Jacobites and Jacobins: the problem with Yes fundamentalism, Promised Joy, Posted: November 29, 2014

I voted Yes. I was sure it was the right thing to do.
It was an article of faith on the Yes side that lots of citizens had journeyed from No to Yes, but no one ever headed in the opposite direction.
Well, more than two months after September 18th, I look around me at what the Yes movement has become. And I think I want out.
[…]
It all seemed so positive at the time. But I’m increasingly concerned that the Scottish public sphere faces a serious threat from authoritarian, sanctimonious Yes fundamentalists.
And that’s the very opposite of what I thought I was voting for.
[…]
[On the SNP]
• identification with the nation, alongside heavy hints that other parties are not identified with the nation;
• the attempt to crowd out other parties as unnecessary to the business of governing Scotland since they know what needs to be done;
• hostility to the neighbouring government, and the attempt to base their own governing legitimacy in their opposition to it;
• mass rallies;
• a romantic air of dewy-eyed defiance.
[…]
[On RIC]
More annoying is the combination of leftist vanguardism and Scottish manifest destiny that has infected supposedly radical conversations since the referendum.
To explain, there is a conviction (that word again) among fundamenalist Yessers that “the 45″ possess a privileged understanding of the direction of history, and that independence is inevitable. Therefore, people who voted against independence are barriers to progress. This is the classic false consciousness trope – those people were wrong and don’t understand what’s good for them.
This sense of being the vanguard of a better future society shaped most of the Radical Independence workshops, and particularly the keynote speeches (with the notable exception of Patrick Harvie, who has retained his objectivity throughout).
The sentimental “we shall overcome” tone is new – no one really spoke like that before the Yes campaign lost. Everyone was at pains to stress how un-nationalist they were. And they were! But suddenly there’s something magical about Scotland that will guide her to independence.
[…]
But far, far worse than any of that was the People’s Vow.
The event climaxed, in what sounds like an all too organismic sense, with the reading of a National Covenant de nos jours.
Where do you start with this? The People’s Vow is a classic piece of vanguard rhetoric. It doesn’t matter if we lost the referendum, it argues – we know better than the voters “who weren’t quite ready this time”. That’s the 2 million voters who weren’t quite ready. That’s a lot of voters. And, ready or not, the People’s Vow dictates terms on equality, land reform and other matters.
Who are these “People”, exactly? Are the people making the vow, or is it made on their behalf? And by whom? And is it also made on behalf of “the 55%” who weren’t quite advanced enough to understand their historical responsibilities?’
[…]
[On the National]
the Herald’s publishers knew that Yes voters would fetishise a Yes paper as “theirs” and mobilise behind it in the post-referendum culture wars.
[…]
And no one on the Yes side sees any contradiction between bemoaning partiality in news coverage, and then launching a Yes propaganda sheet?
[…]
Yes fundamentalists are no longer able to hold political ideas up to objective scrutiny either way. Everything is reduced to the binary independent/ not independent, and Bad Things are blamed on being not independent. Scotland’s nationhood status is, frankly, an insufficient explanation for all political phenomena.
[…]
The Radical Independence conference was in many ways the high water mark of Yes anti-politics in this respect – the “Westminster” parties were routinely booed and the system seen as rigged, while vague programmes of political decentralism were advocated.
[…]
The weeks since the referendum have not been good to the Yes campaign.
Feeling like the bullied, Yes fundamentalists have become the bullies.
Perceiving media bias against them, they have taken solace in media biased in their favour.
Certain that Westminster is undemocratic, they crave unopposed SNP government.
Furious at September’s show of strength by the UK state, they glory in mass rallies and projections of power.
And convinced of their moral authority, they seek to silence any dissenters on social media. […]

Jacobites and Jacobins: the problem with Yes fundamentalism, Promised Joy, Posted: November 29, 2014
https://faintdamnation.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/jacobites-and-jacobins-the-problem-with-yes-fundamentalism/