from the pen of the wonderful Douglas Hine – a manifesto for dark times
When the maps run out
The world is in flames and if you think it’s all the fault of those people — the uneducated, the bigoted — I urge you to think harder.
When the values of social liberalism got hitched to the mercilessness of neoliberalism, it kindled a resentment towards the former among the latter’s losers. The deal was summed up in Alan Wolfe’s formulation: ‘The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war and the centre won the political war.’ He said that in 1999. It was under Bill Clinton’s presidency that the ‘centrist’ settlement between progressive cultural values and There Is No Alternative economics was consummated. Two decades on, that made Hilary Clinton the dream opponent for a candidate running on the fuel of resentment.