The left is succeeding in making your life miserable because they hate humanity.

LIBERALS TRY TO MAKE PEOPLE’S LIVES WORSE

What we call liberalism in America is a global philosophy or movement. Thus, what Janet Daley writes in England’s Telegraph applies equally here, and across the West: “The Left now has a demonic new aim: to make ordinary people poorer.”

We are living through the most startling political realignment in more than 100 years. Never since the advent of modern socialism in the early 20th century has the Left openly advocated making ordinary people poorer, thereby leaving those on the Right to defend the spread of mass prosperity. The debate (if this tendentious chorus of unanimity can be called a debate) on net zero has entirely shifted the ground on which modern political discourse has been based.

This role-reversal is especially clear in the features that were once most characteristic of Left-wing and Right-wing allegiance: it is the radical young who now tend to be most adamant that the freedoms and comforts that come with widespread disposable wealth should be prohibited, while the traditionally conservative older generation is left to fight for what used to be the Left-liberal doctrine that higher income and the independence it brings should be spread as widely as possible. Where organised protest movements in the past have been inspired by the idea that the masses were too poor, now they promote the idea that most ordinary people are too rich.

That is exactly right. The liberal philosophy, reduced to its essence, is that most people need to be poorer, to consume fewer resources. To do less. To enjoy less. But not them, of course. Us.

This is most obvious when it comes to energy:

Until very recently, there was no respectable voice calling for an end to the spread of prosperity to the developing world, as well as in the advanced nations. Now it is not just the juvenile Left making this extraordinary demand. Politicians of the centre-Right who had adopted pretty much wholesale the doctrine of social justice – which is to say, everybody having an equal chance for economic self-determination and a materially comfortable life – find themselves having to justify penalising ordinary people for heating their homes or for travelling beyond their own neighbourhoods.