In the 2010s the main political dynamic inside western societies could be boiled down to simple left and right. Figures such as Jordan Peterson, and others loosely grouped under the banner of the ‘intellectual dark web’, were only just rising to prominence and had begun to discuss the new-fangled idea of the ‘culture wars’.
These days conservatives are just phoning it in, going through the motions, and collecting their paychecks for as long as they can
Today, the battle between progressives and conservatives has been replaced by something far more confusing and unsettling. The recent legislative debacle in Sweden, in which a right-wing government – a government that conservatives cheered as Sweden’s first truly conservative government in a generation – pushed through a law to make it easier for a young person to change their legal gender and access life-altering surgery, is a case in point. It’ll mean that young people can change gender aged 16, rather than 18. No longer will they need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a doctor. Surgery to transition will no longer need approval by Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare.
Neither the Moderate parliamentary group, nor its biggest coalition partner (the Sweden Democrats), nor either of their voting bases, wanted this law. The Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, from the Moderate party, couldn’t really even explain why it was necessary for him to try so hard to push it through. Like a trial in a Kafka novel, the law simply took on a life of its own, according to the logic that there must have been some reason the process started in the first place, and so why stop it? To make matters worse, some of the vocal critics of this new law came from the feminist left in Sweden – that is, the people who are supposed to pass laws like this, over the objections of the conservative right.
By passing a law that his own voters didn’t want, which has created a big public rift inside both his own parliamentary group and the coalition he leads, Kristersson has shot himself in the foot. He has complicated his own upcoming re-election, and added to the growing sense of political malaise and fatigue in his country. The question is why? Why would a politician defy the wishes of his own voters, to pass a law he himself says he doesn’t like, on behalf of his political enemies who themselves are at most lukewarm about it in the first place?
Sadly, I think the explanation behind this topsy-turvy political own goal is probably as simple as it is depressing. Far from Kristersson being some sort of double agent, or there being some conspiracy or other, his behaviour is likely just part of a much wider political malaise in western conservative thinking.
At the moment, the massive problems and unfulfilled promises and crises that seem to lack a solution are seemingly becoming so overwhelming that our politicians almost seem to simply… give up. Take Ukraine. Politicians have so much invested – both emotionally and financially – in the outcome of that conflict, that things going wrong has caused a sort of confusion and mental exhaustion among western politicians. This has led to endless debates in the United States about sending more aid. Bizarre, counterintuitive and harmful political schemes are put forward too, because nobody seems to have the energy left to really come up with alternatives. In Britain, Rishi Sunak had no good ideas left, so he banned smoking. What is there left to do when you’re 20 points behind in the polls?
If the weird and wacky tidings coming from Sweden these days are a sign of things to come, the real news here isn’t that ‘the Marxists’ or the ‘postmodernists’ have come back with a vengeance. No, those people are just as dazed and confused as everyone else: like their political opponents on the right, or the eunuchs of the forbidden city during the last years of the final Chinese Empire, these days they’re mostly just phoning it in, going through the motions, and collecting their paychecks for as long as they can. In the West, it’s the ‘conservatives’ that we should really be worried about.
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