Today's young are breaking the cliché that you get more conservative as you get older. Council officials I spoke to were struck by how anxious they were for tough measures to be taken against the gangs which persecute them.Is the Counter-Counter Culture coming?
When the new generation grows up and takes over this country, liberals should prepare themselves for a shock. I'm sure they will be more tolerant than their parents of many things, but not, I think, of crime.
Friday, July 04, 2008
The Counter-Counter Culture
There is a brilliant piece from the Evening Standard by Nick Cohen the other day.
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10 comments:
I think you are on to something there .The Liberal elite that smarmed their way through the media ( typified by J Snow ...with his Neo Con bogey men) , are getting decidedly old .
The baby boomer generation who had it all are becoming the new old contemptibles except they really are and Nick C has written at length on this subject.
The problem I find is that there is a gap in the middle between the old Tories and the new right .
PS I suggest you read Fraser Nelson in the Speccie , superb , today
Nick Cohen misunderstands. We simply have very different views of what should and should not be a crime...
Can't remember who was that said it, but: "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged"
The idea has never really occurred to me before, but I suppose that it is inevitable that the generation growing up today are going to be conditioned (disfigured) by the fearful, retributionist atmosphere that prevails at the moment. If all you’ve ever known is the hyped, hysterical media coverage of crime, with its simplistic shrieks of indignation and its voyeuristic obsession with child murderers and youth knife crime, then you’re going to grow up scared and revengeful.
How could we realistically expect young people reared in our political culture to be liberal on crime? It is much more realistic to expect that they will be the hang’em and flog’em generation.
To read more of my views link to my blog, Just who the hell are we?, on wordpress.com:
http://adammcnestrie.wordpress.com/
henry crun..
It was Tojo wasn't it?
Adam
Do you think the average "yoof" is more affected by TV News or by their experience on the street?
I don't think its the Mail Wot Did It.
Surely that shuld be fearful re-distributivist??
Didn't we already have that. New Labour's anti-civil-libertarianism appeal to fear finds a lot of support among people of Cohen's age and not much younger.
Crime obsession in times of stable or falling crime has been one of the dominant themes of politics for the last 20 years. I blame Nick Ross, and latterly all those damn dramatic CCTV shows.
14,000 people treated in hospitals for knife crimes last year. No wonder people are saying enough is enough.
It's not about the left or the right - it's about reclaiming humanity.
dear dizzy.. how & when did you come up with the phrase "counter-counter culture"? i'm curious because aside from myself & the friends i've managed to infect with the word i've not come across any one else using it, so it's good to see someone else thinking along these lines..
I coined the phrase 4 or 5 years back as an attempt to define where i sit in the world (&always have); for me, most counter culture comes across as selfish self-aggrandizing posing, like hippy's -in the end counter culture offers little to the world at large other than further empowering the cult of the individual.
Counter-counter culture is the backlash to this bullshit mentality.
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