Read on Twitter
Points that I’ve been trying to make, made much more succinctly by Gary Younge here. https://twitter.com/leftwood/status/1333678366378037258
Younge is much nicer than I would be but at root: the commentariat all know each other, are mates, have shared interests, tend to clump around the same broad, basic views and take the same ideas as automatically true, no matter whether they are true or not...
...To the average punter it looks like a conspiracy, and it kind of is, but only in the way that the legal profession is a conspiracy - a bunch of likeminded people with similar but differing backgrounds, who all share interests and take the same view on certain broad issues.
There’s no meeting in a smoke-filled room to decide who’s good and who’s bad; which policies are desirable and which aren’t. There’s no need for one - everybody knows and anyway, if anyone steps out of line, social pressures in the profession will chivvy them back to good manners
The last five years have asked and answered the question: what if these people absolutely are not up to the task of explaining what’s going on? What if they instead refuse to understand and dig their heels in against reality as one bloc, creating their own alternate reality?
Put it this way: you don’t get an entire profession unifying around plainly idiotic ideas like “We’ll defeat Johnson and Brexit by voting for the party which will win eleven seats and if it doesn’t work, fuck it, it won’t be our fault” unless something has gone terribly wrong.
