From The Liberty Wall – Free Speech: How Do We Protect It? – Tyranny Of The Minority (Part 2)
TOWARDS the end of March we published Part 1 of Tyranny Of The Minority – http://nationalliberal.org/from-the-liberty-wall-%e2%80%93-free-speech-how-do-we-protect-it-tyranny-of-the-minority-part-1 – written by Mick Hume. Hume will be familiar to freedom lovers as the author of the thought-provoking book Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?
Tyranny Of The Minority is based on his new book Revolting! Part 1 of this article looked at how – in the light of Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump – some members of the elite are wondering if ordinary voters are fit to make decisions on major issues. Part 2 continues with this theme.
As we’ve previously noted, this article originally appeared in the Daily Mail in late February. However, we’ve taken the decision to reproduce it in four sections – as we feel that this is the best way to stimulate debate. Thus, if you have any comments please leave them on the Free Speech Facebook site https://www.facebook.com/groups/1607711629485795/ once you see this article appear.
It goes without saying that there are no official links between Mick Hume, the Daily Mail and Free Speech.
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Tyranny Of The Minority: How the most sinister trend of our age is a poisonous conviction taking root on the Left and among the elite that ordinary people are too stupid to be trusted with voting
Members of the elite are wondering if ordinary voters are fit to make decisions on major issues like Brexit.
In the eyes of the Establishment, the only possible explanation was that those millions were simply too ignorant, uneducated, gullible, bigoted or emotional to understand what they were being told.
What is curious is that those from the liberal and Left wings — the ones who claim to be most in favour of change in the UK — were most upset.
But instead of trying to understand, the response of many was to dismiss the result as merely a ‘howl of rage’ by voters who must have taken leave of their senses — and to find ways to block it. The Guardian paper, alleged voice of liberal Britain, produced an official post-referendum T-shirt that declares: ‘Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.’
Its columnist Polly Toynbee, grande dame of British liberalism, demanded that 231 Labour MPs — 70 per cent of whose constituencies voted for Brexit — must ‘save us’ from the referendum result. In the name of ‘democracy’, of course.
Such responses let slip the mask and revealed the ugly fact that this country’s political elite believes that matters of government are far too complex and sophisticated to let the governed decide.
For the record, I voted Leave with passion, but my attack is not aimed at the 16.1 million who voted to Remain. They made a rational choice, just as the Leavers did. The difference is that most Remainers now accept the result, unlike elitists such as Tony Blair or Richard Branson — or their poster girl Gina Miller, the City financier who led the court challenge, declaring that the revolting voters’ verdict ‘made her physically ill’.
The reaction from those on the Left was the same when the American electorate handed Trump the keys to the White House.
He had been denounced as a disgrace to U.S. politics not only by the political establishment and the media but also by alpha intellectuals Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. How could Americans resist being dazzled by such a star-studded appeal, you might think?
Yet more than 62 million Americans did just that. They voted Trump in — to the consternation of every ‘liberal’ voice in the land. On campuses, students held protests and college authorities offered counselling and time off to ‘grieve’, as if they were victims of a tragic disaster.
Personally, I have no truck with the illiberal, free-speech-stomping, narrow-minded Trump. But what I don’t get is their astonishment and hysteria at what happened.
After the election, everybody suddenly started asking: ‘How could they vote for him?’
But it should not have been difficult to get a sense beforehand of the growing anger against the political elite among the voters Clinton branded ‘deplorables’.
It was just that nobody had ever bothered to ask those ‘deplorables’ what they thought. The underlying problem in the UK, the U.S. and other Western societies is that politics and public life have increasingly become the preserve of a self-regarding elite of officials, opinion formers, intellectuals and so-called experts. They treat ‘ordinary people’, the masses, as outside of politics and beyond the pale, their concerns marginalised and ignored.
The Brexit vote marked a revolt against the ‘enforced conformity’ preached by this elite. That it came as such a shock to them was a sign of how little contact they had with the real world. And still many of them don’t get it.
In the Left-wing New Statesman magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins, the leading evolutionary biologist and renowned humanist was unable to suppress his true feelings that the large slice of humanity who voted Leave were ‘stupid, ignorant people’. He protested that ‘it is unfair to thrust on to unqualified simpletons the responsibility to take historic decisions of great complexity and sophistication’.
Presumably such decisions would be better left to highly intellectual minds such as his own. Great atheist that he is, he appears to think the rest of us should have blind faith in people like him.
Meanwhile, the normally unflappable ‘leading man of the Left’, philosophy professor A.C. Grayling, wrote to every MP (apparently in the name of his students), demanding that they vote to ignore the result — which he said was driven by mere ‘demagoguery and sentiment’ — and remain in the European Union.
His extraordinary contention was that the majority of people are what he called ‘System One’ thinkers, who make decisions on impulse — and that what we need is to pay more heed to ‘System Two’ thinkers, who seek information, analyse it, and weigh arguments in order to come to decisions. People similar to him, presumably.
• For an excellent review of Trigger Warning click here: https://countercultureuk.com/2015/07/26/trigger-warning/
• To check out a review of Free Speech click here: http://nationalliberal.org/review-of-issue-1-of-free-speech
• Check out Free Speech: How Do We Protect It? Click here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1607711629485795/
• Check out Revolting! Click here: https://www.amazon.com/Revolting-Establishment-Undermining-Democracy-Theyre/dp/0008220824/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490209013&sr=1-1&keywords=mick+hume
Date: May 18, 2017
Categories: Articles