Tag: left

Conversation with a Centrist

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Here’s an imaginary conversation, based on real ones that I’ve heard or taken part in. The names I use mainly relate to the USA and UK, but the points apply more widely than that.

All these mugs voting for Trump, or Reform, Le Pen and so on. They either don’t know the truth, or don’t want to know it – and they vote for grifters that don’t represent their best interests. Right wing populists get into power, promise to improve things, then just reward their super rich buddies. I despair: these people are just watching fake news on Fox, GB News etc, and swallowing the lies.

You need to ask deeper questions than that. What was the state of things before the rise of these ‘grifters’? People didn’t suddenly become stupid 10 years ago. In fact, I don’t think ‘stupid’ has much to do with it.

Isn’t voting for Trump or Brexit stupid, since he is an obvious liar and Brexit was an obvious con?

There’s more to it than that. See how things got this way. Places like the UK, the USA etc have been ruled for decades by a managerial elite, one a bit to the Right, the other very slightly Left. In all those years, what did they do to enhance public trust in politicians? Look at the Iraq war, for instance. People were lied to. Or the enormous increases in inequality – think of the rust belts created by the wholesale embrace of ‘globalisation’. People were either told that the money didn’t exist to fix the problems, or that the problems didn’t exist at all. The message received was ‘you don’t matter’. Meanwhile lobbyists poured money into  ‘their’ politicians and who then furthered the interests of the 1%, who clearly did matter.  The result was a loss of trust in democracy itself.  A class of elite politicians with more in common with each other than with most citizens. A minority did very well out of this: the majority did not. Read more »

Monday, December 9, 2024

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part One—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin
Photo from https://wel-metcamps.com/

by Barbara Fischkin

People who have never been to sleepaway camp, don’t get it. They tease me when I speak about memories that are decades old, as if I am recalling a past life that never happened. They find it strange that I view my many years at camp as not merely summer vacations but as forces that helped to make me who I am. These camp memories visit me more deeply when the winter sky sets early, fooling me into believing that 4:30 pm is really past midnight. If I am roaming, I wonder if it is already time to go home. I linger. Yes, my summer camp taught me to roam physically—and in my imagination. It was free and free-range.

I’ll tarry briefly where many good tales begin. In the middle: My teenage years, as a camp clerk and then as babysitter for a camp director and finally, as a counselor. These summer jobs were woefully underpaid. But the fringe benefits were great: Opportunities to break rules that were often not enforced, anyway.

I smoked my first joint, out in the open, sitting with friends on a large rock by the lake, right after a late summer sunset. If caught by a camp director, we would have been fired. I don’t think they wanted to catch us. They were somewhere else, smoking their own joints. Romance, along with pot, seemed to be part of the plan for young employees, particularly in regard to the kitchen boys over whom we swooned. My camp, socialist at its core and run by lefty social workers, did not believe in waiters. To check out a kitchen boy, campers and staff had to go to one of several pantries to pick up or deliver food, plates and utensils. A chore made joyful.

 In regard to specific romance, I remember the night I spent with a slightly older male counselor, sleeping with him in his tent—and not doing much more than sleeping. (Maybe it was the pot). Before dawn I shoved him awake and said: “I have to go, I will get into trouble.” He laughed a sleepy laugh, perhaps a stoner laugh and said: “Barbara,  this is Wel-Met. Nobody gets in trouble for sleeping with someone.” Read more »

Monday, December 28, 2020

Reclaiming Freedom

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

A Task for the Left

‘Freedom’ must be about the most popular term in the world of politics, and not only in that world. But what does it actually mean, in social and political terms? How should people who want to be broadly progressive understand it?  Too often the Left finds it hard to articulate just how they stand in relation to it and the effect is to cede the term to the Right. This is important, as the word, vague as it is, carries enormous affective force. It matters to people, because it represents a vital human aspiration. And so it’s too important to be abandoned to the people who are, for all their rhetoric, actually the enemies of freedom. On their account of it, freedom is just about individuals having more choices. This is a very weak account of freedom that ought to be met head on and refuted. It won’t do to change the subject, or talk vaguely about equality and solidarity: the Left needs make it clear what freedom is, what it isn’t, and what it could be. If it doesn’t, it risks being portrayed as being ‘against’ freedom, and in favour of mediocre uniformity and regimentation. So we end up with two caricatures, one about freedom and the other about its supposed enemies.

2020 had plenty of examples of this weak version of ‘freedom’. The Covid pandemic led to masks being rejected, vaccines shunned and lockdowns attacked and breached, all in the name of individuals’ rights and freedoms and ‘freedom of choice’. Beyond Covid, in the UK the freedom flag has been waved in support of Brexit, which apparently also means freedom, via the sloughing off of regulations. In the UK and US the word is hardly ever out of the mouths of Prime Ministers and Presidents. Hardy perennials of the right continue to be diatribes against against Health and Safety at work (‘red tape’), tax (the freedom to spend the money one earns as one pleases) and of course, in favour of arrangements that allow ‘flexible working’ – supposedly to free up the choices of employer and employee, but which in fact confirm the precarious status of hundreds of thousands of workers. Then there are ‘free schools’, free markets and much more. It’s an extremely long list. The Left is generally cast as the enemy of all this, the enemy of aspiration, of social mobility, of the opportunity to become a billionaire. It just wants equality, which stifles freedom.

How should one respond to this? Read more »