The liberal case for Nigel Farage

After ‘it’s not happening’, ‘it may be happening, but for different reasons’, and ‘would it be such a bad thing if it was happening?’, we have finally arrived at the ‘it’s happening and it’s a good thing’ stage of the Nigel Farage banking story. This now-familiar pattern of motivated reasoning was first identified by conservative writer Rod Dreher in his law of merited impossibility, which described how progressives could simultaneously hold the views that gay marriage wouldn’t diminish religious liberty and that the religious liberty of opponents of gay marriage ought to be diminished. As Dreher put it: ‘It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.’

When Farage first claimed that Coutts had closed his account for political reasons, the standard progressive response was that he was lying, followed by some pitiful attempts at justification anyway.