Res Publica

The Sixties and Seventies were fighting years – when radicalism exploded on to the streets. But you ain’t seen nothing like the future...

Ah, the young – if only they knew. Then again, if only I knew. What is going on in their heads? I only know one or two people under thirty well enough to ask, and, even then, it’s not easy. They’re polite, they don’t like to give unnecessary offence, nor do they like to get into a discussion which might turn into a confrontation or interrogation. They’re very nice, young people I brush across.

However, one godson did reveal something in a text before the election. ‘I don’t know anyone voting Conservative,’ he wrote. ‘Nowhere on Facebook is there anyone I know saying they’ll vote Conservative.’

He has 800 ‘friends’, any number of ‘likes’, no formal interest in politics, and something of a secret conservative kink in his character. His circle may or may not be Corbyn acolytes, but I’m guessing they consider the conservative mindset to be callous, uncaring, anti-social, predatory, nationalistic, war-hungry, hypocritical, money-driven, profiteering, contemptuous of the environment, fascistic – evil, in short. If pushed, conservatives would be described as evil.

In the States, this is the common coin among progressives. Trump’s astonishing vulgarisms and insults are characterised as acts of violence and justifying a response of actual violence.

‘We are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people. Why is it a shock when things turn violent?’ tweeted Democrat political worker James Devine shortly after the baseball ground shootings of Republican Whip Steve Scalise and three others. Devine signed off with the hashtag: #Hunt republican congress men.

Or again, according to Professor Johnny Eric Williams, of Trinity College in Connecticut, minority medics or firemen, seeing a white person in trouble, should ‘Let. Them. F***ing. Die.’

The professor has been put on leave by his college, which in turn sparked a row about academic freedom and free speech. It’s part of a #Killallwhitepeople meme that occasionally rises up in progressive circles.

Here, John Mcdonnell accused Tories of murdering the victims of Grenfell Tower. The council deliberately killed eighty-odd people because they were council tenants.

So, the rhetoric is escalating – if people are being murdered for being poor, what reaction is morally unacceptable? Killing in self-defence isn’t murder. Rob Reiner in America tweets that it’s time for all-out war to save Democracy. So-called antifa (meaning anti-fascists) burn cars, break heads and storm the university to prevent Milo the gay gadfly from mocking fat women.

While any conservative criticism can be called a hate crime, progressives will excuse any horror, violence or genocide committed by left wing icons such as Stalin, Mao, Che, Hamas or Robespierre. Conservative hate is malign and unjustifiable – left wing hate is deployed in the cause of a higher and, ultimately, noble purpose.

So, the divide is widening and deepening, and maybe at some point it will be ‘foaming with much blood’.

What hope is there? Maybe we’ve come through worse.

There was terror in the Sixties and Seventies – more than now. We had the IRA; America had the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Ku Klux Klan. Europe had Rudi Dutschke; everyone had Abu Nidal and the PLO.

Cities were disintegrating. Urban decay, race riots, white flight...

We had the mores of a rock festival – unity, community, solidarity, ecstatic contact with others who believed, among other things, that music could change the world. We threw off the yoke of a khaki generation who had saved the world – but that didn’t make them the boss of us.

And, all in all, that didn’t turn out too badly, did it?

Unless, of course, it did. Unless it turned into this that we have here. Unless this is turning into runaway overheating.

Certainly, the younger generation coming up behind the current 18 to 35-year-olds promise to be more extreme than their immediate seniors.

They have been infected with politics. It’s an epidemic. Five-year-olds are primed and scripted to make party political videos (‘I’m very angry with you, Theresa May’). Children in America have successfully sued their government for burning fossil fuels. The teaching of ‘climate justice’ concepts to children in school, and training them for a life of activism and campaigning, will have incalculable effects.

It’s a sort of tsunami. These waves travel through time, looking like any other wave; the same height, the same weight. But when the wave reaches the shore, it reveals itself – it rears up, it keeps on coming. It requires an event like a rising sea floor or, in the case of this metaphor, an election. Suddenly, its power is revealed. So we better start swimming or we’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changing. Again.