Gerald Warner's "The PC police state is finally terrorising even the police", and Barry Rubin's "Silent Revolution"

You can read Warner's superb article on Breitbart, here. In case you need convincing to make the effort, here's an extract:

In 1968 Enoch Powell returned to his native Birmingham to deliver a speech in which he warned of the consequences of uncontrolled immigration. For that outrage against the then embryonic PC orthodoxy he was called "racialist" and "evil" and was deprived of his political career. Yet a Gallup poll showed that 74 per cent of the British public agreed with him and only 11 per cent disagreed.

Consider the significance of those figures. They demonstrate that in 1968 the political class abandoned representation of the majority and identified itself exclusively with the elitist 11 per cent minority. It was able to do so by the anti-democratic device of cross-party consensus, leaving the electorate with nobody to vote for who would execute the popular will.

Warner (orJames Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie, to use his legal name) used to write for the Telegraph before that paper became a mouthpiece for the social democratic views of David Cameron and his chums - but he jumped ship several years' ago.

Warner's pithy little post echoes several reviews I've read of a book published earlier this year, called Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, by Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli expert on Middle East affairs. Rubin's theory is that a new kind of virulently anti-capitalism, anti-West, cultural Marxist left-wing movement - which he refers to as  the Third Left - has been softening America up for decades: all it needed to achieve total victory for its self-hating lies was for a American-hating president like Barack Obama to emerge. Here's an extract from Janice Fiamengo's review in PJ Media:

Rubin calls this hidden movement — an inchoate, uncoordinated, and de-centralized phenomenon — the Third Left. He argues that it grew from the failures of the two previous Left movements: the first under the Communist Party of the 1920-1950s and the second in the form of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. What differentiates the Third Left from the New Left, with which it has many affinities, is the Third Left’s unparalleled mainstreaming of radical ideas. An almost complete infiltration by Third Left cadres of the entertainment industry, mass media, and the entire education system — from kindergarten through university — has normalized what were once shocking ideas, making hatred of capitalism seem natural and desirable, anti-Americanism the only decent response of conscientious citizens, and social inequality a crime for which any level of government control is not only acceptable but necessary.

I'm sure British readers won't need much convincing that pretty much the same thing has happened here. How else to explain a Conservative prime minister forcing through a law on gay marriage despite his own party's almost total lack of interest in the subject - and despite the fact that most homosexuals weren't clamouring for it? Or a Conservative prime minister taking Oxford University to task for not admitting a sufficient number of Afro-Caribbean students, as if places at our top universities are prizes to be awarded to the lucky members of whichever victim group the elite happens to be feeling sorriest for at the time.

The maddening aspect of Cultural Marxism is that it entirely circumvents the democratic process. The most sinister thing about it is that it isn't an organised movement - there are no headquarters to picket, no leaders to topple, no foreign power to blame for organising and financing it. And yet its adherents have managed to infect every public sector nook and cranny with their poisonous, ennervating pseudo-philosophy. Even worse, their takeover of state schools and the universities guarantees an endless supply of brain-washed Marxbots ready to carry on the task of re-wiring our brains in the hope that inapproriate attitudes and the acceptance of "unhelpful" truths will eventually become impossible.

Barry Rubin considered the subject of Silent Revolution so important - so urgent - that he wrote it while dying of cancer, to which he succumbed in February. I think he was right: the malign influence of cultural Marxism is the greatest problem facing the West today. I've ordered the book (available here) and look forward to reading it over the season of good cheer.