It is easy to forget that old communism, particularly in the 1950s and 60s, promised material plenty rather than permanent austerity. When Nikita Khrushchev declared “We will bury you!” in 1956, he was not boasting of missiles or tank divisions on the Rhine, but invoking Marx’s dictum that the working class would outlast capitalism, implicitly pointing to refrigerator and televisions as the symbols of a new socialist affluence. He later asserted that the Soviet Union aimed to overtake and outstrip the more highly-developed capitalist countries in “production per head of population”.
Today’s Left is now animated the politics of resentment: downwardly mobile and incurably self-pitying
For a time, he wasn’t entirely deluded: in the case of the Korean Peninsula, North Korea’s per-capita GNP remained above that of its southern neighbour well into the mid-1970s, and by the end of the 60s every village was wired for electricity. Even the USSR’s famed emphasis on education was less about egalitarian virtue than about a communistic meritocracy, a belief that the best-trained engineer or mathematician could serve the collective better or win the space race. That spirit of upward striving has long since vanished. Today’s Left is now animated the politics of resentment: downwardly mobile and incurably self-pitying.
It is easy to trace this decline to the emergence of the New Left and the eco-Left of the 1980s. What began as a moral critique of consumerism hardened into a kind of aestheticised vindictiveness. And, as ever with resentment, it proved enormously successful. It found its natural constituency among a generation of unadjusted losers who treated money-making as vulgar, something the Rubes and wideboys did, and who now, in their mid-thirties, find themselves marooned in irony sodden, gloomy, flat-shares and looking for someone to blame.
It isn’t entirely their fault; their resentment is, in a perverse way, inherited. They were raised by parents who made easy money doing frivolous, creative things in the 1990s, a decade when house prices were sane, and when the great democratisation of media had not yet occurred. A modest staff job in broadcasting could still buy a house in Zone 2 and a second-hand Saab. Those parents mistook luck for genius and never realised they were living through a one-off tax free equity windfall that would never be repeated. Now their offspring, over-educated and under-employed, sit amid the ruins of a vanished middle-class bohemia.
If this pathology once belonged solely to the Left, it no longer does. Disastrously, the Right now sounds just the same. The supposed custodians of enterprise and self-reliance now speak in the same vocabulary of injury and betrayal. They bewail taxes, regulation and inflation with the tone of people to whom something unspeakable has been done, rather than the tone of people determined to do anything about it. It is the language of the helot and the pay-pig. They have, in effect, adopted the moral grammar of the Left — a politics of “look what they’ve taken from us.” Once the Right accepts that frame, it loses, because the Left will always play the victim better.
And meanwhile, the endless talk of how you “can’t go down to the shops without a stab vest,” or that London has become some ungovernable war zone, only deepens the defeatism. It mistakes hysteria for strength, and obscures the real and serious fact that random acts of violence against law-abiding people are increasing. Not only that it provides us all some mockery to those on the irony left, as they say misery loves company.
A reminder: you, Nicholas, 30 ans, are not the oppressed. You are a white-collar professional, perhaps not as well paid as you pretend on X, and you sit at the very bottom of today’s grievance hierarchy. No one is coming to rescue you; no institution exists to plead your case. Somewhere, a recently arrived refugee from a “war-torn” country already occupies the moral high ground, and, quite possibly, the nice two-bed flat in Zone 2 you once assumed would one day be yours. That is the new moral economy of Britain: pity is currency, and I’m afraid, your Credit Score is pretty dire.
The Right’s crisis, in the end, is that it no longer believes in its own virtue
The real case against higher taxes is simple: Zack Polanski, or any other theatrical moraliser of his type, is not entitled to my money. Nor is he entitled to smother my neighbourhood in 20-mile-an-hour zones nor ask me to tolerate stabbing in my kids school from scum as a form of cosmic balancing. What has taken hold on the modern Left is a belief that the productive citizen, anyone who works, saves and owns, is a kind of hereditary oppressor whose success must be curbed. This is a moral inversion and a more confident right would consider this an outrage on its own terms. Instead Nicholas 30 ans instead of rebutting it, too often internalises it, behaving as though guilt were the natural price of prosperity.
The Right’s crisis, in the end, is that it no longer believes in its own virtue. The post-war social democrats at least believed that planning and redistribution would create a better citizen; the modern Right scarcely believes that freedom can. It mutters about tax bands and fiscal drag but forgets to articulate what low taxes are for, namely, to make men and women independent of those who would moralise over them. And yet most on the Right retreat from these first principles. Their supposed think tanks and pressure groups are among the worst offenders: timid where they should be defiant, managerial where they should be moral. They speak of productivity and “growth incentives,” yet fall silent on the very liberties that once defined English freedom — the Englishman’s home being his castle. The Object of Liberty is Liberty.
A confident conservatism would treat taxation not as an act of victimisation but as a question of justice: what right has the state to spend your time, your effort, your life more wisely than you can? Property and personhood are not so different; both rest on consent. You would never accept the claim that others are entitled to your marriage simply because your wife is attractive, so why accept that they are entitled to your savings simply because they want them? Yet that is the moral logic of the modern Left, that what is desired must be shared, and what is earned must be surrendered.
By numbers, the Right needs to rediscover Thatcher, not as a fetish, but as a temperament. She understood that capitalism must never apologise for itself, and that sentimentality is death to seriousness. Cameron made capitalism afraid of its own shadow; the post-liberal Right, meanwhile, has busied itself conceding moral ground to the Left in the name of “good faith,” when none exists to be returned. Sometimes the proper response to obstinacy, whether from militant unions or moralising bureaucrats is not dialogue but discipline.
For all the talk of decline, Britain remains a country built by those who took responsibility for their own lives, the tradesman Deano, the small employer. I am bullish on Britain for a number of reasons — God deals the Englishman a number of aces, but it cannot be saved by those who see themselves as victims. The Right must rediscover what its ancestors knew instinctively: that no one will ever pity you into prosperity, and that liberty, once apologised for, is already lost.
