We’re all obscurantists now: how the media class copes with democratic loss

In the UK, legions of Labour supporters are realising that their party is hardly different in government to the previous Conservative administration. Guardian writers and below-the-line comments initially blamed the penny-pinching policies of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves on the ‘black hole’ left by the Tories (and Brexit, of course). But as the swingeing cuts continue, and Labour takes from the poor to give to the rich, discontent is rising.

Welcome, Labour followers, to the reality that Conservative voters have experienced since 2010. The dichotomy of Left and Right, which originated in the French national assembly of the late 18th century (nobility sitting on the right and revolutionaries on the left) seems irrelevant to the party in power. The only difference is in presentation: Labour pretends to serve one side while the Conservatives pretend to support the other. Did Cameron, May or Johnson stem the tides of immigration, Green and Woke? No – but they made the right noises to fool the electorate. The establishment wants us to keep the faith in a political pantomime.

The old divide is becoming unsustainable, despite mainstream media efforts. In the latest Atlantic monthly magazine, Anne Applebaum tries to explain what ‘far right’ means in context of Donald Trump’s return of to the White House. How could former Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr. serve a man that the likes of the Atlantic and Washington Post had deemed fascist?

Applebaum is starting to get it, but her prejudices prevent her from really understanding why the Left / Right paradigm is becoming meaningless. She focuses entirely on supposedly problematic ‘populism’, failing to consider how conventional political parties have abandoned the ordinary people to become like the nobility of revolutionary France.

Confusing for Applebaum is the phenomenon of politicians of the Right pursuing causes associated with the Left. She cannot believe that the likes of Trump and Viktor Orban really care about the common people; instead, she sees demagogues exploiting economic and cultural woes in a rapidly changing world. They are conmen, pretending to help the poor while building an oligarchy: –

This rising international elite is creating a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of a law in a world where emotion defeats reason — only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

She has a new word for the Right: ‘obscurantism’. The movement led by Trump and other figures manifests in a nebulous spiritualism, nativist narratives, and covid and climate change denial. The trajectory Applebaum describes is from Enlightenment values to darkness, through cultivation of fear. Ironically, she believes that humanity should be very afraid of viruses and a purported climate emergency, while most Trump voters simply want more freedom and less government, especially government that massively subsidises the left. It’s the establishment that has cultivated fear, from nuclear Armageddon to ‘global boiling’.

I first read Applebaum’s neocon missives two decades ago when I subscribed to the new magazine Standpoint, which I naively regarded as an antidote to subversive identity politics. Like neocons generally, Applebaum was obsessively concerned about Russia, which under Vladimir Putin was a counterweight to the Western-driven new world order emerging after the fall of communism.

Today, such rhetoric is normalised. But Applebaum knows that so-called populists in the West do not see Russia as our enemy or believe that Putin wants to invade Europe. Instead they see NATO and the EU as the warmongers, while the biggest threat to civilians in Western countries is not Putin but their own governments (as JD Vance remarked in his address to a security conference in Munich).

The Right, Applebaum asserts, has abandoned conservatism and caution for a wrecking ball. Democratic institutions are at risk. Again displaying lack of insight, she began her article with a scathing account of the Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu, who was arrested and barred from standing after his first-round election win was annulled. The reason given was supposed Russian influence on TikTok, but it was foreign interference by the EU and globalists that cancelled the election and its likely winner.  Some democracy there, Anne!  Meanwhile Orban has ‘impoverished his country’, she claims, ignoring the EU clamouring for punishment because of the Hungarian government’s legitimate policies.

Applebaum has a litany of slurs for anyone patriotic or traditionalist: law-breakers, thieves, misogynists. And, of course — conspiracy theorists. The latter should be worn as a badge of honour nowadays, because undoubtedly there is a global conspiracy to undermine sovereignty and install an oppressive technocracy. Wild conjecture may abound, but that does not invalidate the obvious truth, as blatantly stated by the World Economic Forum.

She gets something right, by stating that ‘techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology controls us in ways we can’t understand’. But who is controlling this technology? And why is the internet, initially liberating, now used for surveillance and censorship? Populists are not the powerful clinging to the status quo.

Applebaum scoffs at a mystical belief in the ‘deep state’ as a dark force taking humanity in a dystopian direction. Anyone remotely paying attention to politics in the West realises the deep state is a horrifying reality.

The problem with pro-establishment concepts of public opinion and politics is that the disfavoured side is labelled not with its own identification but by smears. ‘Far-right’ is not how most conservative patriots would describe themselves. But this term is used so excessively that libertarians and even socialists have been caught in the net, if they commit heresy against the climate cult or doubt the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

The Right / Left construct is a divide-and-rule strategy that we must overcome if we are to build a unified resistance to the globalist agenda. Applebaum, for all her verbosity, is a useful idiot for the predatory elite. Or more likely, she realises that as an entirely kosher, card-carrying member of the predatory elite, she is quite aware of where her ethnic, social, and economic interests lie: Definitely not with populism.