Saturday, November 2, 2013

Sounds somewhat familiar

Jonah Goldberg, one of the best and most entertaining right-wing journalists, writers and pundits on the other side of the Pond, author of the excellent Liberal Fascism sends out a regular newsletter to which anyone who is interested in cheerful conservatism should subscribe.

The one that hit my in-box on November 1 had this inter alia:
I was going to dedicate this entire “news”letter to gloating over the glorious, nay magisterial, fustercluck that is Obamacare. But a few factors transpired against me. No, none of those factors include the sanctimonious finger-wagging trollery we hear so much from liberals these days that it is somehow wrong to root for the failure of a law that deserves to fail.

Frankly, I don’t quite get the charge. Conservatives said the law wouldn’t work and will be bad for the country. We’ve been pretty consistent on this point (See: 40-odd House votes to repeal, 8 bajillion conservative op-eds, magazine articles, radio diatribes, tea-party protests, the 2010 midterms, etc). And now that it is going into effect and isn’t working and is proving bad for the country, we’re supposed to suddenly act as if this is terrible news? Or, as some argue, this is the moment for Republicans to work with Democrats to make this horrible law more bipartisan.
This sounds very familiar though about another fustercluck and that is the single currency and, indeed, the whole project of Economic and Monetary Union.

At the time we eurosceptics said over and over again not that they will not introduce this ridiculous idea (that was the line many self-deceiving Conservatives took) but that it will be introduced and it will be a disaster. There are thousands of words out there as well as many recordings of radio and TV appearances by this blogger and many others arguing themselves hoarse on the subject.

Well, what do you know? We have turned out to be right. And what happens? Sorrowfully, we are told by all those who were completely wrong that it is not nice of us to gloat; indeed, it is not nice of us even to say "told you so". Instead, we must all pull together to make this ... ahem ... fustrecluck work. For all our sakes.

Well, sorry. It was a bad idea then and it remains a bad idea. As, of course, is our participation in the whole European project.

5 comments:

  1. Yes, many of us wrote about the potential and actual failings in the euro in its early years. I know I was accused of writing too many letters on the subject. Later I had to point out I was angry, not "gloating", so I know what you mean.

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  2. It does rather take the fun out of gloating about the euro when so many people are losing their livelihoods. At the same time, the Europhiles continue to say that the project is a success, simply because the euro zone has not broken up -yet. Bernard Connolly commented on this and remarked that he had never expected to see unemployment levels at 1930s levels, still less to hear such an outcome proclaimed as a success. He also remarked that the euro-project represented a reversal of the outcome of the Second World War in economic terms - a defeat for the Anglo Saxon model.
    Jonah Goldberg's book was a joy - a timely reminder that many aspects of fascism were embedded in ideas which left wing folk regard as " progressive".

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  3. "He also remarked that the euro-project represented a reversal of the outcome of the Second World War in economic terms - a defeat for the Anglo Saxon model."

    That's just nonsense and Connolly ought to know better. The Anglo-Saxon model was destroyed by the British government during the war and immediately after it, always assuming it still existed in the late thirties.

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  4. He was, of course, speaking from an American perspective and also added that the ideal of the Anglo Saxon model had only been very imperfectly and partially realised.

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    1. Or, to be absolute accurate, its imperfect and partial form had been destroyed by the UK government and, to a great extent, the US government.

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