A reader just sent me a puzzler. He agreed with my notion of "Fake Protest." But then what?
Yeah. What about the anarchist left? Who are they and what do they really want? How do we talk them off the lefty ledge?
This is where I roll out my politics-as-war metaphor. The fact is that once you enlist young men in your army, whether as a 19th century recruiting sergeant or as an Activism 101 prof at the U, the soldiers you enlist will be enrolled also in your ideological army, and they will keep believing until, as I like to say, Napoleon leaves them wounded, hungry, and dying on the road back from Moscow.
That is the whole point of armies; you make sure that the soldiers have no place else to go, except continuing on the line of march and following the orders of their officers.
And that is why the recent additions to the Republican Party have been Democrats cast out of the party, left by the side of the road by a progressive army that had used them up. First it was the fundamentalist Christians who found out they were not wanted in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the Sixties. Then, in the Trump election, the white working class finally found a home in the Republican Party in the anti-immigrant, pro-patriot campaign of Donald Trump.
And the point is that, as Ronald Reagan said all those years ago: he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. More generally, the Republicans and libertarians do not recruit people into a movement for, yay, justice or something. The Republican Party and libertarians are People of the Responsible Self; we do not do movements and cults and bending the arc of history towards justice.
So where does that put the anarcho-Communists? Nowhere close to giving up on the leftist project.
I suppose that anarcho-Communism is basically a young man's game. It appeals to the natural instinct in young men that is looking for trouble, the rebellion against the father. Maybe what happens to these radicals is that they grow up and get jobs and wives. And then they find themselves voting Republican.
And after all, Antifa and Black Block is great fun; you get to rumble and break things and fulminate against the Man, and the ruling class pats you on the head for being anti-fascist. Where in this story is anything pushing these youngsters away from their gang-like lifestyle?
No, I think the next candidates for Deplorability would be blacks and women. At some point, more and more blacks are going to tumble into the truth that liberals don't care about them; they only care about their votes and stirring up their hate. And women are going to tumble to the fact that abortion and the sexual revolution are denials of the very truth about womanhood.
Rightly or wrongly, I take the larger view. Our era is the most astonishing cultural revolution in human history, from the necessarily hierarchical agricultural age to the individual responsibility of the bourgeois age. We should expect, we should know, that the transition would not occur in a divine flash of light, but in an endless to-and-fro of trial-and-error.
But underneath all the Sturm und Drang is a profound truth. The exchange economy rewards people for serving other people faithfully and cheerfully. The more you accept this culture in your work and in your life, the better your life will be. And places that try to restore the old hierarchy in new clothes end up cratering, not just at the national level but at any level.
And that is my faith. We have an exchange economy and the prosperity of the Great Enrichment not because of wise rulers that cunningly executed on the bourgeois agenda. We just stumbled into it, and we thrived because the bourgeois agenda works for today's city economy.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, the bottom line is survival. If you do things that enhance survival you survive. If you don't, you won't. Survive.
[W]hat to do about the throngs of self-proclaimed anarchist or anarcho-communists (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one), who state that ANY hierarchy is oppressive and need be subverted in order to empower the individual?He continues:
I find these types most frustrating of all since they are ostensibly fighting for the same general concept as me, a libertarian, but in practice walk and quack like standard-issue authoritarians. As infuriating as these people can be, I think they represent an opportunity as recruits in the ongoing battle of individualists vs collectivists.The frustrating thing for him is that the refugees from the Democratic Party -- lately, the Trumpists -- have "diluted the Right" and prevented the Republican Party from making a course correction away from the welfare state.
Yeah. What about the anarchist left? Who are they and what do they really want? How do we talk them off the lefty ledge?
This is where I roll out my politics-as-war metaphor. The fact is that once you enlist young men in your army, whether as a 19th century recruiting sergeant or as an Activism 101 prof at the U, the soldiers you enlist will be enrolled also in your ideological army, and they will keep believing until, as I like to say, Napoleon leaves them wounded, hungry, and dying on the road back from Moscow.
That is the whole point of armies; you make sure that the soldiers have no place else to go, except continuing on the line of march and following the orders of their officers.
And that is why the recent additions to the Republican Party have been Democrats cast out of the party, left by the side of the road by a progressive army that had used them up. First it was the fundamentalist Christians who found out they were not wanted in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the Sixties. Then, in the Trump election, the white working class finally found a home in the Republican Party in the anti-immigrant, pro-patriot campaign of Donald Trump.
And the point is that, as Ronald Reagan said all those years ago: he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. More generally, the Republicans and libertarians do not recruit people into a movement for, yay, justice or something. The Republican Party and libertarians are People of the Responsible Self; we do not do movements and cults and bending the arc of history towards justice.
So where does that put the anarcho-Communists? Nowhere close to giving up on the leftist project.
I suppose that anarcho-Communism is basically a young man's game. It appeals to the natural instinct in young men that is looking for trouble, the rebellion against the father. Maybe what happens to these radicals is that they grow up and get jobs and wives. And then they find themselves voting Republican.
And after all, Antifa and Black Block is great fun; you get to rumble and break things and fulminate against the Man, and the ruling class pats you on the head for being anti-fascist. Where in this story is anything pushing these youngsters away from their gang-like lifestyle?
No, I think the next candidates for Deplorability would be blacks and women. At some point, more and more blacks are going to tumble into the truth that liberals don't care about them; they only care about their votes and stirring up their hate. And women are going to tumble to the fact that abortion and the sexual revolution are denials of the very truth about womanhood.
Rightly or wrongly, I take the larger view. Our era is the most astonishing cultural revolution in human history, from the necessarily hierarchical agricultural age to the individual responsibility of the bourgeois age. We should expect, we should know, that the transition would not occur in a divine flash of light, but in an endless to-and-fro of trial-and-error.
But underneath all the Sturm und Drang is a profound truth. The exchange economy rewards people for serving other people faithfully and cheerfully. The more you accept this culture in your work and in your life, the better your life will be. And places that try to restore the old hierarchy in new clothes end up cratering, not just at the national level but at any level.
And that is my faith. We have an exchange economy and the prosperity of the Great Enrichment not because of wise rulers that cunningly executed on the bourgeois agenda. We just stumbled into it, and we thrived because the bourgeois agenda works for today's city economy.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, the bottom line is survival. If you do things that enhance survival you survive. If you don't, you won't. Survive.
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