Dear fellow leftists, Can we please stop being the incels of the political world?

December 12, 2019 will not be a day fondly remembered by the UK Labour party. The results were horrid. Dismal. The worst election results since the 1930s, apparently. A mere 202 seats, according to wikipedia, as against the 365 gained by the Conservatives. A loss of 60 seats for Labour, a gain of 48 for the Conservatives. Some of these in seats that Labour has had for decades, or that have never voted Conservative previously. Mainly in the northern portions of England.

Ouch.

I can't blame Labour and its supporters for being sore about this. Who wouldn't be? Nobody likes taking this kind of a trouncing. In politics or in any area of human endeavor.

However, responses from the hard left portion of Labour's base go well beyond the normal and expected response of licking one's wounds, trying to figure out what went wrong and going back to the drawing board, as it were.

What's the Definition of Insanity?

"Not my Prime Minister: Resist Racist Johnson" reads an event posted on Facebook, calling for a protest on Downing Street the following day, Dec 13. "Boris Johnson is a racist, bigot and homophobe. He doesn't represent multicultural Britain. He has called Muslim women 'letter boxes', called black people 'piccaninnies with watermelon smiles' and LGBT people 'bum boys'.  We can not have him as Prime Minister for the next 5 years. Let's meet the first day of his new term with protests at Downing Street," reads the event description.

And protest they did. "Two people were arrested as hundreds of protesters descended on Downing Street to "defy Tory rule" after Boris Johnson's election victory," reads this Evening Standard headline. As you might expect, this did not go well. "One witness said Whitehall had "descended into chaos" the story claims, and reports on such activities as "Protesters hammered on a bus trapped in the cordon and shouted “free the bus” and “this is our bus”, before chanting the children’s song The Wheels On The Bus." "A handful linked arms briefly to block the exit to the bus while shouting “whose bus, our bus”.

"Visibly frustrated passengers on board were eventually allowed to leave, while protesters tried to board and remonstrated with police amid demands to “free the driver."

Social media is likewise lit up with angry sentiment. Look up #NotMyPrimeMinister on twitter and you'll fast see what I mean. Tweets express dismay over the future of the NHS (National Health Service), opposition to austerity, cuts and privatization and depicting photos and footage from the abovementioned Downing Street protests.

And The Guardian, always the stalwart of good, rational journalism that it is, recently ran this headline: "Britain needs its own Mueller report on Russian ‘interference."

Is any of this sounding familiar? Does it remind you of anything?

Yes, of course. Trump's 2016 victory in the US. Well now we can cue the same kind of ongoing protest and outrage in the left leaning press in the UK. Some of it sensible and justified, but just as much of it hysterical and stupid. And there are, of course, the usual condemnations of working class voters who opted for the Tories as "stupid" and ignorant of their own class interests.

Can we on the left please stop this?

We are embarrassing ourselves. A headline in the Daily Express perhaps puts it best: "Election protests against Boris branded 'pathetic' and 'disgusting' - 'THEY are fascist!' ANTI-Boris Johnson activists have been slammed for being "disrespectful" and "arrogant" after protests erupted across the country against the Tories' landslide election majority."

Indeed.

"Utter cretins. You have the right to protest. But not the right to stampede into London, disrupt everyone, be unruly and vile, if you do, you can f***ing do one. I just can't stand their level of sanctimonious arrogance. They lost, so they change to balaclavas and smoke and aggression because they think they're right and perfect etc."

Others pointed out the protests by "pathetic middle class kids" helped "persuade the so called Labour heartlands that they want nothing to do with you."

I can't say I disagree.

I'm not saying that we can not and should not protest Johnson or Trump when warranted. I'm not saying that Labour, like the Democrats, should not act as the official opposition to the governing party. They're called the "official" opposition for a reason, after all. A key feature of liberal democracy is the right of its citizenry to protest, challenge and criticize the government in power. This provides a check on the power and excesses of the government, keeps them on their toes and motivates them to perform well. At least in theory. Nothing wrong with that.

Moreover, I'm not especially happy about Johnson's victory myself. I'm an avowed social democrat who occasionally flirts with outrightly socialist ideas. The UK Labour party would be my natural home were I a Brit, despite my disagreements with them on some other issues - immigration, identity politics, diversity for diversity's sake, most feminism etc - and my overall disdain for the romanticist culture of protest and revolution for its own sake that tends to pervade much of the western activist left.

Thing is, Labour's defeat here was much less a repudiation of social democracy and much more an expression of exasperation with the long, drawn out process of Brexit. Labour promised a softer deal and another referendum to get the voter's stamp of approval. The Tories, conversely, ran on the slogan of "Get Brexit done." Since a lot of brexiteers were in these more northern, traditionally Labour districts, this put Labour in a very difficult, maybe even impossible position. Hardly what I'd call an endorsement of fascism and racism. In hindsight, the outcome was quite predictable.

What I'm asking is for the left to stop being the political equivalent to that "nice guy" we've all known who whines and moans about how women won't date him because he's too nice. Now we call guys like that incels, and oddly enough, leftists don't like these sorts of fellows much. And with some reason. While it may be objectively true that the women in question would be better off dating nice men as opposed to abusive ones, it's also true that the choice is not the "nice" guy's to make. Incels who whine about women who won't date them come across as entitled. The women chose some other guy. The thing to do is some self reflection and try to figure out why the women made the choices they did so that the incel can make the necessary corrections and hopefully achieve a different result down the road.

The same dynamic applies here. It seems absurd that I should have to point out that if you call the working class stupid, ignorant and racist, they're not going to like you or support your cause any. These kinds of leftists become the incels of the political world. Not involuntarily celibate, but involuntarily out of power. And for many of the same reasons. Their sense of entitlement stands in for a lack of effort to woo the objects of their affection, and they wear their resentment at the predictable and inevitable outcome on their sleeves.

Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won a clean election fair and square. I hate to have to be the one to tell you this if you're a lefty Brit in the mold of Momentum or the Socialist Worker or whatever, but yeah, Boris Johnson is your prime minister. Your feelings on the matter don't override the laws of your land and the fundamental premise of democracy. Certainly you're allowed to disagree with Tory policy. You're allowed to protest it. You're allowed to join Labour, the Lib-Dems or whomever and put your own two-cents worth into the division of an alternate policy agenda.

But please do so intelligently and in a manner that respects the democratic process and the will of the electorate. Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And, in the interests of fairness, Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada, regardless of what rightist voters in Canada's more conservative western provinces may happen to think - and take it from me, they don't think highly of it and are doing no shortage of whining themselves. So this isn't just a leftist thing, but the left should be better than this. If you claim to be for "the people" then the place to start is to respect their will, respect their right to self determination, respect their right to make up their own minds on issues while simultaneously trying to persuade them of the benefits of following a more social democratic as opposed to a more conservative political approach. Calling them stupid and racist probably isn't a good strategy. Just a thought. There can't be social democracy without the democracy, after all.

Please, let's stop being the incels of the political world.

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The Canary in the Coal Mine

How we Know that the "Intersectional Social Justice" Movements of the 21st Century are a Very Different Thing than Previous Civil Rights and Social Justice Struggles 

Social justice causes such as anti racism and feminism have a natural appeal.  What arguments could reasonable and conscientious people make against equal access to educational and employment opportunities?  Who in their right mind would be supportive of barriers to success based on such arbitrary characteristics as race, gender or sexual orientation?  As a culture, we are very fond of stories from our past about how basic rights and civil liberties were won by hitherto discriminated against people.  Vietnam war era rallies, protests and riots in opposition to unjust and costly wars abroad and discrimination and bigotry at home have become cornerstones of the identifying mythology of the western world.  

The appeal that these movements have for people today, even half a century after their occurrence, should be obvious.  But are the movements against sexual and racial discrimination we see today, especially on college campuses and on social media, truly the successors of their summer of love era progenitors?  

There are some similarities and areas of overlap.  Just as earlier periods of civil rights struggles produced its share of unhinged extremists.  But the differences between the civil rights era and what have been called the regressive left and the social justice warriors of our time go much deeper than that.  It is not just that current year has just happened to produce more moonbats and nutjobs than times past, though many factors are conducive to that happening, or that you're just able to hear more about them due to social media.  Beneath the veneer of social justice, the so called progressivism of our era is fundamentally different, and in ways that are decidedly unprogressive, compared times past.

Oppression has been defined as the exercise of authority in a burdensome, cruel or unjust manner, unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power, a situation in which people are governed in an unfair or cruel way and prevented from having opportunities and freedom and as prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or exercise of authority.  Given these definitions, are many of the causes taken up by the regressive left social justice warriors of our time really anti-oppression struggles?

Some questions to ask ourselves, and things to think about:

Are people who are oppressed, as defined above, typically given legal recourse against those who they deem to have defamed the group to which they belong, as is the case of hate speech laws?  

Are the penalties for crimes against oppressed peoples greater if hatred of the group to which the victim of the crime belongs is deemed a motive for the crime in question, as is the case with hate speech laws?

Are members of oppressed groups able to seek and win elected office, sometimes the highest executive office in the land, as was the case in the United States of America in the 2008 - 2016 time frame?  Typically, oppressed peoples are barred from public office, as black people were in the days of apartheid and segregation.

While peoples suffering from genuine oppression can have enlightened benefactors among the more privileged elites otherwise profiting from their marginalization - and good for them when they do, would oppressed peoples enjoy the level of government funding and corporate sponsorship that their claimants enjoy today?  Would advertisers fear to be associated with a brand that did not sympathize with "marginalized" groups?  Would social justice provide not just meaning and purpose for its activist cadres, but lucrative careers in bureaucracies in the public sector, in education at all levels, in both entertainment and informative media and media watchdog groups, in non-profit advocacy, in law, with lobby groups, in politics and numerous other fields?  I would hardly expect advocacy on behalf of truly oppressed peoples to be institutionalized to even a fraction of the extent that it is in western cultures today.

Radical left protest, up to the point of rioting or even terrorism has historically targeted institutions of government and corporate power.  This was the case up to the time of Occupy Wall Street.  Today, anti-racist groups claiming to oppose police brutality protest in a manner that obstructs the lives of ordinary, workaday people surprisingly far removed from positions of power.  Wouldn't it make more sense to picket a police station than to block traffic or obstruct the progress of white students to their classrooms on college campuses? What does it tell us when movements like intersectional feminism and black lives matter spend much more time and effort attacking individuals who happen to be white and male than they do the actual "structures" and "systems" to which they attribute ultimate responsibility for oppression?

Speaking of college campuses, is there no difference between the campuses of fifty years ago, that required court orders to even admit black students at all in some cases, and campuses today, infamous for their immediate and thorough capitulation to endless rounds of demands for courses, entire dormitories and study halls, curriculum content and even convocation ceremonies exclusively for black and other minority students?  

Stories of speakers deemed offensive to minority sentiments being no-platformed, disinvited from college campuses or even provoking campus riots abound, and virtually always with little or no academic discipline or legal consequences following for the offenders, abound on social media.  More astonishing still is the fact that the scripts that these protesters are reading from were written in the very academic institutions they're protesting, and the protests themselves often enjoy at least the tacit, if not open support of college administration and faculty.  If this is oppression, it is certainly the strangest form of oppression I've ever heard of.  

I would expect "oppressed" to be a descriptor of people who are denied access even to basic education, let alone access to the most prestigious post-secondary institutions in the world, even in preference to more qualified applicants who are not members of the supposedly oppressed group.  Oppressed groups would not be granted their own whole fields of study, such as black studies or women's studies, and the works of these fields would not be exempted, at least by taboo if not by institutional policy, from scrutiny or criticism from their peers.  Oppressed is most certainly not the descriptor I'd use to describe those whose mere disapproval or offense could ruin the career of otherwise distinguished professors and make entire college faculties quake with fear.

Oppressed groups and their representatives do not typically enjoy near universally favorable media bias, nor do they enjoy a near complete absence of scrutiny or criticism of claims they make in academic or media environments.  When's the last time you've seen or heard a credible journalist not associated with an explicitly conservative or libertarian news source openly challenge a core doctrine of feminism or a leading feminist theorist or critic?

Issues of concern in intersectional social justice circles have a remarkable way of arising quite suddenly and simultaneously in multiple media outlets, framed in the same way and couched in the same terms with the same talking points.  Observe, again and again, how quickly one manufactured issue after another appeared very suddenly and dramatically, supported almost universally across multiple media outlets or on multiple college campuses, while opposition and criticism to the "progressive" stance on this issue is developed and disseminated only slowly, and articulated primarily in the comments sections of mainstream corporate media outlets.  Would oppressed and marginalized groups have access to the money, resources and skills needed to conduct such apparently professional and well coordinated media campaigns?

Oppressed groups are not typically successful in their efforts to block the efforts of their supposedly more privileged counterparts to bring to light instances of when the "non-oppressed" group suffers domestic partner or sexual violence.  It would be logical not to expect oppressed groups to be capable of marshalling vast mobs on social media to harass, dox or even get fired from their jobs individuals who happen to criticize the orthodox political and social opinions favored by the oppressed group.  The logical thing to expect would be for victims of domestic and sexual violence to be silenced and swept under the carpet if they belonged to oppressed groups.  Could it be that this is, in fact, actually happening, just not in the way, and against the groups that conventional media narratives would have us believe it is?

Demands on behalf of an oppressed groups for the elimination of due process for members of the oppressor group where allegations of rape are concerned would most certainly not be taken seriously, at least in mainstream, agenda setting media, and would not animate policy on college campuses.  If a member of a privileged group were to compliment a member of an oppressed group, I highly doubt that offense or even allegations of harassment would ensue in response, if the recipient of such attention were indeed oppressed.  Extreme flattery would be a much more logical response. The privileged would be enjoined by stringent cultural norms and social mores from speaking well at all of the groups they oppress.

Would truly oppressed peoples really object to their oppressors adopting elements of the culture of the oppressed group, and would an oppressor group who had really adopted widespread attitudes of bigotry and disdain towards the people they're oppressing "appropriate" their culture?  Or would it be sternly frowned upon within the elite, domineering group to adopt any aspect of the oppressed group's culture?  When the dominant group begins assuming certain cultural forms of oppressed groups, is this a mark of oppression or, perhaps, a veiled expression of sympathy?

The real canary in the coal mine, however, is the disposition of protest politics and social justice movements towards the concept of free speech.  No group who ever sought a more inclusive, just and liberal society ever advocated censorship or the silencing of its opponents.  That the protest politics and social justice movements of today very explicitly advocate censorship and the judgement of people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character should tell us everything about their nature today as opposed to their nature - the odd fanatic notwithstanding - back in the glamorized 1960s.

None of which is to say that women, minorities and so on do not have legitimate grievances or that they are not still treated unfairly and discriminated against.  But the worm has turned in many key respects.  

Rather, this is about the appropriation of the historical struggles of marginalized peoples for political purposes much more related to the consolidation of power for a class of people whose resemblances to the truly marginalized and oppressed are literally only skin deep.  

They are, perhaps, better compared to the clergy of medieval Christendom, for whom the works of Christ and the Apostles were more to legitimize their own privileged position in the feudal hierarchy than they were examples to be followed.  Perhaps this is more about that summer of love mythology described above that so many people love so much, and are increasingly turning to now that the clergy of Christendom seem to be receding from their former prominence in largely similar roles.  The clergy of social justice - itself originally a Christian concept, interestingly.  Social justice, or state religion?

Whatever the politics of the regressive left are, they are not politics on behalf of oppressed peoples.