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I think this is a relatively substantial mischaracterization of Murray, who has mostly called himself a classical liberal, except when he decided to embark on the contrarian project of rehabilitating the by-then-already-discredited term ‘neoconservative’ in the late 2000s and early 2010s (largely since abandoned).
He’s a gay cosmopolitan man who essentially wants the cosmopolitan liberal society of the early 2000s to continue forever. He’s pretty open about that, and it is the main reason he is opposed to mass immigration from the Islamic world.
I'm not seeing the mischaracterization. He can call himself a classical liberal neoconservative and suck as many dicks as he wants, he is still haggling against progressive morality.
Why else would a gay cosmopolitan man care so much about the legacy of Winston Churchill? It's because it's a part of his foundation for why the west deserves to survive. A moral narrative of redemption. He doesn't leverage how many amazing gay bars there used to be in London.
It’s because Murray is British and thinks British culture and history are the best in the world, and Churchill is by far the most beloved British political / cultural figure in history, topping almost every single poll of the greatest British people of all time. Ideology is entirely secondary, although in general Murray, as a fan of the British Empire - of which he considered neoconservatism / liberal imperialism a successor - likes Churchill’s imperialism. Churchill’s actual opinions are irrelevant on both sides (see, for example, Cooper’s insistence that Churchill’s primary motivation in prosecuting WW2 was some debts he allegedly owed to Jewish moneylenders).
So is Churchill basically the British Abraham Lincoln, in terms of domestic praise? Or is this more about foreign perceptions of praiseworthy Brits?
I wonder if the same historiographical trends and forces that have happened to some extent over Lincoln have clear parallels for Churchill, or if the trajectory is very different. For example, modern emphasis on how Lincoln was willing to end the war keeping slavery intact, or suspending habeus corpus, was a racist, or a mini-tyrant. Unfair IMO, I think he deserves top billing as one of the best presidents alongside Washington.
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An absolute tragedy. Churchill isn't even a top 3 prime minister of UK.
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Still not seeing the mischaracterization. Why would Churchill, the man whose decision making process ultimately nailed the final nail in the coffin of the British empire, be venerated by the likes of Murray? It's because Churchill opposed Hitler.
Ideology, for the likes of Murray, is central. That is why he spent 30 minutes waffling about good and evil on Joe Rogan when the topic of Darryl Cooper came up.
Not really. Murray’s ideology is the status quo as of the late 2000s / early 2010s. As polling suggests, in the UK among his generation that includes the extremely mainstream and almost universally accepted viewpoint (outside of the radical left and Indians) that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest Britons of all time because he ‘won’ the last major war that the country was involved in - and really there is no deeper complexity to that perception.
Murray’s ideology makes him a small-c conservative in some ways (he basically wants Britain as it existed in like 2007 to exist forever and for it to be filled with people who accept the major tenets of liberalism forever) and a classical liberal imperialist in others. The latter (liberal imperialism) isn’t an oxymoron, by the way, it has a long tradition in British politics going back at least 180 years.
It’s hard to hate Murray because, like Harris, he’s actually pretty open about what he believes and he openly acknowledges that this is mainly based on his perception of his own self-interest. He’s a gay man who wants to export liberal western culture, by force, onto the whole world and prevent mass immigration of people who hate him. You can disagree with him, but he is ideologically consistent.
The veneration of Churchill does not sprout from just winning 'a war' but what war, against who and for what cause. As I stated before, it makes little sense for a fan of British imperialism to idolize the man who functionally ended the empire with his decision making.
We can also see by Murrays own words and actions that he is haggling against progressive morality as he presents his own interests in terms of his sexuality.
To that end nothing I say is a mischaracterization, only a realistic clarification of where Murray is coming from and why.
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