Another incisive piece by Gerard Baker in the Times notes the fact that in both America, where President Bush’s ratings are in free fall and he can’t even secure the appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, and in Europe, where the revolt against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ market capitalism is in full flood and Tony Blair, despite triangulating in the face of this as the face of gritty realism, has nevertheless just seen off the electoral forces of conservatism at home for the third time in a row, the left is resurgent. As Baker notes, the characteristics of this left revival are anti-globalisation and visceral anti-Americanism – with the main target of their ire and scorn America’s mission to spread democracy. As Baker writes:

‘In the Middle East the left finds it much easier to side with the mullahs and the jihadists, the persecutors of women and the torturers of dissidents. America’s flaws at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed by the Left’s political and intellectual leaders as morally indistinguishable from (or perhaps worse than) anything the Islamists and Arab despots have got up to.

'To be fair, not all on the Left have taken their stand on the side of reaction. But the trends in political debate in the West are strikingly clear. We are well on the way to an inversion of the classic Left-Right divide. These days if you’re in favour of policies designed to promote global economic integration, policies that have led hundreds of millions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the misery of grinding poverty, and have significantly lifted the standard of living of workers in the West too; if you support change to topple tyrannical regimes and give some hope to people who have suffered in fledgling democracies, you’re now more likely to be considered a conservative. What, exactly, is Left?’

As I have remarked before, it seems to me that one of the deeper reasons for the left’s pathological hatred of President Bush is that, in his foreign policy it is he who is acting as a liberal interventionist and it is the left who stand exposed as reactionary supporters of murderous and tyrannical ‘stability’. It is the same in domestic policy, where it is the left who take the reactionary position of going along with socially destructive trends that make victims out of the vulnerable. British Tories haven’t understood this at all — which is why they are still impersonating a slow train crash, from which it seems tactful to avert one's gaze.