It’s time to face the facts: Playing the blame game isn’t working anymore
Right-wing parties are an absolute wreck right now.
From the US to the UK to Italy, their pitch is the same:
“If you work ridiculously hard for significantly less wealth than you create for your corporate overlords, we’ll do our best to devalue your money, cut the public services you’re paying for, sell off all your public assets, cut taxes on your bankers and land-lorders, let monopolies spawn like mold spores, and ensure your children have absolutely zero hope of owning a home or ever being free of colossal amounts of compounding interest-laden debt.”
It’s a raw deal, and even conservative voters are starting to realize this is an utterly stupid way to structure civilization.
Literally no one except the extreme-right 10% wants what the Cons are currently selling.
And Conservative politicians are starting to wake up to this reality. In the UK, recent polls suggest just three Con MPs would win their riding (out of 600+ seats) if an election was called today.
So what is their response?
To play their four worn-out classics:
Unsophisticated working-class Brits love to hate immigrants, having bought the propaganda that their jobs were stolen by newcomers and not by multinational corporations automating their jobs or sending them overseas.
This hatred for outsiders is best personified by the sociopathic new Home Secretary/real-life-witch Suella Braverman, who despite being the daughter of first-generation immigrants wants to deport refugees to Rwanda, saying:
“I would love to have a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”
How can people with such abhorrent views towards vulnerable people ever get re-elected?
Bush and Obama went with “the Middle East.”
Trump went with “Ch!na.”
UK Cons are blaming Russia for 100% of the crushing inflation that is devaluing their currency, despite the fact that the fix for UK inflation is outrageously simple — nationalize the energy industry like Germany/Sweden/Norway/Iceland/Switzerland/Austria/Finland/France to make it not-for-profit, tax back the hundreds of billions they printed for the rich during Covid, then democratize the banks and declare a debt jubilee to erase the debt bubble.
I abhor ad hominem arguments.
Attack the issue, not the person.
But Cons know they’ve lost all moral and rational high ground on all the major issues, so they revert to doing what they do best: mud-slinging whataboutisms at their detractors.
British Cons are particularly skilled at attack ads, which have ramped into overdrive since a third unelected Con PM came to power last month:
“Siding with dangerous protestors” is Tory-speak for “opposing their new fascist crackdown on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”
Meanwhile, a woman at my wife’s work had to wait ten hours for an ambulance because of Conservative cuts to the National Health Service.
Here’s another:
The actual truth? The Cons have refused to cap the surprise extra profits of war-profiteering oil monopolies and are loading up the nation with interest-bearing debt to subsidize Shell (which happens to be the PM’s old company.)
For those who are keeping score, the Cons have ruled for thirty of the past forty-three years and have had six of the past eight Prime Ministers, including the last four straight.
Imagine being in power for the past twelve years and thinking you can blame ANYTHING on the powerless opposition.
Blaming the big bad bureaucracy is another classic tune that right-wing voters love to hear.
But surely you can see there’s a breakdown in the internal logic of the ruling party blaming the government, right?
The ruling party are the government.
To blame the government is to call yourself utterly incompetent.
Somehow no one points this out to Conservatives. If they’re as so brutally stupid as they say they are, they should step aside and let competent people run the nation instead.
But no matter, the “government is bad” and therefore Cons shuffle their leaders constantly, all the while corporatizing the government wherever possible, selling off public assets to the lowest (Conservative-supporting) bidder.
Meanwhile, they brutalize the poor with crushing austerity, slashing the services that taxpayers are paying for.
Check out the approach of their fourth finance minister in four months:
(Compassionate and ConservativeTM are oxymorons, by the way.)
Jeremy Hunt won’t touch unlimited bankster bonuses or the surprise profits of oil monopoly war profiteering, but he’ll make sure babies don’t get proper checkups, thousands die because ambulance wait times have breached four hours, and old people shiver in the wintry cold.
- For being incompetent, or for being malevolent.
- For ignoring the cries of the poor.
- For living so out of touch with the common man.
- For believing toxic libertarian corporatist Ayn Rand hyper-individualist extremist ideology.
Saying “sorry, we were wrong” isn’t hard.
And it’s the first step toward righting their wrongs and charting a new path.
But the reality is that today’s Cons are totally out of ideas. They have literally nothing to offer that the majority wants.
This means there’s a huge opportunity to reform conservative parties around the world, evicting the fake conservatives and corporatists and pressing hard into new ideas that could actually improve life for human beings.
Instead of growing the corporatocracy and slave-like neofeudalism, they could conserve freedom by protecting and expanding democracy.
If they truly cared about human freedom, they would stand up for our collective rights:
- Freedom of human speech
- Freedom of the factual press
- Freedom of belief
- Freedom of non-violent assembly
- Freedom of movement
- Freedom from hunger
- Freedom from violence
- Freedom from exploitation
Rather than blindly seeking growth in the parasite anti-economy, they could focus their full attention on growing the real economy:
- They could democratize the banks and erase the people’s debts.
- They could make human necessities like heat and energy not-for-profit.
- They could outlaw for-profit land-lording or tax it out of existence.
If conservatives were serious about conserving the economy, they’d get to work eradicating the parasites that are choking the real economy to death.
It’s hard to believe, but the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all came to life under Richard Nixon. Without clean land, air, and water, we literally have no future. Millions of commons conservatives — especially farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen — fundamentally understand that sustainability is an economic, social, and scientific imperative. Nature doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.
So instead of fracking and drilling and clear-cutting and polluting the planet to death, conservatives should build a sustainable stewardship mindset that protects our natural resources in such a way that allows nature to produce abundant wealth for all living things.
Right-wing politicians have a choice: They can wake up and realize that they are out of acceptable ideas; that the vast majority hate their evil, selfish, hyper-individualist, anti-democratic, boring old ideas.
Or they can go full-court-press into corporate feudalism, then fascism, and then total societal breakdown.
History has shown us again and again what happens when right-wingers refuse to reign in their worst impulses and work against the betterment of the masses.
When you side with corporations and creditors, you make yourself an enemy of the people.
At present, civil wars are brewing around the world. If we want to let off some steam before things reach a boiling point, we need pro-human leaders to rise up within conservative parties and chart a new path forward.
Heck, maybe progressives need to start joining conservative parties.
UPDATE #1: One hour after this article was published Suella “I Hate Humanity” Braverman was sacked as Home Secretary.
UPDATE #2: One day after this article was published, and after just 45 days in office in which a former Shell corporatist cost the nation hundreds of billions, the unelected and now former Prime Minister Liz Truss is entitled to £115,000 per year from taxpayers for the rest of her life.
It’s time to try democracy in the UK.
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Author Jared A. Brock
