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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Regressive Left Pt. 4: Postmodern Pandemonium

Critical theory and postmodern philosophy, which were discussed in the previous section, are not inherently regressive. Neither is the women's liberation movement, the civil rights movement and other causes for social justice that gained traction in the late 20th century. We are a better polity for our valuing of racial and gender equality, and for seriously and honestly scrutinizing our own past, history and even or deepest held philosophical convictions. 

There is an enormous gap, however, between these noble endeavors, which is the face of "transformation" in academia and elsewhere that the public, media and policy makers at all levels saw, and what was actually going on behind the scenes, where far fewer people looked with a scrutinizing eye.  The goal of the emerging political transformation in academia beginning in the late 70s was not merely to make these places more open and inclusive to those who'd previously been excluded, but to remake the very philosophical foundations upon which western liberal civilization rested and at the very least, to turn numerous other mediums, including video game journalism, into bully pulpits from which to convert the privileged heathen into woke privilege checking "social justice" activists. 

Outside the academy, the results of this transformation seemed comical and ridiculous.  Examples are numerous and easy to find in anti-SJW and anti-postmodernist spaces online. The infamous Alan Sokal affair lampooned the excesses of transformational curriculum, as well as exposing its weaknesses. The curriculums of "dead white males" were seen as built upon foundations of privilege and discrimination, even as those curriculums emphasized foundational enlightenment and liberal values upon which the importance of racial and gender equality were based.  All of this talk of science and mathematics privileging the "male" values of logic and reason over the "women's way of knowing" that emphasized emotion and empathy are easy to scoff at.  Not to mention how ironically reactionary is the implication that logic is inherently masculine and emotion inherently feminine. Isn't that kind of thinking what feminists were supposed to be against?

But the underlying issues are more serious, and "transformative curriculums" became the foundation of what has turned out to be a growing threat to liberty and perhaps the very survival of western civilization. It is important, therefore, to look at some of the more important doctrines and how they've driven regressive tendencies we've seen.

Perhaps the most important and dangerous of these doctrines is "Standpoint theory" which asserts that "knowledge stems from social position. The perspective denies that traditional science is objective and suggests that research and theory has ignored and marginalized women and feminist ways of thinking. Conspicuously and tragically absent is the postmodernist admonition against broad, sweeping universally applicable metanarratives. The theory emerged from the Marxist argument that people from an oppressed class have special access to knowledge that is not available to those from a privileged class, and is essentialist and reductionist in the extreme. In the 1970s feminist writers inspired by that Marxist insight began to examine how inequalities between men and women influence knowledge production.

We've all seen footage of SJWs at demonstrations loudly reminding their opponents that "you're a white male!" and otherwise falling back on identity to circumvent argument. This is among the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the SJW and the intersectional social justice left more generally.  This rhetorical, and ultimately philosophical device is founded upon standpoint theory, wherein marginalized or oppressed identity confers infallible moral and intellectual authority, so long as the correct party line is being espoused, of course.

An intersecting concept, if I may borrow the term, is “prejudice plus power” proposed in 1970 by feminist activist Patricia Bidol-Padva in her book Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level.  Besides being as much postmodern wokeness as I've yet seen in one book title, this has gone on to become another fundamental core doctrine of present day SJW thought, and it is the oft stated notion that women cannot be sexist, minorities cannot be racist and so on. Here, what it means to be prejudiced is redefined in terms of social power, in a self referential, self serving and ideological way. It also gives an easy out for members of so called marginalized demographics to indulge in as much bigotry and stereotyping as they want without fear of social censure.  Critics have called it the bigotry of lowered expectations.

A related concept is the "authority of experience" which relies upon a similar concept of making standpoint on a privilege vs marginalization continuum a determining factor in the evaluation of an individual's speech or conduct. The "experience" even of offense or inconvenience, let alone oppression by a marginalized person becomes equivalent to admissible evidence of racist or sexist conduct if done by a "privileged" person, regardless of their intent.  The speech-act hypothesis, which blurs the distinction between words and actions, was seized upon by these kinds of feminist theorists to assert that so called hate speech, or anything that marginalized people found offensive, was actually dangerous and oppressive, and thus warranted censorship.  Here we have the foundations for the concepts of microaggressions, safe spaces and trigger warnings.

It is all well and good that we listen to those from designated marginalized demographics when they discuss their experiences. There is truth in the notion that it's hard to understand others until you've walked in their shoes. When that's impossible, simply listening is the best that can be done.  This critique is not a call that feminist or critical race theorists be silenced or ignored - that would be hypocrisy in the extreme. 

Rather that we be careful in attributing to the subjective experience of the marginalized the status of moral and intellectual infallibility, and especially of treating their standpoints as license to circumvent essential bedrock liberal concepts - civil liberties, due process for the accused and so on. Or even as a license to act obnoxious, as is so often done in social justice circles. Standpoint theory is deeply flawed and prone to abuse, for reasons that should be self evident, and personal experience is likewise a flawed means of arriving at truth, for reasons best articulated by the social constructionist postmodernists themselves.

It is also worth asking ourselves just whose voices are going to constitute the voices of the oppressed and the marginalized? By the logic inherent to standpoint theory we should ask ourselves if tenured professors in premier educational institutions in first world countries are really the best people to be speaking on behalf of the downtrodden and marginalized? While there's nothing wrong with having the opportunity to get a first class education in such an institution, that seems to me itself the hallmark of privilege. Social class and economics as a factor in pervasive inequality is conspicuous by its absence in much of transformative postmodern academia and associated activism, and is perhaps the one thing about Marx that they'd be improved by adopting. The popular image of the smug, well to do college prof telling the unemployed white male construction worker to "check his privilege" perfectly represents the hubris and hypocrisy of the transformative academy, and smacks of more than just a little psychological projection.

For educated professionals versed in "transformative" theories to graduate from such a college, and move on to acquire an influential position in education, media, tech or other influential field and use said position as a bully pulpit from which to beat less institutionally powerful people over the head with their white or male privilege is an act of audacious hypocrisy that escapes scrutiny largely due to just how vast a scale this kind of behavior occurs on, as the recent Damore lawsuit against Google is one prime example of, among many. The allegations in said lawsuit cover a harrowing list of abuses of power undertaken in the name of "diversity" and justified by its supposed challenge to white male privilege. Notice how the privilege of the all powerful CEO and management over the workers to enable such abuse does not factor into their analysis of privilege.  The use of standpoint theory by decidedly privileged executives and intellectuals to shield their own views from criticism smacks of Lenin's authoritarian concept of the revolutionary vanguard party.

Yet this kind of Leninist ideological institutional capture is precisely what was advocated and practiced by the regressive architects of so called transformative academia.  Peggy McIntosh, who we met previously as the mother of contemporary privilege theories so popular among today's SJWs, is quoted by Christina Hoff Sommers in her opus, Who Stole Feminism?:

I think it is not so important for us to get women's bodies in high places, because that doesn't necessarily help at all in social change. But to promote women who carry a new consciousness of how the mountain strongholds of white men need valley values - this will change society ... Such persons placed high up in existing power structures can really make a difference.

When you get through the woke metaphors, what this really boils down to is the capture of institutions and the diversion of their purpose to the advancement of regressive left ideology. The idea that academia, among other institutions, should remain essentially neutral and promote clear and critical thinking regarding all ideas does not fly among ideologues who view knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge as being socially constructed, for the benefit of the privileged and the expense of the marginalized.  

And as Sommers describes, McIntosh was but one of a vast network of activists who were very good at this. It was suggested that applicants for positions of influence in the academy and (eventually) outside of it be screened for their ideological correctness.  Again, all of this seems alarmingly reminiscent of the old Leninist concept of democratic centralism and the vanguard party.  Concerns raised by the likes of Jonathan Haidt regarding the leftward swing in academia find their origins in the ideology of McIntosh and her contemporaries as much as they do in broader demographic trends, though Haidt definitely deserves our support and commendation in his efforts to stem the tide. 

Sadly, these are considerations that few in academia and the media have chosen to vocalize, and almost universal appeasement on an institutional level has enabled the growth and empowerment of a decidedly illiberal social trajectory, especially among the younger millennial generation.  Their success in the capture of academia goes a long way to explaining the dominance of their ideology in mass media and its control over the discourse surrounding race and gender relations in the agenda setting institutions of our civilization.

It is a mark of transformative curriculum's success that the glaring problems with this cluster of ideas should require elaboration.  They fly in the face of how we now know the human mind works, which would confirm the postmodern theorist's view that experience is subjective and filtered through the subject's unique psychologically constructed interpretation of experiences and beliefs, of which an alleged "harasser" could not possibly have knowledge.  An educated woman in today's world, for example, duly instructed in feminist theory while in college, could no doubt easily take offense to nearly anything a male could theoretically say or do: a glance being "male gaze", a compliment or even a polite civil greeting becoming "harassment", attraction becoming "objectification" and consensual sex being rape if she later reports "feeling violated" and so on, although feminist theorists will virtually always deny these linkages if actually challenged on them.

Regardless, these concepts had been codified into law as a result of high profile sexual harassment cases from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which what a "reasonable woman" feels to be offensive and discriminatory, rather than the intent of the presumably white male to offend, discriminate, or abuse institutional power, was to be what determines guilt. Hence the disregard the "believe women" movement had for any notion of due process. 

In 2017 - 2018, the juggernaut gained still more momentum through the #MeToo and #Timesup campaigns. Here we see standpoint theory and the authority of experience deployed when, via the phrase "you're a male, you don't get to decide" is used to justify an unwillingness to differentiate between flagrant abuses of power a-la Harvey Weinstein on the one hand and day after regret or bad sex on the other and a whole gamut of unpleasant but not necessarily coercive sexual experiences in between.

The implications of requiring men to be responsible for the emotional experiences of women in this manner should disturb anybody who's serious about the use of anti-harassment laws to actually eliminate harassment rather than be a club in the hands of women in their relations with men, not to mention extremely paternalistic. Implicit here is the decidedly reactionary notion that men are driven by sex while the morally and aesthetically superior female is above such animalistic concerns, and that women must weaponize access, or lack thereof to sex as a means of controlling and punishing men. All for great social justice, of course.  This extremely sex-negative outlook bodes ill for the future of gender relations, and we're already seeing a tendency towards stark decline in the levels of partnering correlating with age in America and elsewhere.  

While very few regressive feminists would take this to the penetrative sex equalling rape extreme for which such feminists as Andrea Dworkin (who would later deny holding this view) were notorious, perpetual emphasis on women's experience of violation rather than of pleasure as being the norm in heterosexuality led to a dim view of human sexuality.  The outcome, desired I suspect, is to place a chill effect on heterosexual romance that we increasingly see reflected throughout all of society.

The present epidemic of sexlessness in Japan, concerning as it is for demographers and psychologists observing the harmful psychological and economic impact this is going to have, is where these trends are likely to take us, and the recent spate of me too sexual misconduct allegations following the Harvey Weinstein meltdown are not going to help any, and neither are most popular male responses to feminism, such as the MGTOW - men going their own way movement, which often comes across as being the male version of the same thing.  An unlikely outcome of all of this is the mutual respect and equality across gender lines that contemporary feminism so often claims is its goal.

Thus far I've spoken of feminism and gender theory, but many of the same concepts are applicable in critical race theory, queer theory and others like them. Frantz Fanon's views merit a look where race and decolonization are concerned.  Here again, we see mere political reform as being insufficient.  Wholesale cultural change, in which "redemptive violence" is suggested to play a role in exorcising deeply internalized colonization and white supremacy, is said to be what's necessary. 

There is nothing wrong, of course, with a historically colonized nation wanting to return to its cultural roots and reclaim its language and symbols in addition to political independence. However, the Mau Mau tactics employed by Black Lives Matter and the South African Fallist Movement, not to mention the horrific spate of farm murders also in South Africa and finally the deepening poverty in Zimbabwe should all remind us not to view decolonizing struggles and efforts through too rosy a lens.  It is tragic that these kinds of theories may drive people of color and the third world to learn the hard way, just as Europe did in its wars of nationalism and religion, and later with fascism and communism, that liberal principles are not mere social and cultural constructs designed to legitimize the rule of the privileged, but very much the opposite: a bulwark that protects all people, regardless of color or identity, from the terrors of mob and state violence. 

Radical feminism and anti colonial racial nationalism came into their own on college campuses in the 1980s. A part of their success was due to the vacuum left on the left by the decline of socialism and trade unionism during the Reagan/Thatcher era.  Yet they did not suddenly materialize in that time, but rather evolved alongside of the broader new left of the 1960s. And that is where our focus will turn next.

... to be continued in Part 5: Radical Ruckus

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Neoreaction: Right Wing Postmodernism Pt 2

Suppose one had a world view characterized by Wikipedia's definition of postmodernism, "an attitude of skepticism, irony or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality" and instead insisted on the primacy of identity and society in a manner that precluded a universal truth that would be binding on all of humanity.

Alongside this you cultivate an extreme distrust towards the social structures within which you lived.  You regard these structures as inherently dangerous to the identity group to which you belong, and indeed to all distinct identity groups to which people could belong, and this was a serious threat because on some level, you realize that identity is fundamental to human nature.  You live in a society that is inimical to your race, nationality, culture or religion and privilege other groups at the expense of yours.

However, you are nagged by doubts about whether these social structures could ever really be defeated, however much you might want them to be.  Perhaps the culture in which you live benefits you materially, or in some other way that you're unable or unwilling to be fully aware of, and this deters the kind of sustained pushback necessary to truly overthrow or separate from it.  Or maybe you can't shake the notion that these social structures are just too strong, and the group to which you belong has passed the point of no return in a terminal decline, and so you approach the whole issue with any of several reactions.  Grim resolve.  A smirk.  A kind of ironic nostalgia.

So as a result, the subgroup to which you belong is characterized by a considerable degree of angst and irony. The popular culture that appeals to you appropriates imagery (or sound or some other form of artistic or cultural creation) from the culture it despises and uses it in a deconstructive or even a subversive sort of way.  To the extent that your identity group becomes politically conscious, it adopts a counter-cultural and adversarial stance vis-a-vis the dominant culture, without pushing things to the point of outright revolt.  You do need the apparatus and institutions of the dominant culture to maintain your standard of living, after all, though you understandably loathe to admit it.

With me so far?  Good.  Now here's the curveball.  You don't live in something like a patriarchy or a colonialist society.  The angst you're experiencing is not as a result of the recent failure of socialism, that grand experiment in democratic egalitarianism, though to be honest it was known to be corrupt and ineffectual for quite some time now.  Indeed, very much the opposite.  Your angst is as a result of the apparent unravelling of western civilization, whether you frame it in racial (white) or religious (Christian) terms.

The society that oppresses you is not marked by an ideology of racial supremacy, but rather an ideology of forced racial integration and contrived egalitarianism.  All around you: in academia, in the media, from the ever swelling ranks of government bureaucracy, and no small number of your family, friends and acquaintances, is repeated ceaselessly an incessant cant stressing the evils of your racial and ethnic group.  Only that group is white and European in origin.  Your identity and culture are being invisibilized under an endless barrage of egalitarian dogmas and smug platitudes stressing culpability for the evils of history.

Like your relatives on the postmodernist left, you feel that the last few hundred years and its insistence on the primacy of reason, universality, the individual, science and progress is a massive sham, and that your race and culture have suffered for it.  But you can't really blame the postmodern devils like racism and patriarchy for the decline of your own race and identity, since racialism, heteronormativity and patriarchy are very much what you actually believe in, were you to be honest. So this kind of rules out postmodernism proper, given its egalitarian implications, though it shares many other elements with what you believe.

So we'll have to call the worldview you've embraced since being redpilled something else.  Maybe ... the dark enlightenment?  Sure.  Why not?  And speaking of red pills, has anyone who's actually taken one made note of Neo's copy of Simulacra and Simulation - a significant work of decidedly postmodern philosophy by Jean Baudrillard when we first meet him in The Matrix?  Isn't it kind of remarkable that one of the neoreactionary movement's most well known metaphors is taken from a film franchise that deals very heavily in postmodernist themes such as reality creation and the distinction between the symbolic and the real?

Truth is, the right wing has been flirting with postmodernism for a while now.  And why shouldn't they?  If all cultures are equal and there's no objective means of deeming one superior to another, than on what grounds can a left that makes multiculturalist claims object to the claims of racial distinctiveness and demands for cultural protectionism made by the white nationalists?  Indeed, it was postmodern cultural relativism that laid the groundwork for a reemergence of white identity politics in the post WW2, post civil rights era.

Likewise, postmodern critiques of the scientific method as being mere ideology or social construct, or at the very least impossible to disentangle from the language, culture, politics and power relations from which it emerges, opened the door for the emergence and legitimization of intelligent design as being the equal of evolution, for climate change denial or for the acceptance of just about any conspiracy theory you can name.  And through its embrace of postmodernism, the left gave up its moral and intellectual right to tell any of these people that they're objectively wrong, and they all damn well know it.  Just try telling conspiracy theorists, white nationalists and religious neoreactionaries they're wrong.  The tone of voice you'll hear when they call you a cuck or a degenerate will sound strangely like the tone you get out of feminists and SJWs when they dismissively insist that you're a white male.

We're all writing our own realities now.  The road to a presidential administration claiming the validity of "alternative facts" in the face of "fake news" can really be said to have begun in the English departments of the 1980s and 90s with claims of "the death of the author" and the "deconstruction" of the western canon to reveal its subtexts of power and privilege.  How appropriately ironic.  Those who once insisted that free and open discourse, especially across racial and gender lines, is really impossible since "all principles are prejudiced" and "all discourse is about power" now find themselves trembling at the ascension to the White House of a man who flaunted all norms of decency and civil exchange across racial and gender lines.  Again, appropriately ironic.

To say nothing of an internet culture that is saturated with mimetic imagery that is used to deconstruct their opponent's political positions - meme magic so called, the ironic appropriation of corporate icons - think McDonald's "Mac Tonight" - synthesised and sampled vaporwave music, cynical youth culture - think 4chan, and even a whole satirical, synthesized religion to rival that of the Spaghetti Monster or the Sub-Genius: the Cult of Kek and its use of Pepe the Frog as a postmodern avatar of an ancient egyptian chaos deity.

All the while, the progressives can only look on with the same kind of horror that traditionalist conservatives did when the western canon and the Christian faith were savaged in the halls of academia and in popular culture alike.  It would be meme magic that would finally deconstruct the deconstructionists.  And good on them.  Quite an impressive feat for weaponized autism.

But many of the outcomes of all of this haven't been so good.  The extremes of skepticism, balkanized identity, cynicism, bitterness and defeatism that were pioneered by the French postmodernists and have gradually migrated across the political spectrum over the last few decades have left the western world hopelessly divided and bereft of either the will or the know-how to sort itself back out again.  Though originally thought of as an antidote to a potential reemergence of totalitarian ideology, postmodernism may well have backfired, and itself become a vehicle for the reemergence of willfully anti-rational fanaticism and hatred, both on the right and on the left.

There are no doubt dark days ahead.

Read Neoreaction: Right Wing Postmodernism Pt 1.

Opposition to the SJWs

The SJW types have peaked in recent years.  They are institutionally dominant - in colleges, mainstream media and so on.  But that actually isn't a good sign for them.  Holding institutional power but lacking in actual cultural vigor is a sign of waning influence.  And don't mistake shrill fanaticism for cultural vigor, they're poles apart.   There's a lot of resentment and discontent with them now.  For most of the 2000s, people like me who were critical of the excesses of political correctness were kind of an odd breed.   The winds of popular opinion and cultural progress were in the sails first of the so called new atheists and their criticisms of conservative Christianity, and then of the massive proliferation of social justice and feminist blogs.  

That's not the case anymore, and the social justice crowd would be in a world of trouble if they didn't enjoy such high levels of ideological protectionism in academia and mainstream media.  Their purity spiralling and fanaticism is reflective of deep seated fear - the tide has turned against them and they know it.

I think that if you compare things to, say, four years ago, there's quite a bit of anger and frustration with the SJWs that simply wasn't there before. In fact, you didn't have terms like SJW or regressive left before, say, 2014 or so.  This was because before then, the kinds of views we associate with the SJWs were hegemonic, at least in their respective theaters of operation, particularly racial and sexual politics.  The hysterics we're seeing out of them now are because they're facing something they haven't faced in a long time, and that's real opposition.  

Thing of it is, the inertia of ideas has a long term effect.  Apparently rising popularity of SJW types of ideas and activism today is in part due to the inertia of their ideas over the decades.  It's not going to collapse overnight.  Kind of like the religious right, it's going to be a long process.  I think you can compare the SJWs of the Obama era to where the religious right was in George W. Bush's time.  Perhaps maximal in terms of actual institutional power, and their supporters were at a level of peak belief and fanaticism.  But the vigor and vitality had shifted to their opponents, and had been for a while.  The religious right was faltering by the late 1990s.  Anyone under 30 in the Bush years was quoting Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens etc. as if they were gospel.  How ironic.  And you're seeing levels of religiosity declining to this day because of it.  The SJWs are, I think, headed in the same direction

So the SJWs peaked in terms of institutional power during the Obama years, and you can see the results of this in the vitriol shown by mainstream media towards Trump.  But the mere fact that this vitriol is now visible and ostentatious is itself a sign that we've turned a corner.  If the SJWs were truly hegemonic, Hillary Clinton would now be president and these issues wouldn't be a matter of controversy.  Shrillness and hysteria is a common reaction of movements when it begins to dawn on them that they ain't gonna pull it off.  

As to the democratic party capitulating to the SJWs, well, would this be the same democratic party that lost, if only by a narrow margin, last November.  The same Democratic party that lost the House in 2010, gone from a 60 seat supermajority in '08 to a 46 seat minority today, many hundreds of state legislature seats and how many governorships?  Twelve is the figure I've seen.  

Now, does this mean the Democrats are going to suddenly make a dramatic change of course?  Of course not.  Again, these kinds of changes take a long time to really play themselves out.  Movements as given over to fanaticism as the SJWs don't give in nearly that easily, and institutional change could well have to wait until the current crop retires or moves on from their positions of influence.  The DLC has been almost laughably reluctant to look long and hard at their policy platform, their ideology and their broader political culture since Clinton's defeat.  It's all still the Russian's fault, the last time I checked.  Thing is though, Clinton's loss was narrow, and it's quite possible that Trump could really blow it and push support back in the Dem's direction.  Indeed, Trump's win has given them a cause to rally around.  A lot will depend on how things go in 2018 and 2020.

There's something to be said for the fact that there's more opposition [to the SJWS] than I'm giving credit for, and it's not always immediately apparent when you're at the peak until you've actually crossed it and started going down again.

There is a lot of opposition, but like I said, it's unorganized, and it doesn't really know how to organize.  That's the countervailing force.  That's the one thing the SJWs really have going for them.  The core of the anti-SJWs, typically net savvy younger white males, are not the types of people that are well disposed to working effectively together over a long term to achieve political goals, the occasional 4chan meme or prank notwithstanding.  

So while I think the SJWs have peaked, they will be around a while yet.  Quite a while.  There's a reason the colleges and most major news outlets are pro-SJW.  The SJWs are directly traceable to the west coast new left of the 1960s.  These guys did not peter out in the 1970s, contrary to popular belief.  They retreated into academia and they did not waste their time when they got there, again contrary to popular belief.  They stopped with the Marxist stance on economics, so the FBI finally left them alone.  They were no longer a threat to the real power after that.  So they didn't matter.  Except when they did.

Look at these French postmodernist philosophers they studied.  Derrida, Foucault and that whole crew.  They have a reputation for being a bunch of unintelligible gobbledygook.  And it was true to a fair extent.  But literary deconstruction is not a wasted skill.  It's why academic feminists are so damn good in flame wars.  They don't even bother wasting their time answering their opponent's arguments directly.  They dive right into the assumption that their opponents are merely defending a position of power and privilege, because that's all human behavior ever boils down to as far as they're concerned, and it drives their opponents - usually 4chan or manosphere types, batty.  Studying that stuff also leads to an understanding of narrative and cognitive framing.  They understand media, and they understand it on a social, economic and psychological level, not just its basic workings.  A lot of this goes back to the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Rudi Dutschke and others had about a long march through the institutions, which ties into their hegemony in academia.  From there, they learned how to look at the way institutions work and how to coordinate their efforts to strategically apply pressure to get what they want.  The ideas of Saul Alinsky and stuff like that.  

Again, to their opponents, typically paleoconservatives, neoreactionaries and the right wing of the so called skeptic community - think YouTubers like Sargon of Akkad and the like, everything I've described above is what they call cultural Marxism.  It's all bad, horrible stuff because it's supposedly Marxism and we all know that didn't work from the history of the USSR.  Well that's just patent nonsense.  Cultural Marxism is a contradiction in terms.  Marx was adamant about the primacy of economic relations and how culture ultimately flowed from that.  

Marx was proven right when this huge shift to the left in academia and the mainstreaming of feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration and so on coincided with the mainstreaming of neoliberal capitalism.  And it makes sense because rapacious capitalism always needs new markets to expand into, and if women and minorities are going to provide that, then that's what's going to happen.  But the neoreactionaries and the paleocons can't see that.  They're totally fixated on Marx the way the dumb lefties can't get over Hitler.  And what's really funny is that they usually don't have a clue what Marx actually believed.  I suggest Marxist ideas to alt-rightists and they tend to actually like it, as long as it's not recognizably Marx to them.

The SJWs won't be defeated by anything on the right, because a lot of the population doesn't trust the right wing, and with good reason I think, and also because mainstream conservatism doesn't really mind the cultural left, truth be told.  It's a steam valve for dissent, for one thing.  Better a bunch of angry feminists than a revitalized trade union movement, for example.  That would be a real threat to corporate power.  Occupy Wall Street unnerved them, and I think it's kind of remarkable that the SJWs emerged so suddenly into the social media mainstream not too long after that.  

So the left can have the cultural stuff, since it's actually good for capital anyway, and the right keeps what it really wants: a low tax, deregulated economic structure.  Weak unions and so on, as well as a hawkish foreign policy.  A strong capacity to project power in the middle east to protect petrodollar interests.  The deep state is happy with that, they could give a rat's ass about college feminists being oppressed by privileged white males, and are frankly glad, I suspect, that such things are a huge big hairy deal to the left.  The culture wars distract people from what's really happening at the deep state level, and that's where the real action is.  So this is a perfect arrangement for them.

I'm thinking back to the height of the Religious Right... maybe, late 90s, early 00s?  This was the last time the GOP could run on something like the marriage amendment and it was a winning issue for them nationally.  Was it obvious at the time that the religious right was about to begin the decline?  Not necessarily.  The boomers had turned sharply to the right in the 80s and Generation X was also a right-leaning generation.  Only the oldest of millennials had come of age by that time and it was unknown what their voting patterns would be like.

I frankly think the religious right peaked in the late 1980s and kind of plateaued through much of the 1990s.  The 90s were harder on the religious right than you might think.  The big GOP win in 1994 was kind of a last hurrah, so to speak. The Clinton/Lewinsky affair, I think, was an early major signal that moral conservatism was in decline.  There was all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth in right wing circles back then over the fact that Clinton was not removed from office because of that.  The death of outrage, I remember conservative pundits calling it.  People just didn't care that much.  It was between Bill, Monica and Hillary as far as a lot of people were concerned.  

And even during the Bush years, this kind of thinking didn't really change all that much.  The GOP was sitting pretty when it came to electoral success, but the culture was slipping away from them and they damn well knew it.  The religious right were soon to lose over gay marriage, which was the death blow for the religious right, I think, though that wasn't finalized until the Obama years.  Sure, the religious right is still around and managed to get one of their guys as VP, but frankly, I think they're about as undead as their purported savior at this point.

Time will tell.  One piece of evidence could be whether the Dems run a Kamala Harris type in 2020 and go all-in on the identity politics campaign again.  An even bigger piece of evidence will be whether it works or not.  And yet even more important may be analyzing demographic trends in 2020 and (more importantly) 2024 and beyond, when the generation after millenials starts voting and we start getting some data on how conservative/liberal this generation will be and what trends will continue/end (is there a name of this generation yet?)

Well yes, that will be big.  A lot depends on what happens in 2018.  A lot more depends on 2020.  The post-millennials are quite conservative from what I've heard, but it's too early to tell, like you say.  As for the democrats, it doesn't look like they're going to change all that much.  The mainstream voices on the US left - the HuffPost, Salon and so on, are doubling down on the intersectional feminism, and so on.  It's hard to tell if that's what the base really believes, or if the privilege checking tail is wagging a much more populist dog at this point.  

As for the intersectional SJWs, that movement is very self destructive.  Women of color are calling out their white sisters for being "white feminists", black cishet males are being called "the white people of black people" and cisgender gay males are being accused of being more misogynistic than even straight white dudes, if you can believe it.  Plus they're lionizing Islam now, with leaders like Linda Sarsour and the like.  Squaring feminism with the circle of Shari'a law is doubtlessly an irrational fool's errand to a rational person, but irrationality has long since passed critical mass, and there's a lot of woke pink hat wearers that are more than prepared to take the whole thing at face value. 

But then, the opposition doesn't win elections.  The incumbent party loses them, so what happens in 2018 and 2020 will have a lot more to do with the performance of the Tweeter in Chief's administration than any kind of shift of the ideological poles that might occur between now and then.  I don't find that a comforting thought.

Neoreaction: Right Wing Postmodernism Pt 1

This is not an Article on Postmodernism

The alt-right crops up frequently in social media.  When Hillary Clinton cast the alt-right as a boogeyman in contrast to her own 2016 election campaign, this was its appropriately ironic break into the political mainstream.  I say appropriately ironic because the true nature of the alt-right has been obscured by much of the media attention that's been paid to it.

The alt-right is not chiefly about white nationalism.  White nationalism is about white nationalism.  Not all WNs are alt-right, and more traditional, orthodox neo-nazis tend not to like the alt-right.   While there is plenty of racism on the alt-right, that's not its defining characteristic.  In this two part series, I attempt to explain what I think postmodernism is and the effects it has on society, and then assert that what really defines the alt-right is that it represents the right wing's embrace of postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a slippery concept to pin down.  In spite of this, it comes in for a lot of criticism and is often scapegoated for western civilization's going in the wrong direction.  Wikipedia describes postmodernism as follows:

"While encompassing a broad range of ideas, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies and various tenets of universalism, including objective notions of reason, human nature, social progress, moral universalism, absolute truth, and objective reality. Instead, it asserts to varying degrees that claims to knowledge and truth are products of social, historical or political discourses or interpretations, and are therefore contextual or socially constructed. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, irreverence and self-referentiality."

This page offers some additional insights:

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characteristic of the so-called "modern" mind. 

A common denominator in many descriptions of postmodernism is a loss of faith in the project of the enlightenment and a propensity towards radical forms of cultural relativism.  Other features commonly associated with postmodernism include:

• A number of French philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, among others.  
• Rejection of metanarratives, which are seen as all encompassing truths universally applicable to the whole of the human race. 
• Poststructuralism, a rejection of a model of understanding human culture by way of its relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. 
• Deconstruction, a means of studying literature that "that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new word construction, etymology, puns, and other word play."
• Postmodernism became increasingly prominent in academia after the Second World War, alongside the somewhat related concept of critical theory, associated with the Frankfurt School.  Postmodernism's skepticism towards enlightenment ideas dovetailed with critical theory's mounting assertions that the Marxist critique of capitalism was merely the tip of the iceberg, and atrocities ranging from colonialism to the world wars and the holocaust suggested that there was something inherently wicked about western civilization itself.  
• Concepts such as cultural hegemony, and mixtures of Freudian concepts with critiques of political economy to describe methods by which marginalized and oppressed peoples internalize their oppression.
• Orthodox Marxism, and especially Marxist-Leninism, was seen as more part of the problem than part of the solution, as the revelations of atrocities inside the USSR came out.  Furthermore, the working classes in the capitalist world had no real interest in overthrowing capitalism, as Marx suggested they should have.  Rather, their aims were simply to have sufficient income and leisure with which to enjoy the products and services provided under capitalism.  Worse still, capitalism was proving superior to Soviet socialism in terms of actually delivering the goods and providing a material standard of living. For most people in the 1st world, leastwise.
• Given the working class's acceptance of capitalism based on rising living standards, critiques of capitalism emerged that tended to more strongly emphasize social alienation and commodity fetishism, and a resulting anti-consumerist disposition.  Related to this were abstract, appropriationist and expressionist forms of art, and irony laden popular culture that positioned itself as a kind of protest against consumerism and commodification.
• If the working class was not willing to play the revolutionary role that Marxism cast for them, other constituencies of people would have to be found whose experiences of alienation under not just capitalism, but western civilization as a whole made them better suited for revolutionary struggle: the 3rd world, racial minorities and people of color, women, LGBT people, Muslims and so on.  And so identity politics were cast into the mix.
• Bodies of critical theory rooted in identity politics: critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory and so on likewise used postmodern methods to convey their messages and deconstruct the classical canon of "dead white males."  These bodies of theory became increasingly influential in academia and beyond.
• Implicit in the blend of postmodernism, critical theory and identity politics is a rejection of any separation of scholarship and activism, or for that matter of livelihood and activism or of personal lifestyle choice and activism.  The concepts of liberal impartiality and private/public distinction were called into question as just more western liberal privileging of, well, privilege. 
• As such, the "social justice warriors" so called have no qualms about the use, or one could say abuse, of institutional power against their political opponents, or of anyone deemed privileged, for they maintain that the broader society in which everyone operates consists of little more than a network of oppressive social systems designed to further uphold privilege and exclude the marginalized.

The above concepts gestated in academia over a span of decades, and made themselves felt in academia and elsewhere in the form of what was called political correctness.  It was the emergence of the internet and social media, however, that gave what had until then had been a largely avant-garde movement exponentially greater reach with which to reach into a mainstream popular culture that was largely defenseless against the deconstructive techniques of postmodern critical theory.  

The largely rationalist and modernist libertarian individualists who dominated internet culture were as helpless before the postmodern SJW onslaught as the religious traditionalists had so recently been before those same rationalists.  The sharpest skeptics on the internet cast their facts, figures and logic in vain against an onslaught of identitarian ideologues for whom the very terms of rational debate were dismissed as mere devices of and rationalizations for hegemonic white male privilege.  

What was worse, the institutions of knowledge and culture, staffed and managed as they were by graduates from colleges where the varied forms of critical theory were taught, tended to take the side of the social justice warriors.  To legions of social media moderators and blogs covering a whole gamut of subjects, liberal claims to a universal notion of equal treatment rang hollow.  There was no such thing as racism or sexism against the "privileged" and some of these people had no qualms about getting personal or even attacking the families or livelihoods of anyone who dared disagree.  There were no bad methods, only bad people, after all.

But at the heart of postmodernism's strength was also one central weakness: what exempts it from its own critiques and techniques of deconstruction?  If all "truths" are relative social constructs that are more accurate reflections of the fault lines of power in a given context, does this statement also apply to an academic and popular culture that's become infused with the postmodern forms of left-leaning critical theory?

"The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philosopher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."

The cultural luminaries in academia and mainstream media were not expecting the answer they were to get.

Read Neoreaction: Right Wing Postmodernism Pt 2 here.

The New Atheism: When Bertrand Russell Met Lenin Once Again

The "new" atheism - a misnomer, really - emerged into the mainstream in the early 2000s with the publication of such works as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.  It was not really new in the sense that they were not saying anything that Bertrand Russell hadn't said back in the 1920s, and other philosophers before even him.

What was new was how this early 21st century wave of atheism used the internet to take the American cultural scene by storm.  The net was dominated by a younger, more libertarian cohort, and they were getting ever angrier and more frustrated with the Christian conservative Bush white house.  It wasn't just Bush's policies that drove their bitterness, but rather his facade of down-home folksiness, exemplified by his intentional mispronunciations of words.  These new atheist authors found a receptive audience in these social media pioneers, for whom the problems America, and indeed the world, were facing were reducible to too much church attendance among red state Americans.

The Meme of Legends

These new atheists did indeed make a convincing deconstruction of evangelical Christian doctrines, and their propensity to mop the floor with Christians in online flame wars became the subject of memes.  The case they make against the inerrancy of scripture is convincing.  Personally, I was never really convinced by them, however.  Not fully.  While this argument drove online atheists crazy, I was among those who thought of them as their own sort of evangelists.  I didn't trust the degree of importance they attached to the nonbelief in God, as if that was what made or broke a person morally or intellectually.  Funny how alike their mirror image fundamentalist rivals they were in that respect.

I didn't trust how eager so many of them were to pronounce as fact something they could not prove - the nonexistence of God, despite their constant insistence on smoking gun evidence for God's existence from their religious opponents.  The implication that all the world's problems could be laid at the feet of belief in Christian dogmas struck me as absurdly reductionist. Bertrand Russell became aware of the fact that God-belief wasn't the real root of the problem after meeting Lenin in 1920, and becoming extremely put off by Lenin's fanatical devotion to a decidedly non religious ideology.  My direct experience with Bush era internet atheists was that they were staunchly unwilling to learn from Russell's experience.  Talk to them of the terrors of the Soviet anti-religious campaigns or the Red Chinese invasion of Tibet and cultural revolution, and I was universally admonished - especially by female liberal atheists - to stop sounding like such a McCarthyite Republican.

Their experience with religion seemed limited to the conservative, evangelical Bush presidency and was defined entirely by being opposed to abortion and gay marriage.  I was no friend to religious conservatism either, and had not been since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s wherein I was accused of devil worship on account of listening to heavy metal music and playing Dungeons and Dragons.  But after having read Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer and others who'd done deeper research into the nature of belief and fanaticism, it seemed to me as though the new atheists were hamstrung by a decidedly one dimensional take on spiritual concerns.  Although some of them had even read works by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, many atheists I knew online and in real life seemed to not grasp that side of human nature that was drawn towards the mythical, the poetic and the spiritual.

Increasingly, online atheism came to be about smugness, wittiness, signalling, sarcasm, posturing, decidedly anti-holy holier than thou-ness, and just how much smarter they all were than those stupid religious rubes, inbreeding in the Ozarks, or the like.  Being considered a good person was measurable by the correctness of one's beliefs and one's politics.  The smug scenester mindset that I'd seen among my counter-culture acquaintances in high school was there all over again, except it was religious incorrectness rather than listening to the wrong kind of music that would get you snubbed by the very same people who claimed to despise preppy snobbery.  There was no room at the table for people who believed in sky daddies, invisible pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.  He who fought with monsters was not taking care, and gazing altogether too long into the abyss.

I disliked religious intolerance, of course, but much more the intolerance than the religious.  Especially when said intolerance was becoming increasingly agenda-driven and ideologically ego-stroking and self serving.  Most anti-religious liberals were decidedly unwilling to take on Islam, for instance, long before Maajid Nawaz called out regressive leftism.  Associations of anti-Islamism with racism were not invented by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It was old hat even then.  Censorship and sexual prudishness were only wrong when the Catholic Church and southern evangelicals were doing it.  When radical feminists and college campuses were doing it, you were obviously an anti-gay, anti-abortion Bush loving republican for even daring to say such a thing.  Clerical celibacy was just oh, so unnatural, but separatist radical feminism was heroic resistance against the patriarchy.

This was my experience from 2006 onwards.  What would come to be called the SJWs and the Regressive Left were, as popular concepts, years away still.  But the foundations had already long been laid and set.  The hypocrisy on the left that drove me to abandon progressivism in the late 1990s after reading Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power only seemed to be intensifying.

Thus, when donglegate happened, and Elevatorgate happened, and Atheism+ happened, the new atheists were a lot more surprised than I was.  Descriptions of the debacle that was atheism+ in this 2013 article in Atheist Revolution now seem quaintly humorous in their familiarity.  Postmodern intersectional 3rd wave feminism: Like Seinfeld, classic Star Trek or the music of the Beatles, it's easy to forget that a much younger and less worldly you actually experienced it for the first time:

"On August 19, 2012, blogger Jen McCreight unleashed "Atheism+" upon unsuspecting atheists around the world, and some would say our community has been divided ever since."

"Still others were turned off by the manner in which Atheism+ quickly became an "us vs. them" endeavor that seemed to be more about branding, self-promotion, and purging the atheist community of those who were not liked by those who decided to promote Atheism+ than it did about social justice."

"I was wrong about most atheists valuing skepticism and critical thinking. I would soon realize that many atheists were not skeptics or critical thinkers, at least not when it came to some aspects of their ideology. Unfortunately, I discovered I was wrong by observing the behavior of many of the most vocal supporters of Atheism+. They demonstrated little willingness to think critically or skeptically about the particular form of feminism that seemed to be at the center of their worldview."

"Because Atheism+ was righteous, those who offered criticism were not just people who disagreed; they were bad people. In order to be a valued member of the community, one needed to be the right kind of feminist."

And this, the canary in the coal mine gone silent even in 2013:

"Social justice tends to emphasize human rights, making it more inclusive than the particular issues Jen listed after it. For example, social justice efforts have long focused on the plight of the poor. This was nowhere to be found on Jen's list."

You don't say!

The moment I had been hoping for since 1992, when I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - when a substantial portion of liberals would catch on to the fact that the postmodern progressivism of which the new atheism was a part, and Christian conservatism were much more alike than different beneath their cultural veneers - finally seemed to happen in the later part of 2014.  The tone of the discussion had finally shifted.  Bill Maher and Sam Harris were squaring off against Ben Affleck on Real Time, and a YouTuber calling himself the Amazing Atheist had finally found a punching bag he preferred to the Christian God in another YouTuber by the name of Anita Sarkeesian.

Once again, it seemed, Bertrand Russell had met Lenin, and was again unimpressed by what he saw.

About damn time.