“Opposition to Brussels is becoming fashionable” – Thoughts on The Divide

This piece by Janet Daley in today’s Telegraph is of interest, and these paragraphs are the heart of it:

… there must be a lesson here for those who hold – and would like to proselytise – currently unfashionable opinions. How exactly has this happened? How is it that this stance, which has been travestied and traduced by the entire Left-liberal media behemoth, has still managed to win through to the hearts and minds of so many fashionable anti-establishment people?

And perhaps even more beguilingly, why are so many acerbic comedians and social satirists happy to stand up in public for a cause that has been largely associated with politicians who have never knowingly told a joke? …

Of one thing I think we can be fairly sure. Harry Enfield, Bob Geldof, Vic Reeves et al were not won over by Teresa Gorman’s ‘street cred’ or Norman Tebbit’s hairstyle. Neither the cut of Norman Lamont’s suits nor John Redwood’s demotic vocabulary made them think: “Hey, these guys are my sort of people. I like the look of them. What’s this they’re saying about the European single currency being a bad idea for Britain? I think I’ll join up.”

No, I believe not. They must have been – wait for it – persuaded by the arguments. Imagine that. They must have heard people who look and sound nothing at all like them, saying things that struck them as basically sound. …

I’ve been flogging away with ideas for the best part of my adult life so far, so you might expect me to greet JD’s piece with unmitigated reverence. However, one of the ideas I’ve been flogging away at is that persuading members of the Conservative Party to support something is not the kiss of life, rather is it the kiss of death. This is not an idea of the kind JD is talking about; it’s a propaganda idea, a focus group idea, an idea about how to win arguments by unfair means as well as by fair ones. It’s an idea about “positioning”, “associating”, about atmospherics rather than just about principles. (At the risk of getting too technical, much of the idea of being principled is itself an idea about atmospherics.) The story here is of a generational divide, between on the one hand the parents of the sixties generation, and the other the sixties generation and all generations since. “New” Labour is now firmly this side of The Divide. But the Conservatives are still desperately trying to cross this divide (the less dumb ones) or still fighting the old sixties battles against the future (the relentlessly dumb, geriatric ones), and thus still pathetically stuck on the far side of The Divide. Poor old Norman Tebbit is a perfect example of this phenomenon. He explicitly blames “the sixties” for everything bad that has happened since, and if he doesn’t actually believe that the Beatles etc. should be dis-invented he nevertheless allows himself to come across like that.

And my point is this: “we” (the libertarian movement, the social and intellectual and cultural milieu that gave birth to things like Samizdata.net, i.e. every other rock musician on the planet who hates both taxes and drugs laws and all their friends and admirers) are all firmly this side of The Divide. We don’t have an army of old age pensioners moaning about single mothers to piss in our propaganda every time we say anything. We don’t have a racist rump to expel, because our pro-immigration propaganda made sure that these bigots never joined us in the first place.

Every time some hideous Conservative dinosaur denounces us, we win. New Labour people don’t hate libertarianism; they listen to it and learn from it. Many Old Conservatives do hate libertarianism with a passion, because we piss in their propaganda (by pointing out, for example, that freedom means capitalism and drugs). The strength of the libertarian movement is not just its friends; it is also its enemies.

In general, if you have a good idea, you have to explain it to the post-sixties generations in their (our) language, and wrench your idea out of the hands of the Tebbits of this world.

It helps if you are post-sixties yourself. And I’m not just talking date of birth here, I’m talking state of mind. I know dozens of self-crafted Conservative dinosaurs, many of them not born until long after the Beatles split up, who have spent their lives making sure, quite deliberately, that they didn’t cross The Divide. (Think John Redwood.) These idiots and their camp followers spent the eighties telling me that they knew all about “persuading people” and that I and my fellow libertarians knew nothing of such things, because we were too “extreme”. You have to “take people with you”, not “upset people”, blah blah blah. Now, these wretched folks, and all those whom they duped into wasting half their lives following them, are realising that it was actually the other way round. We were ahead of them both intellectually and atmospherically.

And one of the ideas we have spread is that, despite many appearances to the contrary – niceness to foreigners, better food, better sex, etc. – British membership of the EU is actually a bad idea.

It was us (broadly defined – I’m including the rock guitarists in with “us”) who got through to those comedians, not the Conservatives. Those cinema adverts didn’t just happen. ‘Street cred’ operators, former rock guitarists and pop group managers, made them happen, operators from this side of The Divide.

It is precisely because the Conservatives have not been in charge of the anti-EU campaign that it may now be beginning to succeed. We anti-Conservative anti-EUers translated the anti-EU case out of Conservative dinosaur language and into post-sixties language, normal language, and enough of what we said got through, despite the best efforts of the Conservative dinosaurs to keep this argument to themselves and thus guarantee defeat for it. When you look at the Conservative Party, don’t think: future. Think: asset stripping. Think: rescue the good stuff and kill off the thing itself. “Conservative”? What kind of a brand name is that? If it wasn’t called that, would anyone with a grain of sense want to call it that now?

It’s a nice idea that the Euro is becoming unfashionable because of pure high-minded principle. But there was more involved than that in this victory, if that is what it proves to be.