jokerman
Vital Football Hero
How people arrive at their political positions is no simple thing to answer. You might say that my conservatism is a function of my age and comfortable position in life. I'm alright Jack and have something to lose. You might say that someone else's anger at the world is a function of their own personality, experience and resulting unhappiness. Both might be true, but assuming either is disrespectful, probably wrong, and the arguments are still to be had.
My impression, and it is only an impression, is that most of the people who comment on Guardian pieces are young, university-educated, and insecure and that the Guardian's editorial policy now is to feed this, just as much as The Telegraph feeds other troubled dispositions. It's also my impression that The Guardian comments section is the least tolerant of the three papers I look at. You see flat out ding dongs on The Telegraph and The Times comments sometimes, but dissent on the Guardian is met by pretty fierce crowding, justified by a collective sense of being right, clear seeing, and fighting fearful odds. This is not a comment on the article writers nor, I suspect, on the vast majority of the people who read the paper, just those who comment who, like all of us on here, are batshit crazy in one way or another. It is worrying though since I still assume The Guardian readership to be the thoughtful, good guys (although not half as thoughtful or half as good as some of them assume themselves to be).
I think any claim to love one's country has to embrace the whole enchilada, not just selective, romanticized accounts of the bit we like, be it the rise of Britain to top nation, indigenous Englishness, or the heroic struggle of the working class for liberty. Take the English civil war. The whole struggle is part of our story -not just the cavalier bit or the roundhead bit. And Britain's story is not just the story of people trying to advance progressive reform and those who opposed them. It's also the story of people trying to create a place secure from without, safe within, at peace with itself, respected, rich and happy, and there is by no means a simple relationship between all those goods, or between them and the key planks of a progressive platform. How we puzzle our way through all this was, and continues to be, the story of our country.
