the process was provided in Heinz Arndt’s autobiography – to the great amusement of my Dad.
Those home truths are that some left wingers do think that Bush is a greater evil than Al Zarqawi, and the Republican Party a greater evil than Al Qaeda and its offshoots. This is just plain ridiculous, and shows a total lack of perspective by those who make it, but it’s a view you can read consistently in Green Left Weekly and sometimes in more mainstream media as well.
I don’t know much about the ‘evil’ thing, but to think that Al Zarqawi&Co is a greater threat to the humanity than Bush&Co is clearly a lunatic delusion, which seems to a manifestation of Islamophobia.
It’s ‘left’ to want protection from monomaniacal corporations. It’s ‘right’ to want protection from redistributive governments. The richer you get, the ‘righter’ you get. Hence the mostly one-way ideological migration. Some call it maturity.
It would be ironic if those with the most faith in economic incentives were the most likely to protest this observation.
Why, this may be a good theory of evolution of the average Joe, but it does nothing to help explain Cohen/Hitchens conversion from ‘address the root causes’ to ‘bomb and occupy the bastards’.
In support of AlanDowndunder:
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
“Also, could people stop calling liberals ‘conservatives’. That is really insulting.”
There’s the problem right there gentlemen.
“liberal”, “conservative”, “left” and ‘right” have so had the stuffing beaten out of them in the World Wrestling Strawmen Federation that they are just hollow men, filled only by our arguments now.
Back OT. Sometimes I reckon some of the folks under discussion think being a loud and proud apostate is its own thrill and reward. And you may have noticed many of the more public 180 degree turns were executed by people hitting menopause and/or the seven year itch.
Besides if you change direction so dramatically once, who’s to say you won’t do it again?
So is it a drunken/last gasp of the juices move, a sudden glimpse of the light, a controlled skid in a slippery world or the emerging need to ensure you can still reel in gigs that will cover both alimony and school fees for the kids hitting their pre-teens?
You all know that young man with a heart goes left, old man with a head goes right thang. To which I’d add, anyone of any age or sex without a sense of humour or an eye for human absurdities is doomed to be a frequently fanatical preacher of whatever makes them feel good about feeling bad.
A. J. Muste, leading US Trotskyite, abandoned Communism when he had a vision of Jesus in Notre Dame Cathedral.
Perhaps RWDBs might lure leftie targets into places of worship. The results may be very beneficial to The Cause.
(Try to avoid mosques, but.)
Terje,
The problem with your argument that the Greart Depression was the result of special one-off events (what economic phenomena isn’t?) is that the Great Depression wasn’t unique.
Since at least the 1830’s, the developed economies suffered a series of prolonged and severe recessions – that of the 1890’s was even worse than that of the 1930’s in at least some countries.
At the same, the rate of economic growth in most developed economies was lower than the average in the period from the 1930’s to the present. (Economic growth in Britain in the 19th century probably averaged under 2% per year).
As my On Line Opinion/Workers Online piece has already been linked, I won’t repeat what I said there. The one thing I would want to add is that the phenomenon of youthful leftists going all the way over to the right seems to be highly concentrated amongst the intellectual left in academia, the commentariat and amongst former student radicals.
There are some high-profile examples of erstwhile environmental movement activists (e.g. Paul Gilding), ex-Communists (B. & M. Taft, L. Bermingham) and ALP leftists shifting their loyalties to a greater or lesser extent, but I am aware of very few, if any, people who began their political engagement as young left-wing workplace trade union activists, young feminists, young Aboriginal activists or young queer rights activists who’ve become, respectively, Howard-huggers on IR, patriarchal family values conservatives (Bettina Arndt is about it), outright opponents of the Aboriginal movement’s landrights and reconciliation agenda, or heteronormative family values conservatives.
This strongly suggests that the experience of oppression, and the practical difficulty for workers, women, queers and blacks to escape it by any means other than successful struggle to end it, has a salutary effect on one’s political development which is not shared by intellectual barrackers who liked cheering what seemed to be the winning side in the 1960s and 1970s, and switched team allegiances in the 1980s and 1990s.
I also had a personal communication from Steve Edwards in which he asked whether his personal journey from forest-blockading anarchist at 17 to RDWB at 24 was a classic case of the phenomenon we’re discussing. I haven’t yet done Steve the courtesy of replying, so I’ll state here that Steve’s political development isn’t really such a case. It seems like an example of the political and intellectual fluidity one would expect among intelligent young people who read, think and discuss a lot, although perhaps entailing a bigger shift than most.
“That’s the most pathetic thing that I’ve ever seen you post, Rafe. It’s the exact mirror of the “communism works, but Russia and China just didn’t do it rightâ€? bullshit that was popular thirty or forty years ago.”
If you want to pursue that line you need to specify what the communists should have done in order to do it properly.
More to the point, SJ’s claim is simply refuted by the facts. Reforms in the direction of free trade have produced desirable outcomes wherever they have been tried, most recently in the structural reforms of the Hawke/Keating era. Of course free trade produces the best outcomes when it is a part of the liberal package that includes the rule of law and a sound moral framework.
As to humility after changing horses, that is a personal matter. One would hope that people will remain open to arguments from all sides and specify what sort of evidence or other persuasion would prompt them to shift their position. That would make their stance rational or scientific, rather than an act of quasi-religious commitment.
” Reforms in the direction of free trade have produced desirable outcomes wherever they have been tried, ”
There are loads of counterexamples to this claim, Argentina in the 1990s being an obvious one, NZ less dramatic but still striking.
Of course, you can redefine “desirable outcomes” down, or rule out failures on the grounds of the ex post discovery that they didn’t do reform properly, but then so can defenders of Mao and Stalin.
Paul,
isn’t this just another example of what Winston said about if you aren’t a commie when you are a teenager you don’t have a heart and if you still are when you are 30 you don’t have a brain.
I changed from being a marxist when it was clear to me marxism could only exist when there were good people. I knew they weren’t any.
Unfortunately it took me another twenty years to realise why.
Homer, I’m not sure if it was Winston or George Bernard Shaw who came up with that line.
I have my own version of it, which runs: if you haven’t noticed the injustices of our society by the time you’re twenty, you haven’t got a heart. If you’ve still *only* noticed the injustices of our society by the time you’re thirty, and not noticed its redeeming features, you haven’t got a brain.
The problem with the people we’re discussing on this thread is that they have *ceased* noticing the injustices of our society.
My criticism of orthodox Marxism/communism is slightly different to yours. I would argue that it falls into the trap identified by Gandhi, of trying to design structures so perfect that people no longer needed to be good. This is something which Marx himself warned against, obliquely, in his Third Thesis on Feuerbach.
If all people were unfailingly good, we would be in a politics-free world because such people could make any social system work well.
Wouldn’t Popper, and I suppose the “Third Way”, say “neither of the above”?
A Popperian/Third Way model (as I see it) seeks to maintain and improve wellbeing* by ever better knowing what works to do this (with the fewest or no side-effects) and seeing that implemented.
Following that model has of course led to policies being implemented, some of which were initially put forward by the right, some by the left.
I suppose I’m suggesting that a quantitative/what works dimension can help advance – even resolve – a lot of Left/Right debates/standoffs.
I think I’m also suggesting that the whole Left/Right construct is ultimately only a rhetorical one, not a logical one.
Paul, who knows but it sounds like something Churchill would say.
Sorry, lost the footnote, which is:
*Hopefully, increasingly for the whole planet, not just people.
“. . .Nick Cohen, a recent exemplar of the left-right shift.”
This is one of the uncommon occasions on which I disagree with JQ. I don’t regard the arguments or the sentiments in the Cohen piece linked by CT as entailing a wholesale left-right shift of the kind represented by Windschuttle, Catley, etc. I see it as an internal critique of some positions – well, perhaps, some instincts – within the left which I also regard as indefensible, as a leftist and a card-carrying Green. Even Tariq Ali has managed to identify terrorism as the “anti-imperialism of fools”.
As for Cohen’s support of the Iraq war, my view remains that this position was and is (a) wrong and (b) shared by quite a few people on the left, and defended by them with basically left-wing arguments. Think of Bone, Hartnett, Langer, Carr, York, Berman, Enzensberger, Piccone, Aaronovitch, amongst others.
I doubt if any of the people you’re stereotyping have ceased to notice injustices, they’ve finally discovered that they can’t be cured or relieved by state intervention.
It’s not only the chattering classes who’ve experienced a major shift in ideology- people are coming to the conclusion (albeit slowly) that government (and other bureaucratic organisations) are rarely if ever the answer to social and/or economic problems, hence the slow death of organised labour and general apathy to the two major (and virtually identical, except for semantics) political parties.
Maybe people are just growing up, and deciding they no longer need to hold nannys hand.
Most of my peers have moved from leftist to more libertarian/”conservative” political views, while remaining socially liberal, except for the few who have remained in public employment or academia- there is a bit of a vested interest in supporting statism when you’re reliant on same for sustenence.
Alan Downunder says: “The richer you get, the ‘righter’ you get.”, but Abb1 thinks this doesn’t explain the adoption of specific positions on eg. “bombing the bastards” in Iraq. It does, actually, through the well-known “dinner party effect”. When in social situations with people you really don’t want to offend (maybe the boss) or people you want to impress with your intelligence, it’s always safer to agree with a loud and positive statement. If you disagree, you have to prove your views, without benefit of preparation and at the risk of forgetting authors’ names, important facts etc. You can easily finish up in that awkward state of knowing that you’re right but looking badly wrong. On the other hand, if you say nothing or loudly agree, you avoid this risk. After a while, if you do this often in the same company, you are identified with that viewpoint and are socially required to continue maintaining it.
Now Abb1 may say this applies only to the Average Joe, but actually I think Great Minds are just as vulnerable to this powerful effect as anybody else. Not many people, however dedicated to truth, are prepared to stop a conversation dead, offend important people or reduce their wives to tears just to win a debating point.
‘Most of my peers have moved from leftist to more libertarian/â€?conservativeâ€? political views, while remaining socially liberal, except for the few who have remained in public employment or academia- there is a bit of a vested interest in supporting statism when you’re reliant on same for sustenence.’
You obviously haven’t moved on from Marxism.
I doubt if any of the people you’re stereotyping have ceased to notice injustices, they’ve finally discovered that they can’t be cured or relieved by state intervention.
so, to rephrase, substitute “the use of force” for your “state intervention”, and “bringing democracy” for your “injustices (being) cured”. you might see where this is going.
the purported discovery of the ineffecacy of state action would would be an, um, unlikely, explanation for nick cohen’s or christopher hitchens’ support of the iraq war.
Re Jason Soon’s comparison of Jack Strocchi to Mahathir Mohammad “on the Jews�.
C’mon, Jason – you’re ignoring a lot of context here. Individual beliefs are one thing (and I agree with Ian that IMO Jack doesn’t come across as anti-semitic, in any event), but Malaysia is officially anti-semitic as a country – turning away from its borders all Israeli passport holders. As a barometer of race (etc)-hatred, actions always speak louder than words.
Is there any reason why it couldn’t have been handled by a mercenary force? There would have possibly been less blowback in the West, and I doubt if there would be any more indignation in the middle east, who regard the coalition forces as oil mercanaries anyway (along with a fair swag of the anti-war left).
You obviously haven’t moved on from Marxism. Huh?
“You obviously haven’t moved on from Marxism. Huh?”
By this I mean that you put forward a generative class theory (i.e. a Marxist theory) of the political opinions of your friends in academia and the public sector.
“My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right” – Ashleigh Brilliant.
More to the point, much of this is in fact not a change of underlying position but partly a change of label and partly a change of means of expression as things like the ALP and the Liberals change their agendas and expect us to remain rusted on, when we were only ever finding the best of a poor fitting stock from a ready to wear range. Just the other day I heard this sort of thing from an ALP friend of mine, reflecting my own connection with the Liberals as least worst. If JQ hasn’t changed to find a better hole, that may mean he can’t find one either or that he was focussing on the labels rather than what was happening. He may be as stranded as “old Labour” in the UK.
Not so- I wasn’t commenting on generalities, just from personal experience. All the people I know who are in public employ are politically of the left, and vocally so, moreso than any of my more conservative cohorts who don’t discus politics much, especially in the company of the aforementioned public service/academic types, who try to dominate any discourse on such matters and quickly become tiresome and repetitive on such issues. No stereotyping (as opposed to the context of this post), just observations.
I request that we drop the subject of Jewish intellectuals, as being likely to derail general discussion. For the record, I don’t think anyone in the thread is guilty of anti-semitism. But, Jack, you promised never again to write “pee-cee” on this blog, and I request you adhere to this more strictly.