A British pundit, Melanie Phillips, says that her country needs a Sarah Palin. In doing so, she makes some intriguing points:
so-called ‘progressives’ on both sides of the Atlantic have gone into paroxysms of rage and panic over Sarah Palin.
For she has taken the supposed characteristics of the Left – youth, dynamism, change, excitement and social conscience – and presented them as conservative virtues.
Since the Left habitually shores up its own position by demonising conservatives as nasty, backward-looking, mean-spirited, lifedenying, prejudiced, stupid and boring, it recognises her as a mortal threat – not just to Obama but to its whole political platform. . . .
Like McCain and Obama, [Tory leader David] Cameron too has grasped the public’s anti-establishment mood.
But he made the error of assuming that the reactionary old order to be overturned was conservatism, while change, hope and progress resided on the Left.
But this is a caricature which, although an article of faith among the media, bears scant relation to reality.
It is the Left which upholds the miserable social and educational status quo which causes such misery and harm to so many at the bottom of the heap.
It is the Left which preaches despair by believing that nothing can be done to stop social ills such as crime, drug addiction or teenage pregnancy.
Instead, it sets up vast infrastructures at public expense to mitigate their worst effects – which has the effect of entrenching and deepening those very social ills.
By contrast, any hope of real change for the better lies in the restoration of this country’s tradition of morality rooted in Christian religious conscience, exemplified by the Tories’ Social Justice Commission.
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