This video is an hour long, but I can assure you that it flies by, because Nick Cohen speaks like a man whose hour has come. Watch it if you want to understand the perverse dynamics of current Western politics.
I have to admit that a few years ago I was a bit worried for Nick. The pressure of having to write so many different columns can’t be conducive to a tolerable psychological equanimity, especially if your only mode is full-on, righteous polemic and you have to summon it for four deadlines a week.
But by God, What’s Left? has been vindicated in every particular. His arguments about where liberals have gone wrong are now undeniable, and he now makes them with a devastating clarity and fluency.
The death of Christopher Hitchens has left a gaping void in the market for an Englishman of rectitude, fortitude and eloquence to go and sort out the Americans’ politics for them. Nick Cohen is surely the man to fill it.
Go Nick!
That’s more like it, What’s Left seemed more end-of-term reportish for the school bully than clinical dismemberment. Cohen’s interview shows him as a principled, decent coherent man although he was recently morphing into a sort of Martin Lutherish (political classes for the hammering of) character, albeit one who had not yet found his Erasmus or Albrecht Durer.
However, I have this feeling that, although his mantra is fairness for all God’s critters there is an opt out clause as long as they ain’t Conservatives or, indeed, conservatives, we can stay round the campfire, as long as we accept reformation.
He’s getting there, I think Malty.
He often remembers to stick in a paragraph about how ‘the right are just as bad at this’ etc but it’s never nearly as convincing as when he’s hammering his own side.