Occasionally, one encounters an article that is irrefutable, not because its arguments are utterly watertight but precisely because it has no ‘arguments’, because refutation can find no foothold in meaningfulness; an article which is little more than an attempt to dress up the proposition ‘I like x, I dislike y’ in the appurtenance of reason; an article whose assiduous eschewal of discernable content is almost impressive; an article that is only interesting as a living inventory of journalistic clichés, non-sequiters and vacuous propositions, a mere simulacrum of actual thought, an object lesson in what to avoid, a coagulated mass of confusion from which it is impossible to extract a valid idea. Initially, one is tempted to unpick a single sentence before realising that to do so would entangle one in a whole machinery of error from which there is no productive escape. Occasionally, one finds such an article, which in its utter typicality passes beyond itself and becomes a useful illustrative symptom of a larger malaise .
Oh, incidentally, here’s a recent piece by Melanie Phillips.