Athgarvan Musings

Will the world be very different after this election? Does the election really matter whoever’s elected. Is this election as important as the world wants us to believe it does? The world, in the guise of the two major parties and the whole ideological apparatus that supports them — the think tanks, writers, magazines and websites, the entertainment and news industries — depends upon our passionate commitment to a this-worldly politic. It does this in part by making small differences look big, and by making political identities more important than other identities.

G.K. Chesterton (What’s Wrong With the World, 1910)  compares Gudge (conservative) and Hudge (liberal). Our mainstream conservatives and liberals differ in some ways from those of 116 years ago, but not all that much. Chesterton suspects they are secretly partners and only pretend to fight. Gudge wants something profitable, and Hudge obligingly comes with an idealistic-sounding rationalization. “Hudge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance", he writes. In particular, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.