The Other Club blog takes its name from a dining club founded by Winston Churchill and F. E. Smith in 1911. Rule 12 of that club: “Nothing in the rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere with the rancour or asperity of Party politics.”
The author is a Libertarian, and views most politicians as clowns.
“Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right…”
— Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan,
Not that politicians are actually funny. Just as the concept of “clown” has evolved as menacing, politicians ever tend toward authoritarian creepiness; disguised as “for the better good of the people.” They have good intentions. Promising state intervention attracts votes.
This applies to the right and the left, which is only a cosmetic distinction serving to mask the necessities of totalitarianism. Whoever rises to the top of an aspiring collectivist utopia will face the same forced choices. Across time, across cultures and embodied in dozens of fearless leaders, we have irrefutable evidence that collectivist state ideology results in economic disaster and human misery.
Identity politics is on the rise. It is necessarily collectivist – whether practiced by Alt-right or Ctl-left, Nazi or Communist, Donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren.
*And, yes, that’s a lobster hat on the donkey. A subversive channeling of Jordan Peterson?