Time to play dirty? Lessons from the David Starkey affair

Nice guys like Starkey and Darren Grimes, and the rest of us, face some choices. Alinsky notoriously suggested that we don't play fair. None of his neo-marxist cultural revolutionaries would disagree.

We either play the game that we have been forced to play, or we surrender. Rod Dreher's Benedict Option – retire to the caves and hope for the best – may not work for those who have to interact on a daily basis with the progressive world, earn a living, and put food on the table for their families.

It might be objected that many of those who chant BLM talking points are not really "revolutionary", but are merely either useful idiots or sincere liberals who merely want justice for their favoured victim groups. For the oppressed homosexuals and blacks and women and whoever might feel oppressed on a bad day.

(Truth to tell, we are all capable of feeling oppressed. And, objectively, we may well be oppressed. And not only in convenient leftist-defined categories. As a left-handed batsman, I often felt oppressed when facing devious right-arm bowlers with a good leg cutter. Life sucks).

No, anyone who witnessed the Grimes interview in the aftermath of the Starkey cancellation must see the stark (no pun intended) realities we face. Ignoring for the moment the truly mind-blowing current challenges like Covid fascism and its attendant suspensions of freedom, for no good cause, and the ever encroaching Chinese communist imperialism, we have to peer over the horizon and acquire a new realism about the continuing and potentially civilisation-ending culture war.

The opposition means business. They hate us. They know there is a war being fought. A war they intend to win. Some like Marc Sidwell who has recently penned a great small book, The Long March, think that the war is in fact already over, won by the left. Eminent philosophers like the late Sir Roger Scruton would no doubt have agreed. The task is now to accept defeat in the first culture war, then figure out how to fight back and reclaim all of our lost ground in a new offensive campaign. A new war. To gather warriors around us, and plot the way forward, with resolution, intent and carefully deployed resources.

The innocent right endlessly and tediously plays the left's game.

As Bernard Woolley who in Yes Prime Minister all those years ago, pointed out this reality to the hapless, fictional Jim Hacker. Like all conjuring tricks, you will always take the card the conjurer plays. The appeal to forgiveness, to reason, to rational debate between equally equipped intellectual adversaries, is all-but-compelling to a rational, liberal mind. Sadly, it don't work. We are not dealing with liberal minds. The response of conservatives and true liberals is, sadly, the product of a naïve mindset.

It is past time to re-read Machiavelli.

The next move is ours. History, in every sense of that term, depends upon our response. Time to play dirty. The other side does. It knows no other way.