We the people ignore sneers of the left ‘elite’CHRIS KENNY

Former WA Labor premier Geoff Gallop on the ABC's Q&A program on July 22

• 12:00AM JULY 27, 2019
• 292 COMMENTS

We really are an impudent lot, what with our views, opinions and even our votes getting in the way of a green-left elite who would love to rule over our lives with wisdom and benevolence.

Yes, we are a bit uppity. The green left tells us what is needed, takes the trouble to share its insights with us and proffer prescriptions — and we go and reject it at the ballot box.

We seem to mistake guidance for condescension, sound advice for patronage, and conferred knowledge for paternalistic instruction. We seem all too eager to bite the hand that pats us on the head.

Either that or we are right and the green left has become so indulgent, insular and self-referential it has forgotten its commitment to democracy, the battle of ideas and the good sense of the mainstream. Political debate is starting to look like Gilead, an even more warped version of The Handmaid’s Tale, where members of green left are the commanders who hold all information and power and have lost all aptitude for the organic business of democracy, choosing to screw us over instead.

If anyone had any doubts about this phenomenon — the growing disdain of the left and the broader media/political class for the mainstream — it surely was put to bed on Monday night. The forum was the weekly high mass of the media/political class, the ABC’s Q&A.

“The class war was conducted by the conservatives — the people versus the elites,” former West Australian Labor premier Geoff Gallop said. He is now an academic (wouldn’t you know it) and was arguing that rather than Labor’s massive tax-and-spend election platform being an example of class warfare it was the Coalition that created such divisions by daring to challenge the edicts of the elites. Seriously.

“They (Coalition) were running the class war,” he said. “The Labor Party position was, ‘Let’s look at the middle class and some of the views they’ve had about how to improve our society, and let’s link that up with working-class people who’ve had certain issues come up in relation to their material living standards, their opportunities to get education, and to link those two together to create a better society’. It was the Liberal and National Party that ran the class war, and they won.”

Gallop said Labor needed to forge an alliance “between those of low incomes or perhaps even those that are really battling with life and circumstances, with those that are well off but can see that we need to do something about our climate, etc”. Read that again — it tells you more than Gallop intended.

Labor, according to Gallop, needs to ensure poor people and battlers can align with those who are “well off but can see” what needs to be done. Woe betide us if poor people and battlers actually had any idea about what should be done.

Gallop argued the real class war was the same as that being fought in Donald Trump’s America and Boris Johnson’s Brexit — “the people versus the experts and the elite”. Perish the thought — it sounds like democracy.

Somebody needs to take Gallop by the hand and lead him through the streets of our nation. He is bound to meet some battlers who know what needs to be done and some wealthy elites who have no idea. I am happy to make the introductions for him.

This Q&A vignette presented the epitome of the elitist hubris that is destroying the left — and undermining our national debate into the bargain. Here was the virtue-signalling, ego-driven, sanctimonious divisiveness that is cleaving Labor away from the mainstream voters from which it emerged and for which it exists.

The left now seems to act with all the self-righteousness of the commanders of Gilead. And, by the way, it makes them look every bit as drab, humourless and doomed. This fits into a global pattern. It was no accident Gallop mentioned the US and Britain. The disdain for democracy is as global as it is palpable.

In the US, mortified that voters saw fit to “drain the swamp” by electing Trump as an agent of change, the liberal left has wasted almost three years indulging in bizarre conspiracy theories, impeachment plots, investigations and vociferous assaults against the people who made this choice. It is textbook denial.

If the Russians weren’t to blame, then it must have been collusion or evil manipulation of the electoral college, goes the logic, as the Democrats and their many allies in the media end up blaming the citizens empowered by the US Constitution. They seem to have forgotten the crucial first three words of that document: “We the people.”

In Britain, too, the media/political class is in denial, unable to see the wisdom of restoring British sovereignty, disconnecting from a sclerotic Europe and re-engaging with the broader world. Instead they blame xenophobia, ignorance and idiocy among voters — denouncing the people — and they refuse to enact their will as they descend into chaos.

This is a time in history when Johnson is portrayed as extreme because he is committed to enacting the people’s democratic wishes. In our country a Coalition government drifted to the green left, lured by the siren song of the so-called elites. But through leadership tumult and deft stewardship from Scott Morrison, it applied a corrective and, much to the dismay of the so-called elites, it survived by returning to mainstream values.

Yet people such as Gallop and others from Labor’s ruling class are angry that the people have revolted against the elites. How far has Labor strayed? A party formed so the collective power of the workers could challenge the unfettered control of the capitalist elite now sides with the remunerated, educated elite against those too preoccupied with paying their mortgage or supporting their families to indulge in the great symbolic, emotional, post-material and, sometimes, futile causes of the green left.

The extremism is something to behold. For the left, it is not just that the wrong person is in the White House, No 10 or the Lodge; they seem to believe all their beliefs, policy goals and sensibilities are being trashed. They feel the need to demonstrate their higher ideals by declaring the populist destruction of all that is desirable, hopeful and uplifting.

Feminist commentator Jane Caro (yes, I can hear you sighing but these are the sorts of commentators the left reads, publishes and invites on to the ABC) revealed this delusional despair on Twitter this week. “I read my grandson a book about dinosaurs this morning but I changed the end,” tweeted Caro. “ ‘The dinosaurs ruled the earth for thousands of years but then they voted for Trump, Morrison & Johnson, and that was the end of them.’ Alfie sighed & shook his head, expressing my sentiments exactly.”

Whether this was a social media fantasy or actual political indoctrination bordering on child abuse, only Caro can know. But the insight it provides into the mindset is more than a little disturbing and enlightening.

Gallop, Caro and their mates rail against the democratic world in which they live, sneer at their peers and despair at the choices of the masses. And in parliament Labor, initially at least, opposes tax cuts, foreign fighter laws and the repeal of medivac laws — in other words, it fails to accept it got anything wrong.

The logic is irresistible. If Labor, Gallop, Caro, Hillary Clinton and Theresa May all did nothing wrong, then it must have been those stupid voters. They have ruined everything.

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