What we’re seeing is not fightback, resistance and protest. It’s two things: players who are hedging their bets to avoid alienating customers and activism groups, and the activists and snowflakes who are having the mother of all extinction bursts.
Liberals are moral progressives. They impose their beliefs on the People through legislation and media content. Some of those were needed (racial equality legislation, TUPE), some have turned out to be dubious (Divorce Reform), and some are simply bad (Angela’ Army). There’s a built-in obsolescence to the liberal programme: once they have imposed legal and cultural enlightenment on the society and economy, if not in the hearts and minds of the people, they’re done. Time to quit liberalising and go get a proper job. Said very few political movements ever. So having done the sensible stuff, those liberals who can’t get proper jobs go in search of even more recherché causes to foist on the People. In the end, they choose a cause too far, pass through the Looking-Glass, and the People become the enemy. Through the Looking Glass they can fight the causes of cultures and people who represent everything their parents professed to despise. Which is why we have female snowflakes wanting to import unskilled, unemployable men from a deeply misogynist culture who would put those very snowflakes in burkas and confine them to the kitchen. Because all the snowflakes despise now are the taxpayers with jobs and children they want to prepare for the world.
Once Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, it attracts the dispossessed, the alienated, and many of the younger, disaffected people who can’t get jobs. Those people also hate the taxpayers. Communism never got a real grip in the UK because young people could get jobs, and they suspected correctly there was more to it than workers’ rights. Looking-Glass Liberalism has its following in the West today because there are a lot of young people who suspect that they will never benefit from participating in their economies, and who also suspect that they were not raised with the skills or temperament to participate advantageously. In which case, some of them will be quite happy to tear it all down. After all, what has post-modern Capitalism ever done for them?
Populism is in part a reaction to Liberalism Through The Looking Glass. It says “Enough!”. It says: “This is not your country” and much worse than that, it says “You are not Good People.” Populism is an existential identity threat to Looking Glass Liberals, who have no other source of self-identity and self-esteem than the craziness of their causes.
Populism appears when Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, and has established itself as the dominant cultural and social doctrine of the Chattering Classes (media, PR, advertising, politics, diplomacy) and is the dominant mood of mainstream literature, film, theatre, comedy and art. As it wakes up, Populism says “This is not my beautiful country, this is not my beautiful culture, my god! What have I done?”.
And then it seeks to evict the squatters and bulldoze their camps. Metaphorically, and in the case of “The Jungle” at Calais, literally.
Business has to do its PR, recruiting, advertising and investor relations within the mainstream mood. It cannot afford an avant-garde moral appearance: it can only change sides when the new winner is clearly ahead and in sight of the finishing line. Until then, it has to go with the favourite. Right now, Looking Glass Liberalism still looks good. If you live in a large city. If you are well-paid and have marketable talents.
The Tech giants don’t care about immigrants, only cheaper programmers for the commodity tasks. If they cared about human rights, they would not be outsourcing to China or Mexico. Taiwan is just about okay, and that’s why my Apple kit gets made. When keeping a supply of cheap(er) labour and cosying-up to the mainstream can be achieved by signing a motion deploring 90-day immigration bans, they will sign the motion. And when it doesn’t, it won’t. And unlike governments, corporations can spin on a sixpence. It takes five minutes to tell HR they don’t have to bother with LBGQT hires anymore. The Looking Glass Liberals know this, and they know they and their crazy causes are a cost, not a benefit, to most corporations and all taxpayers. But the corporations will be the last ones to turn, unless they are run by a Rupert Murdoch. Someone has to go first.
Until then, we have to live with the screeching of Looking-Glass Liberals and their fellow-travellers being thrown out of their place in society, culture and politics (they never had much of a place in the economy, except as recipients of other people’s taxes). And all the posturing idiots don’t seem to know that someone is taking names.
The ass-kicking will follow.
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