Roll your eyes if you like, but the joke is still on you

The right wing media loves to think of itself as a sensible and realistic voice in the face of the wild dreams of the ‘loony left’. Conservative pundits roll their eyes in mock paternal exasperation at their left wing opponents, as if to say ‘when will they ever learn?. I will never forget a conservative cartoon I saw on the net which demonstrates how perfectly how the right often attempts to marginalise the left. It featured a liberal and a conservative sharing a flat. The conservative is portrayed as neatly dressed and fairly generic, whereas the liberal has a beard, long hair in a pony tail, a vacant look, a spliff clamped between his teeth and uses the word ‘man’ more than is necessary. Ie the conservative is the normal straight laced guy with his head screwed on, and the liberal is a drugged up fruitcake hippy. Left wing projects, like the welfare state are according to their assumption too big, too expensive, too outlandish, and can’t possibly work. We are, as far as they are concerned, a bunch of deluded wishy-washy bleeding heart liberals who can’t be taken seriously by right thinking people.

But a quick glance across the political spectrum shows that it is in fact within the ranks of the right wing that delusion is most rife. I would site climate change denial as a major part of this. James Delingpole, Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips, they are all deeply conservative pundits, and all are vociferous climate change deniers. But the people with the degrees and PhD’s, the scientists, the people who actually know what they are talking about, all see what’s coming, but conservatives seem to think that having their heads in the sand constitutes an accurate world view. Although there is something in the fact that many deniers, Steve Milloy and Pat Michaels being good examples, have been proved to have links with oil corporations. Another example of inherent ignorance in the right wing press’s ideological repertoire is the typically conservative ‘virtue’ of patriotism. Britain had the largest empire the world has ever seen, something right wing pundits seem proud of. But as anyone with a basic knowledge of history knows, the bigger the empire, the more excessive the bloodshed. I’ll mention slavery, the opium wars, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the fact that we are credited as the inventors of the concentration camp to demonstrate the extremely poor taste of lauding the British Empire days as a proud moment in our history.

The right wing press often makes a chief bugbear out of non-issues, such as immigration. Playing on the fears and prejudices of a trusting readership, newspapers like the Daily Mail create threats and outrages where there aren’t any. Would it surprise any of you to learn that only 2.5% of the British population consists of immigrants, and that most of this number is made up of Australians? This doesn’t seem to matter to conservative columnist Richard Littlejohn, who claimed that immigrants are ‘showered with’ a weekly benefit allowance of an incredible £170, when it is in fact just £33. So just who is it showing a detachment from reality here?

Much of the right wing press, The Times for example, take the free market ideas of that poisonous oligarch fellating anarchist Milton Freidman as gospel, along with the odious IMF and World Bank, despite the fact that experimentations with these ideas led to the economic decimation of South America, the installation of many dictatorships including that of General Pinochet, and more recently the current credit crunch. So who exactly is crazier: the left with its ‘unworkable’ free health service, or the right, with its climate change denial, immigration paranoia and laissez-faire economics which is directly responsible for the current recession. As a friend of mine put it, what kind of credible economic system collapses every ten years?

For many American and British conservative pundits, democratic socialism, socialism, Marxism, communism etc are one and the same thing, and any initiative in that vein, however reasonable, is definitely a leftist conspiracy to overthrow the government and make lentils compulsory. They play hard on remnant McCarthy era paranoia over anything that threatens commercial interests. You only need to look at the hysteria over Obama’s free healthcare package to see what I mean. Stalin, for them, proves once and for all that the left cannot be trusted. But the fact is that the right has had its dictatorships to. The peak achievements of the left are not the brutal regimes of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, but Roosevelt’s New Deal, the National Health Service, and other elements of the Welfare State. Every time in history the right has claimed something wasn’t possible, there was the left to say 'No, you are wrong, there is hope, people are good, and a better life is possible'. And what does the right have? Free market economics. Pah.