About three weeks ago I had a brainwave about the left. It is a school of hate, I realized. But then, yesterday, I had another epiphany. It is this.
First the left teaches its clients to fear; then it teaches them to hate. This is a natural progression that is entirely consonant with the logic of leftist politics.
The whole arc of leftist politics is to identify a class of helpless victims, about to be demolished by some class of oppressors and exploiters, and to lead them to justice and safety.
Obviously, this class of victims will be people that are afraid. So the lefties will play upon their fear.
But what happens when the left has led their victims to victory, and won their victims by peaceful protest their own pot of gold from the modern state? Obviously, following the famous victory the time for fear is now over. But the left will not want to disband its merry band of activists and protesters. What? Surrender that hard won power and prestige? No, in Phase 2, the left switches to hate, and teaches its Little Darlings to hate the oppressors and exploiters it formerly feared.
As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, the movement becomes a racket.
So let us begin with Marx. After extolling the rise of the bourgeoisie, he exposes its soft underbelly, in The Communist Manifesto:
And so the workers got the vote. Why was this? Because the bourgeoisie was persuaded that it was right and just that the workers should get the vote, even though the middle class could see that the workers would not want the same things that they did. And the workers got free education, and labor unions, and then government pensions and health care. Again, the middle class didn't really like the welfare state; it wasn't going to help them, who already saved their money for pensions, and got health care, at the very least, through the local "lodge doctor."
But if the workers were getting what they wanted, what would be the point of voting for lefty politicians? That was when the left started teaching the workers to hate. The workers were part of the center-left coalition, and they had to be kept in a fever of hate against the bosses, who might at any time force the workers to "give back" their benefits. And so it went, until the left started to tire of the workers in about 1970.
With women, early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for men to tender rights to women out of the goodness of their hearts, as an expression of goodwill of the males to the females of the middle class. But by the end of the 19th century, the tone of feminism turned darker. Mrs. Pankhurst spoke of the women's franchise not as "a right, but as a desperate necessity:" women as victims. Well, women did get the vote, and careers, and divorce, and abortion. And that's when they started to hate.
It cannot be an accident that all the vile hate of the modern feminists occurred after the great political milestones. How could that be? Because, once the political marginaliztion of women had been removed, the mobilization of women as feminists had to be conducted on a program of hate. It must follow from the logic of left-wing politics.
In the campaign for civil rights, the early narrative was clearly fear. Jim Crow could work his evil power on southern Negroes as the mood took him. And if the government didn't do its thing, a lynch mob from the local KKK lodge could make the point instead. Just look at how the police beat up civil-rights marchers in the great Selma march on Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama State Troopers clubbed and tear-gassed civil-rights marchers on the road from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Alabama!
But in fact the 1965 Selma marches proved that blacks were no longer helpless victims of Southern racism, because after Bloody Sunday, a subsequent march was protected by "1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals".
Thus it makes complete sense for a new generation of black leaders to realize that hate, not fear, should be the face of black America, and the age of Martin Luther King, Jr., gave way to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton.
The point is that, when your peaceful protests are protected by the federal government it is time to put away fear. But what happens to the movement then? Perfectly simple, you substitute hate for fear, and the movement can go on from strength to strength!
Clearly, the movement for gay rights follows a similar arc. We begin with the terror of the New York City police attacking the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, in June 1969. So gays are taught to fear and we are taught that gays live in fear, of being "outed." But now that gay marriage is a fait accompli, courtesy of the US Supreme Court, the days of fear are over, and gay activists can deploy their hate without fear upon hateful Christian bakers.
There is one startling question about this century and a half of left-wing fear and hate. Was it necessary? These incessant campaigns against the bourgeoisie, against men, against whites, against straights: were they needed to get the rights the helpless victims demanded? For the fact is that, almost without exception they were achieved without a violent counterattack by the bourgeoisie, the men, the whites, the straights in question. Which suggests that maybe all the Sturm und Drang was purely for effect. It could all have been achieved by conversation and persuasion, not by the agency of activism and peaceful protest.
Who knows? But without the activism, the protests, the non-negotiable demands, what would have been the point?
We have now entered into a new phase in left-wing activism: the campaign of hate against the white working class.
As the need for activism continues, even though the rights of workers, women, blacks, and gays have been confirmed by the political system, there is still a need for an enemy, because without an enemy there is no need for politics. And so the left has coalesced upon a campaign of hate and fear on the men of the white working class. This is perhaps the terminal campaign of the longue durée of the left. Because the working hypothesis of the new campaign of hate is that all the Coalition of the Fringes -- the erstwhile marginalized and oppressed victims of what we now call the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and white supremacy -- should combine together in a campaign of activism and peaceful protest against white males.
Notice that this campaign cannot be against all white males because educated white males are down for the struggle; that is how they make their bones. No, it is the working class males that don't get to college on diversity and inclusion, that don't get the government jobs because of being a woman or minority, that don't get into STEM because they don't like school: these are the monsters that the left is now attacking as the far right, as white nationalists, as fascists.
Only thing is that the white working class are not civilized and successful middle class professionals that could be persuaded to give the workers a break, to give well-born women a leg up, to give the former slaves their dignity. And this is because, as I say, the middle class is not that interested in power, and not for reasons of virtue. It is because in the middle class universe the magic bullet is not political power but, as Jordan Peterson points out, competence. If a middle-class person fails to get ahead, he does not blame the system; he blames himself. He understands that the economy ebbs and flows, that failure is a part of life, and that following failure you just have to get up and get going again.
Then there is the little problem that the white working class is not a privileged elite that has been keeping the people down since time immemorial. The white working class is the former Little Darling of the ruling class that has now been cast aside like an ageing mistress. So the white working class is not likely to gracefully concede as the targets of the left have done in former times.
In other words, the game has changed, and it may be that the courses in activism in the left's school of fear and hate no longer prepare activists for the future, but for the past.
For it seems to me that, while it was fair to characterize the left's politics up to now as a coalition of the powerful and the powerless against the middle class, today I think that it is better understood as a campaign of the powerful against the powerless. And I don't think that our lefty friends have a clue about that.
First the left teaches its clients to fear; then it teaches them to hate. This is a natural progression that is entirely consonant with the logic of leftist politics.
The whole arc of leftist politics is to identify a class of helpless victims, about to be demolished by some class of oppressors and exploiters, and to lead them to justice and safety.
Obviously, this class of victims will be people that are afraid. So the lefties will play upon their fear.
But what happens when the left has led their victims to victory, and won their victims by peaceful protest their own pot of gold from the modern state? Obviously, following the famous victory the time for fear is now over. But the left will not want to disband its merry band of activists and protesters. What? Surrender that hard won power and prestige? No, in Phase 2, the left switches to hate, and teaches its Little Darlings to hate the oppressors and exploiters it formerly feared.
As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, the movement becomes a racket.
So let us begin with Marx. After extolling the rise of the bourgeoisie, he exposes its soft underbelly, in The Communist Manifesto:
Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.Slaves, they are, the proletarians, embittered slaves. And not just the workers, but the lower middle class, " the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants," they "sink gradually into the proletariat" immiserated by the monster of capitalism and the neo-feudal overclass, the bourgeoisie.
And so the workers got the vote. Why was this? Because the bourgeoisie was persuaded that it was right and just that the workers should get the vote, even though the middle class could see that the workers would not want the same things that they did. And the workers got free education, and labor unions, and then government pensions and health care. Again, the middle class didn't really like the welfare state; it wasn't going to help them, who already saved their money for pensions, and got health care, at the very least, through the local "lodge doctor."
But if the workers were getting what they wanted, what would be the point of voting for lefty politicians? That was when the left started teaching the workers to hate. The workers were part of the center-left coalition, and they had to be kept in a fever of hate against the bosses, who might at any time force the workers to "give back" their benefits. And so it went, until the left started to tire of the workers in about 1970.
With women, early feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for men to tender rights to women out of the goodness of their hearts, as an expression of goodwill of the males to the females of the middle class. But by the end of the 19th century, the tone of feminism turned darker. Mrs. Pankhurst spoke of the women's franchise not as "a right, but as a desperate necessity:" women as victims. Well, women did get the vote, and careers, and divorce, and abortion. And that's when they started to hate.
It cannot be an accident that all the vile hate of the modern feminists occurred after the great political milestones. How could that be? Because, once the political marginaliztion of women had been removed, the mobilization of women as feminists had to be conducted on a program of hate. It must follow from the logic of left-wing politics.
In the campaign for civil rights, the early narrative was clearly fear. Jim Crow could work his evil power on southern Negroes as the mood took him. And if the government didn't do its thing, a lynch mob from the local KKK lodge could make the point instead. Just look at how the police beat up civil-rights marchers in the great Selma march on Bloody Sunday, in which Alabama State Troopers clubbed and tear-gassed civil-rights marchers on the road from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Alabama!
But in fact the 1965 Selma marches proved that blacks were no longer helpless victims of Southern racism, because after Bloody Sunday, a subsequent march was protected by "1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals".
Thus it makes complete sense for a new generation of black leaders to realize that hate, not fear, should be the face of black America, and the age of Martin Luther King, Jr., gave way to Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton.
The point is that, when your peaceful protests are protected by the federal government it is time to put away fear. But what happens to the movement then? Perfectly simple, you substitute hate for fear, and the movement can go on from strength to strength!
Clearly, the movement for gay rights follows a similar arc. We begin with the terror of the New York City police attacking the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, in June 1969. So gays are taught to fear and we are taught that gays live in fear, of being "outed." But now that gay marriage is a fait accompli, courtesy of the US Supreme Court, the days of fear are over, and gay activists can deploy their hate without fear upon hateful Christian bakers.
There is one startling question about this century and a half of left-wing fear and hate. Was it necessary? These incessant campaigns against the bourgeoisie, against men, against whites, against straights: were they needed to get the rights the helpless victims demanded? For the fact is that, almost without exception they were achieved without a violent counterattack by the bourgeoisie, the men, the whites, the straights in question. Which suggests that maybe all the Sturm und Drang was purely for effect. It could all have been achieved by conversation and persuasion, not by the agency of activism and peaceful protest.
Who knows? But without the activism, the protests, the non-negotiable demands, what would have been the point?
We have now entered into a new phase in left-wing activism: the campaign of hate against the white working class.
As the need for activism continues, even though the rights of workers, women, blacks, and gays have been confirmed by the political system, there is still a need for an enemy, because without an enemy there is no need for politics. And so the left has coalesced upon a campaign of hate and fear on the men of the white working class. This is perhaps the terminal campaign of the longue durée of the left. Because the working hypothesis of the new campaign of hate is that all the Coalition of the Fringes -- the erstwhile marginalized and oppressed victims of what we now call the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and white supremacy -- should combine together in a campaign of activism and peaceful protest against white males.
Notice that this campaign cannot be against all white males because educated white males are down for the struggle; that is how they make their bones. No, it is the working class males that don't get to college on diversity and inclusion, that don't get the government jobs because of being a woman or minority, that don't get into STEM because they don't like school: these are the monsters that the left is now attacking as the far right, as white nationalists, as fascists.
Only thing is that the white working class are not civilized and successful middle class professionals that could be persuaded to give the workers a break, to give well-born women a leg up, to give the former slaves their dignity. And this is because, as I say, the middle class is not that interested in power, and not for reasons of virtue. It is because in the middle class universe the magic bullet is not political power but, as Jordan Peterson points out, competence. If a middle-class person fails to get ahead, he does not blame the system; he blames himself. He understands that the economy ebbs and flows, that failure is a part of life, and that following failure you just have to get up and get going again.
Then there is the little problem that the white working class is not a privileged elite that has been keeping the people down since time immemorial. The white working class is the former Little Darling of the ruling class that has now been cast aside like an ageing mistress. So the white working class is not likely to gracefully concede as the targets of the left have done in former times.
In other words, the game has changed, and it may be that the courses in activism in the left's school of fear and hate no longer prepare activists for the future, but for the past.
For it seems to me that, while it was fair to characterize the left's politics up to now as a coalition of the powerful and the powerless against the middle class, today I think that it is better understood as a campaign of the powerful against the powerless. And I don't think that our lefty friends have a clue about that.
You are a promoter of hate and devisiveness in your blog... sowing fear just as Trump does. I cannot believe that Marjorie buys into this crap.
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