The woke are asleep to the true perils of a new elitism
IN AUGUST 2010 Elena Kagan took her seat on the US Supreme Court, 20 months after Barack Obama became president. It was an appointment that signalled the high point of Democrat liberal control of a court that defines fundamental human rights in the States and acts as a signpost for such rights throughout the world.
By that stage, however, liberals had grown soft and complacent, smug in the certainty of their own arguments, immune to any sense of threat, comfortable with the notion that rights such as access to abortion for women who choose it were now established and stable.
This week’s leak from the US court, which signals that the landmark Roe v Wade abortion rights case of 1973, is about to be chucked overboard by the six-three conservative majority on the court, illustrates how much liberal America has been caught out while resting, if not napping, on its oars.
ETERNAL vigilance was a price the liberal intelligentsia and their supporters have been unwilling to pay for their liberty. So, as they pushed ahead with globalisation, entrenched still further their insider status, enjoyed their pina coladas in the Caymans and did their Christmas shopping in Paris, conservatives were sneaking up behind them.
Also in 2010 Ruth Bader Ginsburg had, for 17 years, been a liberal member-for-life of the US Supreme Court. Aged 77 at that point, Judge Ginsburg knew that President Obama would have appointed a like-minded progressive to replace her if she opted for a tactical retirement. But she carried on regardless until her death at the age of 87 in 2020, only to be replaced by conservative Amy Coney Barrett.
Judge Coney Barrett provides a key vote in the now six-three split that’ll almost certainly remove the guarantee of abortion rights throughout the US, and might threaten other rights, such as gay marriage, which are all based on the notion of privacy.
She is one of three justices appointed by former president Donald Trump, who conservatives (while holding their nose) voted in for precisely that possibility.
The relaxed, self-congratulatory consciousness of American liberals is mirrored here in Europe as well where Germany, France and other progressive countries dropped their guard against old-fashioned threats such as those now so ruthlessly revealed by Russian despot Vladimir Putin’s unspeakable savagery in Ukraine.
LEFT liberal elites couldn’t conceive of a world in which unbridled, irrational aggression would put all the benefits of peace and trade in peril. Now they know how wrong they were – only way too late to prevent the unfolding horror.
The world has changed beyond recognition since World War II and the geopolitical architecture guaranteeing human rights, peace and commerce that followed that terrible conflict.
Then it was a clear choice between left and right; now it’s insiders and outsiders, those with their snouts in the trough and those calling for the swamp to be drained, those who are fully plugged and benefiting and those who feel alienated and hard-done-by.
We all know what that looks like here in Ireland. Political divisions now are less obviously polar and much more personal and emotional.
That’s why old party allegiances are breaking down votes and going all over the place, why politicians are finding it extremely difficult to read the tea leaves, and nobody’s really sure of how things will form in the short-term.
Liberals need to heed Bob Dylan’s injunction in his song To Ramona – ‘everything changes, everything passes…’
Social issues, particularly ones as fundamental as abortion, will always and forever be contested.
Ever since Roe v Wade the counter-revolution has been rebuilding and over that space of time has, in effect, taken over the Republican Party in the US, aided by the huge marginalisation of millions of people who regard themselves as victims in the insider/outsider reality.
Twenty years ago, business people insisted that the trends and habits then prevalent in the US would resurface in Ireland within a year or two.
That cycle is shortening, and it doesn’t just affect business.
The insider/outsider divide is becoming more acute here too. Woke liberals would be well advised to stay awake.