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Nick O'Connor's avatar

You make a strong case that the US (and other Western democracies) have moved leftwards, by your definition. I'm not sure you even try to make the case either that the world has moved leftwards, or that it inevitably does so. Has China moved leftwards? Has Russia? Has India? If they haven't, what makes you think they will? In what sense does the small proportion of the world population living in developed countries adequately represent The World?

There is a sense (in Western democracies) in which the right is the brake, and the left the accelerator. It can seem more useful and exciting to identify with and press on the accelerator - that the right are just small men on the wrong side of history. But sometimes the brake stops the car from driving over a cliff. If the move leftwards was inevitable, and the role of the right futile, then a communist government in the US would have murdered millions of its own citizens, and its tyranny might well continue today. Tens of millions more of the disabled and disadvantaged would have been sterilised (on the grounds of fairness and justice, as so often argued by the left). In relation to which of the supposedly inevitable triumphs of the left in our own day, that you say the right are just pointlessly delaying for a few years, will the rearguard action of the right actually succeed, drive back the left, and save civilisation?

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Will Remmes's avatar

Fascinating essay. While I don’t dispute this theory, which probably holds for the last several hundred years of human history (probably longer), there does seem to be a major societal shift that could throw a major wrench in the trend: rapidly declining fertility.

If “right wing” Christians/Muslims/Jews continue having disproportionately more children than today’s leftists, might his trend reverse in the next 20-50 years?

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