Protest

What happens when someone who is considered a leader switches sides? Should his followers shun him or follow him?

This question is being asked again by many on the left after Nick Cohen, infamous leftist protester and activist has come out with his new book What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.

I was pointed to an interview Nick Cohen gave and he has clearly not left his roots, but he is questioning the current state of affairs among what he calls “Guardianistas”.

“Serious people on the left I have no trouble with. They may not agree with me but they know something is going wrong. An Oxford don has told me, ‘I’m against the war but I hate going on a demo with anti-semites and Trotskyites’. It’s the soft left liberal intelligentsia, those bloody comedians we get these days — they want to feel righteous, they dislike all ambiguity. They want to think they are good. They swear at me.”

Auntie gets it on the chin too. “I support the BBC but I think our problem is the concentration of media in London. When there is an absolute liberal consensus, everyone they meet, eat or sleep with thinks the same damn thing.” So in Iraq’s case this groupthink didn’t come in the hard questions they asked the other side, but the soft questions they asked their own side. “For years,” he writes, “the BBC’s attack dog presenters couldn’t manage to give one opponent of the war a tough interview. Not even George Galloway.”

Auntie got her “impartial, balanced” revenge; on Radio 4’s Start the Week last Monday Cohen was politely monstered by every other left-liberal guest. The Guardian also came up with a novel way of pigeonholing Cohen’s politics as unworthy of serious discussion. “The Guardian online talkboards carried a discussion with me and another supporter of the war from the left with a Jewish name, which was entitled: ‘David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen Are Enough to Make a Good Man Anti-Semitic’.” Not funny, not clever. He has also been pilloried on the paper’s op-ed pages by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.

In that quote we see the term “groupthink”. I recently came across this word in Paul Wells’ new book which I am reading now, but Paul elabourates on not only the meaning but some scientific study into “groupthink”. I will refrain from quoting Mr. Wells directly, but I will say that group think polarizes people according to the studies Mr. Wells quotes. It takes a bell curve where their are few at the extreme and shifts the mass of the bell towards that edge. This is clearly something our society is dealing with now on many issues. Americans and Brits in Iraq … polarized. Canadians in Afghanistan … polarized. Climate Change being unnatural … polarized, etc. etc. etc.

Cohen appears to be standing off from the polarized left on a few issues and as the quote says, he is being “pilloried … by an apologist for the communist dictatorship in Cuba.”?

Wow, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

The left and, in particular, Guardianistas, have made their bed by defending the rights of the minorities in their own nations. Yet only those hard core leftists, leave their own country to protest. The majority of that shifted Bell Curve crowd run and hide when push comes to shove and getting up off their ass is required. You never see the throngs protesting women’s rights in Kabul or Riyadh. You never see the throngs protesting the opening of a Chinese coal fired power plant in Shenzhen. Those not willing to go to the extreme are the ones that are polarized by GroupThink and not the idealogy itself. They just keep jumping on the bandwagon of the issue of the day and pick the left leaning side and champion it, keeping this GroupThink polarization mentality. After all, who wants to be pilloried by your “friends” over a Latte or a Chi at Starbucks?

According to Paul Wells, the Paul Martin government fell in large part due to GroupThink polarizing Liberals towards the idea of change and the extreme was too much change for Canadians. If we are lucky the leftist movement supporting Kyoto will fall because they are all pulling the rope in the same direction and it happens to be one heading towards a cliff that Liberal Environment critic David McGuinty said will cost us as much as $40 Billion a year. That’s a pretty steep cliff that even extreme left leaning Canadians may not want to get close to for fear of falling over.

If we can take anything positive from Nick Cohen’s defection, it is that resistance is NOT futile. We will NOT be assimilated. (If there is anything leftists can take from this, it is that polarization and groupthink will destroy them…but I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell them that before they make like lemmings.)

H/T to my friend Sandy for the Nick Cohen link.