To Riot or Not to Riot

According to a 2015 article in the Intelligencer: A New Study Shows Riots Make America Conservative, author Johnathan Chait suggests that, well, riots make America more conservative. Five years on, it's not exactly a new study.

Who Voted for This?

But that's part of the broader problem, isn't it? This could have been written yesterday, or in 1973, and it would ring just as true. That the antics of the weathermen and the days of rage in the late 1960s contributed to Nixon's 1972 defeat of the liberal Hubert Humphrey is generally accepted and in line with common knowledge. I have a distinct feeling, and we can treat this as a prediction if we'd like, that the 2020 Democratic Party Convention will be a repeat of its 1968 counterpart, assuming it's not cancelled due to Covid 19.

Today, Trump supporters hype violent groups like Antifa or the more unruly segments of Black Lives Matter as evidence of the nihilism that they claim, rightly or wrongly, underlies spikes in left wing activism. While I hate to admit it, they're not entirely wrong. People have many good reasons for not liking rioting and looting. Among other reasons for being leary of the ongoing rampages on American streets today are the deaths of David Dorn, David McAtee, David Patrick Underwood and Chris Beaty. All of whom were black. Did their lives matter?

If the right can ride this conservative shift into power, we'll see nothing change as regards the underlying causes of unrest on the left. Conservatives do what they've always done: entrench corporate power under the auspices of protecting liberty and "American" values and traditions. Nixon did it. Reagan did it. Both Bushes did it. Trump is doing it. George W. Bush can "step into the right side of history" and condemn George Floyd's death and call for change all he wants. He had eight years as president to fix this. When he had the power to do it, he did absolutely nothing to aid the plight of poor and minority communities and in fact did much to exacerbate them.

Conservative governments cracking down, as Trump has vowed to do, bring to mind the oft quoted  definition of insanity. If militarizing law enforcement was going to fix this, I think it would have by now. It's basic common sense that if militarized cops with a "warrior" mentality who view the citizenry as the enemy end up killing citizens, as the evidence suggests they'll do in greater numbers, then we can expect more riots and looting, not less.

And then, of course, more conservative governments leads to more crack downs, more erosion of civil liberties and a more adversarial relationship between the people and the state. If that's the tack we take, don't come crying to me the day self styled revolutionaries burn your neighborhood to the ground.

Conservatism is all about breaking down the relationship between the citizen and the state. Conservatives profess a deep distrust of the state, which is sustained by taxation, a form of transaction they view as innately corrupt. Government is the problem, not the solution, right? Well, witnessing police violence one can certainly sympathize, in principle. Conservatives, at least in theory, emphasize tradition and organic relationships among people, and don't believe that the relationship between the citizen and the state can be positive.

Except when it can be. With enough money, the correct donors and lobbyists can expect first class service from otherwise maligned big government. Electorates swinging right in response to leftist rioting is rooted in the belief that conservatives truly cherish social stability and rule of law. This is a belief that we should all know by now to be misguided, at least among prominent movers and shakers in US conservatism.

Stripped of all pretense, the conservative establishment in America cares about entrenching the power of wealth. Slashing taxes and deregulating finance and industry. Simple as that. At best, they'll take such steps as are necessary to protect the homes of the rich and powerful from the impact of rioting. If you're working and middle class, well, you're on your own. Conservatives have always been quite explicit about this in other contexts. Why would they change their spots now?

Once people wake up to the fact that conservatism in America is all about enriching the already most wealthy and nothing else, they turn to the liberals. The Democrats. The so called progressives, am I right?

Bill Clinton carried on the most reactionary elements of the Reagan-Bush years and in fact doubled down on them, enacting the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in a vain attempt to reach to the center and gain the approval of conservatives. Who still branded him a radical leftist and crushed him in the 1994 midterms.

One would expect that America's first black president, Barack Obama and his black female Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have taken the issue seriously? As the 2010s progressed, more and more African Americans ascended to Mayorships and Chiefdoms over major police departments across the country. Surely they would have gotten a handle on things? Right?

If I hear you laughing, know that I laugh with you.

Between 2013 and 2019 - an even split between the time of liberal democrat Barack Obama and conservative republican Donald Trump, 7,666 people in the U.S have been slain by police. Not all of them black, of course. And I'm sure some of these were non preventable and legitimate acts of self defense on behalf of law enforcement personnel. But still, that's a damn high number, and it suggests to me a very deep problem in the American body politic.

A problem we're not voting our way out of. At least not now, as things stand.

Which brings us back to the rioting. Sure, it's bad. But it's got us talking seriously about this, hasn't it? We're hearing, in drips and drabs, about concrete measures that can, and in some cases have, been taken to actually deal with this issue. It's complicated, and good results won't be immediate even if the broadest suite of proposals were implemented immediately. It goes beyond even reform of the police, into a complete reappraisal of the role of the state in America and its relationship with its citizens.

While rioters and looters are hard to sympathize with, I'd suggest that political leadership in America can deal effectively and proactively with its social problems if less rioting is what they'd like to see. Perhaps a political system that's open, transparent and genuinely democratic instead of simply a tool of the rich elites to maintain control would be a good place to start. At the very least, can we not wait until our cities are burning down before we actually start addressing serious problems?

Getting such leadership and such a system requires that we citizens will have to grasp the fact that the complacency we've become accustomed to over the last few decades won't cut it any more. Politicians won't just do their jobs the way we're all expected to and do the right things for the nation the way we're expected to do our jobs correctly. Keep thinking that you can just go to and from your job and otherwise shut off, and sooner or later the riot will be on your doorstep. The political class needs ongoing pushing and pressure.

Voting conservative and hoping that normalcy, law and order will thus prevail would now be a case of doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results.

I believe there's a word for that.

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Why the Left is Winning the Culture War: Hard Right

Previously, I wrote of the common notion that the progressives were winning the culture war, a brief and by no means complete survey of reactionary thought on the matter and proposed a number of explanations for and caveats to that idea. Now, I begin to look at the deeper reasons why the right, the reactionaries especially, have a difficult time even maintaining the status quo, let alone in turning back the clock, in modern civilization.

The right wing political message is harder. By harder, I mean that right wing political thought trades in both foundational principles and policy proposals that are less likely to be widely popular. Conservatives have always been the "party of no", the party-poopers of the political scene. They claim that we cannot achieve all of our legislative goals without punishing levels of taxation and government overreach.

Central to conservative thought as far back as Edmund Burke is the notion that human nature is not fundamentally perfectible, and indeed it's an uphill battle to improve it at all. Humanity is in need of some kind of higher set of moral and philosophical principles beyond the reach of his will to power in order to keep him on the right track. Religion is often touted as the source of this.

Overall, this is a less popular message than that peddled by reformist politicians and ideologies of boundless optimism. First classical liberalism, then socialism and today feminism promise if not utopia, at least a greatly improved way of life over what we have now. This is naturally a more attractive message. It is more attractive to believe that pressing social problems can be solved, than to view them as intractable and that trying to solve them will simply squander limited and valuable resources. We feel better about the left's message of a brighter future. It flatters our egos. We don't like being told that we have a naturally debased nature that makes social progress very difficult and even dangerous.

The left has a long history of offering up ideal classes of people: the proletariat, the 3rd world, women, the poor and marginalized, who if they were just given the reins of power, would guide us into a world free of exploitation, poverty and war. Being the sober voice in a climate of excitement and enthusiasm doesn't win popularity contests. And don't expect to be exonerated in hindsight when the project truly does go awry, just as you predicted it would, either. Of course, the right does sometimes enter its own politics of fervent hope and even utopianism, but these incidences occur in spite of, rather than because of, the underlying nature of conservative thought.

It is not that the left does not posit the need to make sacrifices for the achievement of its goals. But the left tends to ask more of those who are, at least according to leftist bodies of thought, able to give up more. Moreover, leftism offers hope of societal improvement when all is said and done. The sacrifices demanded by reactionaries, on the other hand, are mainly to stop things getting worse than they already are, and more often fall on those already on the less fortunate end of the social spectrum. This is in contrast to the deeply rooted Christian ethic otherwise so much touted on at least some segments of the left, which generally extols charity and concern for the less fortunate.

It is not that right leaning people are unwilling to be charitable. But they're far more likely to balk at the encoding of charity into our political, economic and social structures in the way that leftist calls for reform advocate for. Rightism would prefer that charity be a private, individual decision, and don't like the notion that there are structural inequities and injustices in the way that wealth and resources end up being distributed. Most people know, or at least suspect how inadequate this will be in the face of the real need out there. Right wing people may sneer at how easy it is to be generous and charitable with other people's money, and that's precisely the point. It is easier. It is easier to at least advocate for redistributive taxation and social spending, even if the threat of capital flight and investment strike make those programs tricky to implement.

Up until very recently, the right was seen as the side of the prudish, the censorious and the puritanical. Say no to drugs. No sex until marriage. Abstinence only. Contraception and abortion are bad, murder even. Every sperm is sacred. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were seen as the gateway to Sodom and Gomorrah. Not among all right leaning people, but those who thought that way did lean right.

That is not the path of least resistance to which people are naturally inclined. While we can hew to very straight and narrow lifestyles in times of shortage and hardship, or else when in tight knit social environments that share the same values, once modern levels of affluence and technological development made less stringent ways of life attainable with reduced social costs, that's naturally what most people did. Who would naturally deal with the shortage and hardship of marrying young and having a mess of children once this ceased to be economically necessary or socially mandated? If there's no real reason not to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll once we stop believing that they'll make the baby Jesus cry and your parents, boss and neighbors won't object to it, it's easier to do so than not to, however real the very real problems of addiction and abuse are, at least for some people.

Over the last decade or so, the cultural left has introduced its own culture of austerity, with privilege checking, broadening definitions of sexual harassment and rape, speech codes, avoidance of bad words that might trigger someone with a marginalized identity, deconstruction and critique of movies, music, video games and so on for sexist and racist content and so on. This goes back a bit further on college campuses, to the late 1980s approximately. And even here, they are not so much suggesting that we "just say no" but rather that we merely get informed, enthusiastic and affirmative consent. In triplicate, and you'd better cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And still hope that no one cries rape or harassment, since the zeitgeist demands that the accuser be given the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, this new stringency doesn't seem to apply to historically "marginalized" groups: women, ethnic minorities, trans folks etc.

Still and all, this is an altogether different message than abstinence only, at least until marriage. An option that is increasingly beyond many people's price range, and not likely to be entered into until after the long period of education and preparation needed to secure the kinds of middle class jobs you can raise a family on. Whatever flaws exist in hook-up culture so called, and there are many, people will simply not revert back to the sexual morality that prevailed in agricultural societies where for all intents and purposes, you were an adult at fifteen.

So while not completely equivalent, the emergent social justice warrior (SJW) is sometimes mentioned as the leftist counterpart to the stuffy Christian conservative. Hard leftists - Marxists, Stalinists and Maoists and the like, have had a similar sort of tough mindedness, but these have never been significant even on what's considered left wing in the 1st world. What's relevant here is that the last few decades wherein second wave feminism gradually gave way to the SJWs are a wink of an eye in the face of the history of western civilization overall, wherein it has been religion and conservatism that has eschewed creature comforts in favor of stoicism and stern morality.

Moreover, reactionaries propose some genuinely harsh measures. Who is going to tell women - the majority of the population and currently united and galvanized by feminist ideology - that their place is at home, barefoot and pregnant after all? This seems like political suicide, and so not surprisingly is backed away from even by those on the right who actually do think this way. In a similar vein, it is the right wing that is proposing that worker's rights be curtailed or even done away with entirely, and employment for mid to low skill workers with little bargaining power reduced to something comparable to serfdom. It is the right wing that proposes that much of the populace lose access to health care, public education, or a social safety net in times of need. Outside the United States, these messages unsurprisingly do not resonate with working and middle class people. And conservatives within America must go to great lengths and expense to gain working class buy-in for their frankly sado-masochistic kinds of policies.

So it is that the right wing presents a harder path for individuals and societies to follow, and not always with a long term payoff to make it worthwhile, other than the suggestion that the left will lead us to a still worse place. This is a handicap for the right. As a reason for progressive dominance in the culture war, I'd say it's relevant, significant even but not central.

For one thing, the right's message of austerity doesn't always fail to resonate. While they haven't convinced most to just say no or wait for marriage, they've convinced many more, particularly in the English speaking world, that harsh cutbacks to social services, infrastructure and the like, along with weakening the power of the unions and the state to affect wages and working conditions were necessary to preserve the long term economic health of the 1st world nations.

The message resonated deeply with many of the people who had the most to lose from it, because it appealed to a sense of heroic mission and sacrifice, as well as to a sense of individualistic masculine pride. The aforementioned Robert Conquest and John O'Sullivan, they who believed leftward drift inevitable in any but explicitly right wing institutions, would have been quite surprised by the direction that Tony Blair would take the British Labour party, and how this was the rule and not the exception in social democratic parties across the western world.

In my own jurisdiction of the province of Alberta in western Canada, it's very hard to win an election if one isn't running on a platform of economic austerity. The deep cuts to social spending implemented in the 1990s by then Premier Ralph Klein make him one of the best remembered premiers in provincial history among Albertans, and they elected United Conservative leader Jason Kenney as premier in April of 2019 in the hopes that he can repeat Klein's performance.

The trick to pulling this off, though, is that a LOT of long term investment into policy institutes, think tanks, alternative media and similar kinds of capital intensive ideological infrastructure was necessary to eventually gain mainstream buy-in. Not just investment, but long term strategic thinking that boiled down the message of austerity to three to four word sound bite slogans with which a compliant media could saturation bomb the public, until massive cut backs and privatization just became common sense.

Another example: to this date, the late David Koch and his brother Charles have financed libertarian minded organizations, with highly successful online outreach and thus right-libertarianism has a notable following among post-boomer generations, particularly of white males who've been excluded from the mainstream narrative of privilege and social justice, themselves rather infamously funded by rival billionaire "philanthropists" such as George Soros. While libertarianism has been, for reasons soon to be discussed, less successful than social justice overall, it does show that the more dour nature of right wing thought is not an insurmountable weakness, provided there's sufficient resources and organization behind it. Which there often isn't, for reasons to be discussed in future installments of this series.

Another weakness of leftism is that it's ideologies are more complex and systemic. The core of right wing thought can be boiled down to the idea that some people are naturally more gifted than others, or that good and/or smart people do good and/or smart things, and so succeed. When society goes astray, it's because bad people are gaining the reins of state power and implementing redistributionist policies. These ideas can range from relatively reasonable criticisms of center left politicians to bizarre conspiracy theories implicating the Illuminati, Elders of Zion or even reptilian space aliens.  As naive as these views are, they are also simpler and easier to understand for the uninitiated.

Leftist theories, by contrast, posit deeper, more complex, abstract and systemic views of the world, and come up with their own unsettling sorts of ideological claims. Leftist explanations of poverty and steep levels of inequality are systemic and therefore not as easy to grasp. They're also easier for the right to straw-man: "leftists are just jealous of people who are better than them and want to take their wealth and resources for themselves" or similar nonsense.

Moreover, leftist claims posit their own challenges that no shortage of people would like to duck or deny. If poverty and hardship have systemic causes and could happen to anyone, does this not then place a burden of responsibility upon the polity and its citizens? Should we not be willing to pony up more in taxes to help the poor, raise the minimum wage or even be prepared to roll up our sleeves and take to the streets because, after all, the means of production aren't going to seize themselves? Is it not easier to simply suggest that the poor are just stupid and lazy and leave the tough job of managing the economy and the polity to the smart fellas willing to put in the time and effort to do it? And if they get paid a lot more money to do so, aren't they deserving of it? This isn't so easy a line of argument to refute as the left would like it to be. It's not completely and entirely untrue either.

Of course, the outcomes of this kind of thinking don't always rebound to the benefit of the right, as "woke" dominance in cultural spheres imposed by incorporated cultural institutions make clear. Cultural leftists did an effective job of organizing and strategizing in order to increase their influence in academia and the media, as any paleoconservative willing to talk about "cultural Marxism" would be only happy to tell you. The thing is, the whole "long march through the institutions" thing isn't simply a right wing conspiracy theory. There's something to it and it goes a long way towards explaining current progressive cultural dominance in cultural spheres, because the right was so poorly equipped to deal with it.

So the right's core political message is tougher overall to accept, though there's plenty of qualifications and exceptions to this. This is one reason for progressive dominance in the current culture war, but by no means the most significant one.

Continued in Part 3: Left Alone

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Why the Left is Winning the Culture War: An Introduction to and Rejection of that Fundamental Premise

I must confess here and now that listening to conservative and reactionary YouTubers is a guilty pleasure of mine. They do, believe it or not, have their admirable traits. On average they come across as more reasonable than their woke counterparts, though this is a fairly recent phenomena. It is, sadly to say, easier to have a conversation with a conservative intellectual than a leftist college activist these days. Would that the former were a bit more numerous and the later a good bit less so. Of course, reasonable leftists would be best of all.

A common lament among the more astute and honest people on the right (yes, they do exist) is the long defeat they've been waging against emergent progressive culture. A good recent example of this is a video posted to YouTube by the Heritage Foundation of a moderated panel discussion hosted by the Claremont Institute entitled America's Cold Civil War. The panelists engage in a familiar refrain: why does the strategic initiative in America's long running culture war now most certainly reside on the left?

The answers that they come up with should be familiar to anyone at all versed in conservative and reactionary thought. It's attributed mostly to the emergence of the new left in the 1960s and their capture of academia and radicalization of the democratic party shortly thereafter. This is not entirely untrue, nor even insignificant. In fact, so not insignificant is it that I've even done a blog series about it, and said series has even been cited as a "foundational text" for reform of the current year social justice movement! But enough plugging out of me. The point being is that many right wing thinkers, ranging from Patrick Buchanan to the more moderate David Brooks to conservative mainstays such as Dinesh D'Souza, Sean Hannity and just about any Fox News commenter you can name lay the blame for the current climate of moral laxity and political correctness at the feet of the new social movements that arose in the 1960s and after.

Some reactionary thinkers trace progressive dominance back much farther than that, and lay it at the feet of the enlightenment itself. This is the premise of the infamous Dark Enlightenment outlook. This being the big N neoreaction, abbreviated NRx and exemplified by thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land.

Progressive triumph and concomitant civilizational decline is such a prevalent theme in neoreactionary work that it's become one of their axiomatic philosophical claims. NRx refers to the current dominance of progressive thought and values as "the Cathedral" and compare it to the dominance of the Catholic Church over medieval culture. They regard mainstream conservative political parties as little more than severely compromised and controlled opposition. A common observation they make is that "any institution not explicitly right wing will gradually drift left," a law of politics they often cite. It is one of three of Robert Conquest's laws of politics, and John O'Sullivan's first law states something very similar. Discussions of the Cathedral and the long term prospects for western civilization are common in neoreactionary spaces, and the mood is not a positive one. Democracy and egalitarianism have triumphed, in their view, and civilization is doomed now that the riffraff are at the helm.

It's interesting to note that neoreaction's criticism of the enlightenment and its views on left wing cultural hegemony place them in a curious and ironic kind of kinship with the very "cultural Marxists" they're otherwise so critical of: the Frankfurt School, the French post-structuralists and even Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci's theories of cultural hegemony. This blog features a discussion of neoreaction as actually being the right's embrace of postmodernism.

Neoreactionary thinkers have spawned an entire underground of bloggers and YouTube commentators. One notable neoreactionary YouTuber who tackles these questions frequently is a trad-Catholic who calls himself The Distributist. I mention him specifically because he's put out some very deep and thought provoking material on this subject that would be well worth looking at. This includes a multi-video series asking What's Wrong with the Alt-Right, a near two hour long video (combining several shorter episodes) on Resisting Progressive Institutions, a video called Sargon, storytelling, Patreon, and power (why the left is winning the culture war) - the name says it all, and a noteworthy video discussing the left as being antifragile. The Distributist is by no means alone in holding these views, but is noteworthy because he articulates them especially well, and his videos are worth a watch if a long view, as in a civilizational level view of the ongoing culture war interests you.

And of course, no discussion of this subject would be complete without a mention of the brilliant Decline of the West, opus of the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, published in two parts, one in 1918 and one in 1921. Spengler's influence on reactionary thought would be hard to understate. Basically, he proposes that civilizations go through life-cycles, and he uses seasonal cycles as a kind of metaphor to outline this. Spengler calls western civilization "Faustian" and that its primary cultural motif or "ur-symbol" is a striving for an unattainable infinity, thus lending it a tragic character. The premise of the work is that Faustian civilization is entering its "winter" phase.

This phase is marked by a rise in materialism and primarily economic and world-power concerns and a concomitant loss of connection to its foundational culture. For Spengler, ideas we would term "progressive" - democracy, emphasis on economics, secularism and the like, exemplify the decoupling of civilization from the culture that initially galvanized it. While deep and thought provoking, Decline of the West is a very ponderous and dense work. Spengler's core ideas are also outlined in this 63 video series outlining the work. Yes, 63 videos, and I would recommend you watch them all. I would name only Karl Marx as a thinker that's been more influential to me personally long term than Oswald Spengler.

I would not necessarily call Spengler a reactionary, and in some ways he had an influence on the eventual emergence of the cultural relativism that today's right so despises. This is because he doesn't believe that a culture or civilization can be rightly understood in the terms established by another culture or civilization. Moreover, he doesn't seem to think that civilizational decline can even be reversed. Attempts to recapture lost glory are part-and-parcel of what the decline, or winter phase is all about. In short, reactionary thinking is a symptom of, rather than an antidote to, civilizational decline.

Moreover, his analysis of western civilization seems to make a progressive orientation practically inherent to its very nature. For Spengler, Faustian civilization is a "historical" as opposed to an "ahistorical" civilization. Historical civilizations see themselves as having a wider sense of involvement in the unfolding direction taken by the human race as a whole, and mark the passage of time and significant events in the civilization's history. This naturally lends itself to a progressive as opposed to a conservative or reactionary view. This underlies much of Spengler's apparent pessimism concerning western civilizational decline.

While Spengler's work was generally regarded as reactionary - he considered "blood" the only force capable of overthrowing the power of money (though he does conceive of race in very different terms than the Nazis and fascists did, and was therefore critical of them) - he did attract some progressive and even radical attention. Frankfurt theorist Theodore Adorno published an analysis of Decline in 1950, which while frequently critical, also hoped that Spengler's reactionary ideas could be turned towards progressive ends. Adorno is a man after my heart, it would seem.

Pessimism pervades classical conservative and neoreactionary thought on cultural matters. Leftism has triumphed, and there's nothing for it now except to observe the long descent into destructive anarchy, from which a culture rooted in strong and sustainable cultural and social norms may eventually reemerge. Or not. According to the reactionary narrative, liberal social norms lead to falling birth rates, which cast the economic and even military advantage of the west into long term doubt, or else necessitate high levels of immigration from nations with very different cultural traditions. Cultural traditions not afflicted by the postmodern malaise and atomistic individualism of the west. It is only a matter of time, therefore, before we all end up having to face Mecca five times a day, whether we wish it or no. Already the cities of western Europe have "no go zones" wherein immigrant communities essentially rule and conduct their affairs in accordance with their own indigenous traditions.

Worse yet, this defeatism underlies much of the nihilism and bitterness one encounters on the fringe right, including that nihilism and bitterness that can drive them to kill. As such, this is a more serious issue than it may at first appear. The manifestos of many an apparently deranged far right terrorist or mass shooter highlight this sense of impending civilizational doom. Feeling like there's nothing left to lose, domestic terrorists such as Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant go on murderous rampages bent on taking as many leftists and Muslims down with them as they can. As such, this is an issue of concern to us all. Now, before you all start barking, I should note that comparable motives such as disdain for the decadent materialism and sexual laxity of the west also underlie a lot of Jihadist militancy and terrorism.

What I want to propose, and what I will explore in further installments of this series is that while this pessimism is not entirely baseless, it's also far from being completely warranted.

Of course there are certain very real advantages that the left enjoys, especially at present and on cultural and social issues. Some of these advantages are "merely" temporal and institutional, such as dominance in mainstream media and academia. Others of these advantages are deeper and more fundamental to the way the progressive vs the reactionary political mind works on a deep level, and each side's views on and resulting forms of political activity.

However, the right wing also has and continues to have its own advantages, and I doubt that the victory of the progressive left in the culture war was ever certain and need not have even been likely. A different kind of right wing could have gotten a different kind of result. Moreover, there are presently very real areas of right wing ideological dominance, and for several decades, hegemony even. What this shows us is that rather than leftist victory being inevitable, both the left and right have been successful in those areas in which each has invested the greatest measure of importance, and thereby activist vigor.

Finally, I ask whether or not what has triumphed in the zeitgeist of the current year really does constitute leftism at all? Are the neoreactionaries correct in that equality, democracy, liberalism and socialism are essentially triumphant, and all that remains now is to watch this unsustainable faux egalitarianism bring about societal collapse? This is a highly questionable proposition. While social equality across certain lines; race, gender and sexuality especially, are currently vigorous and popular notions, in other ways we've never been more unequal and under the thumb of forces and institutions completely lacking in any kind of transparency or democratic legitimacy and accountability than we are now, and this has repercussions for the authenticity of such democracy and egalitarianism as we now have in the west.

Continued in part 2: The Hard Right

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Conservatives are Destroying our Future

University of Minnesota Twin City campuses are putting up posters on bulletin boards calling on all white male shitlords to stop and check their privilege.  The leftist Minnesota based Citypages rather snarkily observes that one liberal student isn't happy about it.  "I have been a liberal all my life," claims Evan Christenson, but claims to "get scared" seeing the bulletin board.  He then took his concerns to the right leaning Minnesota Republic.  "When you have taxpayer money going to a public university, I think every side should be represented," Christenson told the Republic.

Okay, fair enough.

It turns out that the group behind the spread of these boards is a group called CADOF, an acronym for Conservatives are Destroying our Future.

Perhaps they are.  But which conservatives?

The conservatives that would slash funding to universities such as U of M Twin City, or the conservatives making sure the students at said university see privilege in terms of seeing minorities widely represented in television and newspapers or not seeing arriving late for a meeting as a reflection of one's race?

The conservatives that own the banks and credit card companies that make exorbitant profits off the interest charged to low income people who rely on credit to top off their meager wages, or the conservatives who would define privilege as not being seen as fiscally irresponsible when doing so due to race?

The conservatives who are outsourcing jobs and rolling back worker's rights and telling the white male working class to blame blacks and immigrants for being unemployed, or the conservatives telling blacks and immigrants to blame their problems on white privilege?

Don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with fair representation across racial lines in media, or in the public eye more generally.  By the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, after all.

However, some of these points are frankly laughable.  I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented?  You'd be surprised at how easy it is to find the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin or Public Enemy in any music shop.  The trick is actually finding a music shop these days.  Good luck with that.

I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race?  Hello?  Critical race theory, anyone?  Black studies, anyone?  Let's be perfectly honest here: is this a "privilege" that white people should want anyway?  Would we really want the kind of pseudo science that the likes of Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer try to pass off as white identity politics taught in the universities?

Well, expect that to start the day that white youth start questioning where the money for all of this is going to come from?  Or start questioning why, if they're so privileged, why can't they find a job with a living wage and health benefits?  And start coming up with answers that blame Wall Street instead of immigrants or the cozy relationship between finance lobbyists and congress instead of affirmative action.   Once enough white dudes start asking those kinds of questions, expect old Nazi textbooks on racial eugenics to start popping up in classrooms again.  After all, isn't that why they did the first time?

Kind of like how when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. started talking about economic injustice and organizing a poor people's march on Washington, it was then that a bullet found its way into him and critical race theory found its way into our colleges.  Who should you blame for your poverty, Mr. black man?  Why, the white man who doesn't get stopped by the cops, of course.  Just don't pay attention to what the banks and the arms contractors are really up to.

We'll give you a job writing columns for "liberal" newsblogs so long as you attack the underrepresentation of minorities in media and not the systemic lying and covering up of corporate and state abuses of power that the same media engages in.  Just make sure your "radicalism" is advertiser friendly and doesn't scare away sponsors.

The formula is a simple one.  Blame the white trash in the trailer parks for the problems that black people face.  It's really that easy.  After all, part of how we kept poor whites in the trailer parks was to get them to blame the problems they face on black people rather than us.  So it's only fair, really.

We'd do this for white guys too, but we haven't actually had to since the late 1970s, when we were able to use racial resentment to turn blue collar workers against the unions and social democratic politics and get them to support Reaganite and Thatcherite governments.  Farther back than that in the case of the US south.  But you minorities?  You've been so stubbornly left wing for most of the 20th century!  Damn it!  We really did think we were just going to have to go full iron heel with you.

But thankfully, it looks like groups like Black Lives Matter are finally starting to get with the program, and protest against such affronts as police involvement in Pride Parades and "environmental racism."   It actually looked like they were serious about challenging corporate and state power for a while there.  Good thing the tactics we were able to use to get Occupy Wall Street to start worrying more about the progressive stack or "indigenizing" their spaces than about actual finance sector reform are proving to be effective with BLM as well.  Clownish SJW antics make stories go viral, and advertisers like that.  Advertisers don't like having their actual business practises reported on.

As far as any half ways smart conservative should be concerned, universities like U of M Twin City are falling into line just nicely.  Are conservatives destroying our future?  Sure.  What matters, though, is that we all blame somebody with different colored skin for it.

Class vs Race Privilege

A question was recently put: Class privilege is real, white privilege isn't. Agree or disagree?

I think there's something to the idea of white privilege. But it's become this sweeping and reductionist idea that's been used to license shitty behavior.  Hate the white working class all you want, they have all the power because they’re white.  That makes it okay.  Upper middle class academic progressives can thereby scapegoat those stupid, unwashed rednecks for the collective historical sins of the white race. Beneath the very thin progressive veneer of this sentiment is downward punching snobbish regressivism at its ugliest.

Not that this makes racism among the white underclass okay.  It certainly doesn’t, for it erodes their capacity for solidarity with the black underclass that is so needed for both to get a better deal in the long run.  It also lends the legitimacy of “popular support” to regressive policy enacted against the black underclass by the elite.  So called "brocialists" should keep in mind that the black underclass does not have it easy, and that affirmative action and knapsacks of privilege have a funny and ironic way of being colorblind where the lower classes are concerned.  The black underclass has it worse, if anything.  So the white working class should take nothing that I say as a license to be racist towards blacks, so don’t be.  The white working class has a long history of class blindness, motivated in part by racial prejudice and in part by a US left that long ago traded in class for racial concerns and embraced neo-liberalism. This has repeatedly driven the white working class to support regressive right wing politics, as has been recently demonstrated in the US 2016 elections, and they've always ended up suffering for it. 

But for the varied segments of the underclasses to fight among each other over who has it worse is quite stupid, for reasons that should be obvious by now.  It is likewise misguided for the black underclass to despise whitey. This has been good for the black upper middle class that has arisen in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of neo-liberalism - the twin engines of the Democratic Party.  Better for them that the black underclass blame white rather than class privilege for their woes.  But this just puts them in a position oddly comparable to that of the Republican supporting white working class.  The real color of privilege is green, and this can only be challenged by white and black together.

Between class on the one hand and identity - race and gender - on the other, I do think class is the more fundamental of the two, though I don't think identity is completely irrelevant.  This is because it has been made relevant by an elite that has used race and identity as a means of dividing the underclass.  So the reality is that identity and class cannot be so easily extricated from one another.  The postmodern left likes to claim that racism/sexism is "prejudice plus power" and that powerless identities cannot oppress. But where does the power - that makes the prejudice of some groups more pernicious than others - come from?

Ownership of capital and the access to political power this inevitably entails. In short, class.

The problem with the postmodern academic left is not identity politics per-se, but how those politics have been co-opted and made to serve powerful interests. The academic postmodernist "left" refuses to see class for one simple reason: they're much higher up on the class totem pole than they'd like to admit. They're not Fortune 500 or Military Industrial Complex by any stretch of the imagination, but they do possess significant advantages over the working and middle classes. Namely that of supremely privileged access to media.

Their position can be compared to that of the clergy in a more religious era, such as that wherein Marx declared religion the opiate of the masses. They use institutions empowered by capital and backed by the state to spin the dominant cultural and social narratives. As we know from the theorists of the early Frankfurt school, Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and even from Marx himself, the ruling narrative of any era is the narrative of its ruling class. Or in this case, how its ruling class was NOT responsible for the historical atrocities brought to light by earlier generations of radicals.

Plus, you'll notice that the solutions to racial and gender inequality favored by these "leftists" always either empower capital - "fire him from his job!" - or the state - "sue for hate speech!"

As such, the SJWs - the new clergy of our secular era - are not radicals, but rather ego driven enforcers of a decidedly statist and capitalist status quo.

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!