Lefties, LGBTs, Liberals and Their Conceit

Radio host Dennis Prager has a list of questions to help you determine whether your Democratic friend is a liberal or a lefty. E.g.,

8. Is it racist to claim that Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the greatest music ever composed?

9. Is the national anthem racist?

The idea is that: if they unfriend you for asking the question they are a lefty; if they don't they are a liberal.

But I think that rather misunderstands the problem, as though political identity comes with various stands on the issues. It does, after a fashion. But first is the "fake tribe" you belong to, and whose flag you fly.

For instance, on my walk at the top of this hill at Palatine and 60th this morning I passed a gray-haired woman -- probably 70ish -- hauling her garbage can back to her yard. Her house proudly boasts a hand-made Black Lives Matter sign and is in the process of getting solar panels installed on the roof.

Now, is that woman -- who lives on the street with the best views -- a lefty? I doubt it. She is just virtue-signaling that she belongs to the Good People. I expect she has never had an original thought in her life. She just instinctively adheres to the notions and the ideas of her community, and that community is the community of gentry liberals. Right now, all across the land, good gentry liberals appalled by Trump and white supremacy have BLM and #WeBelieve and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs in their yards. 

I'm sure that if I had stopped her and asked why she had a racist sign in her yard she would be mortally offended. It would never have occurred to her that a Black Lives Matter sign means anything other than she is opposed to Racist Police Violence. If I had told here that the leaders of Black Lives Matter proudly identified themselves as "trained Marxists," she would be saying to her gentry friends later today "I can't believe he said that." Because it does not compute for her: it is crazy-cakes.

It is part of the educated gentry's conceit that they are the better people.

Meanwhile Ellie Gardey at The American Spectator writes that "Thirty Percent of Young Liberals Now Identify as LGBT." She offers two theories about this. One theory -- courtesy of the LGBT activists -- is that it represents the natural sexual identity of humans.

The opposite theory would be that LGBT identity is socially conditioned, and that over 30 percent of young liberals adopt gay or transgender identities at least in part because those identities are celebrated within young progressive communities. Young liberals today treat LGBT identity as a protected class, grant greater social status to those who are gay and transgender, and even devote an entire month of the year to parades and celebrations promoting LGBT identity. In such an environment, young people could be encouraged to form a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identity.

Yeah. I mean, if young people are carefully taught that to be gay is to be special, why wouldn't they go for it?

Well, you know how I would understand this. First, from my reductive Three Peoples theory, I would say that it makes sense that People of the Creative Self, who believe that the best life is a creative life, would certainly be open to creativity in sexuality, rather than the boring old marriage and children of the People of the Responsible Self.

I would also add the following possibility:

I believe that girls and women are instinctively (but not consciously) repelled by the humiliation that women have suffered from the sexual revolution. In my limited experience with women down the years, they like to be gently courted. And when they submit to your advances they imagine a relationship from now till eternity. That's a far cry from the campus "hookup" culture which assumes that everyone is ready for, or at least half-a-bottle of vodka away from, a one-night stand. Remember "Mattress Girl?" Her problem was that she didn't like being dumped by her German boy-friend. Indeed the "sexual harassment" thing is that women don't like being treated as a merely "sexual" object. Not by fellow college students, and not by Andrew Cuomo.

Remember LUG (Lesbian until graduation)? Makes complete sense to me. Why get tricked into the male game of notching conquests on the bed-post? Just check out of the dangerous -- and male -- game of sexual league tables until graduation. Hey, you "safetyists" ought to be able to see the sense in that!

See I argue backwards from my current position as a 74-year-old, that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is grandchildren. Why? Because the alternative is oblivion, and who needs that? So, to get to grandchildren, you need children. And to get to children you need heterosexual sex. And unless you want seriously angry children you need those children to be conceived in marriage. As a Colorado philosopher once said:

Children want a mother and a father; their mother and their father.

In my view, the whole LGBT thing is one of the "left's conceits."

And there is another aspect of this, one that tends to get elided in the normal course of things. It is this. The creative life -- in sex, in career -- is not for everyone. Indeed, I would say it is only for seriously crazy people. That's because, in the creativity stakes, many are called but few are chosen. How many people get to have a successful business startup? How many people get to be a famous writer or artist?  That is why Jungians like Jordan B. Peterson talk about the Sacrificial Hero dying on the border between Order and Chaos. Creativity ain't for everyone. Even the successful creative person probably dies in the creative moment. Because you know what the other name is for a creative person? Exactly: Heretic; someone turning the existing orthodoxy -- that's Greek for correct opinion -- upside down. And most people hate the guy that turns everything upside down.

Someday soon, I believe, this whole lefty, LGBT, liberal thing is going to collapse like a burst balloon. And the reason will be that women will revolt against it. I don't know how or when. I think it is already starting, with the movement against "sexual harassment" and the rise of "safetyism." Women expect to be protected, and if you don't protect them they will find someone who will.