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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?

From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.

  • Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent

  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)

  • The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure

  • Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...

  • A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration

  • Liz Truss becomes PM

  • Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?

  • Liz Truss resigns as PM

  • Maybe Boris is coming back?

It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?

What's really happening, there. Help me out.

It also seems like everything needs to have some cutesy name like “Torrey” (which I assume is short for something like “tort”?).

Ah, it's so cute when the kids don't know history!

Explain first why the American political parties are a donkey and an elephant, before casting nasturtiums at other countries.

Anyway, the term is "Tory" (not "Torrey") and comes out of 17th century British and Irish politics. One derivation is that it comes from an Irish word meaning "outlaw", was first used to refer to dispossessed Irish Catholics who became outlaws and bandits, and then over the course of time was associated with the Royalist/Conservative faction in English politics (because the dispossessed Irish Catholics were of course anti-Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans in the English Civil War and anti-William of Orange and pro-James II during the Glorious Revolution), so the term was used to refer to the Royalists/Cavaliers as well, as a disparagement of them:

The term Tory was first introduced in England by Titus Oates, who used the term to describe individuals from Ireland sent to assassinate Oates and his supporters. Oates continued to refer to his opponents as Tories until his death. The word entered English politics during the 1680s, emerging as a pejorative term to describe supporters of James II of England during the Exclusion Crisis, and his hereditary right to inherit the throne despite his Catholic faith. After this, the term Tory began to be used as a colloquial term, alongside the word Whig, to describe the two major political factions/parties in British politics. Initially, both terms were used in a pejorative manner, although both later became acceptable terms to use in literary speech to describe either political party. The suffix -ism was quickly added to both Whig and Tory to make Whiggism and Toryism, meaning the principles and methods of each faction.

During the American Revolution, the term Tory was used interchangeably with the term Loyalists to refer to colonists that remained loyal to the Crown during that conflict. The term contrasts the colloquial term used to describe supporters of the revolution, Patriot.

Towards the end of Charles II's reign (1660–1685) there was some debate about whether his brother, James, Duke of York, should be allowed to succeed to the throne because of James's Catholicism. "Whigs", originally a reference to Scottish cattle-drovers (stereotypically radical anti-Catholic Covenanters), was the abusive term directed at those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Catholic. Those who were not prepared to exclude James were labelled "Abhorrers" and later "Tories". Titus Oates applied the term Tory, which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish Plot and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York.

The Tories and Whigs eventually became/had descendants that became the Conservative and Liberal political parties. The Liberals were very influential and powerful, but waned and were replaced by the Labour Party (which was working-class representation, trades unions, socialism, some communism, and everything in-between). They declined over time until in the 1980s they joined forces with a new party, the Social Democratic Party founded by moderate ex-Labour party members. Eventually the two merged to become the Social and Liberal Democrats, then the Liberal Democrats, and are now a shadow of what they have been.

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And the Republicans have a weird name, too -- what the hell is a Gee-Oh-Pee? And why is the technically younger party the Grand Old One?

Actually the Democrats before the Civil War used the "grand old party" language as well, but obviously dropped it after the war. The Republicans started using it in the late 1870s, in midwestern states where Republican hegemony was under threat from populist movements. The term conjured up images of the Civil War - the main Union veteran's organization was the "Grand Army of the Republic," and "grand" was also sometimes substituted with "gallant" in the expression, an explicitly martial word - so the "GOP" language was part of the Republicans' tried-and-true tactic of "waving the bloody shirt."

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