Yes. Most people once matured and became more conservative as they aged and gained experience. These days, alas, the most uneducated young people in history have been ruined by the brain-washing camps called universities to the point that maturation and the ability to think freely no longer exists in the appalling people who will eventually finish off Western society.

Quite a surprisingly impressive article. I started off a bit earlier than David, but finished up quite a bit later :(

Yes, I don't recognise the current crop of nihilists as socialist - not that, on reflection, socialism ever appealed to the blokes I worked with. As David says, and quite rightly too, they were much more interested in working hard AND hanging onto whatever they earned. And anyway, by the mid-sixties when I started in factories, trying to rally my comrades for the imminent proletarian revolution, almost all of them were fairly new immigrants, some with far more experience of real socialism than I could ever imagine.

Marx would probably categorise much of today's 'left' as nihilist, or anarchist: tear everything down and start from scratch sort of people. There are only right or wrong people in their view, and if you're wrong, it's total: you're Alt Right, fascist, etc. The irony is of course that such absolutism verges inevitably towards the fascist.

There used to be two kinds of anarchist (at least): those like my poor old grand-dad who wanted all people to be free and equal and nobody ruling over them, no governments, no power at all anywhere, somehow; and those who impatiently want to destroy all of tainted society, to hell with the consequences, and start again with (somehow) a clean slate, to build a New Utopia, for which they need tight control, i.e. total power. Of course, Marx had a bit of both.

I hope the journey these days is shorter than it used to be, but I fear that it will inevitably move off in a very wrong direction. It's worth remembering that the great majority of Germans who voted Communist in the late twenties, voted Nazi in the thirties.

Joe

I disagree with your particular take David and find my eyebrows marching up my forehead so far they merge into a receding hairline at the idea you were once a young socialist!

All those who claim to be left-leaning are anything but, including the divisive greens.

The problem is not young elf indulgent socialists but rather the selfish and self-serving political opportunists And say almost anything for a headline. The idea you ever had a heart also beggars belief.

And brains? Can only see where your thinking ability has been mostly circular and one doesn't need to have much in the way of brains for that or your well-publicised attack, for rank political outcomes, on single mums e.g.

You'll have a nice day now y'hear.
Alan B.

Joe I am always delighted by your common sense but you are surprised that Germans who first voted communist then voted Nazi? I would have thought they were two sides of the same coin and it said a lot about the political classes at that time. Let's face it, politics is a filthy business infested by even filthier people.
What's the solution? Sorry I do not know.

J.B. Nazi fascists (Social democrats haha) were what we now describe as far-right or alt-right, the communists of the extreme left.

What they share in common is a predilection for extremely authoritarian administrations/leaders.

Communism requires slavery for its economic survival!

Neither system is moderated by integrity or a moral compass. And seems to hare the latter with most politicians with their non-core promises, weasel words, endless blame-shifting and eternal prevarication?
Alan B.

Hi JBowyer,

Yes, I know that now, but it took a long time: of course, being on the idiot Left, I assumed for decades that Communism and Nazism were at opposite ends of a spectrum, totally unlike, with wishy-washy democracy somewhere in the ineffective middle. Bullsh!t.

As Hayek pointed out, there is really more like a triangle (if you like graphical representations), between communism, fascism and democracy: sometimes some people at the edges of democracy flirt with extreme-right or extreme-left, but more often in practice, the totalitarianism of those extremes drives them towards each other.

So, according to Hayek (and I fully agree), there are two alternatives: democracy; or one of the 'brotherly' extremes of fascism and communism. We fight either for democracy, equality, the rule of law, etc., in the context of an imperfect and always-changing political scene - or we submit our brains and bodies to one form of totalitarianism or the other. Or of both varieties, alternately.

This might explain why, back in the 1920s, so many writers, philosophers, academics, etc., could visit both Mussolini's Italy and Lenin/Stalin's Soviet Union, and praise both equally. That sounds crazy now but it was so. Both types of society devalued anything democracy, being so sure that they had hit on the Perfect Society blueprint, their Utopia, immaculate and fully-formed. So why risk democracy when you could already have perfection ?

As Churchill said about democracy .......

Joe