On both sides of the political divide, there are billionaires bankrolling media outlets. But liberal progressives are way ahead in the game. This is not simply in terms of expenditure but of personnel: mass media is dominated by earnest progressive liberal acolytes eliminating any guilt over their inflated salaries by indulging in ‘soul-searching’ virtue signalling. The best conduit through which they pour out their holier-than-thou ideology, which they convince themselves they really believe in, is through the mass social engineering of the BBC and Sky News: this is what right-minded people should think and accept.
What is perhaps more disappointing is how the media ascends the intellectual ladder so that even ‘highbrow’ publications are susceptible; the only difference is that they use bigger words and try harder to make themselves sound more reasonable. This is more insidious. For many years now, The Economist has followed this trajectory, its issue for the first week of September being a case in point.
Its Bagehot column – note the grandiose acknowledgement of its esteemed Victorian editor – is still fighting the Brexit wars. (Needless to say, The Economist was vehemently opposed to Brexit from the beginning, democracy be damned.) Here its columnist tries to explain away the Brexit referendum result with any reasoning that does not endorse the will of the people (you know – the actual voters).
‘Brexit’, claims Bagehot, ‘was a matter of inept timing’. Well, yes that is strategically true from the Remainers’ side, including, of course, David Cameron’s government. But when can a democratic vote ever be a matter of ‘inept timing’? Does democracy apply only at certain carefully selected moments? Well, the answer to that for many progressive liberals is ‘Yes: when we don’t get the result we wanted’. Of course, most people who voted Remain – be they liberals, conservatives, socialists or whatever – accepted the vote as a democratic outcome. But the progressive liberal elites are still struggling with this abomination of lèse-majesté by the rabble.
Bagehot explains that by June 2016, the EU had experienced a terrible year (bless). Of course, this had nothing to do with the EU’s habitual incompetence, appalling policies and venal indulgence: oh no, it was everything else. It was the victim of a ‘polycrisis’, poor thing: ‘a euro-zone debt crisis, a migrant crisis and Islamist terrorism’ in Europe. Given the enormous damage inflicted by all three, Bagehot feigns faux surprise that the Leave vote, at 52%, ‘was so narrow’. Astoundingly, there is no acknowledgement of the EU’s utterly destructive and deeply culpable relationship with all three of these; indeed, it was the primary actor in all of them. It is as if the EU was not responsible for sawing off the branch on which it was precariously perched.
It is too readily forgotten that during this time, the EU crushed democratic processes and economies in its indebted southern countries, especially Italy and Greece. But the resultant influx into the UK of EU workers had much less of an impact than the EU’s open-borders policies for immigrants, overwhelmingly illegal, from the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Chancellor Mutti Merkel cringingly and arrogantly claimed that Germany (and hence the EU) could manage one million Syrians debouching from train stations across Germany and landing on the coasts of Greek islands in a constant flow of flotillas. Apparently, plenty of Leave voters thought otherwise.
The Economist’s lack of awareness, either through ignorance or deliberate omission, is unfitting of a magazine that purports to pursue ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress’. I was a subscriber to The Economist for decades. Even when I disagreed with its opinions, I still learned much from it. But the same cohorts of progressive liberals who have taken over the BBC and Sky News have now populated its pages, and it churns out the usual woke, anti-democratic guff we see everywhere else. It has long since been time that it should have renamed itself The Conformist.
