A must read that pretty much covers why and where we are and how we got here.
“….Starting in the 1960s the West was subjected to a cultural revolution led by neo-Marxists who co-opted many “useful idiots” to their cause. Timeless values and assumptions about how we lived and what we believed were brushed aside in a seemingly never-ending series of attacks on traditional institutions.
As the cultural revolutionaries slowly moved into and eventually came to dominate most of our social institutions, their appetite for change — and for power — only increased. In their own version of Leon Trotsky’s strategy of permanent revolution, they always needed to find yet another element of Western society to degrade or destroy, to keep themselves relevant and their supporters engaged.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 was a setback for them, as it irrefutably demonstrated the failure of socialist economics. But they quickly regrouped and turned their attention from economic to social structures, in particular education and the family.
We saw the cultural revolutionaries in action in the form of the so-called Safe Schools program, an exercise in indoctrination with a suitably Orwellian name. More comically, the same attitudes were present in an Australian of the Year’s risible attempts to stamp out use of the word “guy”. But the turn of the wheel we have seen this year has a peculiar consequence.
Yesterday’s revolutionaries have become today’s reactionaries. Like all reactionaries, they reject the people’s will (as expressed in this year’s votes) and they want to turn back the clock. They want us to go back to the time — all too recent — when they set the agenda and the rest of us were expected to conform.
Like their powdered predecessors in 18th-century France, today’s elites — the new reactionaries — have a fatal weakness. They have stayed aloof from the bulk of the population — the “deplorables”, in Hillary Clinton’s memorable phrase; those who “cling to guns or religion” in the words of a rather more successful American politician.
Because of their separation from ordinary electors the new reactionaries have misunderstood what the people of their countries actually think and, even more important, they have underestimated their resolve. In Britain, the reactionary elites sneered at their countrymen who wanted no more than to have their country back. Result: Brexit. America’s elites copped a similar hiding from the “forgotten men and women” of the US, who turned out in force to vote for the first candidate in a generation who promised to look after the interests of the whole community rather than the myriad sectional interests to which US presidential candidates usually pander. Result: president-elect Trump.
Lightning has struck twice in the Anglosphere this year and it can strike a third time. The issue that promises to shatter the calm of Australia’s new reactionary class is same-sex marriage. Most of them (but not all) are convinced not only of the virtue of this fundamental change to our society’s oldest and most basic institution — the family — but that they have the people on their side.
However, the polling that supports this view is now as suspect as the recent polling in Britain and US that failed dismally in predicting the recent votes. A more cautious view would be that a people’s vote, with secret ballots cast in the sober atmosphere of a formal plebiscite, and after a period of more balanced coverage of the issue in the media, might actually result in a no vote.
How else can we explain the opposition to the proposed plebiscite than a sudden realisation on the part of the more hard-headed reactionaries that their same-sex marriage project is actually at grave risk if the people are asked to approve it?
The leading proponents of same-sex marriage fear that they could be on a loser if they allow the people to vote on the issue. On that point they may just be right….” New reactionaries have lost touch with people power revolution