Is the Left taking over the World?
Small Men On The Wrong Side Of History Ed West Constable €27.05 ★★★★★
Are conservatives on the way out? Not judging by recent political earthquakes – Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson – if we agree these events were conservative in nature.
But Ed West, like many of the finest rightwing thinkers, is what Johnson would call a doomster and a gloomster. He thinks conservatism itself is possibly doomed, or will survive only in tiny pockets, and fears this era-defining change. No wonder he’s a glass-halfempty man.
‘To be conservative,’ he quotes the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, ‘is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried… present laughter to utopian bliss.’
Thankfully, there is a lot of laughter in this Eeyorish but highly entertaining book.
It is part memoir, as West charts the dawning realisation through his childhood and young adulthood that he is indeed a woefully uncool conservative. To begin with, he thought he had – in political terms – simply aged faster than his friends, as if ‘conservatism was like baldness or impotence’. But as he moves from being the only right-wing journalist on a lads’ mag to a prospective Tory councillor, he realises that his peer group and neighbours aren’t heading the same way. So alongside dips into his life story, and an enjoyable history of conservative thought, he issues a stark warning: the world is getting more left-wing and there’s not really much to be done about it. That old rule about people getting more conservative as they grow older? It simply isn’t true any more.
According to research, the percentage of American millennials who see themselves as ‘liberal’ went from 41% in 2004 to well over half in 2017. Just 15% of them now identify as conservative.
It’s a similar story in Britain where there’s a growing belief that traditional values – things to do with faith, flag and family – should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Left-wingery is the new religion and most young people are genuinely committed believers.
There is a temporary antidote to all this, however, in one uplifting passage, when West escapes trendy North London for rural Herefordshire. A break from the ceaseless culture wars and the bubble of dinner parties does him the world of good.