If we change our name, I suggest 'Doublethink Watch'

Nick has been rather busy recently, and I see that our readers are not short of opinions about his recent efforts. So here are a few points, which no doubt you will expand on or disagree with as you see fit.

I've not read What's Left in book form, though I have read the original Observer columns, but, as I understand it, the 'argument' of the book is best summed up by the Amazon five star review by 'HuddsOn'

These typically liberal traits - an effortless moral superiority, instinctive support for the underdog, and opposition to the status quo - are undoubtedly very easy to ridicule. But they are not inherently malign or wicked. They only become dangerous when they are un-coupled from any sort of genuine altruism. This is what Cohen means when he says the Left has lost its way.

In Cohen's view, substantial segments of the left are in danger of allowing their movement to degenerate into a trite, self-indulgent counter-culture, in which an angry anti-establishment posturing conceals a lack of a positive political programme. mpaigns, are defined by what they're against, not what they're for. Many people on the left are far too ready to draw an artificial moral equivalence between true tyrannies overseas and the very real but usually much milder moral failings of our own leaders and institutions. The author sets out to explore what's gone wrong and why.

That's from a positive review, and it sets out Nick's position as something has "gone wrong" with the left. It used to be good; now it isn't.

Here is Nick on Eric Hobsbawm

No one killed as many communists as the communists did. If Hobsbawm had followed the logic of his convictions and moved from Nazi Germany to seek a home in the Soviet Union rather than Britain, his chances of surviving would have been slim. Either the party would have shot him in the great purge for being foreigner and a Jew to boot, or he would have been forced to denounce innocent comrades to save his skin.

Shorter Nick, the left was always rotten. I did not study PPE at Oxford like Nick, so perhaps I lack his philosophical training. I cannot see how one can believe both 'the left used to be good' and 'the left was always bad'. I only observe that Nick manages to do so.

HuddsOn on "What's Left" again:

The influence of the postmodern theorists, Cohen explains, has also been thoroughly disastrous. Despite, or because of, their impenetrable jargon - "homogenizing epistemic logic", "representationalist discursive areas", etc - many of these obscurantists were able to achieve a high degree of credence in university humanities departments.

Nick on Hobsbawm:

When he stops trying to persuade us to avert our eyes from some of the worst crimes in human history, his merits peek through the fog of obfuscatory prose.

Obfuscation is both new, and the result of post-modernism, and old, and somehow entangled with Marxism or something. Ray Noble's observations on love aside, again I can't see how something can be old and new at the same time.

Elsewhere, Nick reveals that he's heard of Johnson and Boswell, and quotes the former. He's sure that Huffington Post bloggers are unpaid. I'm not. I can't find submission guidelines on the site, but it clearly requires a lot of editorial staff and recruits very like a newspaper. Besides, while it's not as if the blogs are its major draw, I can't believe that Dan Rather would write for free. Many of the HuffPo bloggers aren't, but he a professional journalist. Even if some HuffPo bloggers did write for nothing, none could have thought that it was anything other than a business.

Then there's the Foreign Office.

What set the Foreign Office apart from other cynical western chancelleries was that it was not content with appeasing today's secular dictators. It went on to embrace the theocrats of the Muslim Brotherhood it expected to become the religious dictators of the future.

This seems wrong to me. I admit to a certain glibness in my analyses also known as "they're all as bad as each other" (this works for banks, politicians, countries, religions, women, Top Gear hosts, and much else besides) -- but given, as we all know, that the US supported the Taliban and armed it during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I find it hard to credit the idea that other countries are marked by a distaste for 'theocracy'. Of course, I also don't know what counts as a theocracy. Does Saudi Arabia (with fairly nasty Sharia laws)? Does Israel? Does Pakistan?