The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is a terrific question. Stoppard is reputed to have paused and then answered: “What I most despise are conservatives who don’t conserve.” The sting is more acute when you realise that Stoppard was one of a very few conservatively-inclined writers in today’s world. Nor did he live off public grant-giving bodies that uniformly shun anyone on the political Right. Nope, his plays actually made money – a lot of money – because they were so good.
But think about Stoppard’s point. Today’s Right-of-centre political class is so lacking in cultural confidence that it rarely can summon up the will to conserve anything that just 30 or 40 years ago most all of us would have considered to be of great value and importance. An education system that instils a sense of the West’s greatness, and not just its flaws? Nope. Too hard. A university system which didn’t let its standards plummet over the past three decades, drive out any academics with views to the Right of your average Lib Dem MP, become a factory for race grievance politics graduates and didn’t also become a ponzi scheme, visa-granting machine dressed up as an ‘export industry’? Again, nope. In fact, as I have noted more than once in the past, our unis here in Australia got worse every single year of the nine years of Coalition governments before Anthony Albanese came in and supercharged the descent.
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