Politics

8 September 2007

The odd thing is that it is left-wingers, not Cameron, who have lurched to the right

Evidence that it is a crisis of faith — rather than merely a change of mind — is that lapsed left-wingers, like lapsed Catholics, have a tendency for confessions and exegeses. The latest addition to a nascent genre of literature is the excellently insightful The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (out this week) by Andrew Anthony, star feature writer of the Observer newspaper. In the US, the confessions of lapsed liberals are becoming a significant genre of publishing.

The liberal Left has suffered the double whammy of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, bashing their economic beliefs, followed by the collapse of the twin towers, bashing their cultural ones. It was September 11th — or at least the anti-Western, pro-Islamist apologia for it — which started Anthony’s doubt. But it was a mugging that finally did it for him. Not the metaphorical mugging by reality, but an actual one. He intervened when a schoolgirl was viciously attacked by a gang of other schoolgirls as passers-by just looked on, and was disturbed that everyone excused the attackers’ behaviour, blaming it on poverty and poor education, rather than condemned it. He’s not the first apostate at the Observer. Its columnist Nick Cohen recently provoked near-panic in the liberal Left with his powerful tome What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.

Of course, the journey from left to right is very well travelled, and well remarked on. Just think of former Guardian columnist Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens or the American neoconservatives — who came, of course, from the political Left. The 19th-century French monarchist François Guisot sparked a rash of copycat quotes when he said that ‘Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.’ The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau swapped the word ‘republican’ for ‘socialist’.

The Left often attributes the rightwards drift to the burdens of middle age — acquiring a house, a higher salary and kids makes you appreciate property rights, lower taxes and law and order. But it’s not acquiring property that challenges beliefs, but acquiring wisdom.

The reason so many go from left to right is the realisation that the Right is, well, right. About pretty much everything. You just can’t buck the evidence. That’s why you don’t get books from reconstructed right-wingers proclaiming that at last they’ve realised the Left is right. Instead, the Right is on the rampage, with books such as James Delingpole’s How To Be Right: The Essential Guide to Making Lefty-Liberals History.