Giles Fraser makes a confession:
I voted for Margaret Thatcher. We all decided down the pub that this was the best way forward. Forget the Labour party and their pathetic version of incremental change. What was required was nothing less than a revolution. And in order to bring this about, things had to get a good deal worse. That was the logic: a Thatcher government would trigger a general uprising against the inequalities created by free-market capitalism. I know, I know – the foolishness of youth. It was a stupid idea. But it was a bizarre measure of the extent to which I hated Thatcherism as a philosophy that I was prepared even to vote for Thatcher to defeat it.
Bizarre is right. For I too have been young (though you may not believe it), and there are follies in my past which might have been due in part to my youth. But that particular folly – that we should try to make things better by contributing to making them worse first – never. Wherever does it come from? Think of other spheres of human endeavour. War: we’ll help the enemy win, the better to prevail once we’ve been crushed. Literature: I’m going to start my book with three really incoherent and badly written chapters. Personal relations: I’ll be horrible for a few years, so that they’ll appreciate me all the more later. Sport: let’s lose a couple of Tests so as to make the opposition complacent. And so on.
In politics the folly is compounded by considerations specific to that domain. One: a political defeat can sometimes be calamitous, something your ‘side’ doesn’t recover from for years or even decades. Two: the interests of real people are at stake; how can you credibly claim to have their interests at heart if you’re willing to sacrifice them as an exercise in political education? The assumption, moreover, that everything will be revealed by a political reverse, a period of suffering, or what have you, betokens a view of the world in which the truth is just sitting there waiting to be grasped. Things are always much harder than that.
So foolishness indeed, but a lot of young people manage to avoid it.