Betrayed voters are finally exacting revenge on our arrogant elites

Leo Varadkar

The combined party political forces which run the Irish government clearly thought they were on a roll. They were leading their historically conservative Catholic country into a modern progressive consensus with the enthusiastic gratitude of a liberated people. So confident were they that their attitudes were universally welcomed that they presumed to alter their country’s constitution in ways that would seal this change irrevocably.

The electorate were offered two referenda designed to eliminate the anachronistic words “mother” and “woman” from the great founding document. This was clearly going to be a triumph of the newly enlightened nation which would gratefully, indeed ecstatically, embrace its contemporary identity by a large majority.

Guess what happened. Not only were both these votes overwhelmingly defeated but the humiliation of that misjudgment was almost certainly the chief cause of the presiding Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar’s, resignation.

This was not just a political miscalculation. It was a catastrophic failure by the governing elite (a term which has now become indispensable in political analysis) to remain in touch with the actual opinions of the people who elected them.

Let’s look at another case with some remarkable similarities. The Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, decided to extend the low emission zone which had once applied only to the more densely trafficked area of inner London, to its outer suburbs where car (and van) travel are essential. He had thus slapped a punitive daily fine on anyone who could not afford to replace a diesel or an older petrol vehicle.

Surely the voters would gladly accept by acclamation that even the uncrowded uplands on the edge of the green belt needed measures to promote cleaner air. Then came a by-election in the constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip – one of those outer London areas that the Labour mayor had commandeered for his new anti-pollution drive. Guess what happened. Against the national trends and the polling predictions, the Conservatives held the seat. This was clearly an explicit repudiation of the accepted orthodoxy of the Labour mayoralty and the way it had been applied with almost no consideration of the hardship it might cause in daily life.

Both of these events – and what they tell us about actual public opinion – only occurred because people were offered a chance to cast secret ballots in the privacy of a polling station. Opinion polling, broadcast interviews with people in the street, even casual conversation among neighbours or co-workers, have become systematically misleading as an indication of the true beliefs of ordinary people.

It is quite clear that those who are driving the contemporary orthodoxies that dictate what it is acceptable to utter believe that they have created a crushingly successful hegemony. With a concerted programme of moral coercion and blatant censorship it is obviously easy for them to conclude that they have won the argument when, in fact, they have simply shut it down. So the disjuncture between genuine opinions and those that may safely be spoken is now positively dangerous – not just for those who are at risk of terminal civic and occupational damage if they speak the unspeakable, but to the deluded, self-regarding, opinion-dominating class who think they have won.

Having confined themselves at first to social censure, they are now actually legislating to ban the expression of what, in the most well-known cases, are statements of empirical fact. This is no longer a controversy about democratic freedoms: it is a matter of sanity, of the ability to describe a recognisable world.

The citizenry of a free society face being forced by law to deny intelligible reality, the most clear-cut and risible example of this being the assertion that men are women because they choose to identify themselves as such. You might almost suspect that some malign alien power had infiltrated all our public institutions and put in place a deranging programme intended to undermine rational thought. And that may not be very far from the truth. So how has this happened?

The New Reality (slogan: “Be kind”) certainly does not see itself as malign but it is blatantly and proudly subversive. Its fundamental intention is to replace the meaning of the word “truth” – which has been, and still is among the unconverted, taken to mean based in objective fact.

In the awakened future of this brave new world, truth is whatever you feel it to be. It is your emotional needs and reactions – driven by your own psychological imperatives – that determine “your truth” which must be accepted by the world as “valid”. It is clear that this promotion of what could be seen as pathological narcissism and disassociation from normal social expectations has been permitted to run riot through official and governmental institutions to such an extent that defying it now takes immense moral courage.

It is impossible to exaggerate what is at stake here. It is nothing less than the understanding of what is real, of what constitutes evidence for a true belief. Without reliable and consistent standards for the verifiable meaning of the word “true”, it is literally impossible to make sense of anything.

The creation of this confusion over what counts as a fact has been the object of Leftist subversion for generations. In the heyday of the New Left, when the old Marxist doctrines were being refashioned to suit new cultural ideas, the slogan was, “objective truth is a bourgeois construct”. The “facts” that are offered by powerful authorities are just traps created by the ruling class to keep people enslaved.

This current orthodoxy of personal truth is a direct descendant of that ideology. It is not new or original. (Indeed, the primacy of feelings and intuition over provable, disinterested knowledge has very old roots in mysticism and superstition.) It is being promulgated now by people who actually believe that they are advocating a more communal way of life when what they are really promoting is a form of solipsistic, isolated existence which would make it impossible for human beings to understand one another, let alone share a common cause.

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