Roger Sandall, more right than ever

Sunday, August 11, the day of the Rudd-Abbott debate, also marked the first anniversary of the death of one of Australia’s greatest thinkers, Roger Sandall (1933-2012). Sandall’s The Culture Cult (2001) is a relatively slim tome and yet it provides the sharpest of insights into an ideology that has, over the past half century, hijacked the Left in Australian and throughout the entire Western world. Marx is dead – long live anti-bourgeois bohemianism!

Ideology is to a Leftist what reality is to the rest of us, and yet pro-Labor television and radio polemicists disavow any kind of political bias. For instance, both the staff and the management of the ABC are adamant their tax-funded media monster is not aligned with the Left. The national broadcaster’s managing director, Mark Scott, declared in May this year that it was “far too simplistic” to describe his network’s presenters as “leftist”, and then announced Paul Barry as the new compere of Media Watch, the ABC’s…