Consider what old-fashioned Marxists used to dub ‘the ruling class’.

In a loose and imprecise sense what they meant were the people who occupied the pinnacle places in society, the top politicians, bureaucrats, corporate elites, media barons, university chieftains, top scientists and medicos, the legal establishment, that sort of thing. Of course a great irony of ‘Marxism in action’ was that the new ruling class under communism was far more disdainful of the views of regular people and more invested with a condescending, self-interested noblesse oblige attitude than was the case with the elites they overthrew. Basically, politburo elites became a politicised, monolithic monstrosity.

Of course nothing like what we saw in the old Soviet Union exists today. But what we can see with today’s ruling class across the democratic world is a very bad trend. Our Western political, corporate and even religious leadership has become seriously third-rate. It is ever more monolithic in its outlook – in thrall to a sort of human rights barrister’s type of lefty ‘progressivism’ that dominates nearly everywhere

Prepared to suppress dissenting views and even to indulge in outright censorship as necessary evils, to be condoned and practised in the name of saving the planet or stamping out hate or upholding a strict lockdown? Tick. (I assume readers will realise this characterisation of theirs is open to challenge on just about every axis going.)

Prepared to swallow a group rights type thinking that deals exclusively in an ‘equality of outcome’ pseudo-Marxism, one that downgrades the individual and his or her autonomous choices while dressing up all this barely disguised quota-thinking in the language of ‘diversity, equity and inclusiveness’? You betcha baby! In fact, they think, let’s force employees regularly to have to undertake little modules where they must declare their allegiance to this diversity and equity thinking.

Think I’m overstating this sort of third-rate monolithic orthodoxy because, for my sins, I work in a university?

Well, we now know there was loads of evidence that Covid escaped from the Wuhan lab and that Mr Fauci in the US knew this was a strong likelihood because he oversaw some of its funding. When this was mooted early on the reaction in the legacy media (including in a top scientific journal) was ridicule and censorship. Ditto as regards Big Tech – and if any sentient being believes so-called ‘fact checkers’ do anything other than uphold a sort of political purity test he or she is dreamin’. Big Tech is for Big Left and if that means censorship, so be it. Or think of the dissenting doctors, epidemiologists and scientists who authored the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration.

I think every single claim made by these dissenters has been proved right. But the reaction to it by legacy journalists, politicians and the public health caste was basically just to spend two years ridiculing it and trying to censor it as much as possible. Not refute. Censor.

Or look at what the Durham investigation is now turning up about the extent to which Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and like-minded highly placed people in the FBI and other parts of the senior Washington DC bureaucracy were prepared to go to manufacture a bogus ‘Russia collusion’ lie that would hobble the first half of Trump’s tenure. This is an order of magnitude worse than Watergate, but most of the legacy media is schtum.

I could go on and on but I’ll leave readers to fill in further examples for themselves. The fact is the democratic world, or at least the Anglosphere portion of it, has the worst establishment class of my lifetime. No bravery. No deep commitment to freedom. No willingness to stand up to the wholly unrepresentative Twitter mob. No realisation that they inherited the best culture and places to live in human history and are making things worse. Cowardice. Pusillanimity. And dollops of self-interest.

That leads me to ask: is there a sentient being who still believes the Liberal and National parties in Australia believe in anything at all other than their own electoral survival?

Take our current Prime Minister, the man who defenestrated not one but two of his predecessors. His every instinct seems different to mine. He ignores the presumption of innocence and jumps to assuage the Twitterati in at least four high-profile cases, including a recent one involving a young man contesting a rape charge. He downplays freedom as a value at every turn. He says it was the premiers who imposed some of the worst, most brutal lockdowns in the world. But it was ScoMo who opened the chequebook at every turn to facilitate them

And never once that I can recall did our PM open his mouth and lambaste this despotism and illiberalism. Not one, single, solitary time.

Or take the vaccine mandates. (Full disclosure: I took two shots, not least because I wanted to get out of Australia and see my kids.) Mandates are a disgrace; they don’t work; the virus spreads through vaccinated and unvaccinated alike; no supposedly liberal/conservative politician should support them. And they don’t in Britain, Canada and the US. Mr Morrison tries to finesse this by saying it is the states imposing the mandates. He says it’s up to businesses to decide. The Commonwealth government has clean hands he pleads. Again, that’s a blatant prevarication.

The feds have the money and fund the states. No money, the mandates end. Worse, the feds almost completely fund the universities. Many of them have imposed vaccine mandates. On the PM’s theory, the funder is the decider. In other words, the PM and the Coalition government are implicitly supporting these vaccine mandates in the university sector. If ScoMo wanted, he could end them tomorrow. He clearly doesn’t want to. Quod erat demonstrandum.

We have a political and elite class does nothing when BLM protests explode; one that sees police officers ‘taking the knee’ with unruly protesters; one that watches real protesting violence with indifference, if not approval. We have that same class that does little or nothing when Extinction Rebellion protests snarl up traffic, or when Aboriginal protests camp out somewhere for years. But when truckers who have had their livelihoods ruined join many others to protest the worst inroads on our civil liberties in 200 years (that’s former UK Supreme court judge Lord Sumption, not just me), then the political class reacts. It ludicrously misportrays the vast majority of these protestors as Nazis or racists or anti-vaxxers. (Note: There are real questions about the vaccines and they are one of the least effective vaccines ever. Look at the worldwide data.) It, with the help of a well-trained press, tries to pretend there’s nothing to see here, folks.

I admit I’m very angry about what has happened the last two years – to the self-employed, those in small business, to the poor, and especially to the young. The young have been sacrificed on the altar of a few opinion polls. And here’s the irony. Throwing principle to the wind and being governed by focus groups is in the end counter-productive. You lose elections going down that road.