A Specter is Haunting Social Media.

The Specter of the Alt-Left.

By now, we should all be familiar with Trump's claims regarding the "alt-left" who came "charging at" the alt-right during the recent tragic events at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, which saw one leftist killed and others injured when a car sped into a gathering of counter protesters.

This is not the first time the term "alt left" has been used by the right to describe the violent and fanatical segment of the regressive left.  We have, for example, an entire article full of unmitigated gibberish by one Joseph Farah.  This article is much more a reflection of the extremes of conspiratorial paranoia, flagrant partisanship and personalized hatred for the persons of prominent democrat party politicians and the tired old "democrats are the real racists" obsessions of the paleoconservative blogosphere than they are of anything faintly resembling reality.

Among the allegations he makes against the alt-left:

Supports abortion on demand, taxpayer support for the largest abortion provider in America that maintains nearly all of its abortion facilities in minority communities in the cities controlled by Democrats. That same abortion provider was founded by a leading eugenics advocate, Margaret Sanger, who remains a heroine to Hillary Clinton. 

The “Alt Left” is 100 percent Democrat – a party birthed in the support of slavery, a party whose military arm was the Ku Klux Klan, a party that fought civil rights and integration through the middle of the 1960s. 

Today, the “Alt Left” Democrats ferociously fight any attempts to woo minorities from their political plantation. Those efforts consistently include smearing their opponents as the racists.

So we're actually a vast democrat party conspiracy to keep the blacks in their place via welfare and abortion?  That's certainly news to me.  Perhaps Mr. Farah should join forces with those of the SJW blogosphere who call us "brocialists" and rail against our white privilege. They might be able to save on overhead that way.

Farah is not the only rightist to spout this kind of rubbish.  Sean Hannity has been on about the alt-left for some time now.  Writing in Fox News opinion, Dan Gainor claimed in December of 2016 that "Liberals get hysterical over the 'alt-right' but we are living in their 'alt-left' world."  In September 2016, Katie Kieffer introduces us to the alt-left, and describes us as "accurately describing the ideology of the Democratic party."

Certainly news to me.  Does not accurately describe the views of any alt-leftist I actually know.  And I know quite a few.

But even centrists and moderate liberals have gotten on the alt-left = violent extremists bandwagon.  Writing in Time in December 2016, Gil Troy describes how "The Bernie Sanders–Fueled Alt-Left Viciously Attacked Me."  In March of 2017, James Wolcott makes clear in Vanity Fair why "The Alt-Left is a Problem Too." Where the paleocons peg us as America hating socialists with democrat party membership cards - more about giving red meat to the base than accurately describing a damn thing -  Wolcott appeals to his urban, female readership with equally invalid fears of - you guessed it - frat boy, ass swatting "Bernie Bros" who opposed the Clinton campaign out of racism and misogyny.

The standard bearer for the regressive left, Salon, very recently published an article entitled "Donald Trump is right (about something): There really is an“alt-left,” but it’s even weirder than he thinks."  Kudos to Salon for getting back into the habit of doing a bit of actual research for a change.  Author Matthew Sheffield actually google searched the term and came into Altleft.com, hosted by early alt-left pioneer 'Rabbit.'

Rabbit, along with blogger Robert Lindsay over at Beyond Highbrow can be fairly credited for coining the term alt-left and can reasonably be called the movement's genesis. I've spoken with both men on Robert Stark's Stark Truth radio broadcast.  They're no less aghast than I and many others at how the alt-left label has been continually misappropriated.  So kudos to Sheffield for at least trying to do a bit of homework here.  He outlines Rabbit's vision of an alt-left quite extensively in his Salon article.  Doubtlessly, Rabbit appreciates the coverage.

Sheffield then goes on to say, "Given that almost no one besides “Rabbit” willingly affixes the “alt-left” label to themselves, it’s pretty clear that in the U.S., there isn’t much of a market for socialist-flavored white nationalism."

Nobody willingly affixes the alt-left label to themselves?  Again, news to me.  And news to the thousands who belong to alt-left groups and who follow the Alternative Left page on Facebook, that I founded.  But my own vision of an alt-left is much less a socialist flavored white nationalism a-la the bro's Strasser in the early NSDAP and rather more of the British Labour Party of roughly the same era and immediately postwar.

What I sought to do is distance the concept of an anti PC leftism from so called "race realism."   Race realism is fundamentally an alt-right concept.  In a lot of ways, it's a return of the political right to its first principles - to the centrality of relationships of "blood and soil" so to speak - in right wing politics.

So I asked myself what would a left wing equivalent to this be?  What are the first principles to which leftism needs to return if it is to escape the doldrums that the SJWs were leading it into: safe spaces, 67 genders, trigger warnings, etc?  If the alt-right is about race realism, I concluded that the alt-left should be about class realism.  Not that exclusively.  But that's our niche, I think.  The view that not all people fare equally well under an untrammeled capitalist system. 

Now where we go from there is another matter: for some, nothing short of a Marxian worker's revolution will do.  These would be your leftypol types.  This is the alt-left equivalent to the 1488 crowd on the alt-right.  These are the people who unironically meme about Stalin and the gulag in the same sort of way that some on the alt-right do about Hitler.  I do imagine you'd get some antifa supporters in this crew as well.

That's not my personal take on it, though.  I suppose you could call people like me the alt-left's equivalent to the "alt-light."  Not revolutionary socialists.  Closer to postwar European social democracy.  Think Attlee in Great Britain as an example.  There were others.  A revival of postwar democratic leftism in that vain was what I had in mind.

I don't think this vision is compatible with race realism, for reasons that history has made obvious.  Racial antagonism has shown itself to be a barrier to the development of class solidarity.  That was the case with classical racism in the American south, and is the case now when notions of "white privilege" are invoked as explanations for the problems faced by the black underclass.  Both the reactionary right and the regressive left have much invested in the maintenance of class blindness, and therefore in misrepresenting what the alt-left is really about.

The center-left in the first world drifted away from its postwar vision for two reasons: a disenchantment with socialism and subsequent rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s, and the deepening radicalism of the new left, as represented by critical theory and postmodernism. According to these theories, it wasn't just capitalism, but western civilization itself that was inherently oppressive.  In the social media era, these ways of thinking have burst out of academia and into the cultural mainstream as the SJW - social justice warrior phenomena. 

But the SJWs have no lasting and real way to achieve any real social justice because it takes an almost deterministic approach to its ideas of privilege, marginalization and identity.  While the SJWs are commonly tarred by the right wing as being "Marxist" they are actually near as far from the thinking of Marx as you can get.  Political economy and relations of production were absolutely central to Marx, while they are completely absent from the SJWs.  They are near completely blind to the economic side of inequality: even when they do acknowledge class, they do so as if class were another vector of intersecting identities rather than based on relations of production, of which the SJWs and the paleocons alike know next to nothing.  It is this void that I hoped the alt-left would be able to fill.

The relative success of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign suggested to me that there might be a prospect for social democracy to make a comeback, and even to become a political force in precisely the place where it is most needed and has been longest absent: The United States of America.  

Other things that I believe in and I think that many of us believe in: civil libertarianism, a rejection of censorship, opposition to racism and sexism of both the regressive left and the reactionary right and so on, are tackled adequately by the so called "new center", "cultural libertarians" or the "skeptical community."  The Sargons and the Dave Rubins over on Youtube, and so on.  And that stuff is all perfectly fine.  But glaringly absent is a social democratic economic vision.  

My vision of the alt-left is thus much closer the realist left vision developed by blogger Lord Keynes over at Social Democracy for the 21st century.  Highly recommended.

That's the niche I've hoped, and continue to hope, the alt-left can fill.  In light of how much confusion surrounds the label of alt-left, it's been suggested repeatedly by some of those who share this ideology that we abandon the label.  I don't think the time is yet right for that.  We should cease to be the alt-left once we've become the mainstream of left of center thought. While the term alt-left is a subject of public controversy, it will succeed better in drawing the curious alt-left spaces on social media and exposing more people to what we truly believe than a rebranding - a "rationalist left" or the like ever would.  

Turkey Dinner with the Turkeys

Many newsblogs run cute little articles on how to deal with those annoying relatives who start spouting nonsense political views at family gatherings.  Peace and goodwill towards man are hard enough at the best of times.  The stress of the Christmas season - the shopping, the crowds, the consumerism - doesn't make it any easier.  Finally, throw in that conservative or regressive left relative we all have who preaches and beaks off every chance they get.  Especially if they know you are an unbeliever, and peace on Earth seems as likely at your table as it does between Russia and Turkey these days.

Speaking of turkey.

This is doubly tricky for the alt-leftist.  We get it from both sides. Sometimes at the same dinner table over the same turkey.  And from the same turkeys, stuffed as they are with regressive opinions, and that's a generous assessment much of the time.  Better to think of it as a chance to expose the flawed thinking on both sides of the regressive isle.  What you're likely to hear about depends on whether your annoying relative is reg-left or right wing.  Fortunately, both of these are marked by paranoid obsessions with a handful of recurring issues, so that makes dealing with them a bit easier.

Issue: Abortion
Most conservatives don't care as much about abortion as you've likely been led to believe.  But for a minority on the right, the issue is an absolute obsession.  I hope you're not dealing with one of these.  They're usually deeply religious and thus quite unreasonable.  Regressive leftists are more concerned about abortion overall, and they're adamant in their views that attempts to curtail abortion access amount to an assault on women's rights.  These people are usually also unreasonable.

What to tell them: This depends much on your own views of abortion.  This doesn't tend to be a major issue on the alt-left and personally, I just avoid it.  I regard the paranoia on both sides of this issue to be quite ridiculous, and perhaps the best response is to somewhat snidely point this out.  "I'm sure holocaust survivors would really appreciate your comparison of the fate of the unborn" (or of women denied abortion access, as the case may be) to what actually happened in the camps" or the like.  Are most pro-choicers such amoral nut-cases as they've been made out to be on the right?  Are most pro-lifers the literally Hitler misogynists the left claims they are?  Such claims betray how insular and dogmatic both sides of the spectrum really are.

Issue: Guns
Most progressives don't care as much about guns as they doubtlessly let on.  The truth of the matter is that in the progressive mind, guns tend to symbolize white redneck culture and/or masculine virility, and gun confiscation is seen as a means of figuratively "castrating" these demographics they don't like.  The actual guns themselves aren't such a big thing here - if it were dildos instead of guns that macho white rednecks were into, progressives would be as opposed to them as they are guns.  They'd find a way to rationalize it, I'm sure.  The key point, however, is that given its symbolic nature to a lot of progressives, they adopt anti-gun stances more as a means of signalling disdain for the hillbilly rubes than as a hill they're serious about dying on.

Conservatives are obsessed with the prospect that the current leading politician in the Democratic party is personally going to oversee a nationwide gun confiscation, as a prelude to imposition of communist, Nazi or Islamic tyranny.  Of the last six presidential administrations, four have been Democratic, and though the right wing has harped on and on about Obama, Hillary or Nancy Pelosi personally coming to take away their guns, it's not going to happen, though the right winger will never accept this.

What to tell them: If you're in a really edgy mood, you could tell them that you're all for guns, and suggest that the proletariat will need them if they want to overthrow the bourgeoisie.  Karl Marx himself pretty much said so.  You could also point out the prevalence of gun ownership in urban minority, especially black populations.  Liberals would now be advocating the disarming of black people, and you may wish to ask them if that's what they really want, especially in light of recent police shootings.  If black lives truly mattered, should they not have the capacity to defend themselves?  This same line of reasoning could well have your die-hard right wing uncle thinking gun control might not be such a bad idea.

Issue: Immigration
Conservatives have a much stronger tendency to oppose immigration and lefties a much stronger tendency to support it.  This is rightly an alt-left issue, and both conservative and regressive left opinions on it are not logical.

Believe it or not, the progressive's world would not stop turning if immigration were curtailed.  To them, stressing immigration is pure signalling, no more, no less.  Honestly, what would it really matter to them if their neighbors were foreigners or not?  This is about being smug, being correct and demonstrating white guilt.

What to tell them: Immigration is about cheap labor, and you damn well know it.  Suggest that fewer immigrants would likely result in lower unemployment, and therefore higher wages overall.  Also suggest that solidarity comes more easily to a culturally homogeneous labor force.  Ask your conservative uncle if this is really what he wants?  Also suggest to him that this is why the right wing, once in office, always revs up immigration.

Your progressive sister in law might need more convincing.  While a better situation for the working class should, in theory, be something the progressive left would favor, they really don't.  Given a choice between low wage multiculturalism and a culturally homogeneous social democracy, progressives these days will chose the former, every time.  Perhaps they'll change their tune when you point out that lower wage earners are also disproportionately members of charmed-circle demographics such as women, people of color and immigrants.

Issue: Islam
This one is a lot like immigration in that the constellations of western political forces that support and oppose it are intuitively illogical to any thinking, reasoning person.  Sadly, that rules out most right wingers and regressive leftists.  So the religion of peace is likely to be the berserk button for right wingers while the college lefties rush to its defense.

What to tell them: Ask your conservative uncle if he figures that homosexuality is immoral, that it would be great to shoot commies, that a woman's place is in the kitchen, if we need God back in the classroom, or if the federal government of the United States is much too vast and powerful?  If he answers yes to most or all of the above, suggest that he might actually get along well with the Mujaheddin.  Lord knows, the messiah of the Republican party, Ronald Reagan, felt that way.

You would think that your progressive sister in law would be swayed by the above to think Islam a thing to be feared.  Less than you'd think.  You'll have to press the attack a bit.  The challenge here is to disentangle the religion from the race - suggest to her that maybe if more Muslims were white, she'd dislike them more?

If you fear such stances will have you dodging a bowl of gravy being thrown your way, take a slightly safer tack.  Suggest that Mideast politics comes down to oil and the sale of OPEC oil in US dollars.  As an alt-leftist, you can't go wrong falling back on macroeconomics.  Saudi Arabia excels in the export of two things: oil and Islamism.  US dollars play a key role in both.

Issue: The 2016 Election
A biggie, or perhaps I should say bigly, for sure.  The key to understanding it is thinking as much in terms of who people voted against as who they voted for.   Suffice it to say, the regressive left supported Clinton, the conservatives went for Trump.  Most on the alt-left would have preferred Sanders to either one (lord knows, I would have), but this was a yuge variable for alt-leftists, many of whom (for reasons I'll never quite grasp) supported Trump.

What to tell them: What you accentuate should depend much on whether you supported Trump, Clinton or neither.  You'll need to scrutinize your own reasons carefully if you decided to cast your lot with either one.  I wouldn't have been able to, personally.  If either one wasn't a hill you were ready to die on, than perhaps this argument shouldn't engage you.  A key thing to remember here is that while Trump's electoral college win was considerable, Clinton's win of the popular vote is likely to erode the strength of his mandate.  Keep in mind that if their positions were reversed, your conservative uncle and your reg-left sister in law would completely switch positions accordingly.

The underlying issue in this election, I think, is how both party partisanship and the underlying cultural divide has broken the country.  It's easy to tell your reg-left sister in law to stop rioting in the inner cities - would team Trump be handling things graciously if their positions were reversed?  We know the Tea-Party hard right demonstrated and claimed Obama wasn't their legitimate president either.  It's easy to brand Trump supporters as a "basket of deplorables", but doesn't painting them all with one brush undermine the very spirit of unity and equality and disdain for prejudice that is so much the concern of the Clinton camp in the first place?  Sure, we don't like misogyny, but what's with tarring Sanders supporters as "Bernie Bros?"   It's tempting to blame the democrat loss on identity politics alienating white working class voters, and not without cause, but since when were the republicans the horse to bet on for working class people?  Frankly, their distrust of Clinton was warranted, their support for Trump was not.

Family gatherings with opinionated regressive leftists and right wingers is challenging.  Hopefully their more redeeming personal qualities compensate for their politics.  Try, perhaps to keep the conversation away from politics all together.  But if things stray in that direction, the above advice and, as always, the other red pill are good bodies of knowledge and thought to have in your corner!

The Other Red Pill: Wake Up! Class is Back in Session!

I mentioned previously that societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists do so at a heavy cost.  But then, so do societies that fail to take materialist definitions of class into account when looking at both economic and social issues.  To say that our society has suffered enormously as a result of a lack of class in its political outlook is an understatement of grand proportions.

Historical materialism was consigned to the dustbin of history very prematurely.  The failure of the USSR was not the failure of this kind of an outlook on political economy.  If anything, we've been failing for a lack of it, as I've tried to demonstrate throughout the Other Red Pill Series.  To address numerous social problems, it must be resurrected and rehabilitated, without a lot of the other Marxist baggage it became burdened with over time.  Let's just pretend that Lenin and everything after in the east and the Frankfurt School and everything after in the west never happened, shall we?

In fact, I would go as far as to say that The resuscitation of economic class, as defined in Marx's materialist conception of history, must be THE central project of alternative-left politics.  This is what the Other Red Pill is ultimately really all about.  What we do with that knowledge, as it becomes more mainstream, is up to us. 

But the truancy of the left must come to an end.  It's time to wake up.  Identitarians of all stripes and neo-liberals have kept the wool over our eyes for far too long now.  It's time for the alt-left to take them back to school: class is back in session!

Alt-Left Facebook Groups

Alt-Left types now have a broad variety of groups on Facebook that they can join and pages they can like.  Hooray!

Zena O'Brien's Group

Samuel Attah's Group

Sam LaRose's Group

Ryan England's Page

Realist Left Page

Have I missed any?  Comment with a link below.

Socialist Objectivism - A philosophy for the alt-left?

I'm probably not the person who you'd expect to hear this from, but I've always been a fan of the writings of Ayn Rand.  I think that objectivism is, for the most part, a reasonable way of looking at things.  The Ayn Rand Lexicon writes:

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:
 

• Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

• Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

• Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

• The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Well, three out of four ain't bad.  The first point could be a bit tricky - it's debatable whether the nature of reality is indeed so absolute, but it is not so dependent on the subject as the postmodern relativist would have us believe either.  But even the last paragraph isn't all bad.  What's wrong, after all, with free and voluntary exchange for mutual benefit?   That's all capitalism really is, when you get right down to it, right?  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a bit, as it turns out.  Even the most right wing conservative governments of recent history - Thatcher's UK and Pinochet's Chile, among others, did not trust free market capitalism to the degree that Rand shilled for it.  Rand was one of more than a few right-libertarian thinkers (and that's what Rand was, whatever claims to the contrary she may have made) who claimed that "there was no such thing as society, only individuals."

Not so fast.  Group and institutional dynamics matter.  The manner in which power, responsibility and reward are distributed in both formal and informal associations of people impact on human behavior a great deal, making the total of the whole greater, or at least different than the sum of the parts.  The now famous prisoner's dilemma experiment is a perfect case in point wherein rational individuals acting in the most rational way to pursue their self interests, can end in mutually disadvantageous results.

In this era of postmodernism, cultural relativism and moral relativism seeming dominant in left wing thought, it's easy to forget that the economic left was once advanced by minds so preoccupied with systemic and logical rationalization of human interaction that they dared to call their take on socialism "scientific."  Whatever flaws Marxist historical materialism may have had - if we can take the failure of the USSR and the survival of capitalism to this day as evidence of the failure of this theory - there's also something to be said for it.

For one thing, it states the obvious: entering into "relations of production" of some kind or another really isn't voluntary.  Sorry libertarians.  If there's anything Rand and Marx would agree on, it's that man's necessities for survival aren't going to produce themselves.  This exposes a fatal defect in Rand's theory: the claim that laissez faire capitalism is rendered the ideal system due to all transactions that occur therein being completely voluntary is simply not true.

Marx's definition of class - those segments of the population with the same relationship to the means of production, remains an invaluable concept for clearing away all kinds of ideological rubbish, from the denial of class so often asserted by libertarians and conservatives to the assertion on part of SJWs that social groups with no specific relationship with the means of production - white males specifically - can actually form a ruling class.  Note that even if a disproportionate majority of the ruling class: that class that owns the means of production, are white males, their dominance derives from their ownership of the means of production, not from their being white males.

That all said, there's much to be said also for "free, voluntary exchange for mutual benefit", and that suppression of market activity such as was seen in the USSR requires a ruling class even more draconian than anything seen prior to it.  The idea to aspire to, I think, is not some kind of gigantic central planning bureaucracy, but some means whereby a market system can be socially owned.

Marxist theory made note of the strained political nature of the relationship between the ruling and subject classes.  While this had the danger of demonizing the ruling class and so rationalizing many ugly human rights abuses seen in the Soviet sphere, it also made apparent the need for a strategic political theory on part of the subject classes, whereby they could ultimately challenge the ruling class for, at least, a slate of basic rights under the system, if not ultimate control over it.  Contrast this with the more conservative nature of objectivism, which merely holds its truths to be self evident and simply awaits their uncritical embrace by a populace that accepts basic objectivist tenets.  Marxism reminds us that privileged classes have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo and do not give up their positions without a fight.

Historical Materialism was no more infallible than Objectivism was.  For one thing, Marxism was prone to reversing the mistake that Rand and her proteges made: while individualist thought denies the existence of "society", Marxist thought was prone to the misapplication of denial of the individual. This led to a cavalier disregard for the rights and lives of individuals in the theory and practice of Marxism, its offshoots from Lenin onward, and its present successor, critical theory.  What is said here is not a call that Marxism be revived and adhered to in a chapter and verse manner - there is much there that I disagree with (the labor theory of value, for instance), but rather that basic objectivist principles be joined with basic materialist principles as one (though by no means the only) means of analyzing social relationships.

The greatest danger present in both these rationalist systems of thought is losing sight of the fact that science and reason are processes, not positions.  They are the means of arriving at truth, not labels that one slaps on a particular doctrine as a means of rendering it infallible.  Randroids and Marxists regard capitalism and socialism respectively as the final word on economic theory because their "scientific" or "rationalist" reductionist formulas "proved" them true, and so they are clung to as if they were holy dogmas even in the face of obvious failure and need for reform.  That this kind of pseudo-religious devotion to any kind of theory is dangerous and directly countermands what objectivist and materialist philosophies claimed to stand for needs to be reiterated.  The only dogma should be that there are no dogmas, but theories that are shown to be sound and effective should be regarded as such until proven otherwise.

Never the less, there's a strong tendency towards objectivism on the alt-left, and I would go as far as to say that this is the philosophical basis for the alt-left's quarrel with the regressive left.  I do not think that we can deny the possibility of some kind of "Socialist Objectivism" or "Objectivist Materialism" - an objectivism that accepts some sociological concepts and even some aspects of conflict theory.  It is clear to me that this is indeed the underlying philosophy of much alternative left thinking.

Progressivism and Romanticism

Elsewhere, I had the following to say about the alt-left vs. mainstream progressivism.

I’ll submit as a defining characteristic of the alternative left vs. the more mainstream progressives is that the alt-left is much more skeptical of the transcendentalist underpinnings of a lot of leftist thought, especially post 1960s. We are, at heart, a push to bring enlightenment rationalism back to the center of leftist thought and activism.

Transcendentalism – the kind originating back in 19th century New England, had its roots in European Romanticism, and is marked by a kind of idealistic utopianism. Religion and science alike were distrusted, in favor of subjective personal intuition and creativity. Nature and people considered “closer to the earth” (indigenous peoples and women) tended to be idealized. 

Emotion and intuition were extolled as being a kind of liberation from the bonds of strict empiricism. People were thought of as naturally good but corrupted by overly rationalized institutions and belief systems, against which struggle was seen in idealized terms. 

I suspect that the alt left’s appeal is to people with liberal sensibilities but who are off-put by romanticist elements in mainstream progressivism. This is marked by the progressive’s tendency to go beyond mere equal rights for “marginalized” peoples and into flagrant idealization of them. 

Women, immigrants, people of color, indigenous people, Muslims, Buddhists, LGBT people and so on are not necessarily viewed as superior to white Christian (or atheist) males (although they can be) but as being less corrupted by the soul destroying rationalism of capitalism, objectivism and/or Christian theology, which is thought to instill in the white male an oppressive, dominating mentality. 

I find this kind of thinking to absolutely pervade post modern progressive thought. It is anathema to me, and I think the rise of the as yet embryonic alt-left is kind of rationalist and realist reaction to the romanticist conquest of materialism on the left.

What shall be our mythology?

Malhar Mali has some interesting things to say about "moral communities" in his interview with author James A. Lindsay before this blog entry descends into a morass of misinformed nonsense about Marxism.

I was looking for the generalization of religion that accounts for things like political parties or social movements.  What is the religion like thing, the one that's broader and yet that religions are all examples of?  What's the thing where groups behave like religions without necessarily being one?

He wanders into well trodden territory here; Eric Hoffer was reaching for a similar concept back in the 1950s when he wrote in what is, perhaps, the greatest treatise on political philosophy ever written, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements when he suggested that religions, nationalist movements and social revolutions were all interchangeable as far as his true believer was concerned.  For Eric Hoffer, precisely what was believed in was of lesser importance than the willingness of the True Believer to put absolute faith in it.

Particularly good was this observation/question that Mali put to Lindsay:

I would speculate that on the Left, religion has been on the decline.  Are people picking up these ideologically motivated moral communities such as social justice, 3rd wave feminism as substitutes?

 To which Lindsay gives the obviously correct answer of "Absolutely."  He goes on to describe "moral tribes" in the following terms:

This moral tribe idea is exactly what I was looking for; it's a moral community that has become ideologically invested.  It's taken its moral values and equipped them with sacredness, which is super high value - infinite value - according to the moral psychologist and professor of business ethics at New York University Jonathan Haidt.  Often, members have these "sacred" morals central to their core identity.  They think what makes them a good person is that they hold these values.

So there's every reason to believe that these people we are talking about - social justice warriors, they're often called - are acting in a way that is analogous, even isomorphic to religion. 

I've been saying this for a long time now.  The progressivism of the late 20th century mostly warmed over romanticism from the summer of love era, itself a reboot of a much older way of thinking that arose as a substitute for religion in the late 18th century.  The SJWs did not emerge in the second decade of the 21st century by accident.  What was needed was for iconoclastic anti-religious authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to publish their withering deconstructions of religious - especially Christian - doctrine, undermining belief in God and religion.  Especially among younger, tech savvy libertarian minded people like those found in Silicon Valley and the early adopters of social media more generally.

The so called new atheism was, and could have been, only half successful.  They undermined the credibility of religion and faith, but seemed ignorant of man's deeper need for religion and faith.   If religion itself should fail, something else will step in and take its place.  Comparisons of communism and nazism with religions are old hat now, with no less a luminary than the present Pope Francis observing correctly that "Karl Marx didn't invent anything."  Indeed, ideas such as the community of goods and even the idea of "to each according to his need" have biblical precedent.  It has also been argued, not without merit, that millenarian cults and mystical anarchists of the middle ages interpreted the "prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions." Simply add this to the Jacobin anti-clericalism of 18th century France and the rest is, as they say, history.

Let's face it: overarching narratives of good vs. evil are quite popular.  George Lucas openly admitted that he drew heavily from Joseph Campbell's exhaustive studies of mythology when he created Star Wars.  J.R.R Tolkien drew from a near bottomless well of European pagan mythology and Catholic doctrine (an odd pair) in his own now iconic mythology.  Indeed, it's hard not to see the entire fantasy genre, in literature, film and gaming, as being anything other than a postmodern revival of archetypal mythology.

This Manichean world view may well not be a human universal.  These tendencies in western thought were doubtlessly exacerbated by the nightmarish transformation of the best and brightest the modern west ever had to offer - 19th century German philosophy and romanticism, into the mind-bending nightmare of Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

But even there, Hitler was dealing in Manichean absolutes: the Aryan was pure and benevolent, the Jew was all that was evil.  Since then, I think that the appeal of a lot of our favorite pop-culture narratives (Lucas and Tolkien again, among others) is that they are, at least in part, a re-fighting of WW2.  Essential to successful myth, it would seem, is ritualized or metaphorical re-enactment of existential struggles what were won, but could have gone the other way, and would have if God, right, natural law, historical materialism or some other transcendent power for good not been on our side, and so made our victory inevitable.  For who else's side would supreme good be on?  More comforting to believe such notions than to face the existential dread invoked by the fact that these struggles were anything other than foregone conclusions.

In light of all of this, should it surprise us that these kinds of themes appear in our politics?  Richard Hofstadter's brilliant article on the Paranoid style certainly seems to think not, wherein adherents to one or another modern, secular equivalent to the millenarians see themselves as pitted against a "vast and sinister conspiracy," perceived as being a "demonic force of almost transcendent power."  This is central to the construction of the world view of a moral tribe.  Belief that some or another form of "social privilege" as an extension of a system of oppression so pervasive and evil that the ends of defeating it justify any means is the heart and soul of the SJW world view.  And a major factor in its rise and spread in a post-religious culture.

This is an important question for the emergent alt-left.  Especially given how rationalistic and enlightenment the alt-left tends to be.  Perhaps more important than the question of what shall be our political program is the question of what shall be our mythology?  I do not pose this question with the intent that we fabricate mythical explanations for scientifically understandable phenomena in the manner that religions do.  That was never what religion was really about, and failing to realize that was a failure far grander than all the success that the new atheism had in debunking God belief.

In asking what shall be our mythology, I ask what is the good that we fight for and the evil that we fight against?  Is this struggle significant enough for people to devote themselves to it and find meaning in it?  I defy anyone to find a successful political movement in history that did not pose this question to itself.  If not intellectually, at least instinctively.

A mythologized world view is not without its dangers.  It can all too easily descend into a morass of self righteousness, dogma, demonization of out-groups and puritanism.  Precisely what happened to the SJWs.  Given that cool headed enlightenment rationalism is, I think, the alt-left's greatest virtue, to descend into such fever swamps ourselves would be tragic.  But without some sort of heroic narrative, world views fail to engage people on more emotional levels and fail to tap into that eternal wellspring of archetype that so galvanizes human action, especially collectively, to a degree that makes real change possible.  As such, we're playing with fire here, and it's easy to lose control of it and get burned.  But not playing with fire would have resulted in mankind never getting out of the stone age.

The Alt-left's most controversial issue: To Race Realist or not to Race Realist?

The alt-left is becoming less race realist, and veteran alt-left blogger Rabbit is not happy about it:

"The AltLeft seems to be attracting a new faction of people who want to be “neutral” on the issue of race. A lot of them are “left libertarian” gamergate types who are critical of third wave feminism but reject the AltRight because of racism. People like Sargon of Akkad and Shoe0nhead come to mind. They think any identity politics is bad and that people who defend white identity are just “the mirror image of SJWs ” In fact, this is becoming the dominant faction. They’re basically people who just think this social justice warrior craze has gone too far, and they want to turn the clock back to like 1995 when it was just slightly less prevalent. As I’ve stated a million times before, this will never work."

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, race realism refers to what was once called scientific racism: the belief that there are demonstrable genetic and biological differences between humans based on race, and that these differences are significant enough to influence individual and social outcomes.  This kind of thinking fell out of favor after WWII - the Nazis were major proponents of scientific racism, as we should all know.  Race realist theories were seen as mere pseudoscience and rationalizations for the ugliest episodes from the darker epochs in human history; from the European conquest of the Americas and the slave trade to fascism and the holocaust.

Despite this, "race realism" is far from dead, though it continues to be hounded by allegations of being mere pseudoscience and driven by ignorance and bigotry.  The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray argued that measurable differences in intelligence existed between the races, that these differences were largely, though not completely determined by heredity and that these differences had significant impact on economic and social outcomes.  The controversy was, for lack of a better term, a full-on shit storm.  Since then, the idea has been gaining adherents on the alt-right, of which the early alt-left was a part.

Rabbit's warning of what could happen should we fail to accept certain racial realities is dire:

When a city or a country becomes 70-80% non-white, it will most certainly not retain any “race neutrality” toward white people. Imagine being the white guy in an 80% black country who says “Guys, we’re all just one race, the human race. Here’s what I think we all should do about problem XYZ which would help everyone rather than focus on awarding reparations.”  They will basically just laugh and be like “Whitey, sit your ass down and shut up. We’re in charge now.” Only it won’t actually be you of course. It will be your children and their future that you sold out for nothing but a bit of virtue signaling. Do you want your kids to live in a city that looks like Baltimore or Detroit or the shitty parts of Oakland? Do you want them to go to a high school where they get taunted by mobs of low IQ mestizos, because the school is 95% Mexican? Have you ever felt while walking through a ghetto neighborhood late at night that you had nothing to worry about because this was a “race neutral” environment? In South Africa, whites are running for their lives. Perhaps that wouldn’t happen here, but at the very least don’t expect going to the movies to be a quiet and pleasant experience.

I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by saying this, but I think that the question of whether or not biological and genetic differences between the races exist is of lesser concern than social and cultural compatibility.

And where that is concerned, it turns out Rabbit just might have a point.

Robert D. Putnam (of Bowling Alone legendry) in a 2007 paper entitled E Pluribis Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐First Century, immigration and ethnic diversity does, at least in the short term, "reduces social solidarity and social capital.  New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, residents of all races tend to 'hunker down', trust (even within one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer."

The fear I have of the concept of race realism is the potential for abuse: "Science shows we have higher IQs on average, so the good jobs are ours!"  Are color bars; rationalized rent-seeking for whites - something we'd really like to go back to?  Higher IQs or no, America's historical treatment of its black population is not something to be proud of.

But over fifty years have passed since the passage of the 1964 civil rights act and Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream speech.  We are 7 years into our first black POTUS.  And racial peace and reconciliation are, if anything, further away now than they were in the days of the Rodney King riots or even the Watts riots.  Liberals blame right wing racism.  Conservatives blame the welfare state.  One look at so called "social justice" blogs on tumblr and elsewhere make it quite clear that "judging a man by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin" is resonating less and less with minority communities preoccupied with knapsacks of privilege and cultural appropriation.  Another quick glance at 4chan's politically incorrect forums and reddit forums point to growing numbers of whites who are losing their fear of being smeared "racist" and are unapologetic in their advocacy for racial in-group preference.

And then there's Europe, where years of mass immigration and failure to effectively assimilate migrant populations, culumnating with the dreadful mishandling of the refugee crisis and sloppy attempts at covering up a resulting rape crisis have brought previously marginal far right parties into the political mainstream.  Few places seem to not be dealing with a racial crisis or issue of some kind or another, although some fare better than others.  My home town of Calgary - indeed most of Canada as a whole seems to be relatively (and I must emphasize that term) free of racial tensions.  Which isn't to say that it's not there.  But in most people's day to day lives, multiculturalism and diversity are not working out too badly.  Individual mileage may vary, of course.

This level of cordiality is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, sadly.  Truth is, I rather liked Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream.  I still think it's a worthy vision.  But something just isn't working here.  Is it time to throw in the towel?

I can not and will not advocate racial supremacy nor for the forced segregation of the races in any way.  I cannot associate myself with any ideological rationalization for racial oppression and genocide.  And it is for precisely that reason that I have to wonder if forced diversity and multiculturalism really needs to be a hill that western political elites are hell bent on digging in their heels and dying on.  If a polity can make multiculturalism work, more power to them.  But this religious fanatic level of devotion to diversity that the hegemony of western liberalism has been doubling down on increasingly just seems silly and misguided to me.  You can't force people to like each other when they don't want to.  Keep trying, and something really, really ugly is going to happen somewhere sooner or later.

If people, even people of European descent or, dare I say, white skin, want to live in more culturally or even racially homogenous communities, who am I to tell them they can't?  Now, dramatically curtailing immigration will most certainly cause as many problems as it will solve, if indeed it will solve any, but that's a matter for another time.

It would well behoove the political and cultural elites of the western world to get off their high horses and listen to their populations when they say they're fed up with mass immigration and multiculturalism.  Keep trying to force a round peg into a square hole, and you'll just end up breaking the hole, the peg or the hammer.

The Alternative Left - What it is.

On April 9, 2016 I created a Facebook page and called it Alternative Left.  Both before and since then, I've done online research into the prospect of rebooting the left in the same way that Richard Spencer has tried to do on the right.  The results have yielded a mixture of blogs and other sites that point to a growing discontent with the direction that left wing politics have gone since the demise of communism, among some people on the left.  Central to this discontent is a concern for civil liberties, freedom of speech and ideological pluralism in the face of in increasingly PC leftist establishment, a feeling that economic inequality and class based politics have been neglected due to an overemphasis on identity politics.

While I would like to take credit for being the left's counterpart to Richard Spencer, that honor belongs to one Robert Lindsay, whose blog defines the Alternative left more in terms of what it is not than what it is.  His list of what he feels would disqualify one from being an alt-leftist is, perhaps, lengthy, but basically boils down to a definition of the alt left as a rejection of the excesses of cultural leftism, rejection of social conservatism and support for social democratic kinds of economic policies.

In my months of involvement with this movement, spent primarily on social media outreach; building my page, this blog and Samizdat Broadcasts on YouTube, what I've noticed is a consistent core principle, with a broader variety of ancillary beliefs emphasized in varying permutations and combinations.  And that principle can, I firmly believe,  be neatly summed up as follows:

Alternative Left - Politics, so far confined to the internet and social media, centered around advocacy of a program of protecting western civilization from decline due to an erosion of humanist values caused by regressive leftism.  

Here I am defining humanism with the first line in the Wikipedia article on the same subject: "a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over acceptance of dogma and superstition."

The concept of a "regressive left" is essential, and is the key feature that demarcates the alternative left from mainstream progressivism. Examples of the kinds of regressive leftism that are of concern to alt-leftists include:

1. Replacement of racial and gender equality with an exceptionalism based on white male guilt as the underlying ideology.
2. A cultural determinism wherein people’s actions are judged solely on the basis of whether they belong to “privileged” or “marginalized” demographics.
3. Tolerance and acceptance of Islamism both at home and abroad, and protection of Islamic doctrine and communities from needed scrutiny due to dogmatic strains of anti-rascist, multiculturalist thought.
4. Embrace of mass immigration and multiculturalism without regard to the social problems caused by non-assimilation of migrant populations.
5. Dogmatic and extremist strains of feminist and anti-racist thought and activism, that call for the curtailing of speech when it offends them (so called "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings") and the curtailing of civil liberties for people who commit acts they deem oppressive, such as support for strong hate speech laws or curtailing due process for men accused of sex crimes against women.
6. Loss of free speech and intellectual diversity in Academia.
7. Embrace of "postmodern" philosophies which undermine belief in rationalism and empiricism by accusing these of being white male European social constructs.
8. Obliviousness to or tolerance of widespread economic inequality.
9. A tendency to avoid addressing arguments posed against them and instead relying on name calling, willful misrepresentation of their opponent’s positions and other kinds of stonewalling and evasiveness when faced with opposition or criticism.

From here, come a number of ancillary beliefs around which there is general agreement, but differences of emphasis, nuance and proposed solutions.  These issues are generally:

1. Skepticism towards economic conservatism, or in Europe, economic liberalism. Untrammeled capitalism is seen as generally destructive.  Proposed remedies range from a return to Keynesian social democracy to more thorough socialization of the economy, to third positionist economic theories not yet considered or implemented.  More generally, the kinds of dogmatic and quasi religious attachments to economic theories displayed by Marxists and Libertarians alike are frowned upon.  Note that it is the religiofication of these theories, not the theories themselves, that are seen as the problem.  Orthodox Marxists and libertarians, while definitely ideological minorities on the alt left, do exist.
2. Anti-conservatism.  While the Alternative Left is demarcated from mainstream progressivism by its opposition to regressive leftism, we make no peace with the right!  Religion and traditionalism are eschewed in favor of enlightenment humanism (see above), although we absolutely oppose persecution based on religious or cultural affiliation (see below).  While the alt-left is not against rigorous and peer reviewed scientific study of hereditary genetic differences across race or gender lines, we unequivocally oppose discrimination against people of any and all races, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities and so on, including straight white males.  In a similar vein, our opposition to Islamism is not a call for discrimination against Muslims, crack-downs on domestic civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism or for the kinds of hawkish, interventionist foreign policies in the Middle East that have done far more to fan than to quench the flames of Jihadism both at home and abroad.
3. Strong belief in civil liberties and free speech, especially though not exclusively in the face of the regressive left.

Frustration with the regressive left is palpable all across social media and in the broader society.  But this frustration cannot be allowed to be the impetus of a mass shift to the far right in the western world.  This will be an "out of the frying pan and into the fire" kind of solution.  The answer to the regressive left is not a re-embracing of racism, xenophobia and sexual puritanism.  It is a revival of classical liberal and social democratic principles.  That is what the Alternative Left is all about.

Who is "Agent Commie?" Where does he come from and what does he believe?

Tell us a bit about yourself.
Like my real name?  Ha ha.  Like I'm dumb enough to do that.  Enough of my readership knows who I am anyway.  I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  I'm middle aged - early 40s now.  Married with two kids.  Work full time - at a union job with good benefits and wages.  Too few people have that these days.

Why are you such a political wonk?
I learned the hard way at a young age that you can ignore the broader world all you want, but the broader world won't always ignore you.  Back in 1988, I was 15 and just wanted to listen to heavy metal music and play Dungeons and Dragons.  So it goes without saying that I wasn't the most popular kid in the conservative Catholic school I went to.  That was when Geraldo Rivera did his expose on Satanic cult activity in America.  I remember the moral panic well.

Next thing I knew, I was getting into fights at school, getting called into the Principal's office, quarrels with my parents and so on.  A lot of people really thought that Satanic panic stuff was real.  So at an early age I became accustomed to advocating for myself and the freedom of people like me - oddballs, misfits and so forth, to live our own lives.  The one thing that stands out in my mind, though, is that I did know some leftist people even in those days.  What they pointed out to me was that the things I enjoyed, the metal music and so on, were primarily enjoyed by white males, and it was implied that this was not really a good thing.  This had to mean that those hobbies were racist and sexist.  It was the first time, though by no means the last, that I would notice that the regressive left and the right wing overlapped on a lot of cultural matters.  Nothing has really changed these days, "geek culture" is a favorite punching bag of both moral conservatives and progressives.

So ... Agent Commie?
Well, the funny thing is that I'm not actually a commie.  Not so much these days, anyway.  Friends of mine gave me that nickname years back when I first really got into leftist politics.  That would have been around the mid 1990s or so.  This was a lonely experience - the Berlin Wall had come down, the USSR had dissolved and so the political climate of the time was extremely libertarian.  This was good in some ways.  People weren't so caught up in stuff like heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons.  Some were, but not as many.  But free markets were supposed to be the cure-all for everything, for everyone.   So Agent Commie is used somewhat ironically.  But I also think there's something to be said for theoretical communism, even though I don't think revolutionary socialism is practical.  It had an emphasis on class and economics that has increasingly been lost on the left wing.  I think it's important to bring that back.

Why so?
Because economic and ultimately legal structures provide important context to cultural issues.  I suspect that a lot of the problems on the left today are a result of there being no real political or economic theory.  As a result, issues surrounding race and sex are seen entirely through a cultural lens.  This precludes use of either the political process or economic redistribution to redress inequality.  So unequal outcomes are attributed to discriminatory or supremacist cultures among white males, and it becomes necessary to police these cultures and curtail their expression in order to make things more equal.  This obviously hasn't been helpful.  There's now a lot of anger and resentment towards "political correctness", much of it justified, that is in real danger of being expressed through very toxic politics, such as xenophobia, Donald Trump and stuff like that.

Have you always been on the left?
No.  There was a time, in the late 1990s and early 2000s that I became disillusioned with leftism.  I thought it had become too anti-white male.  I still think that, actually.  Even when I was a true believing communist, I thought that this streak of white male guilt that ran through leftist politics was dragging it down.  It's only gotten worse since then.

But you're leftist now?
I think it's the only thing you can be if you care at all about the 99%, if I may borrow the phrase.  But for a while I looked into right of center ways of thinking.  There is a certain logic to it, and some of it has stuck with me.  To this day, the more articulate alt-right commentators talk about concepts related to an organic society - a complex network of social interdependency that evolves and arises over time and in response to a the needs and issues a particular culture faces.  There's something to be said for that.  I'm not religious now, though I sort of was in those days, but I can see how shared mythology is a potent force for social cohesion.  Today we're seeing a retreat of religion, a retreat of cohesive family units, romantic and erotic love between the sexes is dying, and other kinds of relationships that used to give people an identity and a sense of belonging are eroding, and I don't think that's a good thing.  This is part of what's driving people to toxic political and religious ideologies.  The innate need to belong that's not being fulfilled on a more personal level.

That said, it became obvious to me fairly quickly that right of center governments could not, or would not really address cultural issues.  They simply didn't interest them.  Rightist parties might exploit and even stoke populist anger for votes, for popular support and to keep the base loyal, but their hearts aren't really in it.  At the higher levels, parties like the Republicans in the US, the Conservatives in Canada and Great Britain and so on were all for, or at least indifferent to stuff like radical feminism, mass immigration, multiculturalism and so on.  And why not?  Social liberalism is good for business.

Social Liberalism is good for business?  What do you mean?
It's a natural consequence of the embrace of free market economics that swept the world in the 1980s.  In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe rapacious capitalism as a force that destroys bonds based on land and kin, and "strips the family of its veil of sentimentality" and reduces human relations to money and commerce.  While I think Marxism is overly deterministic, I think Marx was on to something back then and we're seeing it now.  The economy becomes almost an all consuming social force.  Take feminism, for example.  Notice how feminism has become more successful and wide spread in the days since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, despite its supposed liberal leanings?  Part of that is because the left embraced identity issues as a substitute for increasingly discredited socialism.  But part of it was that in a more capitalist economy, women are more valuable as workers and consumers than they are as wives and mothers, so it becomes preferable to have them go to school, work outside the home and so on.  Now, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.  I don't believe that women should be forced to stay home and raise kids if they don't want to.  But the more capitalist the society, the more people become valued strictly in economic terms, and so the tendency to measure "success" in financial terms becomes greater.  And so more women work outside the homes, and this created a new demographic to market consumer products to.

What about the right's claims that feminism, multiculturalism and immigration are destroying western civilization?
They're pretty much false.  Now I do think that social liberalism has become excessive and is having a lot of negative social consequences.  But social liberalism didn't start the fire, so to speak.  The far right is putting the cart before the horse.  The truth goes back to what Marx said.  While racial and sexual equality were compatible with the values of the left, and things leftists have long advocated, capitalism really made socially liberal ideas flourish.  Untrammeled capitalism is an extremely dynamic force.  It causes unprecedented social change.  This was always the problem with conservative thought in general.  Social conservatism and capitalism are actually not compatible.

It's no secret that rates of marriage and birth in the developed world have been falling since the 1970s.  Consumer capitalism has enabled a higher - some might say decadent - quality of life, measured strictly financially, to childless couples and singles.  Plus, the welfare state, private and public pensions and so on have done away with the need for large families, and contraception decoupled sexual activity from procreation.  So the upshot of all of that is that you saw feminism proliferate in the 1970s and after.  Governments then turned to increased immigration to keep population growth sustainable.  Plus, immigrants formed a useful pool of cheap labor, and kept wages down.  As free trade enabled by freer markets allowed industry to move oversees and reduce the strength of the unions, the leftist parties found in immigrants, minorities and liberated women a new base of political support.  But those things were not caused by the left or by a nefarious conspiracy of "cultural Marxists" like the far right is always going on about.

You call yourself "Alternative Left."  What do you mean by this?
To the best of my knowledge, the term alt-left started with a blogger named Robert Lindsay - whom I've had a few online chats with; great fellow, as a kind of mirror image of Richard Spencer's Alternative Right.  The alt-left is basically people who are economically left, and don't fit in with either the right wing or most of today's left.  Especially political correctness and the social justice warriors.  The SJWs are the real fascists today.

So you regard the SJWs as having more in common with the far right than with the left?
Definitely.  You have a total rejection of a materialist conception of history.  You have a rejection of class struggle and liberal ideas of free speech and cultural pluralism.  Politics is seen entirely through the lens of cultural or racial identity, which must be purified and strengthened in the face of a hostile world.  Their world view is emotionally as opposed to rationally driven. It targets groups that have attained autonomous political identity relatively recently so that there isn't a lot of history, custom and tradition to fall back on, so a romanticized narrative of struggle is contrived to fill the void.  They exist in an uneasy collusion with existing political and cultural institutions - they're favored in the media and academia and so on.  This isn't something you'd see with an earlier leftist cause.  They sometimes profess to be anti-capitalist and have a semi-socialist way of coming across, but have little real interest in economics except as an extension of the tribe.  Loyalty to race or gender must supersede any kind of class consciousness or individualism.  That right there tells you all you need to know.  The only thing missing for the SJWs is a single messianic leader.

The alternative left rejects the SJWs for the same reason it rejects the alt-right.  It's anti-authoritarian.  It strongly upholds enlightenment values and champions rationalism over knee jerk emotional responses.  We're odd relatives of the libertarians and Randian objectivists that way, though we're poles apart from them economically.  Oppression and privilege have to be seen in political and economic terms again. so that some kind of measurable progress can be made.

So the Alternative left is basically just the old left?
To a degree.  But a lot of alt-leftists have very real concerns with how excessive social liberalism has effected society. While most alt-leftists reject social conservatism, a streak of concern for cultural stability runs through our world view.  This is a bit different than the strict economics of the old left.   Most of us look at 3rd wave feminism, Islamism and the more militant elements in groups like Black Lives Matter and are aghast.  These are very, very destructive movements.  But so are the alt-right and the libertarians, who so far have been the main opponents of the SJWs.  The problem with them is that they go too far the other way.  Even when they try to deny it, it's hard to avoid the distinct whiff of very real racism and misogyny in these online right wing counter-cultures.  So I'm hopeful that the alt-left can be a sane egalitarianism in contrast to the white male supremacy of the alt-right and the white male guilt of the regressive left.

What's next for Agent Commie?
I've started an Alternative Left Facebook page that's still small but growing steadily.  Now I'm doing my blog - Samizdat Chronicles, and hopefully a YouTube channel in the near future - Samizdat Broadcasts.  Now the historical samizdat was underground media in the Soviet bloc that was critical of the regime, so why would Agent "Commie" call his blog and YouTube channel that?  The answer is that some of the samizdat was critical of the Soviet failure to live up to genuinely socialist ideals,  I hope for my own work to hold the regressive left to similar account.

Any more heavy metal music or Dungeons and Dragons?
<laughs> Dungeons and Dragons, no.  I'm more a Dragon Age guy these days.  I'll be blogging and YouTubing quite a while before I catch up to the amount of time I lost playing DA Origins.  Heavy metal music?  Always!

Agent Commie also plans on spending time with his wife and children, who do not play D&D or listen to metal.  He can also be found at https://www.facebook.com/alternativeleft

No, your OTHER left

Maybe you've heard of the Alt-Right.  Meet its counterpart.  And there's more here.  And here.  And there's a few closed Alt-Left Facebook groups too.  These groups describe themselves as a kind of anti-PC left, some even willing to consider the notion of "race realism" (I'm not among these), or at least not cry "racist" or "heretic" against any straying from the culturally accepted narrative of white privilege.

Is this the thin end of a much larger wedge?  Moving from margin to center, you have decidedly liberal YouTubbers (think Sargon of Akkad or The Amazing Atheist, among many others) who spend at least as much time quarreling with feminist deconstructions of video games and social justice warrior culture more generally, as they do with any kind of religious or social conservatives.  And finally, you have fairly public figures such as Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris discussing the dangers of the "regressive left."  And that's hardly the tip of the iceberg. It's remarkable that the kinds of people who saw the religious right as the clear and present danger to democratic culture ten years ago now devote so much time to attacking this segment of the left.

So what's this really all about and is it important?  What it comes down to is widespread frustration among liberals with a liberalism that isn't very liberal.  The fact that many social justice movements are becoming closed belief systems with cult like atmospheres isn't sitting well with a growing number of people whose nature is to value skepticism and inquiry.  But it's been a slower and much less unified movement than the backlash against the religious right was.  This is due in part to a reluctance among the more educated and liberal segments of the population to openly challenge movements that profess to speak for marginalized peoples.  But the pace of growth of this inter-left or alt-left backlash is picking up.

The real objection isn't with the stated goals of most feminism, Black Lives Matter and other social justice causes, but with the style employed by the regressive left, centered in academia and certain social media spaces (tumblr is especially notorious) and obsessed with identity politics. Its methods are to make identity and "privilege" into a kind of totalistic social determinism, and all interactions between people are evaluated solely on the basis of the ideology's immutable definitions of what kinds of people are "privileged" and what kinds are "marginalized", often to the exclusion of all other factors or individual context.

This is what leads us to social justice warriors making statements like, "white people don't get to decide what's racist" or "males don't get to have an opinion on feminism" - unless the white commentator happens to decide something that another white person has said or done is racist, or unless the male insists that whomever he's speaking with accept feminist authority without question, even if his audience is female(!)  Even  members of marginalized demographics can't speak for themselves unless they first accept and internalize the ideological paradigm. Spectres such as the old notion of "false consciousness" are raised to dismiss heretics and thought criminals who are otherwise deemed marginalized or oppressed, by the advocates of regressive left ideology.

This ought to be raising a lot of red flags - and I do mean RED flags here, because this kind of thinking was the foundation of the totalitarian states that Lenin and later Mao would end up creating, and that shed so much of their own citizen's blood.  This old idea of the revolutionary vanguard, dressed up and modernized for the internet age.  The idea that even violence carried out by so called "marginalized" groups against their "oppressors" is justified or even righteous (#KillAllMen, anyone?) has its predecessor in the much less tongue-in-cheek ideas of "revolutionary terror" that was not merely an ironic expression of frustration to the Soviet regime, but a very real rationalization for very real violence and terror.  And while even those few instances of #KillAllWhiteMen that are

meant to be taken at face value are ultimately toothless given that they don't have the power of a totalitarian state at their backs (not yet anyway), no small number of otherwise liberal minded people who sympathize with feminist goals in the long run find themselves wondering if this sort of thing really speaks for them and their values, especially since they certainly would not by countenancing such humor were it directed by men at women.  I'd be the first to agree that we should all be a little less uptight and learn to laugh a bit more than we do, but in all seriousness, is the degree of hostility fomented in regressive left circles against males a good thing?  Seems to me as though better and stronger relationships between the sexes are what we should be advocating if we want to see better treatment of women by men overall.  Instead, academia and most mainstream media are doing all in their power to push things the opposite direction.  Seems to me as though this will create more, not less misogyny in the long run.  No one was ever rejected into liking and respecting the people rejecting them.  But then, I'm just a white male, so what do I know?

Sure, it could be argued that the two can't be compared, since men have the social power and women do not, and so #KillAllWomen should be taken more seriously as a threat.  But that's precisely the problem with regressive left thinking: it's ultimately circular and relies on its own premises to prove its own points. And if all else fails, just call your opponent a racist or imply that they're a misogynist rube or the like.  And even if power differentials across racial or gender lines were so clear cut and immutable, just how many double standards should we be prepared to accept as a result?  And is advocacy of double standards in favor of marginalized groups really the best way to achieve equality at all?  Or are regressive left canards denying the existence of misandry or anti-white racism in reality what they most certainly look like to me: rationalizations for self serving double standards offered up by people who would benefit from them.

Seems to me as though if people were all treated as equals, with equal standards of conduct applying to all, this would, by definition, erode social privilege and result in greater degrees of cultural equality, without nearly the backlash we're otherwise seeing because most (though by no means all) white males would be a lot more likely to buy into social justice if it were exactly what it describes itself as being, and the rules applied to everybody.  Instead, we have legions of online shills for black and female supremacy attributing the blowback they're getting to racism and misogyny.  While some of it is indeed "old white dudes" unwilling to relinquish their prejudices, just as many are real liberals who are looking at tumblr, Everyday Feminism, Jezebel, BuzzFeed or any other pro-social justice space and seriously wondering if that's what they signed up for?

If I didn't know any better, I'd suspect that gags like #KillAllWhiteMen, however seriously (or not) they're meant to be taken, have a lot more to do with appealing to the EGOS of an educated urban liberal cohort that is not nearly as marginalized as they'd have us believe, than it does with any actual social inequality.  And that's the real problem with regressive leftism.  It doesn't actually do a damned thing to tackle inequality, alienation, poverty, prejudice or any other kind of social evil.  That's why it so often comes from academia and mainstream media and so often targets the lower classes of the wrong gender and color in so condescending a way.  Kind of like masturbation, regressive leftist virtue signalling feels good while you're doing it, but it's only yourself you're benefiting, if even that, in the end.

For many of those who've been fortunate enough to live in the western world and attend its elite learning institutions, ideologies that lay the blame for injustice and inequality at the feat of entire races or genders as opposed to economic class and politics may even be a cathartic way to resolve the cognitive dissonance that one would expect from being a moral egalitarian, yet personally benefiting from sitting near the top of the global shit heap.  The problem with it is, the real poor and the real marginalized, regardless of race or gender, need and deserve so much better.