Yesterday I first developed my idea of Fake Protest, the idea that any protest accepted with equanimity by the ruling class and its supporters is "fake protest," really the ruling class and its supporters pretending that they are the wretched of the earth, desperately crying for justice, when all they are doing is demanding new privileges and free stuff for themselves and their supporters to be taken by force from the unorganized middle class.
The idea of Fake Protest sharpens my previously developed idea that the left is founded on the idea of advocating for those left outside of the political system. Obviously,on this view, the political grievances of the "left-out" cannot be redressed by the normal process of representative government, because the "left-out" are not represented.
I also argue that the Left is a messianic faith that believes that they are the "chosen ones" called to represent, to lead, to advocate, and even to mount bloody revolution on behalf of the wretched of the earth left out of the system. That is the logic underneath the left's culture of Protest.
In 1850 the left was right. Here we had a profound economic revolution that had sucked starving peasants from the countryside and fed them into factories; and the system knew them not. So the workers rioted and presented Charters to the ruling class. Fanatics like Karl Marx prophesied bloody revolution, and the immiseration of the working class, but in the event the rising bourgeoisie listened to the cry of the oppressed and willingly gave them the vote and adjusting the law of the workplace to redress many of their grievances. This was Genuine Protest, and it worked because the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power.
Fast forward to the 1950s and the civil-rights revolution. Here we had blacks, that in the South were genuinely excluded from the system by the gentle persuasion of the KKK and Jim Crow laws. And we had women that had the vote but had read Chapter XXV of The Second Sex and wanted to be "The Independent Woman." And we had well-born college kids that didn't want to fight Communism in South-east Asia. Black leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King had learned from Gandhi and the Indian National Movement and understood that under the rule of the bourgeoisie the people outside the system didn't need to actually riot in the streets to get the attention of the ruling class. Non-violent protest was sufficient, because the bourgeoisie is sensitive to the cry of the oppressed. Why? Because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. But note this: the well-born women that wanted careers and abortion and the well-born kids that didn't want to go to war were already in the system. They just wanted in on the protest action, or had read their Marx and Marcuse and wanted to practice a little intolerant tolerance for the fun of it.
So this was Semi-Fake Protest. Part of the Sixties civil-rights protesting was the genuine cry of the oppressed; part of it was the well-born supporters of the ruling class faking it.
Now we have the progressives of the 21st century that are running around marchin' and protestin' about everything. But there is a problem. Because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power just about everyone that was outside the system in now inside the system. No need for protest, kids: just call your congressman. But wait! Illegal immigrants and Muslims are not in the system. Yay! So let's all protest for the poor helpless illegal immigrants and Muslims of the world. And let's bring them here, because it is a little tricky to protest for people that aren't actually here in the United States. And let's teach all the Good Little Girls that go to government schools and government universities all about protesting, and teach them how to be activists just as we taught the working class to read a write and vote and protest a century and more ago. So now we have a protest culture that is almost entirely about the creative ruling class that is interested in power. And they are protesting in support of people outside the system that they actually had to import into the United States in order to say: Look, here are the wretched of the earth and we demand that the racist sexist homopbobic deplorables of the United States give them their rights!
This is Fake Protest. It is practiced by people inside the system that have the ear and the support of the ruling class -- that is when they are not in fact paid-up members of the ruling class -- and they are pretending to advocate for those outside the system, whereas in fact they have invented and imported these supposed victims in order to have something to protest about. Look, I don't blame these unfortunate scions of the ruling class. For all their lives they have been taught that activism is the highest form of human life when in fact all the heavy lifting was done a century ago. What are the poor things to do? Go and get an ordinary job doing useful things for other people?
Worse, there was never any need for heavy lifting at all, because the bourgeoisie, then and now, is not that interested in power. This has nothing to do with any supposed virtue of bourgeois people, not at all. It is simply that life in the burgs, the 'burbs, the cities, the trading centers of the world, does not require the operation of political power to succeed. Its differences and quarrels are adjudicated by the price system, the marketplace. All that is needed is for people to surrender to the verdict of the marketplace rather than the political process, and everything turns out copacetic.
Alas, for our liberal friends, for the mainstream media, for the belted knights of the academy and the princesses of the academic administration, this must not be true. It cannot be true. If it is true then their lives, every they believe, everything they have protested about is meaningless.
And so they are embarked upon a monstrous journey of piracy, plunder and injustice, where they seek injustice for ordinary people in the name of justice, and silence those who have every right to have their voices heard.
You might say that these people are evil, and you might be right. But I rather prefer to think that they are idiots, people that have never for a moment had a single thought un-curated by the academy, the popular culture, or the mainstream media.
If these people have committed a crime it is that they have been, for over a century, teaching people newly arrived in the city that the way to wive and thrive in the city is not to take on the raiment of responsibility, to go to work, obey, the law, and follow the rules of the marketplace, but to Protest, to have faith in the saving grace of politics.
In the age of Genuine Protest, in the 1850s, this attitude was understandable. Who knew that the new industrial system would, in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, bring everyone to unimaginable prosperity?
In the Age of Semi-Fake Protest there was at least an excuse. Who knew if the bourgeoisie would in fact extend its enrichment and its arms around the black and the brown?
But now there is no excuse, and the proof is that the Fake Protesters have had to import their victims from abroad and gin up the idea that these imports are the same as the factory workers of 1850 and the oppressed Negroes of the 1950s and that anyone that disagrees is a xenophobe and an Islamophobe and a white supremacist to boot.
History will not treat kindly with these mind-numbed robots of the ruling class.
The idea of Fake Protest sharpens my previously developed idea that the left is founded on the idea of advocating for those left outside of the political system. Obviously,on this view, the political grievances of the "left-out" cannot be redressed by the normal process of representative government, because the "left-out" are not represented.
I also argue that the Left is a messianic faith that believes that they are the "chosen ones" called to represent, to lead, to advocate, and even to mount bloody revolution on behalf of the wretched of the earth left out of the system. That is the logic underneath the left's culture of Protest.
In 1850 the left was right. Here we had a profound economic revolution that had sucked starving peasants from the countryside and fed them into factories; and the system knew them not. So the workers rioted and presented Charters to the ruling class. Fanatics like Karl Marx prophesied bloody revolution, and the immiseration of the working class, but in the event the rising bourgeoisie listened to the cry of the oppressed and willingly gave them the vote and adjusting the law of the workplace to redress many of their grievances. This was Genuine Protest, and it worked because the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power.
Fast forward to the 1950s and the civil-rights revolution. Here we had blacks, that in the South were genuinely excluded from the system by the gentle persuasion of the KKK and Jim Crow laws. And we had women that had the vote but had read Chapter XXV of The Second Sex and wanted to be "The Independent Woman." And we had well-born college kids that didn't want to fight Communism in South-east Asia. Black leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King had learned from Gandhi and the Indian National Movement and understood that under the rule of the bourgeoisie the people outside the system didn't need to actually riot in the streets to get the attention of the ruling class. Non-violent protest was sufficient, because the bourgeoisie is sensitive to the cry of the oppressed. Why? Because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. But note this: the well-born women that wanted careers and abortion and the well-born kids that didn't want to go to war were already in the system. They just wanted in on the protest action, or had read their Marx and Marcuse and wanted to practice a little intolerant tolerance for the fun of it.
So this was Semi-Fake Protest. Part of the Sixties civil-rights protesting was the genuine cry of the oppressed; part of it was the well-born supporters of the ruling class faking it.
Now we have the progressives of the 21st century that are running around marchin' and protestin' about everything. But there is a problem. Because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power just about everyone that was outside the system in now inside the system. No need for protest, kids: just call your congressman. But wait! Illegal immigrants and Muslims are not in the system. Yay! So let's all protest for the poor helpless illegal immigrants and Muslims of the world. And let's bring them here, because it is a little tricky to protest for people that aren't actually here in the United States. And let's teach all the Good Little Girls that go to government schools and government universities all about protesting, and teach them how to be activists just as we taught the working class to read a write and vote and protest a century and more ago. So now we have a protest culture that is almost entirely about the creative ruling class that is interested in power. And they are protesting in support of people outside the system that they actually had to import into the United States in order to say: Look, here are the wretched of the earth and we demand that the racist sexist homopbobic deplorables of the United States give them their rights!
This is Fake Protest. It is practiced by people inside the system that have the ear and the support of the ruling class -- that is when they are not in fact paid-up members of the ruling class -- and they are pretending to advocate for those outside the system, whereas in fact they have invented and imported these supposed victims in order to have something to protest about. Look, I don't blame these unfortunate scions of the ruling class. For all their lives they have been taught that activism is the highest form of human life when in fact all the heavy lifting was done a century ago. What are the poor things to do? Go and get an ordinary job doing useful things for other people?
Worse, there was never any need for heavy lifting at all, because the bourgeoisie, then and now, is not that interested in power. This has nothing to do with any supposed virtue of bourgeois people, not at all. It is simply that life in the burgs, the 'burbs, the cities, the trading centers of the world, does not require the operation of political power to succeed. Its differences and quarrels are adjudicated by the price system, the marketplace. All that is needed is for people to surrender to the verdict of the marketplace rather than the political process, and everything turns out copacetic.
Alas, for our liberal friends, for the mainstream media, for the belted knights of the academy and the princesses of the academic administration, this must not be true. It cannot be true. If it is true then their lives, every they believe, everything they have protested about is meaningless.
And so they are embarked upon a monstrous journey of piracy, plunder and injustice, where they seek injustice for ordinary people in the name of justice, and silence those who have every right to have their voices heard.
You might say that these people are evil, and you might be right. But I rather prefer to think that they are idiots, people that have never for a moment had a single thought un-curated by the academy, the popular culture, or the mainstream media.
If these people have committed a crime it is that they have been, for over a century, teaching people newly arrived in the city that the way to wive and thrive in the city is not to take on the raiment of responsibility, to go to work, obey, the law, and follow the rules of the marketplace, but to Protest, to have faith in the saving grace of politics.
In the age of Genuine Protest, in the 1850s, this attitude was understandable. Who knew that the new industrial system would, in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, bring everyone to unimaginable prosperity?
In the Age of Semi-Fake Protest there was at least an excuse. Who knew if the bourgeoisie would in fact extend its enrichment and its arms around the black and the brown?
But now there is no excuse, and the proof is that the Fake Protesters have had to import their victims from abroad and gin up the idea that these imports are the same as the factory workers of 1850 and the oppressed Negroes of the 1950s and that anyone that disagrees is a xenophobe and an Islamophobe and a white supremacist to boot.
History will not treat kindly with these mind-numbed robots of the ruling class.
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