Alt-Left + SJW Alliance? I say no.

In Alt-left OG Robert Lindsay's blog Beyond Highbrow, in an entry entitled Alt Left: A Call for an Alliance with the PC/SJW Leftagainst Trump and the Republican Party, the following exchange is quoted as taking place:

RL: I will make alliance with any and all SJW’s against Trump and the Republican Party. They’re the real enemy. SJW’s are not our enemies. They are our people who have sadly become deranged. But anyone who thinks PC or SJW’s is the main threat is crazy.” 

Tulio: That’s a good way of framing it. I was at the women’s march for my city yesterday and was struggling with how to feel about SJWs. I’m not exactly PC myself, and I have some views about masculinity/femininity/feminism/homosexuality that would get me excommunicated from that crowd. But I was willing to put those differences aside and march with them as a show of force against fascism. Now’s not the time for infighting within the resistance. There are bigger fish to fry.

 At a first glance, there would seem to be merit to this.  And this is more than likely going to be the way things play out in the media anyway.  It always comes down to targeting the top dog, whomever they may be.  The Christian Right was solely in the crosshairs of the internet skeptic community and the progressive blogosphere, and defended by conservatives during George W. Bush's presidency because they were emblematic of that presidency.  They were gradually replaced by the social justice warriors, who were the favorite punching bags of, again, the internet skeptic community and the more libertarian voices on the internet during the Obama years.  There was little sense in going after the religious conservatives during that time.  They weren't in the hot seat.  So it's likely that as 2017 progresses, it will be the alt-right that starts taking the punches now that their God-Emperor is in the oval office, and the SJWs will start becoming yesterday's news.

Never the less, I think the alt left should be wary of palling up with the SJWs.

Now before I go any farther, let me say that I agree with many of Lindsay's concerns about the Trump administration, and find the degree of support he gets on the alt-left to be, at times, quite astonishing.  Donald Trump is not a friend of the working class.  He did put the kibosh on the Trans Pacific Partnership, and that's good.  And I do think that Trump comes in for a lot of hysterical and baseless fear mongering from the reg-left media.  The guy is not literally Hitler, any more than Obama was when the Tea Party was similarly up in arms.   Still and all, we should be wary of welcoming Trump merely because he's hated by the SJWs.  He is not one of us.  As just one example, consider his appointment for Labor Secretary Andy Puzder.  He is known for opposing the minimum wage, is supportive of rolling back eligibility for overtime pay for work in excess of full time hours, is anti union and intends to cut back on enforcement of employment standards laws.   With an appointment like this, Trump has not proven himself a friend of the workers, and for this reason alone does not warrant the support of the alt-left.

I totally get the concerns that Lindsay and others have expressed regarding the Republican Party, and I agree with all of them.  Under no circumstances should we vote for these gangsters.  They are not friends of the common people of America in any way, shape or form.  We have no business supporting them - Trump or no - their long history of freeing the hand of corporate power with no regard to the consequences has done all kinds of damage to the well being of people the world over.

The GOP is a fundamentally corrupt institution.  One look at how they've gerrymandered their lock on the House of Reps makes that quite clear.  Lindsay has several blog entries expressing the possibility of a stolen election.  I don't know about that, but it is rather spurious that Trump can lose the popular vote by a margin of millions and still end up winning in the end.  But that is behind us now, and we will be quite busy over the coming years in our opposition to the ceaseless barrage of regressive nonsense to come down the pipe from the President's desk while Trump sits behind it.   In our opposition to GOP policies, we will frequently find ourselves on the same side as the social justice warriors.  And there's no inherent wrong in this.

But I would caution any sort of coalition with them.  Truth is, the SJWs are not our friends, and nor are they the friends of the common and working people, either.

To understand this, we have to be clear on what a social justice warrior is.  SJW is not a term to be applied in a blanket way to all left of center people. There's plenty of room to be socially liberal or progressive and not be an SJW.  The alt left can and should accept such people.  Likewise, the fundamental problem is not "identity politics."  If repressive policy targets a people based on their identity, then identity politics is the correct and warranted response.  "An injury to one is an injury to all" must be the motto of the alt-left, and if the one that is injured is black, or women, or LGBT people, than by all means we must stand up for them.  What a social justice warrior is, is an intersectional fundamentalist.  A privilege theory determinist.  To an SJW, when the "one" that is injured has a "privileged" identity, the SJW's response is "serves you right!"  SJWs embody the mindset of the scab.  They are explicitly resistant to a return to class and economics as a basis for leftist praxis.  They would cheer a female board of directors voting to crush a union of striking white male steelworkers, or the like. This is why we cannot ally with them except, perhaps, on a very specific case by case basis.  Any observation of them in action should make it abundantly clear that they will not make good allies.

In fact, this fanatical approach to intersectional feminism is likely to have contributed to Trump's victory.  The average citizen takes one look at Black Lives Matter blocking traffic, or reads some misandrist screed from a blue haired blogger on tumblr, and after a while can't be blamed for wondering if making America great again isn't such a bad idea.

Social Justice communities, especially since 2010 or so, are the consummate definition of a circular firing squad: Black Lives Matter crashes a Gay Pride Parade in Toronto because they allowed the Toronto Police to march in the parade.  So in response to BLM demands, Toronto's finest were excluded from the parade - alienating a lot of people with such needless confrontationalism and grandstanding.  White feminists delight in attacking the lack of female leads in Hollywood films until they're assailed for being "white feminists" by women of color or condemned for their "cishet privilege" by lesbian and queer feminists, ostensibly for failing to address issues of concern to their demographics.  Angry and militant BLM feminists demand that white feminists "shut up for a change" and let women of color take charge of the movement.  Even when some of said women of color have ties to orthodox Islamist groups and support Shari'a law.  Because what matters is not what Islamist doctrine actually has to say about the rights of women or LGBT people, but that they rank lower on the intersectionalist hierarchy of privilege vs. marginalization, and therefore what they say goes and cannot be questioned.  Not exactly conducive to the kind of solidarity that will be needed down the road.

Observing antics such as this, I daily read comments on social media such as "I used to be a leftist until I saw ..." and then something like what I've described above is outlined.  Hell, just go over to something like, say, Sargon of Akkad's YouTube channel and read the comments on any of his videos.  That is a very, very common comment.

The social justice warriors are killing the left.  To a considerable extent, they derailed Occupy Wall Street, taking advantage of the Occupy protester's naturally pro-feminist sympathies and making the protests about "indigenizing" protest spaces, confronting "rape culture" and so on.  Before long, big bank and corporate ties to congress were all but forgotten in a mass of criticizing the portrayal of women in video games and the precise definition of sexual consent.  Fast forward five years, and Bernie Sander's presidential bid is derailed, in part due to Clinton's SJW sockpuppets denouncing Sanders supporters as "Bernie Bros" and "brocialists" - implying that they were nothing more than frat boys who happened to lean left on some issues, but were otherwise all about pin up girl and pick up artist culture.

We don't need allies like this.  In fact, the entire raison d'être behind the founding of the alt-left was to establish a kind of leftism that had inoculated itself against  being derailed by a bunch of bourgeois college chicks with daddy issues and sexual hang ups.  "Social Justice" culture is a ceaseless grind of guilt and puritanism.  People don't like constantly being told what they can and can't say and who they can and can't say it to.  People don't like being guilt tripped and kafka-trapped into agreeing with proposals that would never see the light of day on the weight of their merit.  People get frustrated with the constant lack of respect shown their intellects by the SJW's constant bulverism and call out culture.  Whoever has the most "marginalized identities" wins gold in the oppression olympics.  Show off just how "woke" you are by shouting down anybody else who dares suggest anything other than the same old narratives of collective guilt and resentment.  As Saul Alinsky wrote in his 1970 opus Rules For Radicals, "A good tactic is one your people enjoy" and "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag - don't become old news."

The SJWs are well past being old news, and not enjoying the tactic being used - not enjoying anything, come to that - is what SJW activism is all about.  We don't need them.  They will destroy us as they did Occupy and the Sanders campaign.  So destructive have they been, in fact, that I almost wonder if intersectional feminism, especially since 2010 or so, isn't COINTELPRO 2.0.

The alt-left must be the better left.  While there are definitely times when it's necessary to boot members for being genuinely racist or boorish, this is not something that should be relished.  To be effective, we must be for solidarity instead of competitive victimhood.  We must get "the movement" out of the bedrooms and back into the boardrooms of the nation, where it belongs.  We must be fun.  We must welcome honest discussion and disagreement in good faith, such as I'm expressing here with people like Lindsay and his commentators whom I regard as solid friends and comrades within this movement.

We have no need of an alliance with the SJWs.  We must instead be the blueprint for long term success on the left.  Rather than complain about the obsolete and defective SJW model, let's be part of a newer and better model.  The Justice Democrats initiative, being spearheaded by YouTube pundit Kyle Kulinski (among others), and supported by the aforementioned Sargon of Akkad, is a good place to start.  We should, I think, involve ourselves in this and work to stop it being derailed as previous progressive initiatives have by intersectional feminist infestation.  Should this fail, and it may well, then a third party might be necessary, or even the talk of a more radical approach that Lindsay suggests in his column may be warranted.