The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence | Andrew Anthony

‘Liberalism’ and ‘compassion’ have been flags of convenience for the Left, just as, sometimes, ‘liberty’ has been for the Right. The journey Andrew Anthony has made from the Left towards a sympathy with moral conservatism, ‘British’ cultural assertiveness, and concern about international terrorism, has not taken him as far as he thinks. People like Gordon Brown — and innumerable other converts from old to new Labour — have made it too. The allegiance of the Left and its natural supporters is, in the end, neither to arguments nor ideas, nor even to individuals, but to structures. One structure is very like another.

Reading The Fall-Out I was at first perplexed at how long it took the young Andrew Anthony to see through the incompetence and twisted logic of the leftist mindset. But as I followed his progress across the ideological spectrum and saw him start doing, from the anti-Left, exactly what he used to do from the Left — labelling people, labelling groups, labelling ideas, ferreting out absolutist and blood-curdling claims made by individuals on the other side and brandishing quotes (the way the Israelis and the Palestinians do) with a triumphant‘you-see-what-kind-of-bastards-we’re-dealing-with’ — it dawned on me that, furious that he was taken in by the certainties of the Left for the first half of his life, Andrew Anthony may, after half-time, be rushing into the arms of an opposing certainty.

There is a different journey: not from supporting one side in a Manichean universe to supporting the other but from dualism itself to a more tangled, shaded, less coherent world view. It’s a harder journey. I wish as lively a writer as Andrew Anthony would attempt it.