Much of the left, the metropolitan Guardian left especially, remains deeply in love with its hatred of Thatcher, unaware that thirty years on this is the most conservative of emotions. The widespread, vicarious – and alarmingly cross-generational – nostalgia for a time of “real battles” is another melancholy ingredient of this pathology (part of what in the 1990s I called the “socialist heritage industry”). The outcome is a form of self-entrapment that corrodes the capacity to begin to understand the political experience of the last four decades in all its many-sidedness, contingency and complexity.

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Much of the left, the metropolitan Guardian left especially, remains deeply in love with its hatred of Thatcher, unaware that thirty years on this is the most conservative of emotions. The widespread, vicarious – and alarmingly cross-generational – nostalgia for a time of “real battles” is another melancholy ingredient of this pathology (part of what in the 1990s I called the “socialist heritage industry”). The outcome is a form of self-entrapment that corrodes the capacity to begin to understand the political experience of the last four decades in all its many-sidedness, contingency and complexity.

(Source: tonycurzonprice)

January 15, 2012

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