Halloween has passed but the hunt for witches continues, as it has done pretty much every day since Political Correctness became ‘a thing’. If every day seems like Groundhog Day that is because it is: a daily litany of the same dreary obsessions, with race, with sexuality, with the demonisation of masculinity and that old favourite, the gender pay gap. Granted, every year gets slightly madder and more absurd, with new oddities such as gender fluidity being added to the alphabet soup of intersectional identities, but otherwise what is noticeable about the political discourse is how little it changes: identity politics reigns supreme.
The brutal truth is this: purely representative democracies, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, have reached their natural end state. There will be no swing back in accordance with Newton’s Third Law, and no counter-revolution without radical change to the system itself.
There are many theories as to why political correctness arose in the first place. Depending on your level of paranoia, you blame the sexual revolution, the sinister designs of the Frankfurt School, the New World Order, George Soros and the globalist elite. Some of it may well be true, but for it alone to have become so incredibly powerful, to have such a total lock on modern political discourse, would require these entities and individuals to possess supernatural powers of manipulation.
Instead, political correctness must exploit some underlying property of the system itself, and at the heart of the problem lies the corporatisation of our political parties. These seem to have followed the classic arc of decay to which all ventures that have grown to a certain size succumb over time. No matter how vigorous and idealistic they once were, eventually they degenerate, losing touch with their customer base and relying on size and brand strength to survive. Once staffed by colourful rebels, in time they become dominated by grey, careerist marketing men who talk of customers in cold, abstract terms. Steve Jobs inevitably gives way to Spreadsheet Man.
Of course, we are all familiar with what would happen next in the corporate world. Aggressive new start-ups would come along and replace the decadent old behemoths. The free market is so effective in this regard that only 24 companies that were in the FTSE 100 in 1984 are still there today. However, the barriers to entry are so high in Anglo-Saxon style democracies that replacement of our corporatised political parties is all but impossible.
The result is that the parties have permanently lost the innovation initiative. However, that initiative has not passed to the people. Instead, the engine of political innovation seems to be a mixture of the narcissism of our dopamine-junkie elites, forever searching for increasingly exotic minorities to champion in order to exhibit their exquisitely refined sensitivities, and the ability of mass communication to amplify the most extreme opinions out of all proportion. Horribly, this naturally elides with the market segmentation techniques practised by our corporo-political parties. The hideous result is that every bizarre fad is rechannelled by politicians in order to appear attractive to desirable niche-voting demographics.
The current ‘trans’ madness demonstrates this perfectly. No party political strategist would dream of making a big deal out of something that directly affects 1/300th of the demos, but once whipped into a vortex by social media, gender fluidity quickly became a cause célèbre for the ever-cynical Tories in their desperate bid to appear trendy to the vastly larger and heavily Corbyn-leaning Millennial demographic.
We have to accept that the system cannot save itself. Political correctness and late-stage representative democracy have a naturally symbiotic relationship. In the future all administrations will fundamentally offer more of the same: more societal fragmentation, more unhappiness and confusion, more stasis if not outright decay, and, of course, more witch-hunts.
It’s time for a change: on this occasion, to rebuild a socially cohesive society, true conservatives have no choice but to be radical. Parliamentary sovereignty nurtures and shields the corporo-politics that has fragmented society so terribly. It has to go.
