Dare to suggest Labour combine socialist economics with the politics of place and they’ll get the pitchforks out
Imagine you wrote a book warning of the dangers of drugs, only to find yourself labelled a ‘junkie’. Or perhaps one in which you argued the case for women’s equality and were immediately denounced as a ‘misogynist’. Then imagine that your accusers, before casting these aspersions, hadn’t even read the thing.
Well, something along those lines happened to me this week. My book, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, analyses the rupture between the British Left and working-class voters, and concludes that a contributory factor was the former’s increasing tendency towards authoritarianism and its habit of shutting down legitimate debate by dismissing opponents routinely as ‘fascists’, ‘xenophobes’, ‘racists’, and suchlike.
The prominent diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo raked in $12,750 for a speaking gig last month at the University of Wisconsin—70 percent more than the other keynote speaker, black female author 