Some wise words from Ed West at The Spectator, writing from a British perspective, but with some applicability over here (my emphasis added):

[I]t’s an illustration of how progressivism has become internalised that even generation rent can’t bring themselves to consider the possibility that the housing supply on a small quarter of an island with high density might be affected by over 300,000 newcomers a year. Anger about the lack of affordable homes is usually followed a few tweets later with a complaint about why we can’t have free movement. Perhaps… these two things are somewhat connected? Progressivism is simply the faith of the future. Corbyn, unlike May, offered a vision of the future, and when presented with a utopian-but-actually-nightmarish future over no future, most people will opt for the former.



West is right about that. But it cannot be strssed enough that grand ‘visions of the future’ are almost always to be distrusted. Give me pragmatic incrementalism laced with skepticism any day, well, most days. Sadly, this is not the majority view.

West:

I’ve always been of the view that the best ideas don’t necessarily triumph; what matters are how much prestige ideas carry, how much they are associated with high status people, and how much social proof their believers have. In middle class areas now it is not just the case that there are more Labour posters, as has always been the case for reasons of conspicuous compassion; it’s become almost like Northern Ireland. Membership of the Left has become a tribal thing.

To be fair, there’s a touch of tribalism about swathes of the right too.

But this is not just about tribe and social status. There are plenty of people who will believe (or profess to believe) in something as a way of proclaiming their virtue, both to themselves and third parties, and self-interest will usually be somewhere in their calculations too. To take an example from the Left, those who proclaim the merits of the powerful, nurturing state may believe that such a state is a worthy moral goal, but many of them will also think that they will either be running that state or be valued or, at the very least, helped by it.

West is right to be concerned by who has joined the tribe of the Left:

[T]he number of teachers who support Labour shows the extent to which conservatives now have an impossible uphill task; ditto the medical profession and sciences.



West links to some charts showing how teachers’ voting intentions ahead of the British general election. 65 percent of primary school teachers opted for Labour, only 7 percent for the Conservatives. 72 percent of secondary school teachers chose Labour, only 8 percent the Tories.

And that’s before you get to the universities.

West concludes:

Those of us still clinging to conservatism are like Julian the Apostate, the late Roman emperor who tried to turn the tide of Christianisation long after it had become unstoppable. As he might have put it, thou hast conquered, oh leftie.

That last is a reference to the emperor’s (apocryphal) last words: “You have won, Galilean”.

Intrigued, I turned to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

[Julian] viewed the royal court of his predecessors as inefficient, corrupt, and expensive. Thousands of servants, eunuchs, and superfluous officials were therefore summarily dismissed. He set up the Chalcedon tribunal to deal with the corruption of the previous administration under the supervision of magister militum Arbitio. Several high-ranking officials under Constantius including the chamberlain Eusebius were found guilty and executed. (Julian was conspicuously absent from the proceedings, perhaps signaling his displeasure at their necessity.) He continually sought to reduce what he saw as a burdensome and corrupt bureaucracy within the Imperial administration whether it involved civic officials, the secret agents, or the imperial post service.


The poor man would have been done for even without that spear in the gut…