John Lloyd, always a sensible columnist, has a very nice article in the FT weekend magazine, also available if you subscribe to FT.com. It starts as follows:
"At Paris’s Theatre du Chatelet, Leonard Bernstein’s version of Voltaire’s Candide has just finished a run. It featured, in one scene, actors wearing masks to represent five world leaders. These were Tony Blair of the UK, George Bush of the US, Jacques Chirac of France, Vladimir Putin of Russia and - the one former leader - Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. The five are dressed in underpants, in the colours of their national flags",
and goes on to ridicule the unthinking acceptance of the radicalism of the modern left by polite society in Britain. We really are at the level of `two legs bad, Michael Moore good' and Lloyd pins the phenomenon down quite nicely. Read the whole thing if you can.
Two quotes and a book recommendation from the article:
`[the left] has become shrilly undiscriminating, thus threatening to make its tradition unfit for governance.';
`It has destroyed discriminating political thought in a large section of the allegedly thinking part of the west' [try most universities, for a start: ed.];
and the book is
What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen. It sounds promising.
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