France is like a bellwether for liberty. When it goes belly-up, the Anglo liberal democracies thank God for the Westminster system. That was central to Burke’s thinking of gradual reform and the idea of English liberalism. Funny how the French Revolution overthrew the king only to install an emperor. Now the rioters are overthrowing the French. Last weekend, ultra-left groups and looters hijacked cost-of-living and student protests, torched the Limoges town hall, smashed shops, and left hundreds of police injured.
Perhaps Macron should move to Vichy and govern those parts of France not yet occupied by the enemy within.
Terry Barnes, our Morning Double Shot scribe, referred to my ‘dishonourable mention’ of the Burkean tradition in my previous article. No dishonour was intended! But in Burke’s time, the political institutions that enabled English liberalism were largely intact. History proved Burke to be correct. Now, however, too many parts of the institutional framework have been undone in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It’s like we have cut down our institutions to bring the devil to justice. In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More warned Roper not to cut down the laws of the land in pursuit of the devil. For what would he do, with the laws cut down in the name of equity, when the devil turned to face him?
This is what two-tiered policing has done to us. Those deemed ‘privileged’ by critical race theorists face the full force of the law, while others are given latitude in the name of justice. The pattern is familiar across the West. In France last weekend, authorities insisted the violent ultra-left fringe would be prosecuted, yet the broader collapse of equal application has left little standing when disorder arrives. We’ve seen the same selective enforcement in the US and Britain.
Here, both major parties have white-anted our institutions in the name of Liberty and Equality. Pity they forgot all about the Fraternity part.
Identity politics and its far-left radical offshoot, critical race theory, spawned movements that have resulted in the decline of our sense of the common good. It has close links to Marxist thought because it refers to liberty as equality. The Marxist idea is that overthrowing capitalism and the state will give the proletariat power.
The neo-Marxist experiments we are living today, however, are not focused on the owners of the means of production, or capital, as the oppressors. Instead, the oppressors are those who share national, cultural, and racial qualities that the oppressed do not. It’s actually quite clever because it removes the capitalist’s main argument – aspiration – if you work hard, you can achieve as much as the next person.
Australia has an historically important mix of public education and healthcare that takes aspiration a step further. Both were designed for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. You can’t aspire to be wealthy if you need money just to have an education and access to healthcare.
To be sure, our education and health systems aren’t perfect, but the idea is sound. Critical Race Theory treats that aspiration itself as suspect, as if the desire to rise marks you as an oppressor rather than a free citizen. You can’t aspire to be something you can never be. Except, of course, a woman. You can aspire to be a woman then just say that you are. Thanks to Julia Gillard’s 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act, which replaced biological sex with gender identity.
Theoretically, that wasn’t quite as silly as it sounds. Removing sex as a fixed category dissolves one more grievance inside the privileged class, so the focus can stay on the national, cultural, and racial characteristics of the oppressors no matter their gender.
A conspiracy, you say? Or is the Fabian wolf in sheep’s clothing the guiding principle of the left’s long march? As we have seen Germany, Britain, and now most visibly France come undone, it is only a matter of time before the hatred of Western civilisation manifests similarly here. Liberty and Equality without Fraternity leave little to hold the common good together.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you’d like to support his writing, please shout him a drink over at Donorbox.
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