Another Lefty Wanker Proselytising Their Guilt

The main reason I loathe the modern left is that it is so heavily represented by people who think like Theo Hobson.

On 29 August 2010, this nauseating little turd wrote an article for the Guardian (surprise) entitled “Liberal guilt? Good for you”, with the subheading

It's right to be anxious. To be completely fatly smugly relaxed about our problematic world is the definition of the Tory soul.

It was probably read with smug approval by the middle class, university educated Guardian readers over breakfast as they prepared to drive self absorbed brats Katie and Oliver to their respective private schools.

This distillation of Western, middle class, lefty onanism was then reprinted in Australia in the SMH and the Age, under the title “Liberal guilt is nothing for a decent society to be ashamed of”.

Theo Hobson, your "little parade of privileged anxiety" does fill me with derision: not because I am a Tory, but because you are a sanctimonious tosser.

Your representation of politics as a dichotomy between smug, amoral gluttons and moral, “guilty liberals” is childishly absurd. Your characterization of liberal guilt as “conscience”, with the implication that anyone who disagrees with you has none is typical of the political piety of the modern left: anyone who differs from your position is not only logically wrong, but morally wrong, therefore a bad person, unworthy of participation in our great rule making enterprise.

Wantonly, recklessly or even negligently polluting the environment is seen as morally wrong and in many cases criminal by the vast majority of sensible people across the political spectrum. The only people who appear to disagree are at opposite extremes of this spectrum: self serving, corporate buccaneers and self serving, totalitarian governments, each the enemy of genuine liberalism.

Such general censure is entirely different from believing wealthy people should be able to pass their assets to their children, rather than have a large percentage confiscated by the state, that culture is a major contributor to the poverty of societies, that state funded IVF treatment should only be available to married couples, or that people have the civil right to say: “we don’t want any more Muslims here because their values are too different from ours”.

These are political positions which should be actively debated. To present anyone supporting them as lacking conscience is a device typical of both the modern left and religious right, intended to avoid arguments based on evidence and logic, which I suggest they are fearful they would lose.

“Self-accusing anxiety” does not necessarily accompany liberalism. It does however accompany the perverse bastardization in which “equality” (as defined by “ethical” people such as Theo Hobson) has been given such precedence over liberty that it must be imposed by countless committees regulating every aspect of not just economic, but social behaviour.

If you feel guilty about inheriting wealth and power from your society, then give away as much of it as will assuage your conscience. But don’t sit there in your political piety and tell other people they are morally wrong if they do not share your definition of justice.

The word “liberal” has become pejorative in places like the United States. That religious conservatives hold so much influence there is significantly due to the hijack of liberalism by Theo Hobson and his identity politics, social engineering, “guilt industry” ilk.