There is no obvious sign that LGBT pride events will become a thing of the past – indeed, to all appearances the movement seems to be growing stronger all the time. Yet that is exactly what I am going to predict: that the promotion of progressive politics (typified by the twin policies of abortion rights and LGBT rights) will, at some point, be consigned to history.
What is the basis for my prediction? To answer that I need to begin with a (short!) history lesson.
The Anabaptists
We’ll begin with an attempt to establish a theocracy in the city of Munster in Germany in the early days of Protestantism. Munster had a long history of anti-Catholic feeling from its Lutheran pastor and a man called Bernard Rothmann who regularly churned out pamphlets opposing Catholic doctrine. Towards the end of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-25, Rothmann’s pamphlets started to proclaim that the Bible called for the absolute equality of man in all matters including the distribution of wealth. The pamphlets, which were distributed throughout northern Germany, successfully called upon the poor of the region to join the citizens of Munster to share the wealth of the town and benefit spiritually from being the elect of Heaven.
A group of Anabaptists (Protestants whose key belief was adult baptism) arrived in town and were quickly elected to the city government. As moderate Lutherans hurriedly left the city, their property was shared out to the poor. Soon there was a proclamation that all property was held in common.
The city was soon under siege by forces led by the local Catholic bishop. It did not stop the development of new polices. Everybody was re-baptised. Icons and other images were smashed in cathedrals and monasteries. Then a new leader was appointed (because the old one believed he had a prophecy that he should set forth from the city to fight the Catholics with just twelve men – it didn’t work) who proclaimed that he had the royal authority of David and that the city was the new Zion. And because there were far more women of marriageable age in town than men – most of them ex-nuns – polygamy was legalised. The leader took sixteen wives.
All the while people were starving because of the siege. In the end the city was taken, the leaders killed, and the new Zion was at an end.
The French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789-1799 began with an uprising among the heavily taxed and starving common people against the aristocracy and clergy, led by some middle class men with radical ideas. It took three years of political struggle before the revolutionaries were fully in control; the king was executed shortly afterwards.
Very soon after that the radical Robespierre and his Jacobins assumed power. The following two years brought a mixture of good and bad ideas – price controls on food, abolishing slavery, expelling all religious leaders, creating a new secular calendar – but it also brought public executions of anyone remotely suspected of opposing the Revolution, giving the period its name of the “Reign of Terror”. There are stories of farmers reporting that their neighbours had expressed anti-Revolutionary sympathies and then taking over their farms after the inevitable execution. Old scores were settled in a similar way; there was no effective court system to weigh competing claims for justice, just a swift route to the guillotine for those who were accused.
The next government suspended elections, repudiated debts (creating financial instability in the process), and further persecuted the Catholic clergy. They did have significant military successes abroad but charges of corruption facilitated a coup led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.
Soviet Communism
Soviet Communism lasted from 1917 until 1989-91. Like the French Revolution, it started as a peasants’ revolt led by some radicals. Once established, they introduced a planned economy in which all industries were nationalised and controlled by the State. They too introduced a new calendar.
The Party was supposed to represent the interests of the workers, with Congress as its highest decision making body. However after Stalin took power, Congress became largely symbolic.
The centralised economy was rarely as well run as economies in Western countries. For example, the “One Big Factory” system where one factory would be the only supplier of a certain object for the whole Soviet Union was probably designed more to enforce dependency of the various internal republics on each other than for efficiency of production. It did not help that every factory had a manager and also a Party representative; the former could take no decisions without the approval of the latter, and the cost of running the huge Party bureaucracy was significant.
However, the economy showed its worst face during the “Holodomor” famine in Ukraine in 1932. The comparatively small harvest that did grow was shipped elsewhere (and considerable amounts were sold abroad) while the people literally starved to death – and were forced to watch films which portrayed peasants as counterrevolutionaries hoarding grain and potatoes. The number who starved to death in 1932-33 across the USSR (but mostly in Ukraine) was probably higher than the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler; as a measure of the desperation, 2500 people were convicted of cannibalism during that period.
Communist rule was sustained by suppression of alternative views by arrests or (in neighbouring countries) military force; by suppression of news from the West (many people were banned from travelling to non-Communist states); by inculcating a fear of Americans in particular; and by various economic tricks that robbed individuals in favour of the State. Eventually a new young leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided on a policy of openness to the West instead and granted free elections. The whole Communist system collapsed shortly after that.
So why is this history lesson relevant to modern progressive politics?
It’s relevant because there is a pattern to the above stories. It goes like this:
- An (arguably) good cause triggers a major change in official policies.
- The new policies take time to be fully established.
- When they are, they are taught in schools and elsewhere as “the right way”.
- The movement is taken over by even more radical people and produces ideas that are obvious lunacy to anyone who is not a radical.
- The new somewhat crazy system is sustained by suppression and oppression of alternate views.
- The whole system suddenly collapses.
I believe that progressive politics has reached stage 4: the stage of lunatic policies. It has certainly reached the previous stage, in lobbying if not in law: OFSTED’s head wants LGBT issues to be taught in primary schools (where they don’t even have sex education yet!) and the BBC recently screened a series of LGBT children’s stories on young children’s channel CBeebies.
Let’s take two examples of the lunacy, both from the USA whose politics tends to be a few years ahead of the UK’s:
Abortion
As President Trump and various US states have introduced limits on abortion, other Democrat-controlled states have gone the other way. It has now reached the stage where bills in some states and in the US Senate have been proposed to guarantee that babies who are accidentally born alive during an abortion should have a right to life and medical care – and every bill has been vetoed by Democrats.
Yes, you read that right. Democrat support for abortion has reached the stage of supporting infanticide (by deliberate neglect) of live babies. Every Democrat currently in the running to oppose Trump at the next election supports this kind of infanticide.
In many ways it’s just the logic of abortion taken to its ultimate extreme. Abortion rights advocates pay no attention to the rights of the baby; it’s all about the rights of the mother. Yet now the pretence that abortion doesn’t matter because an unborn baby is not a human being is gone; the belief is seen in its fullness. And to many Americans, it’s obvious (and horrifying) lunacy.
LGBT
The lunacy in LGBT is coming from the T – transgender rights. Apparently anyone can declare themselves to be transgender whenever they feel like it. Men can do so in a shop if they want to use the women’s toilets – an employee of the Target chain was fired for denying a man this ‘right’. Transgender people can compete in sports for the opposite sex which means several US women’s sports events are now being won by “transgender” men. And for good measure, there aren’t just two genders to choose from; you can be somewhere in between. New York State has defined a list of 23 genders that people can officially be (with a handful of new pronouns that people are legally forced to use), and a politician elsewhere in the US managed to find reference to 71 different genders. (He did it because his state’s legislature had to vote on whether to approve each one separately, and as he had hoped, they ran out of time!)
All of this has greatly upset feminists and other women who feel unsafe in public toilets where men are allowed entry (with good reason). Marina Navratilova, known as a lesbian as well as a star tennis player, has called the admission of men to women’s sports “insanity” – and has been roundly condemned by the current generation of LGBT lobbyists for doing so.
The feminists are right. Martina is right. This is lunacy.
What happens next?
What happens next is suppression and oppression of views opposing the progressive orthodoxy (which can already be observed, for example in the 'debate' about “gay conversion therapy”) followed by collapse of the whole belief system. I cannot say when this will occur, only that the collapse may well be sudden. I know of someone who predicted the collapse of Soviet Communism in an article written in May 1989 – but it wasn’t published until 1990, by which time it looked far less prescient than at the time it was written.
After that – who knows what will happen. If good sense prevails then being lesbian/gay/bisexual will probably be viewed as involuntary but not ‘normal’. A desire to change gender (to the other one – there are only two) will be viewed primarily as an unusual mental condition and treated as such, with transgender surgery only being a last resort. Abortion will be recognised as ending the life of a human being whose rights must be weighed against the mother’s. Maybe, to some extent, the father and the rest of the family should have a say too.
No doubt there will be some “true believers” in progressive politics who will fight against the new ways to the end of their days. After all, Russia still has a Communist party. There just won’t be enough of them to make any major difference any more.
