I’m starting to think that the Left might actually be right
It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.
The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
Moore is not recanting a lifetime of conservative beliefs. Rather, he is re-examining them in the light of current affairs:
The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy.
That last bit about confusing populism and democracy is an underlying flaw of the Tea Party right. I hope it does not take the US voter 30 years to figure out that we are being misled by a power-hungry few.
A dyed-in-the-wool conservative, convert to Catholicism, and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore asks questions that all true conservatives and Reagan republicans should be asking themselves.
(Moore’s full bio:
Charles Moore was born in 1956 and educated at Eton, and Trinity College, Cambridge where he read History.
He has been editor of The Spectator (1984-90), the Sunday Telegraph (1992-5) and The Daily Telegraph (1995-2003).
He is the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher and continues to write for The Specator and The Daily Telegraph.)