The Heart and Soul of Regressive Leftism

A question was put to me:

So Antifa advocates "Punch a Nazi". Would they still be OK with a male Antifa member punching a Nazi if she were a woman? Would Antifa, which is definitely very pro-feminist and committed to the principle of preventing violence against women, be conflicted by these two seemingly contradictory principles? That is the real question that is hard to answer.

It is easy to answer once you understand how the hard-line intersectional feminist mind actually works. The answer simply is yes, absolutely. Antifa have assaulted TERF feminists, why wouldn't they assault an actual Nazi woman?

Remember that antifa are the militant wing of the intersectional feminist movement. They're not anarcho-communists, whatever colors they may wave or fly or symbolism they may display. In the intersectional feminist ideology, identities are ultimately social, not biological constructs. This is very important to recognize, and clears up a lot of confusion surrounding their activities and beliefs.

Notice that these are the people pushing "trans women are women" narrative the hardest, even though they have male anatomy (unless they've had the full sex reassignment surgery and so on) "Woman" as a biological category is meaningless to them ideologically. Were you to suggest that women are defined by their anatomy and biology rather than social status and identity as marginalized people in a patriarchal society, they'd accuse you of being a misogynist, since you are "reducing women to their anatomy" and therefore "objectifying" them.

Unfortunately for you, were you to do this, this would be classified as Nazi, since the intersectional feminist regards as Nazi/Fascist that which threatens people with marginalized identity sets. You don't actually have to sympathize with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini's actual ideology in order to be considered a fascist or a Nazi by Antifa. So they would probably punch you too. Hope you've been training on the heavy bag.

'Woman" is a socially constructed identity, and constitutes whatever is deemed marginalized relative to men. And it seems to be the case that people with marginalized identities can lose or forsake those identities if they take the side of those with privileged identities. Indeed, they're especially hateful towards women, PoC, trans folk and so on who go over to even moderate conservatism, let alone Nazism.

The mindset of the intersectional feminist regressive leftist is not often studied and understood by its opponents. The thing to keep in mind is that their outlook on the world is very different than ours. It's helpful to remember that:

1 - They don't believe in a common, objective reality that we all inhabit. They believe that much that we take for granted in terms of perception, conceptual thought and basic philosophical concepts such as metaphysics (the nature of reality), epistemology (ways of knowing that reality), morality (what is right and wrong) and so on are actually psychologically and socially constructed.

2 - They have a very manichean world view. This means that they see things in very stark good vs evil terms. It's all about those with marginalized (good) vs privileged (evil) identities or combinations of intersecting identities (hence the term intersectionality). So it's white vs PoC, male vs female, heterosexual vs LGBT, cis vs trans and so on. Given point 1 above, there's no room for any kind of common understanding between opposed sides. All interactions between those with marginalized vs privileged identity sets are "power discourses" meaning zero sum contests wherein one must win and the other must lose.

3 - Positive moral concepts - goodness, mercy, truth, right and so on are defined entirely in terms of what benefits those with marginalized identity sets and/or harms those with privileged identity sets. The reverse is also true - evil actions are rendered evil by who performs them, not by the characer of the actions themselves. This is why, according to the regressive intersectionalist, PoC can't be racist, women can't be sexist and it's not objectification when women ogle (or even assault or rape) men.  Thus, in defense of the marginalized and against the privileged, the utmost of ruthlessness and mercilessness is not only justified, but mandated.

4 - As kind of an aside, Marxist-Leninism and Maoism were basically like this as well, only with the proletariat and its self appointed Vanguard representatives filling in the role of marginalized, and the bourgeoisie filling in the role of the privileged. Lenin even coined a phrase for this exact concept - "Kto Kovo." Meaning who/whom? Who benefits? Trotsky embodied a similar concept in the question, "Towards socialism or towards capitalism?" This explains much of the character of these regimes.

5 - Not all sympathizers with regressive left ideologies go all the way in regards to the above. Fortunately, most are restrained to varying degrees by the prevailing moral order of the west, which implicitly holds that moral law is equally binding on all. To believe this while still proceeding in favor of social justice and fairness is the key indicator of the genuine progressive leftist as opposed to their regressive counterpart. In our currently free and liberal society, most intersectional feminists are not this fundamentalist in their interpretation of their ideology. I describe here the ideological system in its purest form, not as it is embodied with absolute consistency.

Antifa go farther than most down the dark path of regressivism, however. I suggest that they not be trusted, and resisted where possible. Perhaps against actual, bona-fide Nazis it's worth allying with people like this. Churchill and Roosevelt did that while allying with Stalin, after all. But other than that, these extremists of the regressive left are not to be trusted.

Understand the above, and you understand the heart and soul of regressive leftism.

Read The Regressive Left: History, Theory, Methodology: The Regressive Soul
Read The Regressive Left: History, Theory, Methodology: The Militant Mind

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Alt Right vs. Alt Left

According to Alt-Right blogger Vox Day:

"The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy."

If this is the Alternative Right, what then would be the Alternative Left?

The Alt Left believes Enlightenment civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its own foundational pillars.  Of these, the first is reason and rationality, the second is individual liberty and the third is the enlightenment era philosophical tradition.

This promises no panacea, and often results in tension between competing ideals of the good.  The libertarian/individualist traditions and the egalitarian/collectivist traditions - think Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx for example, are often at odds with one another.  But common to both in the end is a commitment to a rationalistic world view and a belief in concepts such as scientific and social progress, however imperfectly these are often expressed or implemented.

We are skeptical of religions as dogmatic systems and romanticism (in its original meaning) and are likewise skeptical of deterministic and closed systems of "rationalist" thought such as Marxism and Randian objectivism - though ideas may be taken from both if warranted.  The labels of reason and rationality cannot be applied to closed and non falsifiable systems of thought, and individual liberty is not upheld by anyone who would demand the sacrifice of human well being to a dogmatic insistence on either market or plan.

It would be easy and correct to respond that man does not live by reason alone.  Fundamental to man's nature is the need for meaning and purpose which often find themselves expressed in the forms of religion, identity, artistry, creativity and mythology.  It is because of and not in spite of these needs that enlightenment civilization must be upheld.  The absence of liberty and reason in theocratic and fascistic spaces testify to this.  It is for the sake of poetry and spirituality, of philosophy and the arts that the foundations of society should be reason, liberty and enlightenment philosophies.  It is not the case that the alt-left eschews questions of identity and spirituality in favor of a narrowly economic and rationalistic conception of man.  Rather that a rationalistic and free social order is an essential foundation for man to satisfy his spiritual and philosophical yearnings.

There are those who assert that the enlightenment has failed, and advance a "dark enlightenment" calling for a return to tradition, religion and monarchy.  This is fundamentally misguided in that the neo-reactionary critique accurately targets not modernism, but postmodernism - or at least the bastardized implementation thereof, and its own neoreaction is really just a different version of the same thing: the replacement of reason, liberty and philosophy with identitarian subjectivism, tribalism and fanaticism.

To these ends, it is clear that the majority of the self described Alt-Left adheres, above all, to the disentangling of romanticism from leftist thought, and it is this that satisfies our definition of both alternative and left wing.  To this end:

·      We favor the redressement of the extremes of economic inequality and corporate power, not the quasi-religious glorification of revolution for its own sake. 

·      We favor equality of right and - ideally - opportunity for women and people of color, not the quasi religious glorification of the foreign and the feminine. 

·      We favor conservationism and environmental sustainability, not the quasi religious glorification of “Mother Earth” or back-to-the-land utopianism.

·      An approach to reform that emphasises implementable policy, not some or another kind of change of consciousness.

Vox Day would see the unseating of a democratic polity marked – in the words of conservative luminary Russell Kirk - by division between “all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal” in favor of a polity marked by division between “men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage.”

It should be apparent to any reasonable person that this is the forcing of a choice of evils by means of a false dilemma, and one not marked by greatly different choices in any event.  Ultimately, would not a “genetic heritage” be every bit as binding and deterministic in the long run as an “enduring moral order in the universe” and a “constant human nature” if not more so? 

The neo-reactionaries have observed the morass that the postmodern regressive left has inflicted on western civilization via its capture of academia and mass media, and advance in defiance to it merely a belief in either ethnic or racial nationalism, or a belief in a reassertion of religious traditionalism or fundamentalism.  Utterly absent is any rational analysis of either the institutional structure of the organs that propagate culture in the west, the philosophical underpinnings of regressive left thought nor the strategies employed by the regressive left to gain the influence that it has gained.  Meme warfare - essentially online culture jamming - is child’s play compared to hegemony at the governance level of the very internet platforms whereon the memes are hosted and spread.

Due to their mutual faith in identity above all, the failure of both the reactionary right and the regressive left alike should be a foregone conclusion.  But that failure threatens to be very costly, and presents a fundamental threat to the western tradition that neoreaction so claims to cherish and want to uphold but simultaneously undermines, and that the regressive left claims to despise and wish to supplant but simultaneously depends on.

Erroneous philosophical foundations will not produce polities that last.  The extent to which western civilization has declined is quite proportionate to the extent to which its academics and professors extol their “genetic heritage” in preference to their responsibility to understand art, science and philosophy in any sort of nuanced and sophisticated way.  One look at a black studies or a women’s studies department makes that perfectly clear, and a white male version of the same thing will only hasten this decline.

The great demarcation in modern politics is between men and women who uphold a humanistic vision of reason, liberty and philosophy, and those who uphold a tribalist vision of fanaticism, authoritarianism and dogma.  In the later camp, it does not fundamentally matter if one’s loyalty is to the white race or the black, heteronormative machismo or radical feminism, the Christian Church, Islamic Sharia or state Atheism, libertarian capitalism or socialist planning.  When tribe, dogma or ideology supersede humanity, reason and philosophy, the end is always a bloodbath and the beginning is denial that we have a choice between the first three and the second three options.

No need to Falsely Tar Antifa. They're Their Own Worst Enemies.

A lot of false nonsense has come out of 4chan and similar circles regarding Antifa, such as a Snopes recent expose of faked Antifa flyers calling for the murder of white children.  Other hoaxes have involved a flyer from Emerald City Antifa warning people against dating white people, a man being stabbed for allegedly having a “fascist haircut” and a phony “Antifa manual” that appeared in, among other places, a site that equates Antifa with the alt left. 

Don’t believe any of it. 

While I worry about Antifa's propensity to mob rule and vigilante violence, let's keep in mind what they profess to be up against here.  While actual neo-Nazi activity in America is very low and quite marginal, the history of the appeasement of the Nazis both inside the Weimar Republic and, later from Britain and France during the 1930s should teach a clear lesson. Had Hitler been stopped much earlier in his career, and there were countless opportunities to do this right up until the 1938 German annexation of Czechoslovakia, the inevitable war against him would have been far less bloody.  Those who would take the fight to a resurgent Nazism before it's allowed to take real roots have a strong historical case to back them up.

But so too do Antifa's critics.

The good cause that is fighting fascism does not excuse Antifa from the very real dumb things they do.  Plus a lot of the false flags being carried out against Antifa, while not justifiable in and of themselves, are carried out because the nature of hard line ideological movements make them especially vulnerable to those kinds of tactics, as well as rule out the more moderate forms of dialogue and debate.  The actions of 4chan and other right wing sources, despite their own glaring disconnects from reality, shouldn't surprise us.  We should rather be surprised that it is 4chan and not the FBI that are carrying these kinds of actions.  This is how radical politics have played out in the west and in America in particular for a long time now. Many parallels with the new left of the 1960s and 70s burning itself out on ideological excesses abound here.

It might well behoove Antifa to adopt some semblance of a formal national structure and issue a statement of principles, a manifesto or something of the like outlining precisely what they believe and how they hope to go about achieving their goals. This could include a statement to the effect that persons who are not fascists have nothing to fear from them. They'd do well to resolve their differences with Trump supporters through debate or the ballot box, and make clear that they'll fight only in self defense at this time.

The decentralized and utopian nature of the far left in America mitigates against this kind of thing happening, however.  Especially so given the Manichean worldview that's so typical of extremist thinking in general.  There can be no negotiation with pure evil, and that being anything other than themselves.  The western left, from Antifa to its antecedents in Occupy Wall Street to their antecedents in anti-WTO protests and going all the way back to 19^th century communal utopians, have a long history of utopian naivety and reliance on ideological purism for movement cohesion. There’ve been exceptions, of course, but they had their own problems, such as the Communist Party USA parroting the Soviet era Kremlin’s line on damn near everything. 

But, by and large, English speaking radicals have tended to eschew the procedure and organization of parliamentary institutions in favor of an admittedly well intended but ultimately ineffective commitment to purity of consensus.  Doubly so now given how committed to a lot of critical theory/postmodernist concepts (the "authority of experience" for example) the western left has become, lending themselves to eschew classical definitions of fascism (if not the very concept of classical definitions) in favor defining fascism along the lines of being anyone unwilling to give "marginalized peoples" a complete moral blank check vis-a-vis the rest of the population to decide on everyone's behalf what is and isn't oppressive and offensive.

In a similar vein, they've opened themselves up to these old Leninist arguments of "revolutionary violence" that Herbert Marcuse also explored in the 1960s, which basically said that violence was justified if carried out on behalf of "marginalized" "oppressed" or "revolutionary vanguard" groups against their "oppressors", be these the police, the state, peaceful conservatives or anyone so hateful enough as to be born with white skin. 

The left have largely sold their souls to these kinds of concepts, and the result is the creation of echo chambers that are short on reality testing and dissent and long on boundary policing.  This not only alienates potential support and doubtlessly drives away those supporters who end up on the wrong end of some internal power struggle or another, but makes groups like Antifa vulnerable to infiltration and subversion via false flag operations, both from their political opponents (think 4chan) and from state enforcement agencies wanting to avoid dirtying their image via open police state tactics.

Expect COINTELPRO types of activities to be carried out against Antifa - if they haven't been already, because that's what the historical precedent would suggest. I don't support such tactics, of course, but through its embrace of that eternal albatross around the neck of the western left, revolutionary romanticism, Antifa is doing little to help themselves here and I find them hard therefore to sympathize with.

Simply saying "you've all been duped by the conservative media" isn't going to help any, especially given how much media (CNN, Huff Post, the Guardian, Salon, Mic and a host of other news blogs) are decidedly not conservative.  Plus, as any politically minded YouTuber these days would be more than happy to tell you, anti fascism has now become a full fledged moral panic on the left and even in the center, so blaming Antifa's poor reputation entirely on the media dodges the core issue.

The real way to fight fascism is to shore up the center - to create and defend robust democratic institutions that are transparent, inclusive and accountable to the people they're intended to serve.  Most western nations have a long way to go in that regard.  This is especially true in the US, where unrestrained money in politics has all but completely compromised the integrity of political institutions, and the resulting lack of public confidence should therefore not surprise us.  That's what got Trump into office, and that's when extremist ideological movements start becoming attractive to people.

Likewise, that's when people stop believing in the power or even the desirability of the state maintaining order in the face of rising extremism, and take matters into their own hands via groups like Antifa.  This should trouble us, for this is precisely the kind of scenario that makes the rise of authoritarianism more palatable to the mainstream, who would otherwise eschew it.  While groups like Antifa overstate the threat posed by Trump himself - the man is no Hitler, he's not a step in the right direction either.  The great danger is that by contributing to a climate of chaos and political violence, Antifa may well lend legitimacy to calls for a strong man to come along and restore order the old fashioned way, and thus end up with a kind of tragic self fulfilling prophecy.  

I don't believe that Antifa are the moral equivalent of Nazi skinheads and I grow weary of those who suggest that they are.  If Antifa were a Marxist Leninist movement, a case for that could be made.  If they extolled Stalin or Mao, you can say that they’re as bad, or at least in the same league, as Hitler and the Nazis.  There may be some of these inside Antifa, and Antifa may themselves be clear that they regard the fascists as a much more clear and present threat than the bolshevik types and choose therefore to prioritize fascists as a target and even ally with hard line communists against them. Much like our governments did in WWII.  But they primarily identify themselves as anarchists, not cold war era Kremlin mouthpieces with red flags.

But that does not place Antifa above criticism, however much one may agree with the stated goal of fighting Nazis, and does not mean that Antifa are not dangerous in their own ways.  If Antifa are dangerous, at least to their targets at "free speech" rallies, can their targets really be blamed for taking action against them, becoming a kind of AntiAntifa, if you will? 

Antifa are burying themselves in their own ideological excesses, and they have no one to blame for that but themselves.

Antifa, Nazis and the Alt-Left

This whole "alt-left = antifa" kerfuffle has, I think, made clear that the real alt-left fights a two front war, and that there is a definite moral asymmetry between our two groups of opponents.
The regressive left certainly comes in for criticism. No question about that, and I make no apologies for the criticisms I've made of them over time. But they're simply not in the same league as the reactionary right in terms of being completely disconnected from reality.
The regressive left will either deny that the alt-left exists at all, for which they can be forgiven because the alt-left is still very miniscule, measured by the number of people who identify as alt-left. Or the regressive left will throw their typical bromides of "racist", "misogynist" and "privilege" at us. Again, this is not entirely unwarranted, though it is most certainly not entirely true either, since alt-left groups on social media do draw a good number of "left wing of the alt right" types. The regressive left is wrong, of course, in their typical lack of understanding of nuances of any kind of political thought that isn't drenched in white male guilt. So pooh pooh to the regressive left.
But the reactionary right? They're something else all together. The amount of absolute and utter nonsense that I've read from paleocons about this whole matter will make your head hurt. The alt-left = the democrats = Marxists. We're all marionnettes of Hillary Clinton and Obama, who are full-on Stalinists hell bent on destroying America. As with everything that comes from the InfoWars, "don't tread on me" section of the internet, EVERYTHING they have to say about us is a reflection of their completely epistemically closed and delusionally paranoid view of the world. Between them and the regressive left, there's just no comparison. They both lie and they're both obsessed with and completely preoccupied with their own ideological pet fetishes to be sure, but not on nearly the same scale. The difference is one of orders of magnitude.
In the same vein, there's likewise no real comparison of antifa with actual neo-nazis. Antifa are, of course, light years from being blameless. Attacking peaceful Trump supporters, as they have yet again in recent days, is stupid and repugnant, and cheapens and undermines the very cause that Antifa professes to be about. Their behavior is inexcusable and sickening.
But don't even try to compare it with actual Nazis and fascism. Just don't. Antifa's antics are bad, to be sure. But they've got a ways to go to catch up with Auschwitz. To put it very mildly. Or even the Jim Crow era of the US south.
If I could address antifa - and given the recent equation of the alt-left with antifa, it's quite possible that I might be able to with at least a few of them, I'd implore them to understand actual politics a little better than they apparently do and refrain from equating Trump supporters with actual fascists.
Don't like Trump? I don't like him either, but he ain't Hitler. His supporters are not the SS Einsatzgruppen, and you cheapen the horrors of Nazi Europe when you even hint at making that suggestion.

That's what really gets under my skin about a lot of this. Eastern Europe in the 1940s was horror beyond reckoning. Whole populations were systematically abused in the worst ways you can think of, right up to wholesale slaughter. It's a slap in the face to the survivors and the families of the survivors of the barbarism that real totalitarianism unleashed in 1930s and 40s Europe when that horror becomes a mere rhetorical gimmick for incendiary pundits trying to score points in 21st century American partisan party politics. I remember saying this to the Tea Party dumbasses who tried saying Obama was literally Hitler, and I'll say the same thing to the antifa idiots regarding Trump. Shut up already. He's not Hitler. And you're a disrespectful asshole for even suggesting that he is.
But I have WAY less than no use for any piece of shit who profess to admire Hitler, display a swastika, SS runes, death head insignia or any other trappings of Nazism unironically, or start spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense. Espouse that crap and you're signalling support for the worst atrocities humans ever visited on each other. As bad as you've been taught Hitler was, he was worse.

My grandfathers went overseas to fight that monstrosity, and not with mere pepper spray and bike locks either. The "antifa" they belonged to used Sherman tanks and Lancaster bombers, or at least Enfield rifles. They didn't go there to engage in robust debate. "Deplatforming" in those days usually involved a lot of explosives dropped from high heights. And a lot of people died. That was tragic and unfortunate, but way better that than a Nazi hegemony in Europe.
And we call them heroes today, and so we should. I have no problems, none whatsoever, casting my lot in with antifa provided they confine their direct action tactics to actual real Nazis, skinheads, Klan and real bonafide fascists. Not mere conservatives or libertarians who, however much we may disagree, are not in the same universe of ugliness as Hitler and his goons, and with whom our differences can still be settled at the ballot box.
For antifa to commit violent assaults against peaceful conservatives and Trump supporters is repugnant, criminal and inexcusable, and I would implore them to stop if I could, or else implore the powers that be to step up police action to put a stop to it. But what I will not do is equate antifa's violence with the ugliness of the Nazis themselves. The memory of what happened at Auschwitz does not deserve that kind of dishonor.

A brief history of the Alt-Left and where it's going

A brief outline of the history of our movement:

"Let us Face the Future!"

The alt-left is basically a revival of the early to mid 20th century anti-communist, anti-stalinist left. These were people who were pro labor, pro social democracy and in favor of civil rights, but put off by the authoritarianism of the Soviet bloc, and a bit later on, by the radicalism of the new left of the late 1960s.

This kind of progressivism faded away during the 1980s and 90s. With the collapse of communism, a leftism opposed to authoritarian leftism was without a foil. Plus, deindustrialization and the resulting decline of organized labor meant that the electoral support for classic social democracy receded. The likes of Reagan in America and Thatcher in the UK signified a structural shift away from the policies of economic center-leftism. 

Center-left parties gradually picked up the slack in a few other places. These included immigrant populations, which had grown as a result of increased immigration adopted by governments as a response to declining domestic birth rates, and an intellectual establishment based around academia and a nascent social media. These sorts of people were more interested in cultural leftism, so called political correctness. There was little concern for the social democracy of old on the center left. The kinds of salt-of-the-Earth blue collar workers and farmers who were once the backbone of the labor and cooperative movements were now distrusted and ridiculed for their religiosity and alleged racism.  The new political divide was between these urban PC cultural leftists, and these once labourite suburban and rural voters won over to the right via social conservatism.  The especially virulent strand of rightism represented by the religious right and later, the Tea Party, proved especially polarizing. 

Gradually, the religious right was pushed back due to the success of philosophically minded atheist authors, backed by an internet savvy skeptic community, riding a wave of disillusionment with the Bush White House and its costly and devastating war in Iraq over non existent weapons of mass destruction.  These new atheist authors and their amazing mouthpieces on social media held Christian fundamentalism to scathing ridicule and withering critique.  Important to their deconstruction of Christianity was its long record of support for social injustice and discrimination against women, minorities and gays, the later of whom were then campaigning for marriage rights. 

Then came the Lehman Bro's meltdown. Criticism of neoliberalism, always present under the radar but never on the national agenda, became more prominent. This compounded the already tarnished image of the conservative Bush White House, and Obama was subsequently elected on a platform of "hope and change" implying that he would be another Roosevelt. The results were less than were hoped for, mind you. Then the subsequent rise of Occupy Wall Street and the popularization of the meme of the 1% vs the 99%. Like their antecedents in the anti WTO protests of the late 90s and early 2000s, their issues resonated with people, but the culture of radicalism was off putting to many.

Also off putting was a growing tendency towards a soft authoritarianism on the cultural left. The rise of the social justice warriors, and their belligerent approach to cultural leftism, became deeply polarizing.  Especially on college campuses, where they popularized the tactic of "no platforming" speakers they did not like. The PC left's pushback against the religious right and the Tea Party seemed a hollow victory given how alike the religious right and the Tea Party they had become in the process.

A related phenomena was the so called regressive left, a kind of cultural leftism that cozied up to Islamism, and criticized opponents of mass Islamic immigration as Islamophobic. This despite growing public concern over rising domestic terrorism and changing demographics.  The Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, and sexual assault scandals such as the Rotherham affair drove immigration to the top of concerns of voters across the western world, fuelling populist anti-immigration backlashes in America and Europe.

Then came manufactured clickbaity social media scandals such as donglegate, gamergate, elevatorgate, shirtstorm and Atheism+, which ended up causing a liberal schism between the SJWs and the so called skeptic community, alongside the rise of the alt-right. The SJWs and regressive left had prompted a reactionary backlash that had a profound effect on internet culture. This backlash attacked the SJWs and the regressive left with the same vigor with which they went after the religious right only recently.  

The social justice left could not have responded in a more counter-productive manner: insisting on ideological compliance due to the moral authority implicit to being progressive, or by appeal to their marginalized identities.  With displays of outrage that would win Oscars in Hollywood, the race and gender, rather than the arguments of the skeptic community critics were what a centralized, ideologically disciplined, overwhelmingly pro-social justice media and academic establishment establishment chose to focus on in their counter attacks.  

The rivalry grew increasingly bitter and more intense, with regressive leftists and social justice warriors, convinced that "there were no bad methods, only bad targets" took to doxing, smear campaigns and other forms of more personal attacks against their skeptic and alt-right critics.  Their opponents retaliated in kind.  At best, disputes between pro and anti SJW factions on social media became barely distinguishable from the trading of insults on a grade school playground.  Quite frequently, it resulted in people being fired from their jobs, blacklisted in various communities and wedges being driven between spouses and within families. 

But these counter-reactions to the new authoritarian left did not satisfy everybody. For many, the alt-right went too far in the opposite direction, going as far as to rehabilitate fascist and white nationalist ideas.  The two sides seemed to mirror one another in their contrasting bigotries and sexually repressed juvenile acrimony.  The Skeptic community, hewing to a path of classical liberalism, had little to say on issues of economic inequality, and were often as critical of "socialism" as they were of political correctness and Islamism.

Finally came the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump's success, due in part to support from the alt-right, showed the potential for an online political movement to challenge the status-quo. Bernie Sanders was the most successful US presidential candidate since the gilded age to refer to himself as a socialist. His success showed the potential for a revival of social democracy.  The bitter truth was that the 99% so called hadn't recovered from the great recession.  Increasingly, new jobs were either temporary, low wage and part time, or required huge amounts of education and involved an on call 24/7 way of life.  Work/life balance and union protection had grown scarce.  Sanders had tapped into a resentment against capitalism that had begun to fester even in the heart of the good 'ol U.S of A, the likes of which had not been seen since the days of the robber barons. 

2016 was the pivotal year.  It began with a handful of bloggers thinking of themselves as "the left wing of the alt-right" or "liberal race realists."  They added a much needed and conspicuously absent economic element to the alt right's nationalist critique of globalism.  White birth rates would remain low if jobs didn't pay enough or were too demanding timewise to support a family.

In late 2016, the unthinkable happened.  Disillusionment with the direction that the regressive left and the SJWs were taking things caused "I'm with her" - the successor to the now distant and disillusioned "Change we can believe in" to fall before "Make America great again!"  Following this was nothing less than an all out civil war on the progressive left between those who thought the election results due to just how deeply racist and misogynistic America was, and those who thought that the left's obsession with racism and misogyny to the exclusion of jobs and the economy was precisely why Hillary Clinton lost.  

Plus, it turned out that many people who were anti SJW and even involved in GamerGate or the skeptic community had otherwise progressive tendencies, but were disillusioned with the direction cultural leftism was going.  Driven by trendy academic theories such as intersectionality and postmodernism, and pushed by smug, self righteous and condescending commentators on social media, the cultural left had become censorious, puritanical and open in its disdain for people based on race and gender.  Wasn't this precisely what the progressive left was supposed to be against?

Yet for these disillusioned progressives, the alt-right wouldn't work because if its own embracing of reactionary ideas.  The answer to the white male guilt of the SJWs had to be something better than white male supremacy.  Libertarianism was similarly to be distrusted, despite having the right stances on free speech and a live-and-let-live mentality, due to its laissez faire economics.

The formula then was this: Pragmatic center left economics; social democracy plus cultural libertarianism plus a rejection of identity politics as represented by the twin ills of white male supremacy (the alt-right) and white male inferiority (the SJWs + Regressive left) plus a respect for freedom of religion that is still uncompromisingly secular does not play favorites between Christianity and Islam.  All of this bound together by a commitment to the core principles of the enlightenment: scientific rationality (with a respect for that side of man that is mythological and spiritual in his yearnings), a rejection of deterministic ideologies and reductionist social narratives, and an unwavering belief universal human rights and responsibilities.

Will this formula be enough to yield political success?  If it is to, the alt-left will have to contend with several challenges.  

The first is who ultimately defines the term?  Will it be the original left wing of the alt-right bloggers?  Several conservative media outlets have identified the alt-left with the kinds of militant antifa protesters that have been rioting on college campuses.  Will the true meaning of what it means to be alt-left be reduced to a mere class reductionist rejection of identity politics, a rebirth not of the anti-authoritarian left but of mere vulgar Marxism?  The alt-left would do well to reaffirm its historical anti-communist stances and its commitment to an open, pluralistic society.

Related to this is the problem of outreach: the alt-left will need to find ways of getting its message across to the broader public, so that it can attract more adherents and possibly even influence the ideological and policy directions taken by mainstream center-left forces.  

A hard decision the alt-left may soon have to make is just how purist is it going to be in its opposition to identity politics?  How does the alt-left plan on breaking out of its young white male demographic ghetto?  Where and with whom does the alt-left hope to find a basis of political and economic support?  As a possible answer to this question, how should the alt-left relate to organized labor, or what's left of it?  

Criticizing the deterministic IdPol of the intersectional SJWs is all well and good, but as previously mentioned, a quasi Marxist class reductionism is hardly a better alternative.  This has been tried, after all, and the results can't be considered much of an improvement. The alt-left's critique of identity politics is going to have to be better than anything we've seen thus far out of the skeptic community, the alt right or the class reductionists, and they will have to a better job of delivering on the concept of social justice than the social justice warriors themselves.  

The alt-left will also need better answers to the problem of immigration, fast becoming a make or break issue in western politics.  The alt-left will need answers to hard foreign policy questions.  And the alt-left will have to answer these questions in a political wilderness characterized by fake news and shifting political alliances at home and abroad and a core constituency that is notoriously difficult to organize.  

But if the alt-left do not answer those questions, who will?

What the Hell Happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

Q: What the hell happened to Samizdat Chronicles?

A: Samizdat Chronicles is now The Alternative Left on blogger.  

Q: Why?

A: To make it easier to find, to make it among the search results when "alt left" or "alternative left" is entered into a search engine.  Ultimately, so that it's the Alt-Left itself that defines itself, since there's a lot of confusion in the media about exactly what the Alt-Left is.

Q: So what's changed?

A: The appearance.  The layout.

Q: What's stayed the same?

A: The content and the author's towering intellect. <grin>  I'd also like to bring additional writers on board, and eventually turn this blog into a sort of news and opinion forum for people with alt-left points of view.  Hard as this may be to believe, I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

Q: You're not?  Who the hell are you, anyway?

A: I get that all the time. <laughs>  My friends know who I am.  It's not hard to figure out.  I came to the Alt-Left in the spring of 2016.  I started the page Alternative Left on Facebook in April of 2016, and launched this blog and its accompanying YouTube channel around the same time.  Plus, I've been in other forums and media that host Alt-Left views.  I blog under the names Agent Commie and Ernest Everhard - if you don't know, he was the main protagonist in Jack London's classic dystopian novel, The Iron Heel.  Think of that book as a Marxist mirror image of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  Ernest Everhard is to historical materialism what John Galt was to objectivism, just without the huge long author filibuster.  

Q: Is the Alt-Left Marxist?

A: Some Alt-Leftists are.  A good way to think of the Alt-Left is in contrast to the Alt-Right.  If the Alt-Right are race realists, the Alt-Left are class realists.  Meaning that we accept that class differences are real.  

This means that capitalism is a very different system for people who must sell their labor power for a wage in order to survive than it is for people who own capital, meaning productive assets, or shares thereof.  The evidence for this is that since neoliberal globalization triumphed in the 1980s and 90s, incomes and wealth have grown vastly more for high income earners and people with high levels of net worth.  For the middle and working classes, it's been stagnation or decline.  

Most people on the Alt-Left are not full fledged Marxists or communists, though.  The majority favor classic social democracy - a reinvigorated social safety net and regulatory system, modern monetary theory, universal single payer health care, stuff like that.   The Alt-Left was energized quite a bit by Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential bid.  Though he did not win the Democratic Nomination, he showed that there was measurable public support for a candidate running on an economically progressive platform and who even referred to himself as a democratic socialist.  In America.  Imagine that.

Q: This sounds like the Old Left.  Is that what the Alt-Left is?

A: Kind of.  The Alt-Left's ultimate aim is to push back against neoliberal dominance in political, economic and social spheres.  This puts the Alt-Left outside the mainstream of center left politics, which has almost completely capitulated to the right wing in economic philosophy, especially since the collapse of communism and the waning of organized labor in the wake of neoliberal globalization.  Replacing social democratic economics as the centerpiece of center leftism has been postmodern identity politics and cultural issues.  Terms such as "political correctness", "social justice warrior" and "regressive left" describe a world view and its adherents that attributes power and privilege to race and gender rather than class that has become hegemonic in academia and from there has spread into other cultural spheres.  The Alt-Left thinks this has been very harmful.

Q: The Alt-Left claims to be against identity politics.  Do you deny the existence of discrimination against women, people of color and other marginalized groups?

A: No.  This idea gets advanced by regressive leftists and SJWs, and it misconstrues what we mean when we say identity politics.  Think of Martin Luther King Jr's dream that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  This is the ultimate repudiation of identity politics, because it claims that identity should not matter compared to personal character.  This is what most Alt-Leftists favor.

Identity politics means making identity - one's race, gender, sexual orientation or whatever - a determinist characteristic.  Influenced by postmodernism, post-structuralism in philosophy and textual criticism and so on, classical liberal approaches to the issues faced by minorities was pushed back in favor of a more aggressively nationalistic approach. So concepts like white privilege, male privilege and so on were applied in a very sweeping and reductionist way, asserting that all whites/males were sexist and racist.  It was asserted that women and people of color couldn't be racist or sexist because these things were defined as power plus prejudice.  

Particularly alarming were the assertions that speech that offended so called marginalized peoples needed to be curtailed, as a necessary means of creating more inclusive and equal environments.  Academic authorities and mainstream media capitulated to this line of reasoning almost completely without question. So you're seeing more and more no-platforming on college campuses, so called safe spaces, the gross misuse of trigger warnings.  Trigger warnings were supposed to be for PTSD sufferers, and applied to very specific things.  This is gravely troubling for most Alt-Leftists.  

On the other hand, we're equally troubled by the right wing, which seems to be capitalizing on public resentment against leftist identity politics to advance reactionary agendas.  We already see this with Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the Alt-Right, and so on.    

Q: So the Alt-Left is strongly supportive of free speech?

A: Oh, very much so.  Most of us, anyway.  It is vitally important that a segment of the left stand up and speak out in favor of free speech, because the left is in very real danger of ceding the entire issue to the right.  A whole lot of people were left in political limbo, because they support free speech but don't trust conservatives and libertarians on a host of other issues, economic issues especially.  This is devastating for everybody.  Having to choose between free speech and free expression on the one hand, and protections against corporate excess and abuses on the other is an awful choice to force people to make.

Q: Another Alt-Left site calls itself 'The Left Wing of the Alt-Right' and entertains ideas of race realism.  Is the Alt-Left race realist?

A: Many of the early Alt-Leftists were race realists.  The term was first used by bloggers who had defected, or were offshoots from the Alt-Right.  They advocate race realism alongside liberal politics and leftist economics.  A tough circle to square, if you ask me.  The idea is not favored by most Alt-Leftists I've had dealings with.  The problem with it stems from the difficulties in serving two masters, so to speak.  How can we be class realists while supporting one of the harshest ways of stratifying a society that history has yet seen? 

Personally, I have no interest in or use for claims of vast differences in IQ, for example, across racial lines.  These claims are almost always advanced in the interests of puffing up white nationalist egos and the so called "science" backing up the claim is a legitimizing facade for this.  This has been my experience, at any rate.   But a growing problem has been that more and more alienated white youth are becoming receptive to Alt-Right claims.  On the surface, it's easy to be dismissive of 4chan culture, the preoccupation with meme warfare and cartoon frogs and so on.  But don't underestimate it.  It's tailored quite nicely to its target audience.  

And the regressive left doesn't help matters.  They ceaselessly lecture the young white male on his privilege, when he probably doesn't have it that good.  It goes back to what I mentioned above about class.  The regressive left is class-blind.  That's why they conflate being white male with privilege.  So they blame being white where they should blame power.  They blame being male where they should blame greed.  The descent of the mainstream left into this anti-western civilization, anti-white, anti-male hate cult ends up legitimizing the narratives of the macho and racist Alt-Right.  The two sides feed off one another.

Q: Well, that's just about it.  You mentioned earlier about turning this blog into a broader Alt-Left forum?

A: I think so.  There's a lot of ideas and enthusiasm among Alt-Leftists.  If other Alt-Left thinkers are interested in publishing articles on this forum, I'd be happy to accept submissions.  Email them to me or else indicate in the comments section either here or on Facebook, and if the submission is at all cohesive and the feedback is good, the author can become a regular contributor.  

Regressive Left Pt. 10: Lucid Leftism

Consistent in the history of regressive leftist thought are recurring cycles of idealistic and well intended beginnings giving way to cynicism, repression and violence.  This can be the result of failing to reach goals that were unattainable in the first place, or early successes leading to mission creep – the expansion of the movement’s original goals, or an arrogance of power – the tendency to equate success with virtue.  In each case, the end result is the same: an intensification of radicalization and fanaticism which eventually fizzles out, though only after inflicting, to varying degrees, damage on the structure of society.

The current form of regressive leftism is directly traceable to the protections extended to movements representing marginalized people in academia and mainstream media, and the resulting taboos on dissent from and criticism of these ideas.  Criticizing any aspect of feminist theory or critical race theory was equated to misogyny and racism.  From there, the natural tendencies towards reductionism and extremism that take hold in ideologically homogenous spaces did the rest.  First in academia, then in other spheres of culture.

This dovetails with the observations of former senator J. William Fulbright that:

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But… when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.

The liberal tradition in the west has become accustomed to defending the democratic humanist strand against the intolerant puritan strand, but has the weakness of perceiving intolerant puritanism is a feature solely of the far right.  Since harsh and angry moralism usually does come from the right, and the anger of minorities when it does arise is understandably seen as justified, this is, to some extent, understandable.  But it is also a testament to just how anglo and Eurocentric even the progressive traditions of the west can be.  One look at the history of Russia or China makes clear how dangerous the leftist strands of intolerant puritanism and harsh and angry moralism can be, especially once they acquire institutional power.  Which they now have in the western world, though not to nearly the degree that Stalinist and Maoist forms of totalitarianism did.

The result has become an affiliated network of intersecting identitarian closed belief systems structured around the rationalization of self serving double standards and exemption from laws and social mores binding on the rest of society.  A now common pattern of initial and popular success followed by ongoing confrontation and social conflict due to unattainable or undesirable goals has been the pattern for civil rights, feminist and LGBT rights movements.  This has been a failure by every measure, but especially the measure of its intended results: equality for marginalized people vis-à-vis mainstream society.  As any regressive leftist would be happy to tell you, glaring statistical inequalities between races and across gender lines remain.

It can be asserted, and rightly so, that many of the remaining inequalities are economic and persist because the current wave of regressive leftism has focused too extensively on culture and identity at the expense of economics.  This is true, but must not be seen as being by itself an effective antidote to regressive leftism. Don’t forget that we’ve had experience with forms of regressive leftism that were exclusively economic in their focus, and these too failed.  It is the concept of reductionism, not any one particular manifestation of that concept, that is the core problem.

The status quo is not sustainable.  Militant and confrontational regressive left movements are contributing to a counter-radicalization of the regressive right.  The “alt-right” movement is a key example of this.  This is contributing to an erosion of faith in liberal democracy that is frighteningly similar to what was seen in Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

What can be done?

The danger of the intolerant puritan tradition of the left must be recognized by the democratic humanist tradition of the left.  It is as simple as that. This is not without precedent – the social democratic parties of Europe rejected the Soviet model and made this rejection explicit at varying points in the early to mid 20th century. 

Taking the attitude of “no enemy to the left” is a good way to move out of the later and into the former category. This does not need to detract from being firm in opposition to the regressive right.  Taking the attitude that to criticize any aspect of the left for regressivism is somehow taking away from focusing on the “real enemy” is a classic false dilemma.  Moreover, is it any real victory to defeat the right only to assume its worst characteristics?  Those who think it acceptable, let alone necessary, to accept anti-white racism, anti-male sexism or Islamic fundamentalism have very clearly lost sight of the forest for the trees, and become hung up on oftentimes self serving ancillary dogmas such as “power plus prejudice” at the expense of the initial long term goals of racial and gender equality and secularism.  

Plus, if we do not get our own house in order, why should anyone else listen to us anyway?

Doing this will not be easy.  The democratic humanists need to understand first and foremost that the intolerant puritans do not naturally listen to reason.  Manichean worldviews lend themselves to distrust of outsiders and a propensity to see politics as an apocalyptic, winner take all power struggle as opposed to a process of give-and-take.  As such, negotiating and bargaining with any serious prospect of results is simply not an option, especially when the intolerant puritans have the advantage of positions of institutional power.  Which they most certainly do at this juncture.  Regressive leftists will negotiate and bargain, but not out of principle but rather out of a strategic evaluation that suggests them as being the most expedient means in the moment.  They will abandon reason and negotiation the instant it becomes expedient for them to do so.

This kind of thinking is not naturally or easily understood by the democratic humanists, who tend to place faith in the best ideas naturally winning out once shown to be truly the best.  Evaluating ideas entirely on the premise of who benefits between the good guys and the bad guys is not what democratic humanists naturally do.  

Democratic humanists evaluate ideas on what produces the greatest benefit to the greatest number.  They assume, or at least hope that this criteria will naturally lend the best ideas to implementation by responsible people in authority, and become despondent when this doesn’t happen. They do not like coming to grips with the realities of power politics.  They take their own propensity to reason and justice for granted.  They must get over this.  Marx once said that the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.  Democratic humanists must realize this and act accordingly.

They must think in terms of gaining influence and power so as to impose their worldview, even if that world view ultimately boils down to taming the scope and strength of influence and power.  There must be a long, hard look at how institutions such as media conglomerates, academic institutions and access to government are structured, and how power and influence are distributed in those institutions. 

The democratic humanist tradition must now take seriously the need for its own “long march through the institutions” in order to preserve the integrity of those institutions, while at the same time criticizing those same institutions for the flaws in their power structures and the abuse of power those flaws lend themselves to.  Ultimately, transparency and democracy across all mediums should be the end goal.

It is a sad truism of history that fanatics and true believers are naturally adept at organizing and coordinating their efforts, while getting any two free thinking libertarians, left or right, to work together if they disagree on anything is notoriously difficult. Perhaps that is an insurmountable problem and a big part of the reason why regressive forces have wreaked so much havoc throughout history.  But cultural and civil libertarians are going to have to put aside their differences and work together to counter regressive influences.

Three particularly important goals for enemies of regressivism:

• Requiring that intent to harass or create a “poisoned environment” be proven on at least a balance of probabilities or a preponderance of evidence in order to secure a remedy in court over a harassment or hate speech allegation.  “Privileged” people cannot be held responsible, on pain of professional or even legal consequences, for the emotional states of “marginalized” people, given what we know of how the human mind works, regardless of “social context” so prized by regressive social theorists.

• As a corollary to the above, political opinion and opinion on social issues should be a protected category of legal discrimination, especially in employment, just as race, gender, etc.  It should be especially costly to terminate an employee for expressing an opinion on political or social issues, just as it is for protected grounds for discrimination.  Exemptions to this can be extended if the non-expression of certain views can be shown to be a bona-fide occupational requirement.  There’s plenty of information about these  concepts in fields pertaining to human resources management and employment law.

•  Strong College Campus Free Speech legislation must be passed, preferably at the federal level but at least at the state/provincial level.   It's provisions would include the following:

1. Require colleges to adopt, at the governance level, policy statements that make crystal clear organizational commitment to free expression, and make crystal clear that it is not the university's role to protect students or faculty from ideas they find offensive or disagreeable.
2. The campus must be declared open to any speaker invited by students, student groups or faculty.  Disinvitation of controversial speakers should thus be prohibited.
3. There must be serious consequences for actions that result in shutting down speakers on college campuses or harassment of students and faculty for political reasons, including complicit administration failing to act accordingly in response to such events.  Suspensions for first offenses, expulsion/termination for cause in the case of repeat offenses, and even legal prosecution if warranted.  
4. Independent bodies should be established to investigate student and/or faculty allegations of "ideological gatekeeping", which I define as attempts to block the academic progress or careers of students or staff for political or ideological reasons.  This body would also be emboldened to investigate claims of ideological indoctrination in academic settings.  Remedies could include reprimands or other disciplinary measures up to and including termination (in the case of multiple repeat convictions) against offending faculty members.
5. The legislation itself would contain language cautioning academic institutions against fostering or allowing to be fostered a campus culture that romanticizes violent extremism, direct action, and other militant and confrontational forms of activism.  Honest discussion of the above would be permitted.
6. Strong protections for the due process rights of students and faculty charged under any of the above sections, and strong protections for the rights of student and faculty to engage in peaceful and non-disruptive protest. 

People simply must have assurance of their protection from legal or employment related repercussions for expressing their views if regressivism of all kinds is to be pushed to the margins of society.

These measures will not be adopted by legislative bodies voluntarily.  Doing this requires organizing from the grassroots level up.  Here is where the regressive left, with its roots in Marxism and the social movements of the 1960s, have an advantage.  Cultures of activism are deeply entrenched with them.  But it will have to be done by anti-regressive voices if the regressive voices are to be countered.

The good news is that smaller victories can be racked up along the way if anti-regressives learn how to act effectively in groups.  Names on petitions or email blitzes to counter regressive pushes to boycott what they deem offensive or terminate the employment of people who offend them would be much more valuable than the broad mass of the population proclaiming “what is this world coming to?” whenever the boundaries of political correctness are pushed to newly absurd extremes, but otherwise doing nothing.  

Regressive left outlets can even be subjected to boycotts of their own advertisers unless they agree to publish voices that counter Islamist, misandrist or anti-white narratives.  Anti-regressive forces will gradually be taken more seriously when they prove themselves capable of exerting the same kinds of pressure as regressives have fine tuned the art of exerting.  I would caution against countering one set of identity politics with another, however, and hope that anti-regressive forces do not start calling for the censorship of voices they disagree with.  If regressive voices are to be marginalized, it should be because the majority of the population reject their message out of a belief in liberal-democratic ideals, not because regressive voices have been silenced in any way.

Long term success means studying the deep as well as the surface arts of political activism.  Study the history and theory of the new left especially and learn how they did what they did.  Read Saul Alinsky, for example.  Study the theory of Marshall McLuhan and learn about how media works on a deeper level.  An early political influence of mine had a saying, "don't hate the media, become the media."  If you can, research critical theory and postmodern philosophy and think about how they can be used against rather than for regressive aims.

Study the works of George Lakoff and learn how to use language to frame issues in ways that do not inadvertently bolster the worldview of your opposition.  Do not accept regressive frameworks, rather use democratic humanist frameworks to construct a narrative that casts non-regressive activists in a noble light.  People will go to great lengths on behalf of causes bigger than themselves and leadership that casts them in heroic roles.

Do not attack the values of regressives when those values are good, but rather cast non-regressives as the better representatives of those values.  Suggest that marginalized people would be better off, in the long run, if their individual autonomy and liberty is respected rather than their being puppets of a self appointed vanguard interested in appropriating popular struggles as a means of advancing their own world view.  Think what you will of #GamerGate, #NotYourShield was infinitely more valuable.

But don’t be afraid to attack the values of regressives when they are obviously flawed.  The self serving and hypocritical nature of any position deriving from “power plus prejudice” thinking is long, long overdue for being called out as such.  Especially when the regressives manipulating this kind of thinking are themselves obviously powerful, or at least influential.

Pick your battles, and do not dig in your heels over issues that play into regressive hands.  Is, for example, an all-female Ghostbusters reboot a hill that anti-regressive forces should commit themselves to dying on?  The backlash against stuff like that just confirms regressive left claims that their opponents are driven by misogyny.  Think through your criticisms and be sure you're attacking from high ground: in the case of the Ghostbusters reboot, you could criticize the cynical use of gender equality as a Hollywood marketing tool, for example, or condemn the psychological blackmail inherent in using the potential to be accused of misogyny as a device to compel otherwise unearned positive reviews or to deflect legitimate criticisms of the film.

Does it not make more sense to go after regressives on areas where they are more easily and demonstrably wrong, such as the absurdity of feminist and Islamist cooperation? And when you do make your arguments, make certain of the strength of your position and have the necessary facts and logical conclusions to those facts at your disposal. Educate yourself on logical fallacies, and don't allow yourself to be fooled by common bait-and-switch rhetorical tactics, such as Greenwalding, bulverism and the regressive propensity to rely on emotional shock value to bypass the critical thinking logical mind and go for the more instinctive, emotional and thus more easily manipulated core.

Think along the lines of a Sun Tzu or a Miyamoto Musashi and simply don’t give battle when your opponents have the advantage.  Strategize and strike from a position of strength. You'd better believe that regressives are going to be thinking likewise.  They are quite directly taught this when they learn to deconstruct literature, study media theory or sign on with professional activist and protest organizations.  The most malignant of regressive leftists - a small minority of the total who, by their nature, tend to gravitate towards positions of power and influence - are downright Machiavellian.    

Part of the reason that the skeptic community is having a harder time with regressive leftism than they are with religious fundamentalism is that the regressive left is right about some things.  Feminist and anti-racist doctrines begin from the naturally defensible position of racial, gender or even economic equality.  Nuanced analysis will be required to catch them when they stray from the good sides of their core doctrines.  Democratic humanists will have to be on their toes if they are to catch the point at which regressive leftists betray or abuse core liberal principles in pursuit of regressive aims.  It requires ongoing study of the thought of your enemy.

The regressive right is an easy opponent by comparison.  Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, unfounded conspiracy theories and patriarchalism are simple matters to attack and discredit from without.  Though it has been done countless times, regressive right ideologies require ongoing deconstruction and refutation.  The regressive right also cannot be allowed to thrive by speaking to concerns that a regressive left, bound by its own political correctness, are unwilling to address.

The regressive left is not so easy to defeat.  The regressive left cannot be beaten by an external attack on their principles.  The regressive left will only be beaten by superior, meaning non regressive versions of themselves.  That is what the alt-left, the revival of the democratic humanist tradition, must at all times strive to be.

Original Alternative Left Facebook Page Description

The original description of the Alternative Left Facebook page.

A specter is haunting the internet - the specter of the alternative left. But what is it, exactly?

There's no one ideology. No party line. Rather, an overall sympathy with liberal and progressive ideas but a distaste with how leftist thinking has gone. Alternative left can be used to describe people who are, to varying degrees, left of center, but may believe any or all of the following:

• Believe that the most pressing forms of injustice and inequality of today are economic.
• Favor free speech and are civilly and culturally libertarian - especially on college campuses - but distrust libertarian views on economics.
• Don't like political correctness and think social justice warriors are obnoxious, but aren't willing to abandon social liberalism all together. 
• Oppose racism and sexism, but think that equality and universality should actually mean equality and universality. Racism means racism against ANY race, including white people. Sexism means sexism against any gender, including males. Feminism and anti-racism are essentially good ideas worth fighting for, but double standards and prejudices that favor groups that are rationalized on the basis of the group's historical "marginalization" actually defeat the purpose of egalitarian politics, turn people against these causes and are usually self serving and opportunistic. 
• In the same way, it doesn't make sense to you that so many leftists ruthlessly attack Christian fundamentalism in the name of science, secularism and women's rights, while defending similar criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism with cries of "racism" and "Islamophobia."
• Progressive thought needs to get real about economics. Vague and utopian "anti-capitalism" is useless. Neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism are feasible, but something better and more equitable and just than this crony corporatist neo-liberalism has to be possible, feasible and implementable.
• Many progressives today just seem irrational, dogmatic, fanatical and overly sensitive. They don't engage in dialogue with other people and political thought and instead just try to drown out other points of view with shrill cries of "racism", "misogyny" or the like and disruptive protest. People cannot be expected to support ideas for progressive social change if their advocates are fanatical grandstanders. 

Left of center thought seems to be having a revival the likes of which have not been seen since the 1960s, especially on "social justice" and feminist blogs on social media sites like tumblr. But this progressive revival is coasting - neo-conservatism lost credibility during the disastrous Bush years and the religious right retreated (in some quarters, at least) under the criticism of the new atheism, that has created an ideological space wherein progressive thought has proliferated. But it will not last if it continues to rival the far right with its own brands of irrationality, dogmatism and authoritarianism. The backlash has already begun - the online rebellion against the excesses of contemporary progressive thought that began in obscure fields such as video game journalism has begun to spread and grow more mainstream. An equally irrational brand of extreme white male identity politics, an "alternative right" if you will, will capitalize on this inevitable backlash if voices on the left do not speak up and demand that progressives return to true enlightenment values. 

If you hold any of these kinds of views, social media can seem like a bizarre and irrational place. Your pleas that cooler, more rational heads prevail grow increasingly unheeded. But you are not alone. There are many who think this way. But it seems like you fight alone. You know full well that "no force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one."  But the alternative left will make us strong!

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.