Right Wing Purity Culture

In a recent conversation I had with him, Carl Benjamin says:

I am honestly of the opinion that the right doesn't have this kind of purity culture, and that's definitely to their advantage. I'm not saying it doesn't ever exist or anything, but as a general rule, the right is less puritanical in this regard. 

This is in reference to the proclivity towards a highly doctrinaire and manichean world view that one often encounters in hard left circles, both in current year and throughout its history. Indeed, the decision of myself and my fellow Facebook page moderators to even have a conversation at all with the dreaded Sargon of Akkad would no doubt face heavy denouncement in typical left wing circles. And not "I disagree with Sargon on the following issues ... " but rather a "How dare you even think of speaking to so someone so racist, fascist, ignorant, stupid etc" kind of response.

Were they to discover that I found Mr. Benjamin to be a reasonable and cordial fellow with whom I would have some ideological disagreements as well as some areas of overlapping concern, that'd be treated as nothing short of blasphemy. And this includes many of the sorts of leftists who advocate a retreat from identity politics in favor of more class struggle. Get the pitchforks and light the burning pyre. We have a witch here. Conversing directly with demons, no less.

I was a youthful target of the Satanic Panic in the late 1980s, so it wouldn't be the first time.

While I realize that Sargon has his detractors and those who've claimed to have had bad experiences with him, that doesn't involve myself and my fellows who took part in the discussion. I felt I'd get that out of the way, because I know what the comments are going to say where ever I post this. You have a problem with Sargon, take it up with him. I'm no one's attack dog, and I'm not getting involved in YouTube drama.

With that all said, I did not follow up with Sargon on this idea of there being far less of a purity culture on the right, but upon reflection, I don't really agree. I suspect it looks that way because the purity culture on the right manifests itself differently from the one on the left. But that doesn't mean it's not there. It comes down to this:

The left's main concerns are with oppression, exploitation and discrimination. And that's perfectly reasonable. But progressives are vulnerable to the idea that any deviation from the established party line on any given issue will inevitably open the door to and enable, if not outrightly perpetuate, oppressive treatment of marginalized peoples. As such, rather like a religious fundamentalist who fears that the edifice of his religion will collapse if any element of the canon is called into question, unquestioning obedience to established orthodoxies is demanded on much of the left wing. Marxist Leninism, feminist theory, critical race theory and queer theory are almost unequivocal on this. These doctrines are the maps and blueprints that one must follow - to the letter - if a just society is to be achieved.

The right's main concerns are with degradation and loss of cultural and economic vitality, and that this would be bad because those things contribute to the strength and health of the polity. Again, well and good. But this likewise lends itself to conservatives fearing that any attempt to reform culture, politics or economy in a way to make them more inclusive or to provide a safety net for those in need will end up enabling behaviors and activities that cause a dilution of both personal morality and relationships that uphold the integrity of society. Right wing theories: neoreaction, libertarianism, white nationalism and religious fundamentalism are all underwritten by this kind of fear. A "camel's nose, once in the tent, the body is sure to follow" kind of mindset prevails in any discussion of either regulating the free market economy, or becoming more permissive regarding social norms and mores. Integrating between the races will dilute the purity of whichever race is superior. Allowing religious pluralism will cause the one true faith revealed by God to be diluted or lost, etc. You get the picture.

The contrasting concerns of social justice and social protectionism result in the respective purity cults of the left and right manifesting in different ways. The purity cult of the left is decidedly ostentatious and demonstrative, in keeping with the nature of the leftist narrative as themselves as some kind of last ditched resistance effort against an encroaching fascist tyranny. Convinced of the powerlessness of the purported targets of this tyranny, stark raving terror actually becomes a "reasonable" result. It's more visible because protest and civil disobedience are much more front and center in leftist theory.

The cringe factor here comes from the fact that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, while having politics vastly different than mine, are not quite what the hysterical left echo chambers make them out to be. Accusing these men of wanting to "erase" marginalized peoples or believing that women, people of color, LGBTQ people and others "should not exist" actually pushes them beyond being "literally Hitler" and makes them out to be something out of the darkest of speculative fiction, like the wicked Emperor Palpatine or the Dark Lord Sauron. It need not be said that this is hyperbole, not reality.

The purity cult on the right is harder to see because it's less ostentatious. For one thing, the individualism espoused by the right makes them far less likely to organize and protest, and when they do, their predilection for order and personal discipline makes these protests far less rowdy and prone to acts of hysteria. But they do happen, as Tea Party protests against Obama's attempts to bring in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act demonstrate.

More significantly, however, the right's belief in the underlying unity of strength and virtue lends itself to the right wing purity cult expressing itself in displays of strength, not weakness. Thus, rightist denounciation of leftists has about it a definite macho swagger. Hence its denunciations of leftists as snowflakes, cucks, degenerates, too stupid to learn about economics, etc. While the right attacks communism in some of the same terms that the left attacks fascism: condemning its historical brutality and totalitarianism, and the same kind of cringy comparisons of leftist figures like Bernie Sanders with historical tyrants like Josef Stalin as exist on the left comparing Trump to Hitler etc, the right tends to express contempt at the notion that such manly men as themselves would ever need a social safety net or protection from being exploited as a worker, consumer or investor. A crucial difference, perhaps the definitive difference, between left and right.

For the right, the answer is always very simple. Find another job. Start your own business. Don't do stupid stuff. Don't get sick or injured. Be Superman. Predict the future with pure accuracy. Were you as manly as themselves, you wouldn't need no namby-pamby social safety net, union representation or government regulations to protect you from hardship and exploitation. Well, too bad for them that actual human beings in the real world are not made of such stern stuff.

This isn't to say there isn't a place for conservative or libertarian questioning of leftist policy proposals. Sometimes they really are untenable. But the problems arise when pressed for specifics, the rightists resort to their own brand of emotionalism as opposed to reasoned argument. You're too degenerate, cucked, stupid to understand economics, etc. And then they'll go on to sneer the ironically labeled "tolerant" left. Such self awareness.

Much of the US right's entire ideological shtick lies in a constant onslaught of propaganda saying that any government interference in the economy at all is basically tantamount to socialism. Distinction is not made between the light interventions of neoliberals a-la Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, the more heavy interventions advocated by Keynesians, welfare liberals, new dealers and social democrats - think Roosevelt or Attlee, the far reaching but incomplete control advocated by democratic socialists or regimes like Allende's Chile or Chavez's Venezuela and the total control practiced by Stalin and Mao. And where would they stand on small government or even stateless models advanced by some kinds of leftists: anarcho communism/syndicalism, mutualism or the like? These are obviously enormous theoretical differences and yield very different outcomes, but you'd never guess that by reading conservative sources or the responses that right leaning people make in any kind of social media platform, in their own attempts to deplatform their political opponents by implying that they are weak, stupid or degenerate.

Well, you know what? If your precious free market is so fragile that it will collapse if any attempt is made to tinker with it, perhaps it's not that strong either, and maybe libertarians descend into being their own brand of hysterical SJWs for claiming taxation is theft or that regulations stopping them from dumping their pollution into the water or the air as they please constitute a lighter, softer form of the boot of socialism. A sort of economic microaggression, if you will. And notice how triggered they get when you tell them there are sound economic, political and social reasons for taxation and public spending. It's like you're "Marxsplaining" or "Keynesplaining" their oppression to them.

Poor guys.

If you can slow down anything recorded by Ben Shapiro to a pace at which it becomes intelligible, the whole idea being advanced is pretty straight forward. And it's the same with Turning Point and a host of other conservative ideological sources. Bernie Sanders = Joseph Stalin. Obama's America = Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.  Obamacare = Stalinist collectivization. Keynesianism and Marxism are described as being one in the same. Despite the fact that demand management policies have been part and parcel of how all of the world's most successful economies have operated at least as far back as the second world war.

Such hysterical and stupid phrases are not being shrieked aloud for all to hear by outraged women and college students taking to the streets, but they are no less hysterical and stupid for that difference. Any government intervention in the economy, any provision of social welfare, any protection of workers rights reveals a "lack of understanding of economics" and surely won't work despite the fact they have been working for decades now across the developed world. All presented by some wannabe tough guy whose macho swagger implying that he can beat you up so that makes his views correct. This looks different than the SJW's displays of emotional hysteria and terror at even the most tepid step away from his ancap or intersectioal feminist dogmas, but does not alter the fact that, at heart, it's the same thing.

An ideological purity cult.

Besides, there's plenty of precedent for very real and dangerous ideological purity regimens on the right: the various red scares, McCarthyism, the Satanic Panic, to name a few. If the right wing has done it before, why should I think they won't do it again? There's enough love for the likes of Augusto Pinochet among hard line libertarians and reactionaries these days for them to most certainly not have my trust. Perhaps they'd be amenable to a deal, wherein I won't send them to a gulag if they don't throw me out of a helicopter, assuming either of us ever had the chance. But I'm not holding my breath.

Not all right wingers are Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer Warriors or the like, some of you might say. Fine. Some of you are no doubt thinking "straw man" to everything I've said here. Fair enough. Some more conservative leaning people are reasonable, as my discussion with Sargon exemplified. But not all leftists are Antifa either. Rightists get annoyed whenever they're hysterically tarred as racists, nazis, misogynists and the like by the left. Okay, fair enough. Then don't tar the whole of the left as either violent ancom or tankie nutjobs or hysterical feminists with obvious mental health issues either. The right warns the left that its irrationality will drive more people to the right. Fair warning, but that's a two way street. At some point, after being called a cuck and offered enough helicopter rides, more people might start wondering if there's maybe something in Karl Marx's library that these right wingers and their paranoid cries of "cultural Marxism" don't want them to know, and the Streisand Effect takes hold from there.

Listen to myself and my fellow alt-left mods converse with Sargon of Akkad and the Secretary of Akkad here.

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Intersectionality is Itself a System of Power

Intersectionality is itself a system of power. It upholds the status quo and protects the powerful and privileged.

Recognizing this is the key difference between the alternative left and other current forms of political thought.

A fan of the Alternative Left Facebook page recently posed this question to me:

Have you considered that you might be postmodernist? The actual meaning of the term, not Peterson's ridiculous conflation and confusion of it. It seems as if a lot of your philosophy relies on the rejections of meta-narratives.

At a glance, this seems an absurd question. Isn't rejection of postmodernism integral to the alt-left? Doesn't all that deconstruction and bafflegab distract from the hard and real work of class struggle? Isn't a return to some semblance of economic realism, if not historical materialism, what we're all about at the end of the day?

Not so fast. While I don't think postmodernism is a tenable philosophy long term, it does make some good points. It's like nihilism and other forms of radical skepticism. They're nice places to visit, and doing so is a sign of intellectual growth, but you wouldn't want to live there.

My quarrel with postmodernism is how it tends to be cherry picked by the intersectional left, the feminist theorists in particular. They're quite good at using deconstruction to pick apart the texts of their opponents, and will exploit other postmodernist concepts such as "the death of the author" - the idea that textual interpretation by authorial intent is flawed - to license their tendency to simply read their own narrative into ideas that threaten them. They use such notions as science being a western, patriarchal "way of knowing" as a legitimizing excuse to handwave otherwise proven claims of some biological basis in gender differences, for example.

Deconstruction, cognitive framing and other advanced linguistic concepts are devastating ideological weapons against those who are not aware of them. Intersectional theorists get a unique education in these concepts in the academic institutions wherein their views dominate. Institutions that are not cheap to attend and require significant baseline intelligence to be successful in. They're therefore able to win debates against their less privileged opponents simply through framing and linguistic and cognitive gimmicks of this nature.

Ultimately, however, feminist theory's apparent embrace of postmodernism is self serving pretense. Notice how their own theories are presented as if they were eternal truths, universally binding on all people under all circumstances. Cultural relativism is fine when it's used to impose multiculturalism and diversity upon western cultural spaces, but has a funny way of disappearing when similar demands of tolerance are made of feminist theorists in turn. Fixed and objective meaning of text based on authorial intent is not authoritative, since the author no doubt lives in a network of socially constructed systems of which he is barely aware. But not so the feminist critic. Her views, and her views alone apparently, somehow transcend the context of the society that gave rise to them, and so are above questions of this nature and constitute an ultimate authority on par with divine revelation.  No one is faster to declare epistemic superiority for their own points of view - standpoint theories so called - than college feminists who've studied the poststructuralists closer than anyone. If feminist theory is not a metanarrative, you tell me what is.

Who deconstructs feminist theory, one must ask?

Yeah, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

Herein lies a very central tenet of alternative leftism: that the brands of postmodern critical theory so prevalent on college campuses and that are the underlying ideologies of the SJWs are actually conservative, not radical. They are in fact themselves systems of power, like the very notions of patriarchy and colonialism they so love to deconstruct.

This is quite naturally a counter intuitive concept when first exposed to it. Feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and so on - Intersectionality serving as a kind of one ring to rule them all and thus a useful term for referring to them collectively -  is interpreted either as official party line and not to be questioned, in the case of the mainstream left. Or else condemned as "cultural Marxism" and taken at face value as advocacy for an artificial egalitarianism, in the case of the right.  Neoreaction comes quite strangely closest to the truth in its denouncing of progressive ideology as "the Cathedral" - a vast Matrix like social construct comparable to the Christian church in the middle ages - the state religion to which everyone must pay homage, hence the term.

The Cathedral: It doesn't challenge the aristocracy.
It is the aristocracy.

Neoreaction's flaw, however, lies in the irony of its denunciation of progressivism in those terms. Isn't a medieval form of social organization exactly what they want? The Church of the middle ages, far from being an institution for egalitarian social levelling, had a long history of supporting the aristocracy and running interference on behalf of the status quo, despite a good portion of what Christ actually taught, which may be where the confusion arises.

So it is with intersectionality. Despite its pretenses, and despite what were likely genuinely radical critiques at one time, current year intersectionality does not challenge privilege. It upholds privilege.

Do not misunderstand me, dear reader. I do not condone racism towards minorities, misogyny and homophobia. The left spearheaded the fight against those things for all the right reasons. And not merely because prejudice undermines working class solidarity, thought that is reason enough. To be left is to value equality, to some degree or another, and fair treatment regardless of what one is by accident of birth. Intersectionality itself was intended to be a manner of looking at how various different forms of oppression reinforce one another. This is not in itself a bad idea.

The problem is that intersectionality has evolved into something does not actually promote real social justice. Its lack of tolerance for dissent made it vulnerable to abuse on part of the unscrupulous, who were thereby attracted to intersectional feminist spaces. They've co-opted social justice movements, and used them as tools to oppress people. It's like Marxist Leninism 2.0 - a popular movement is appropriated and exploited by an elite vanguard professing to represent the interests of marginalized people, and using that to consolidate their own power. Cultural rather than political power this time, but the underlying mechanisms are quite a bit alike.

It's also quite different from Marxism in one key aspect, and this is often overlooked by those on the right who equate intersectional ideas with Marxian leftism: intersectionality's lack of emphasis on political economy. It is not merely that they simply don't care about or are ignorant of the internal workings of the international economy or the political machines of the G7 nations. Intersectionalists are rewarded by capital for framing privilege in terms of racial and sexual identity rather than in terms of wealth and political power. These rewards include expansion in academia, access to agenda setting mass media and favorable policy service. Ideological systems that truly threaten the status quo do not enjoy universally favorable media bias, moderator bias on major corporate social media platforms and an exalted status in academic institutions.

The state religion does not advocate for the truly marginalized within the polity.

It's important that you divest yourself of the notion that intersectionalists truly represent the underclasses, including most women and people of color. They occupy a very different world than that of working single mothers or unemployed minority youths in the ghetto, or on their way to prison. They occasionally will use real oppressions suffered by women and minorities while making the case for an increase in their own influence, but that is the only reason for which they ever seem to do so. If one takes their standpoint theories at all seriously, the plush halls of the academy and major media outlets are not the places we should be seeing credible voices of the oppressed and marginalized. Those voices are kept quite intentionally silent, because their demands will be for redressment of their economic hardships and lack of political representation.

Women who are turned off of men and family as a result of feminism, and men who are turned off of religion, community and nationalism as a result of anti western critical theory find themselves completely atomized and without an identity. This is central to the alt-right's critique of modern liberalism and the abolition of borders.

But the real question is: who is the real beneficiary of all this? The far right will tell you that this is "cultural Marxism" and is necessary in order to groom the populace for the embrace of socialism.

That's not what happened. If you do not believe that, observe how neoliberalism increased apace just as this so called cultural Marxism did. The emergence of political correctness coincided with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. If the idea was for feminism and multiculturalism to precede socialism, they could not have failed more miserably.

Atomized individuals turn to careerism and consumerism to fill the void, and they're more easily replaced when cheaper cogs for the machine are found. So they're more obedient and easily used in the workforce and more responsive to consumer trends. When other vectors of identity are removed, do the brands we work for and consume become the way we identify ourselves? This seems to me to be the triumph of capitalism, and quite in line with the manner in which Marx believed capitalism would progress, abolishing relations based on kinship and reducing all human interaction to commodity exchange, rather than the triumph of Marxism itself that it's so often described as by reactionaries.

Hard Fact: Social liberalism is the handmaiden of capital, not of revolution. And so capital became socially liberal when national economies became fully saturated and capital had to go global in order to keep up its expansion. The alt-right is hated in the capitalist press because capital must always seek new markets, and it was therefore in capital's interest to globalize and promote diversity.

Observe one of the methods whereby Intersectionality preserves its hegemony: by seeking to get people who disagree with them fired from their jobs. Often with no recourse or due process whatsoever. In what world does leveraging the power of capital over labor so flagrantly and directly constitute anything that could be at all called left wing? This is what was done to socialists and trade unionists back in the bad old days of blacklisting. This isn't to say that removal of an offensive or hateful person from a workplace isn't sometimes appropriate or necessary, but to use the threat of employment loss as a means of enforcing ideological conformity more broadly is something the left should not be supporting. We can question the rationality of workers supporting conservatism all we want. It won't seem quite so irrational now that this ugly tactic has been normalized.

Another hard fact: Intersectionality relies on the absolute power that capital has over labor and consumers in order to successfully impose its will on the population, as it's doing in geek culture, for instance. The capacity for populations to resist cultural and moral relativism imposed from above would be greatly increased if cultural and economic as well as political institutions were democratized and under some or another kind of social ownership.

Intersectionalists are a safe and nerfed form of "leftism." One that attacks white male "neckbeards" and "dudebros" in places like 4chan while leaving the State Department, the military industrial complex and Wall Street lobbyists unscrutinized. Activists and even radicals who truly want to challenge the status quo find their anger and vigor channeled into safe outlets that do not truly threaten the powers that be. Offensive statements by white male celebrities are made front page news by an intersectionalist movement that's presented in the headlines as being radical and subversive - the resistance, so called. Offensives launched by the US military on the other side of the world in defense of petrodollar interests are kept more safely out of the public eye.

Intersectionality is a tool used by an educated elite to police the culture of the underclass, and to undermine the solidarity of that underclass by dividing it along racial and gender lines. We've seen this done time and again now: with Occupy Wall Street, with Bernie Sander's campaign for the White House, now with the Democratic Socialists of America. Most leftist spaces on social media are completely overrun by intersectional dominance, even ones that profess to be Marxist or anarchist.

Intersectional activists have a curious way of coming to dominate leftist spaces, and maintain their power through dividing the left against itself and redirecting popular anger towards other segments of the left. Sometimes the target is white male leftists - brocialists, so called. Sometimes it's white feminism, or TERFs or straight feminism. Sometimes straight black males are called the white people of black people. Sometimes cisgender gay males are driven out of LGBT spaces. Some or another activist has run afoul of the intersectionalist overlords and is publicly shamed, like in a Maoist struggle session or the young kids being banished from polygamous fundamentalist communities for the most trivial reasons.

But the real reasons aren't so trivial: to maintain the power of the leadership over the flock. Ceaseless purity spiraling destroys the cohesiveness of the left. J. Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO could not have done a better job if they tried. Perhaps the FBI still is, and that's what all this really is.

Like a puritanical religion, intersectionality promotes a guilt based morality that ceaselessly berates its followers for their ideological and lifestyle shortcomings. Theories of inherited privilege based on what people are by accident of birth become a moral burden comparable to original sin. People with a lot of internalized guilt do not take action to challenge their leaders. They punch down, not up. Nearly any action a person may commit or even a thought they might think can be construed as oppressive in some way or anther. That combined with intersectionality's taboo on questioning claims of oppression made by its activist leadership - who are above any kind of ethical or moral standards due to their supposed "marginalization" - results in a near cult like atmosphere in intersectional spaces. Not surprisingly, most people want nothing to do with this and thus nothing to do with the left overall. Who does that benefit, in the long run?

As mentioned previously, considerable education is needed to really understand their theories, and the intersectionalists themselves conveniently have a near hegemony within the academy itself. Hence, the relative absence of working class people in these self styled radical movements. Which in turn makes the whole of the left easy for the right to denounce as "limousine liberals", "champagne socialists" or the like. No more effective means of turning the working class off of the political left could be contrived. This makes McCarthyism look clumsy and amateurish. People who are rightly put off by intersectionality then defect quite willingly to conservatism as a protest against it. One almost wonders if this wasn't the intent all along.

The problem is not with education itself, which is perfectly fine and good. But rather with the co-optation of education to serve elite interests. Something that the left was much more willing and able to call out prior to the capture of the humanities and social sciences by intersectionalists.

The ideology of intersectionality itself is constructed to be a closed system of thought, wherein disagreement with it is likened to actual oppressive behavior against a marginalized person. Allegations of racism or sexism - made with the backing of powerful media outlets - against lone individuals without recourse and no due process are effective and currently socially legitimate ways of marginalizing people. It's a good way of removing someone who's bringing up facts and ideas that the truly powerful don't want publicly legitimized.

Far from emboldening the resistance, intersectionality keeps protest culture in line and ensures its continuity as a controlled opposition. One that allows the powers that be to claim that they allow and legitimize dissent - so long as it doesn't really threaten them. One oligarch or another might get thrown under the bus due to his alleged racism or sexism here and there. The oligarchy itself is thus made safer, for it submits itself to the appearance that it really is held to scrutiny and made accountable for its abuses. Surely the absurdity of a racist or sexist comment ruining a CEO while his abuse of his workers, defrauding of his shareholders and pollution of the environment as a matter of course going completely unnoticed highlights the absurd nature of intersectionality as a form of radicalism.

With leftism like intersectionality, who needs conservatism? It's the ultimate metanarrative, and if the postmodernist techniques of deconstruction can be turned against it, that can only be a good thing. An essential thing, as a matter of fact.

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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.  

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.  

The Universal Job Guarantee

Exclusively on Samizdat Broadcasts!

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!

Ernest Everhard, Do You Even Socialist, Bro?

Do you even socialist, bro?

"Ernest Everhard" - my personal meme stash and blogging page on Facebook, named for the Marxist protagonist in Jack London's dystopian classic, The Iron Heel, received the following message earlier today:

"Also, do you think you could establish a doctrine beyond just anti SJW? You say you a communist but in your policy you are a social democrat. Are you a revolutionary socialist?"

Fair question and fair point, though I do think I'm more than merely anti SJW.  I'm against closed, manichean systems of thought, of which intersectional feminism is one.  Revolutionary socialism is another, so I guess that answers that question.

I think there's a great deal to be said for Marxist materialism as a means of analyzing the economic structure of a given society.  But my messenger makes a good point: for someone who so insists that part of how leftism has gone wrong recently is its neglect of economics in favor of cultural issues, I do tend to neglect economics in favor of cultural issues.  Physician, heal thyself!

So here goes ...

Marxist materialism was a work of genius for its time.  But it hasn't aged well, obviously.  Marx wrote at a time when early industrial capitalism still had an almost feudal character to it.  Some top-hat and tails tycoon - think any antagonist from Charles Dickens novel or Sir Topham Hatt - owned the textile mill, sewing floor or whatever.  Whatever was left over after all of his expenses were paid was his, straight out, unless he was indebted to a bank or other patron.

For reasons too complex to detail here, Marx thought this system doomed to fail.  Capital would amass into fewer and fewer hands and downward pressure on wages, and hence demand, would contrast with increased productivity, and therefore supply, driving the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.  His famous predictions of a dictatorship of the proletariat and eventual rise of communism are, of course, well known.  To this day, the mystique of "worker controlled" economies continues to enamor idealists.  Perhaps had things remained that way, Marx's predictions would have come to pass by now.  In my experience, workers aren't that interested in worker's control.  Worker's control actually entails more work.  Best to leave it to professional managers, That's what they're paid the big bucks for, is the general attitude.

The emergence of the joint-stock corporation in the mid 19th century changed things.  Somewhat.  Larger industrial concerns - steel mills and the like, became too costly for all but the most obscenely wealthy people to afford.  Joint-stock made it possible for somewhat less obscenely wealthy people to get in on the action as well.  Now, instead of one Sir Topham Hat, many could go in together as shareholders, who would elect a Board of Directors to run the organization.  In most models of corporate governance, the Board hires a CEO to manage things on a day-to-day basis.  This model had the effect of separating the managers from the owners - profits accrued to the shareholders, and the board/CEO were salaried employees much like the workers themselves were, albeit more generously compensated.

Of course, the same downward pressure on wages remained, since profit still amounted to the difference between income and expense.  But the countervailing measures we're all familiar with began to emerge: the rise of organized labor, government regulation of wage levels and working conditions, and progressive income tax schemes used to fund social programs for the benefit of the needy - the basic planks of social democracy.  Once these measures were in place, however, capitalism was allowed to remain.  Back in the USSR (bonus points if you read that in Paul McCartney's voice), capitalism was abolished entirely, and Lenin and his successors would try out actual socialism in earnest.

History has generally not been kind to either the socialist or the social democratic ideals.  I'll consider the reasons below:

Places where capitalism was done away with entirely encountered varying degrees of bad results.  The reasons included lack of competition and lack of profit incentives stifling innovation and productivity, and the economic calculation problem - when markets are not used to allocate goods, price fluctuations are not able to signal increases or decreases in demand.  What really kills socialism, though, resides in Marx's theory of surplus value.  The assumption at all profit = exploitation and that therefore the whole value of labor should accrue to the workers or the state results in an absence of capital markets.  You see, not all of those profits went towards top hats and tails.  Of course, a lot of it did and obscene differences in wealth emerged and continue to emerge.  But a lot of it was reinvested too, and this allowed economic growth and jobs to increase.  Where capital markets cannot exist; where stocks and bonds cannot be issued, this becomes much more difficult.  This, I suspect, is why thoroughly socialized economies tend to descend into stagnation and failure.

What of social democracy, then?  Traditionally social democratic mixed economies tend to be top performers in the world economy, so social democracy is the horse to bet on, is it not?  While it is superior to either Sir Topham Hat capitalism or communism, it's not without limitations.  Limitations that have grown harder to get around as the economy has become more globalized, though wiggle-room still exists and governments, particularly neoliberal ones, are as likely to use these factors to rationalize giving away the store to corporate interests as they are to face these factors as true constraints.

The main problems are investment strike and capital flight.  Those with the capital to do so simply don't invest and therefore fewer jobs, less credit and reduced growth long term.  This article in the great Jacobin magazine illustrates the pressures that international investors can bring to bear upon governments in order to erode social democratic protections.  These result in reduced taxes on high incomes, weakened unions, working class taxpayers shelling out for bail-outs, job losses due to free trade deals, taxpayers shelling out for startup costs, weakened consumer, shareholder, labor and environmental protection legislation and everything else that excite Thatcherites and Reaganites.

The competitive nature of capitalism and the drive for ever reduced costs and increased profits drive transnational corporations to exert these pressures on governments.  This is how Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs happen.  We are back to where we were before we considered socialism and social democracy to begin with.

So what can be done?

The core problem seems to be that revolutionary socialism goes too far while social democracy doesn't go far enough.  I believe the answer is to go back to the basic corporate model of ownership and governance, and work with rather than against market forces.  If tax or wage increases eat into net income and therefore disincentivize further investment, then we can achieve the desired results - increased incomes for the working class and revenues for the state to then spend on social welfare - through increased state and/or worker ownership of shares in the publicly traded corporations.

To achieve this, I would make the following proposals:

• That a public investment authority be created in order to establish sovereign wealth funds.  This has been done with some success in other places - the Norwegians did it with their oil industry and have been quite successful.  Doing this would require the state to begin acquiring shares in publicly traded corporations at home (preferably) and abroad.
• All citizens receive a capital endowment upon reaching a certain age.  This endowment would take the form of a non-transferable share in the aforementioned sovereign wealth fund.  This share would naturally be equal in size only to every other share that every other citizen likewise receives.  So one share of millions.  Plus, the state would not divest the entire value of its sovereign wealth fund in this manner.  The state would retain a sizable share, and reinvest the profits as well as use some of the income so generated for public finance.  All told, not enough to put anyone on easy street, but should help with those "pay the rent vs. feed the kids" conundrums that the underclasses contend with.
• The entirety of the nation's publicly traded stock would not be nationalized in this manner.  A capital market would continue to be permitted to exist.  No single person or entity would be permitted a complete controlling interest in any corporation.

And yet the basic corporate model of governance and operation remains.  Except that the shareholders entitled to vote at annual shareholder meetings are now much of the population, or at least trust companies, banks or investment firms retained by much of the population to manage their investments, should they so choose.  This means partial, if not majority votes to the board of directors.  Which would still be required by its fiduciary duties to maximize shareholder value, but could also be restrained by limitations imposed by the shareholders.  

The obscene and ridiculous American habit of allowing the Chair of the Board to also serve as the Chief Executive Officer could be made against the corporate charter or bylaws, for example, though this should simply be outlawed by fiat.  In other regards, regulation of the corporation would thus be as much a matter of internal governance as compliance with government legislation.

Beyond this, social democratic measures would be vastly easier to implement, though they'd likely be less necessary since the above measures deal with the structural inequalities of capitalism.  This will be especially important as advances in artificial intelligence and robotics kill ever more jobs.  Fully automated luxury communism just might be possible after all!

Still, utilities and essential services would still be best delivered by crown corporations and universal social programs.  Social safety nets, a negative income tax, a basic income or even a job guarantee would still be worth considering.  Unions would still be a part of things, both as a means of codetermination - representing company staff on corporate boards of directors (like they do in Germany) and standard collective bargaining roles more generally.  

Well, it is seizing the means of production, in a manner of speaking, is it not?

Thinking Outside the Vox

Way back in the halcyon days of 2010, when hope and change were still things in the democratic party, blogger Julian Sanchez used the term epistemic closure to describe the crisis he saw on the political right in those days.  Long story short, epistemic closure refers to the insulation of both a belief system and the media built up around that belief system against any further knowledge, ideas or lines of reasoning.  Naysayers and dissenters are best ignored alltogether, or tarred by association with the enemy - whoever they are.  But it goes deeper than that: once an ideological system is firmly commited to, lines of thought that even potentially threaten it simply can't be given even the slightest legitimacy.  The rapidity with which the USSR unravelled after glasnost was introduced illustrates the risks invovled.

Hence epistemic closure.  For the American conservatives, the Reagan Era only really ended when our favorite reality T.V star won bigly over the GOP establishment.  Up until then, there was nothing a tax cut couldn't fix and the democrats were forever coming to take everybody's guns away.  Argue with them about any of it, and you'd had the wool pulled over your eyes personally by Obama, Hillary or Nancy Pelosi, who were nothing but Marxists out to destroy all things American.

When Sanchez described this phenomina on the right, he saw little comparison on the left in 2010.   As perhaps a foreshadowing of what was just around the corner, he cited liberal obsessions with racism as being the sole motivation of the tea party as the closest that the left, such as it was, came to its own brand of epistemic closure.

He would not have to wait long for the leftist equivalent to epistemic closure.  Allow me to explain.  Or perhaps I should say, allow me to voxsplain:

One of the most striking examples of this epistemic closure among liberal writers are their forays into “explanatory journalism.” The idea that many people might like clear, smart explanations of what’s going on in the news certainly has merit. But the tricky thing with “explaining” the news is that in order to do so fairly, you have to be able to do the mental exercise of detaching your ideological priors from just factually explaining what is going on. Of course, as non-liberal readers of the press have long been well aware, this has always been a problem for most journalists. And yet, the most prominent “explanatory journalism” venture has been strikingly bad at actually explaining things in a non-biased way. 

I am, of course, talking about Vox, the hot new venture of liberal wonkblogger extraordinaire Ezra Klein. It was already a bad sign that his starting lineup was mostly made up of ideological liberals. And a couple months in, it’s clear that much of what passes for “explanation” on Vox is really partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise.

The article also mentions the fact that most "voxsplainers" - the tired pontification of liberal canards to the ignorant masses as if they've never heard it before - cannot pass Brian Caplan's Ideological Turing Test, defined as the ability to convincingly and authentically relay their ideological opponent's position on the relevant issues.

Perhaps the most quintessential Voxsplaining I've yet encountered is Aja Romano's protracted voxplanation of How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men into White Supremacy.  It's what you'd expect:

In many alt-right communities, men are encouraged to view women as sexual and/or political targets that men must dominate. The men in these communities don’t see themselves as sexist; they see themselves as fighting against their own emasculation and sexual repression at the hands of strident feminists. 

So called "manosphere" concepts are then used as a kind of gateway drug to interest socially isolated young men deeper into an esoteric politics of crypto fascism and white supremacy.

Well, duh!

The alt-right and the manosphere are full of what the internet nowadays calls cancer - content that is light on intellectual content and heavy on cringe.  But the deeper point here can be summed up in an old African proverb that warns that if you don't initiate your young men into the tribe, they'll eventually come back and burn your village down.  Experts on gang, cult and extremist recruitment tactics have long understood this.  Alienated young men with no roots in the community and little prospect for a good life are easy marks.  Ironic then that the most strident on the alt-right, and their Islamic Jihadist nemesis, are ultimately drawn from the same ranks of humanity.  Ironic, but hardly without precedent.

Absent from Romano's analysis of the Alt-Right and its origins is any prescription of actually countering this that might actually reduce the propensity of young men to be drawn to extremism.  Targets are described as being sexually frustrated and often raised by feminist single moms, and the lure of being a real man as opposed to being weak and emasculated is what's used to draw them in.  The only difference between "Sieg Heil" and "Allahu Akbar" in this case could well be whichever one gets to them first, and what color their skin is.

The article chides the alt-right for offering alienated young men no real advice for dealing with loneliness, emotional issues and relationship difficulties and instead simply scapegoating independent women and minorities for their personal problems.  While this is a fair criticism, it's one that could as easily be leveled against Vox, and its countless clones across the internet.  Apart from scolding young white men for their racism and sexism, what is the mainstream left really offering them by way of an alternative?

Especially since the Vox article traces the history of the Alt-Right through Donald Trump's victory, through the Brexit vote and back to the GamerGate online movement, and to the various segments of the "manosphere" that existed prior to that.  The numbers and influence of these angry white dudes - the rank-and-file, or mooks - to use online video game terminology - of the forces of oppression only grew, despite all of the efforts made by Vox, Slate, Salon, Everyday Feminism, Occupy Democrats, Jezebel, The Mary Sue and other outlets of enlightened progressivism to tell them how very, very sexist, racist and fascist they were being all the while.  In fact, how very Nazi they had always been simply by virtue of being white males.

And now they're surprised when these same angry young dudes turn out to accept and embrace an ideology that actually promotes racism, misogyny and fascism.  They're surprised that the generation of young men these single feminist mothers raised have become exactly what single feminist women have been telling them they were since they were old enough to pluck letters off a computer screen: racist, misogynist and fascist.

Who would have guessed?

That, folks, is what epistemic closure on the left looks like.

Young white males are quite within their rights to reject the online left's obsessive and compulsive idealization of women and minorities.  They are well within their rights to reject the ceaseless narrative of white male "power" and "privilege," especially when it comes from credentialed academics and pundits who have way more power and privilege than many of these young white dudes will ever have.

They are not entitled to have the women to whom they're attracted reciprocate that attraction.  That much is true.  But they are entitled to not have their natural instinctive urges tarred as misogyny, entitlement and objectification.  They are entitled to pursue love in a culture in which all the weight of mass society is not behind the demonization of male sexuality and the equation of female rejection of men with female power and independence.  And they sure as hell are entitled to not have to function in a society that brands their own similar rejection of women (or men passing themselves off as women) to whom they're not attracted as being misogyny, "fatphobia" or "transphobia."

Alternative online communities are not attacking "social justice warriors" because they're all - to the last, racist, mysogynistic and otherwise deplorable.  People of all descriptions object to the SJW's self righteousness, their hypocrisy, their arrogance and their propensity to milk privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" rationalizations for all the self serving double standards and get-out-of-jail free cards they're worth.  This, it would seem, is the real gateway drug to bona-fide fascism, racism and misogyny if indeed there ever was one.  And that should concern us all.

Fighting the alt-right cannot be done by further pontificating to angry white dudes on how very deplorable their anger, their whiteness and their dudeness is.  Perhaps the wisdom of Lao-Tsu could be of help to us - and the wisdom he conveyed in The Tao Te Ching, not The Art of War.  Sometimes the way to victory is by not fighting, but by offering an olive branch; membership in the tribe before the village gets burned down.

The mainstream leftist media shows at best a mixed inclination to do this.  Perhaps the real antidote to the alternative right is an alternative left.  One that might think that full employment, maybe even a job guarantee, might be a more effective way to get young men out of their parent's basements than yet another lecture on girl power would be.  One that has not yet succumbed to epistemic closure and is thus able to think outside the Vox.