Strength as Weakness, Weakness as Strength

Decency and Honour can be undone by cowardly and unprincipled conniving

A terrifying thing about engaging with the right is how often they openly admit to wanting to make your life worse. You frequently encounter right wing voices online who seem to be openly rubbing their hands and slobbering with glee at the thought of getting one over on you and your ‘type’ - of the state punishing you once their ‘chosen one’ gets into power.

I can’t stand right wing voters, particularly after the last 4 decades of them being proven wrong, by their own standards, time and time again.... But I don’t want ‘vengeance’ on them - I want the country to get better for them too!

I vote to the left because I want to make the country better for right wing voters as well as me (and everyone else). The only ‘vengeance’ I want is for society’s most well off to stop stirring the pot and to contribute a little bit more to make life less shit for the rest of us... as has been proven perfectly possible throughout history and across the globe. I don’t want millionaires and billionaires to go hungry or cold, I just want them to pay a bit more taxes to improve the society which has clearly been very kind to them, whilst leaving others behind.

But if you spend anytime interacting with the right online, soon, their bitterness, their vengeful streak comes through. They’re all ‘just you wait till trump/farage gets in power, then we’ll show you’. (And just look at the leaders they choose - prissy, infantile ballroom-loving trump, cosseted pub bore farage. These men represent the absolute personification of weakness elevated by money.) Open - proud - hostility to their countrymen, yet they call themselves patriots?... and I’m a straight, white, middle-aged, working-class family man - they STILL want to fuck up my life because I have different opinions to them... what must it be like to NOT have been born already pre-jumped through these hoops of conformity they demand?!

Amazingly, these people who have spent the last 20 years whining that people calling them arseholes when they say arsehole things is the same as ‘oppressing their free speech’ are now lining up to vote for a farage - a man who has openly and proudly promised to torch every single piece of legislation which protects our right to free speech!

But then comes the paradoxical problem for anyone to the left of these ghouls. As individuals, we are strong because we try to adhere to our own set of consistent principles - which means that whenever any public figure on the centre or left fails to adhere to said principles, we reject them instantly and fall into the ‘they’re all exactly the same!’ trap... whilst the right - due to their intellectual weakness, worship of hierarchy, and cowardly inability to admit to being wrong - will back their chosen heroes even after they betray they time after time after time.

johnson and farage’s brexit caused the migrant boat crisis. This is clear as day. You can look at a countless charts showing a massive increase in small boats virtually the day after breixt was enacted. We voted Brexit, lost our rights on the promise of ‘controlling immigration’, then immigration immediately got worse anyway. now, aristocrat-backed farage wants to play the exact same con twice by ditching the echr, and these dipshit cucks are queuing around the corner to be swindled the exact same way twice inside a decade!

Austerity, privatisation, the truss budget, hard brexit, trump worship and (latterly) the Iran war Reform politicians supported every single one of the Tories worst sins for 15 years - indeed, many reform politicians are proposing even more extreme versions of the conservative policies which degraded our nation for a decade and a half.

This all exposes a tragic paradox which we need to confront and mitigate;

The right as a cohesive whole is able to attain and maintain its grip on power because its individual components are weak... its voters will happily be lied to and screwed over, because they are too intellectually feeble to recognise when they’ve been conned, too emotionally weak to admit it even when it becomes obvious, and too morally weak to confront their own hypocrisies head on. The right’s main media mouthpieces have fabricated a victimhood narrative about being ‘silenced’ which they spread through continuous platforming by mainstream press and broadcasters. Its politicians are promoted not by skill but by their weak tendency to massage the leader’s ego - which only needs massaging because it is weak! In these ways, the collective weakness of conservatism manifests as strength.

On the other hand, progressive voters and mouthpieces stick rigidly to their principles, instead of worshipping heroes as flawless. We refuse to let people off the hook just because they are on ‘our team’. This leads to a kind of puritanical outlook whereby every commentator, publisher, or politician must either behave absolutely perfectly today, tomorrow, and even way back in the past - or they are seen as “exactly the same” as those on the right. We allow consistency of morals and principles to become a zero-sum game which diminishes the chances of any of those principles ever being realised. No public figures are ever going to be perfect. This does not mean that some won’t be better! In displaying the strengths of being honourable, fair-minded, and even-handed, we - as a collective - end up being weakened.

This is the paradox of strength and weakness.

And I wish I knew the answer