If you are sitting there wondering what all the fuss about Confederate statues is all about, then I have a simple answer for you.
It is all about virtue-signalling.
Or more exactly, it is all about calling out people that turned out to be on the wrong side of history.
And, of course, it is all about the fact that modern leftism is a secular religion, in which public deeds are judged as personal moral actions.
In other words, in lefty world, your political positions and acts are judged as though they were personal moral positions and acts.
And that, in my view, is utter stupidity, since politics is division and government is force, and therefore nobody involved in politics should cast the first stone.
This came out rather clearly to me in a book by a recovering French lefty, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times. He opens the book with a conversation he had with Nicholas Sarkozy, in the run-up to Sarkozy's successful campaign for the French presidency. Sarkozy was a friend, but Lévy couldn't vote for the center-right politician. Why not? Well, because of the four political events that define Lévy as a political person.
And what are those four events? Thank you for asking.
First, the Vichy regime. Should we "forget Vichy's crimes...?" Of course not.
Second, the Algerian War. That was the last colonial gasp of the West in the 1950s in which France put down an insurrection in its North African colony, and then walked away from the mess it created. Should we stop "beating our breasts" about this criminal brutality? Certainly not.
Third, May 1968, the student rebellion in Paris. Should we judge it a black hole "sucking up everything that was solid" in traditional and Gaullist France? Certainly not: it was a "happy moment: new freedoms, novel power for women to do what they wanted with their bodies... modernity."
Finally, The Dreyfus Affair in the early 20th century. That was about the Jewish army officer that was degraded and imprisoned for espionage. Dreyfus was almost certainly innocent. Was this about "Tradition, Authority, Nation" or a case of the reason of state losing its way?
Do you see what I see? I see a mindless attempt to separate the sheep from the goats. It wants to know: Do you have the right thoughts? Or are you a deplorable?
Just for contrast, here is what I think are the Big Issues for France over the last century.
One, the incompetent failure to manage the rise of Germany. France got into three wars with Germany, in 1870, in 1914, and in 1939 and lost them all. Well, it would have lost them all if it weren't for the good old USA. Now I would say that the big question is: what went wrong that France could be so stupid?
Two, the folly of France's corporatist, managerialist state and economy in which nobody can be fired, and that nobody can be hired, and France's farmers get to loot the rest of the country. It actually works OK for the top 25 percent with good college degrees. But anyone else better get a government job and hang on tight.
Three, the folly of Muslim immigration. The record on immigration in the US over the past century and a half is that, in the early stages, a new immigrant group barricades itself in an ethnic ghetto until its members acquire the skills and cultural knowledge to venture out into the wide world. It was nip-and-tuck that the US managed to integrate the Irish, the Germans, the Italians into the Anglo-Saxon culture, and I think that World War II did it. But now the best and the brightest encourage immigrant groups in their instinctive separatism.
See, my idea is that the correct policy for the last 150 years would have been: first, encouragement of a moderate nationalism; second, education of the working class and immigrants to understand and accept the market economy and submission to the verdict of the market in prices and wages; and third, a moderation of immigration to make sure that assimilation is the only strategy that pays for immigrants.
And the left has been on the wrong side on all these issues.
Now I do not say that the moderate left is as bad as the leftist monsters -- the Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros -- that created a river of blood and a harvest of sorrow for at least 100 million humans in the 20th century. But I still think that the butcher's bill for moderate leftism will be horrendous.
But meanwhile we are busy exhuming the graves of the past instead of preparing sensibly for the life of the future.
It is all about virtue-signalling.
Or more exactly, it is all about calling out people that turned out to be on the wrong side of history.
And, of course, it is all about the fact that modern leftism is a secular religion, in which public deeds are judged as personal moral actions.
In other words, in lefty world, your political positions and acts are judged as though they were personal moral positions and acts.
And that, in my view, is utter stupidity, since politics is division and government is force, and therefore nobody involved in politics should cast the first stone.
This came out rather clearly to me in a book by a recovering French lefty, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Left in Dark Times. He opens the book with a conversation he had with Nicholas Sarkozy, in the run-up to Sarkozy's successful campaign for the French presidency. Sarkozy was a friend, but Lévy couldn't vote for the center-right politician. Why not? Well, because of the four political events that define Lévy as a political person.
And what are those four events? Thank you for asking.
First, the Vichy regime. Should we "forget Vichy's crimes...?" Of course not.
Second, the Algerian War. That was the last colonial gasp of the West in the 1950s in which France put down an insurrection in its North African colony, and then walked away from the mess it created. Should we stop "beating our breasts" about this criminal brutality? Certainly not.
Third, May 1968, the student rebellion in Paris. Should we judge it a black hole "sucking up everything that was solid" in traditional and Gaullist France? Certainly not: it was a "happy moment: new freedoms, novel power for women to do what they wanted with their bodies... modernity."
Finally, The Dreyfus Affair in the early 20th century. That was about the Jewish army officer that was degraded and imprisoned for espionage. Dreyfus was almost certainly innocent. Was this about "Tradition, Authority, Nation" or a case of the reason of state losing its way?
Do you see what I see? I see a mindless attempt to separate the sheep from the goats. It wants to know: Do you have the right thoughts? Or are you a deplorable?
Just for contrast, here is what I think are the Big Issues for France over the last century.
One, the incompetent failure to manage the rise of Germany. France got into three wars with Germany, in 1870, in 1914, and in 1939 and lost them all. Well, it would have lost them all if it weren't for the good old USA. Now I would say that the big question is: what went wrong that France could be so stupid?
Two, the folly of France's corporatist, managerialist state and economy in which nobody can be fired, and that nobody can be hired, and France's farmers get to loot the rest of the country. It actually works OK for the top 25 percent with good college degrees. But anyone else better get a government job and hang on tight.
Three, the folly of Muslim immigration. The record on immigration in the US over the past century and a half is that, in the early stages, a new immigrant group barricades itself in an ethnic ghetto until its members acquire the skills and cultural knowledge to venture out into the wide world. It was nip-and-tuck that the US managed to integrate the Irish, the Germans, the Italians into the Anglo-Saxon culture, and I think that World War II did it. But now the best and the brightest encourage immigrant groups in their instinctive separatism.
See, my idea is that the correct policy for the last 150 years would have been: first, encouragement of a moderate nationalism; second, education of the working class and immigrants to understand and accept the market economy and submission to the verdict of the market in prices and wages; and third, a moderation of immigration to make sure that assimilation is the only strategy that pays for immigrants.
And the left has been on the wrong side on all these issues.
Now I do not say that the moderate left is as bad as the leftist monsters -- the Lenins, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, Castros -- that created a river of blood and a harvest of sorrow for at least 100 million humans in the 20th century. But I still think that the butcher's bill for moderate leftism will be horrendous.
But meanwhile we are busy exhuming the graves of the past instead of preparing sensibly for the life of the future.
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