TERFs: Executed via Circular Firing Squad

"Under Thatcher and then Blair and continuing up until our contemporary moment, the working class has seen its culture slowly and progressively destroyed," Deirdre O'Neill writes in this Medium article, and she's not happy about it. I can't say I blame her so far. I'm not happy about it either.

One of the consequences of the massive changes that have taken place in working class life over the last forty years of neo liberalism has been the erasure of class-consciousness and the loss of the language of class as an analytical framework within which to articulate and make sense of those changes.

Couldn't agree more. The article gives an account of how the left abandoned material, working class concerns in favor of cultural and identity based issues of greater concern to a careerist academic middle class that is generally accurate. It's also worth noting, however, that there was not, for a time, much choice of which way the leftist parties of the developed world should go. This was a long, painful and complicated process, so it's worth going over it again, in point form:

• Disillusion with Marxian socialism and materialism setting in on the post WW2 left, as the tyrannical nature of Stalin's U.S.S.R becomes known.
• The emergence of critical theory and the new left. The third world abroad and minorities at home are cast in the role once reserved for the industrial proletariat.
• The increasingly international business environment leading to what we came to call globalization. Mid to low skill level jobs that depended on union representation and a sophisticated regulatory welfare state to maintain a middle class lifestyle were among the first to be lost to the third world.
• Automation also proceeded apace in this time.
• Resulting in a decline in the political clout exercised by the unionized blue collar working class, itself became more conservative as a result of attaining a middle class level of existence after WW2. 
• These factors allowed the likes of Reagan and Thatcher to come to power in the US and UK, and they adopted policies that further weakened the power of organized labor. 
• Leftist governments such as those of François Mitterrand in France were forced to backpedal on social democratic reform due to the threat of capital flight and investment strike, which were becoming bigger clubs in the hands of the rich and powerful, and this trend would only increase into the internet age.
• Corporate media would lay the blame for this investment strike and capital flight on the flawed and anachronistic ideologies of the center left parties, and whip up popular backlash against social democratic ideas. Electorates now do corporate power's dirty work for it, urging leftist parties to get with the program and enact business friendly neoliberal policies, and in so doing giving those neoliberal policies a thin but very useful veneer of democratic legitimacy. 
• Communism unraveling in the U.S.S.R and its satellites, and the People's Republic of China embracing market reforms, discrediting socialism in the mainstream.
• New social movements emphasizing identity gradually becoming more mainstream in the late 20th century.
• Declining birth rates resulting in western governments relying on increased levels of immigration to top up population growth.
• Large numbers of women, people of color and immigrants entering the workforce swelling its numbers, further weakening labor's bargaining power, but also serving as a new basis of support for center left political parties.
• The shift to a more managerial role in the global economy results in increased emphasis on higher education in the western world as the key to a middle class lifestyle, while blue collar labor declines. A university degree, once the pedigree of the upper crust, now becomes the mainstay of the middle class.
• Concomitant with this is the identity based new social movements finding their stronghold in academia, concluding a long shift away from economics and towards culture in a western left disillusioned with the obvious flaws and failings of the so-called communist world.
• Abandoned by the "left", the working class becomes vulnerable to political exploitation from the right, which appeals to their resentments towards cultural elites but shifts their anger towards scapegoats - immigrants, minorities and the like, to gain their votes. Once in office, the right then abandons cultural populism in favor of economic neoliberalism. 

The upshot of all of this is that the leftist political parties of the first world shifted from the unionized blue collar working class to educated cosmopolitan urban knowledge workers as their basis of support, and they really didn't have much choice if they wanted to stay relevant in electoral politics. From the early 1980s onward, it simply wasn't possible to win an election on a socialist or social democratic platform in most developed nations. It's as simple as that. Sorry. I don't like it either, but that's the way it was, and in many places continues to be. Social democracy is struggling world wide, with few exceptions. One of these exceptions being, of all places, the USA, where Bernie Sanders has galvanized considerable support for a social democratic platform. 

Did the moneyed classes capitalize on their newfound advantages over the working class? Certainly. But was it all part of a conspiracy to destroy the working class right from the get go? I doubt it. In a way, that's really the damning thing about capitalism. It's destructiveness is so unintentional. Capital follows the path of least resistance and maximal profit by its nature. Conspiracy is not only unnecessary, but often counterproductive.

Which brings us to the second thrust of Deirdre's article, summed up in this passage:

In the light of this its difficult not to consider the rapid rise of transgender ideology and its concomitant activism enthusiastically embraced by the middle class left, to be connected to the dismantling of radical politics over the last 40 years and the demoralization and feelings of defeat it has engendered.

From here, the article veers into "TERF" or trans-exclusionary radical feminist territory. While I sympathize with some if its criticisms of "transgender ideology" the problem I see with the older 2nd wave TERF brand of radical / socialist feminism is that they opened the door to all of the metapolitical tactics that the transgender ideologues are now using on them. That the intersectional transgender movement would upset the TERFs has more than a whiff of karmic justice to it. The transgender activists have not only beaten the TERFs at their own game, they've beaten the TERFs at the very game the TERFs wrote the rules for.

That's gotta hurt.

Let's take a closer look.

Transgender activism has presented the privileged with an opportunity to ignore questions of class inequality while at the same time allowing some the opportunity to perform a superficial radicalism and progressiveness.

This was radical feminism from the 1960s onwards. Shooting down the romantic overtures of the male of the species took on the moral and cultural gravitas of a revolutionary act against tyrannical power in the ego drenched minds of pseudo intellectual women and their male lapdogs from the 1980s onwards, at least as far as most mainstream media was concerned. A lot easier than unionizing the local supermarket, I suppose. If society is going to legitimize any demographic's favorite activity as an act of glorified transgression against supposedly illegitimate power structures, who wouldn't jump at the chance if it was their group that would be so privileged?

The transgender movement demands a rejection of biological reality. There is something very terrifyingly fragile about our commitment to reasoned debate if we can so nonchalantly cast aside facts such as our biological constitution.

TERFs were looking on much of gender as being no more than a social construct going back to the 1960s. Many such feminists went as far as to claim that heterosexuality itself was little more than a creation of the patriarchy designed to objectify and oppress women, and would dismiss all arguments to the contrary appealing to evolution and biology as mere apologetics for male power and privilege.

Funny how it's okay to handwave realities we don't like when we're the ones in the privileged position of being able to call others out on their privilege. When it's us who are supposedly privileged, that's when it's different. That's when the Anita Sarkeesians of this world suddenly start understanding where the Carl Benjamins of this world have been coming from all this time.

There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the question of transgenderism and its impact on women and by women I mean people who belong to the sex class that has ovaries and is able to give birth.

There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the twin and intersecting questions of feminism and neoliberalism and their impact on men and by men I mean people who belong to the sex that has testicles and are able to impregnate women. A "left" consisting of a bunch of infighting identity based movements drawing their lines of concern only up to the point where their own "marginalized" identities can be deployed for political and social advantage is not a left that can successfully push back against global neoliberal hegemony.

The levels of groupthink necessary to keep this ship afloat, the self censorship, the intimidation, the blatant dishonesty, the denial of debate with howls of ‘transphobia’ point to a left in deep crisis.

You don't say! Just replace howls of transphobia with howls of racism and howls of misogyny and I think you get the picture. Back in the 1990s, liberal feminists along the lines of Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Cathy Young were describing the radical feminist women's studies classrooms in very similar terms. You can guess how well they were, and continue to be, received in feminist circles.

Are we starting to notice a pattern here?

The middle class dominated left has abandoned its obligation to critically engage, to clarify and to lead on the political issues of the day. Instead it has simply accepted the terms of the debate put forward by the trans militants (including their really basic conflation of sex and gender). This failure is rooted in the left’s acceptance of identity politics with its assumption that how a group (or the primary definers within a group) articulates its oppression is the last word in the matter.

This is called Standpoint theory and was a central element in radical feminist ideology almost right from its inception, and the source of much of its authoritarian and antinomian character. Implicitly up into the 1980s, explicitly since then.  Related to this is the notion of a vanguard party or movement taking it upon itself to define who is and isn't part of the charmed circle they've taken it upon themselves to represent, and decide unilaterally what the group's interests are, on behalf of the entire group. This has been standard practice on the regressive authoritarian left going all the way back to Lenin.

The decision of liberal academia to acquiesce to the demands of the standpoint feminists and deligitimize any and all criticism of women's studies as misogyny, criticism of critical race theory/black studies as racism and so on has been a dagger to the heart of every good and noble aspiration that the political left has had over the last several decades. Centuries even. The damage that this has done has been absolutely incalculable. At the very least, it's laid the foundations for all of the excesses of current year SJW culture. And it wasn't done to appease the transgender activists. It was done to appease the second wave feminists in academia during the 1970s and 80s.

The closing down of the complexities of this discussion with the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is profoundly undemocratic. In a properly functioning democracy the concerns of everyone would be included in an open and transparent discussion.

The concerns of everyone would be included in an open, transparent discussion? Would this include men's rights activists, typically brushed off as misogynists? Would this include that segment of the working class opposed to high levels of immigration, typically handwaved as racists? Would this include feminists who are not women of color? Typically brushed off as white feminists? Would this include cisgender heterosexual black males, sometimes brushed off as "hoteps" or as "the white people of black people?" Would this include white cisgender homosexual males, who are branded as misogynistic for doing exactly what TERFs think white cisgender females should be doing: rejecting the opposite sex for sexual and romantic partnership? Does it include the white male class conscious working class, the "brocialists" so called?  Does it include the original alt-left; race conscious white socialists? We wouldn't want to leave anybody out now, would we?

I think we all know what Deirdre's answer to all of those questions would be.

While I agree that stratifying people in accordance to how "marginalized" they are is incredibly counterproductive and completely contrary to the notions of inclusivity and equality that the social justice crowd so loves to pay lip service to, once again we can hardly lay the blame for this at the feet of the recent wave of transgender activism. Welcome to the world non-black, non-women and non-queer leftists have been living in ever since the summer of love, Deirdre. I'm pretty sure I can guess your response. Some sort of sneer about really giving a shit about the privileged class. Well then, forgive me if I don't give a shit about whatever frustrations you've suffered at the hands of the transgender activists. So much for solidarity, or an injury to one being an injury to all, I guess.

Instead, critical thinking is relabeled ‘transphobia’, even basic facts are now apparently a sign of Trump leaning tendencies (thereby ensuring that the Right will own this issue, because the left cannot sensibly discuss it). Rather than fighting for us all to transition to a fairer more equal society, the social justice warriors focus on the right of men to adopt the stereotypes that most women have long ago rejected.

Once again, this pandora's box was flung open by the 1960s and 70s wave of radical feminism, and this now apparent sense of indignity and having been cheated by transgender activists utilizing all the same methods reveals just how arrogant and bloated with a sense of entitlement feminism's 2nd wave really was. Who decided what "stereotypes" were "outdated" and that any defense of traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, even if voluntarily adopted instead of socially mandated - was indicative of far right politicial leaning? What are we to make of women who are frustrated with being shamed out of activities deemed too traditionally feminine, such as being stay at home moms, getting married or having romantic relationships with men? Your frustration with being silenced by transgender activists is understandable, Deirdre, but what about all the people who had to be silenced so that your brand of misandrist radical feminism could become hegemonic in academia and most media?

Contrary to current year perspectives, the academy of the mid 1970s onward wasn't some stronghold of ideological pluralism and sexual license that we've only very recently lost. Rather, it was the anti heterosex radical feminists who had seized the commanding heights of politically correct discussion, and they were saying to male liberals all the same things this article accuses transgender activists of saying to TERFs. A decade prior, the 2nd wave radfems had done the same thing to the 1960s new left. When the male radicals of the time accused the feminists of distracting from and derailing class based politics, I'm sure we can all guess how sympathetic the radfems of the time were.

Welcome to the Revolution

Hell, it may not even have really begun there. The new left had supplanted the old by sidelining the blue collar proletariat in favor of the third world and ethnic minorities. The old left had supplanted the classical liberals by sidelining the property owning bourgeoisie in favor of the industrial workers, the classical liberals sidelined the aristocracy and the clergy, and so on. With but little exaggeration, we can trace this back all the way to the signing of the Magna Carta.

All of this points to the fatal flaw at the heart of the direction the left has gone in almost since its inception. A politics based on the oppression olympics, so called, is doomed to fail. Sooner or later, you meet someone more oppressed than you, and the moral force with which you've been pressing your claims against those higher up the social hierarchy than yourself now compel you to yield to those pressing claims against you from below.  We need a better approach. We need a comprehensive theory of liberation applicable to all, rather than a ceaseless dialectic of oppressed and oppressor, a dialectic that promises revolution, but only seems to deliver a circular firing squad.

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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.

Regressive Left Pt. 8: The Regressive Soul

Alongside Marxism, the Victorian era social purity movements, could be described as a parallel developments.  These were “do-gooder” causes generally spearheaded by women activists in the mid to late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Their intention was to reassert traditional Christian morality, and so sought to curtail sex, alcohol use and gambling. 

At first glance this does not seem at all leftist; more comparable to the religious right of the 1980s.  But as with feminist and traditionalist alliances to combat pornography in the 80s, the social purity movement triangulated with social justice and traditionalist movements.  Many of its adherents were suffragettes – so much for the myth that regressivism in feminism is a new phenomenon.  It's also noteworthy that certain concepts on the alt-right, such as "race realism" - then called "racial hygiene" found support with social purists.

The social purity movement owed its doctrine in part to the puritanical character of the protestant Christianity of its day (itself a revival of classic 17th century puritan morality occurring in response to a spike in out of wedlock births among the lower classes in the late 18th century stemming from the libertinism of that era), and in part  to the influence of early to mid 19^th century utopian socialism and the abolitionist movement which, despite having as its primary intent and purpose the noblest objective of outlawing slavery, was also prone to high standards of lifestyle purity and boundary policing between itself and a broader society often seen as corrupt and wicked. 

One of these Utopian influences was French Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier, who could perhaps be considered the great grandfather of radical feminism, and along with Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen were the earliest articulates of socialist ideas.  Almost Two hundred Years before the launching of Tumblr, in addition to actually coining the term feminism, Fourier attacked marriage and gender roles and stressed the potentially fluid nature of gender and sexuality in a pamphlet entitled Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux. The similarities of these and many other of Fourier’s ideas to present day postmodernism, critical theory and feminist theory have not gone unnoticed, and he is cited as a crucial embryonic influence on the thought of the present day left, especially when it began its post WW2 departure from Marxist orthodoxy.

Fourier was born in France in 1772 and so lived through the tumultuous birth of the whole left-right system of categorizing political thought, though he fought on the counter-revolutionary side and is said to have narrowly escaped execution at the hands of the Jacobins. 

Not long after the French National Assembly divided itself between the right – favoring the Church and the monarchy, and the left – favoring revolution, all the way back in 1789, did it become apparent that if liberty, equality and fraternity were to be realized, heads would have to roll.  Quite literally.

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity." – Maximillian Robespierre, 1794.

“lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.” – Maximillian Robespierre, 1794

Our boy Robespierre – a primary influence on the governing philosophies of Lenin and Stalin, together at first with the militant working class Sans-culottes and later the more bourgeois but still very radical Jacobins, perhaps constitute the ur-example of regressive leftism.  They didn’t waste time and they didn’t mess around: While the revolution was at its height in ’93 – 94, they attempted to do away with the Catholic church and reset the calendar to year zero, a feat not duplicated until the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia nearly two centuries later.  In all, the reign of terror claimed between 18,000 and 40,000 lives and things didn’t really straighten out until Napoleon began his rise to power.

Kinda makes the SJWs vs. the Trump administration look like a shadow play, doesn’t it?

Prior to the French Revolution, the concepts of left and right as they apply to political thought break down, since they had their origins in that time.  But in the course of my research into this matter, a work I found referred to time and again was The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn, first published in 1957 and again in 1970. 

The book describes apocalyptic religious sects that arose in the mid to late medieval times, and the dynamics of these groups sounds quite intentionally familiar:  they thought of themselves as

“The elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted and yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral … systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque … ruthlessness directed towards an end which by its nature cannot be realized – towards a total and final solution.” 

Repeatedly in discussions of this book it is suggested that these apocalyptic medieval sects were the distant spiritual forerunners to the 20th century ideologies of communism and fascism. 

This can describe not merely dissident religious cults that groaned under the medieval Catholic church, but also that very same church when it was itself persecuted by the pagan emperors of Rome.  The most distant antecedent of today’s leftism – both progressive and regressive,  can perhaps be traced back Christ’s famous sermon on the mount, where the founder of the western world’s most entrenched moral and religious system urges his followers to forswear greed, lust and sin in favor of simple lives of charity and virtue, for he assures his flock that one day, the meek shall inherit the earth.

Having seen how integral to the western experience what we've come to call regressive leftism actually is, let us now abstract its most basic and common characteristics.  Those features that crop up most or all of the time, be it with the Jacobins in revolutionary France, Marxist-Leninists both in and out of the Kremlin, politically correct college professors or Antifa rioting in protest against Donald Trump’s presidency.  While time, place, circumstance and ideological particulars vary considerably, certain core characteristics recur. 

If any singular characteristic can be shown time and again to define the regressive left, it is the ubiquitous recurrence of a manichean worldview.  This term derives from an ancient Persian religion that stressed a fundamental conflict between a spiritual, pure good principle of light and a materialistic, pure evil principle of darkness.  This is an apt metaphor for the regressive left, or indeed any regressive way of looking at the world.  The image that regressive left ideologies conjure up is that of a vast system of oppression, designed to relegate certain portions of the population to a marginalized way of life or even to destroy them all together, and the activist communities as the last line of resistance against it.

Again, Norman Cohn sums it up perfectly in The Pursuit of the Millennium: 

“The world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness – a power moreover which is imagined not simply as human but as demonic.  The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it.  Then the saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who hitherto have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall in their turn inherit the earth.  This will be the culmination of history; the kingdom of the saints will not only surpass in glory all previous kingdoms, it will have no successors.”

Be it the revolutionaries vs. the ancient regime, the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, the “movement” vs the “system” or queer women of color vs. the “Kyriarchy”, regressive leftism presents a secular version of this principle.  Again, this is not unique to regressive leftism.  It is deeply embedded in what would seem to be humanity’s innate way of seeing the world. 

There is, perhaps, an evolutionary basis to this.  Moral relativism was not an option throughout most of man’s evolutionary history when he was not the apex predator he’s been for the last several millennia.  Tales of monsters, the sacrifices required of man to appease them and the heroes who finally triumphed over them are almost ubiquitous in the mythologies of ancient people, and were used to bind human tribes together and give them a common identity.  We have not evolved beyond our love of such stories, as the popularity of heroic franchises such as Star Wars or Harry Potter attest to.  In the words of the American playwright David Mamet, it is in our nature to dramatize.

It can be rightly insisted that there’s no fantasy in man’s history of oppressing one another, and that there is nothing wrong with opposing this.  From war to slavery to sweat labor to racial discrimination to domestic violence and rape, our propensity to abuse power over one another can and should provoke resistance and movement towards a better world.  This is all true, but not where the problem with regressive leftism lies.

The distinguishing thing about the regressive left, however, lies in a peculiar tendency to regard specific instances of oppression and exploitation not as dependent on context and circumstance, but as universal constants.  At all times and in all places, “the history of all man hitherto has been the history of class struggle” – or of the struggle of sisterhood against patriarchy, or of consumerism vs. harmony with nature, of white colonialism vs people of color, and so on.

What Richard Hofstadter said of the “paranoid style” in regressive rightism in the early 1960s is likewise true of the regressive left’s perception of whatever “system of oppression” they are motivated to oppose:

“The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a "vast" or "gigantic" conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat them is not the usual methods of political give and-take, but an all-out crusade.”

This drives the almost apocalyptic nature of regressive leftism, wherein the means justify any ends taken to defeat “systems of oppression” that are so broad and all pervasive as to completely define all aspects of human existence.  Anybody who’s ever tried to debate a regressive leftist knows full well that it usually ends up being a frustrating exercise in navigating bewildering labyrinths of truths, half truths and flat out lies, not to mention every logical fallacy and rhetorical dirty trick, from kafkatrapping to Greenwalding to outright gaslighting that you can think of. 

This is seldom because regressive leftists are inherently bad people, although some are or have been, and often because their whole moral and intellectual compass is attuned differently than that of most other people.  This is crucial to bear in mind when dealing with a regressive leftist.  To them, the goal of defeating whatever system of oppression they oppose and bringing about whatever utopia they are eager to replace it with overrides all other considerations.  And in pursuit of this, the ends always justify the means.

Truth and falsehood, right and wrong are defined in terms of whether the “movement” or the “revolution” is advanced or set back.  This may require that certain actions that would otherwise be considered wrong, or even repressive, be undertaken.  But the short term, temporal evil that censorship or repression of enemies entails is more than made up for by the long term defeat of ultimate, eternal evil that is the intent behind such actions.  From Lenin’s doctrine of “Kto Kovo” to Marcuse’s doctrine of “repressive tolerance” to Patricia Bidol-Padva’s doctrine of “power plus prejudice”, this kind of thinking runs like a common thread through most regressive left praxis.

... Continued in Part 9: The Militant Mind

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Keep it Regressive - Upping the Ante Post Inauguration

Sargon of Akkad hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Jonathan Pie hates having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

Something tells me that Snopes.com isn't happy about having to defend the administration of Donald Trump.

And I'm not happy about it either.  Not that it's "defending" Donald Trump per-se, It's about trying to keep political discourse open and reasonable.  Scrutiny and criticism of Trump will be more effective in the long run if it's not so marked by sensationalism and hysteria.  People are going to start rolling their eyes whenever the Huffington Post, CNN or any of them pound their "Trump is evil Hitler" drum, and the ironic result of that is that eventually Trump will gain greater leeway to act.  I suggest to the chattering classes that they go back and read that old Aesop story about the boy who cried wolf.    

As recently as a few months ago, I was rather proud of the fact that hysterical paranoia surrounding the sitting President was a right wing specialty.  Sure, "Bush derangement syndrome" did have its excesses, but nothing that could compare to Tea Party or Info Wars type nonsense asserting that Obama was a Muslim, a communist, a non-citizen or even the Antichrist.  And for those of us with a few more years under our belts, Bill Clinton was an evil commie coming to take everybody's gun's away.  

And it goes back much further than that.  Further than Reagan and the paranoid Moral Majority of the 1980s accusing my favorite heavy metal records and role playing games of the time of being Satanic.  Richard Hofstadter was writing about the Paranoid Style in American Politics as far back as 1964.   To say nothing of McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the American Mercury Magazine (which returned in 2010, by the way, with the only thing missing being Pepe the Frog) - the craziness of which drove William F. Buckley to leave it and go start the National Review in the early 1950s.  It's even older than that.  The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the sundry anti-immigration leagues of the late 19th century and anti-Illuminati conspiracism going back further than that.

The progressives, with all of their flaws, are simply smarter than that.  Sure there had been dumb leftists too: the degeneration of the Communist Party USA into a mere mouthpiece for the Kremlin, the carrying around of pictures of Chairman Mao and fetishizing of 3rd world dictators among the New Left, Herbert Marcuse's doctrine of "repressive tolerance" and the related concept of "power plus prejudice" to emerge out of the radical serge of the late 60s, the personal becoming political among the anti-heterosex feminists of the 1970s and 80s, the emergence of political correctness in the 1990s, the apologetics for and palling up with regressive Islamism in the Bush years (and carrying on to the present day) and the emergence of the social justice warriors in the last decade or so.  All of it stupid and counterproductive.  But widespread mass hysteria and moral panic akin to the red scare or the Satanic panic was simply not within the purview of left wing politics. 

Oh no.  Not us.

Then 2017 happened.  

Antifa riots in DC following Trump's inauguration destroy, among other things, a limousine belonging to a Muslim immigrant, whose livelihood may be lost as a result.  231 people all told were arrested.  

And then, of course, there was UC Berkeley meltdown in response to Milo Yiannopoulos's speaking tour, causing an early estimate of $100,000 damage and sporadic reports of injuries.

Though the worst of what we've seen thusfar, these are not isolated incidents either. 

Suddenly, the special snowflakes on tumblr don't seem like such a big deal now, don't they?

I've had personal experience with these antifa characters.  I moderate several alt-left Facebook groups, and quite suddenly - almost as if on cue - they're spamming every leftist social media space with bland calling outs of "liberals" who refuse to endorse black block tactics, with some even going as far as to call liberals "fascist sympathizers."  I don't brook a whole lot of this - they get banned right quick if they descend to such foolishness as to believe that smashing store windows, lighting garbage cans on fire or pepper spraying unarmed civilian protesters is some kind of valiant resistance to fascism, on par with the British R.A.F in the summer of 1940 or the Red Army in Stalingrad circa December 1942.  Seizing the means of production, they are not.

Don't major in political science.  That would be my counsel to these antifa apologists.  If antifa and actual Nazis ever end up in a real clash, can I guess it will be over who hates "liberals" more?

Do I need to actually say why it is these black block tactics are stupid?  Do I have to explain why no platforming is stupid?  Do I have to explain why attacking peaceful civilians - not actual nazi skinhead gangs that are really causing trouble, like antifa was established to do, but nothing beyond normies wearing "Make America Great Again" caps - is stupid?  Do I have to explain why smashing store windows and burning your own campus and urban core to the ground is stupid?  Do I have to explain why behaving this way in front of the whole world due to the reach of social media is stupid?

Let the recent spike in Milo's international profile and book sales answer that question.  

There's now a petition circulating to have antifa declared a terrorist organization.  And I don't blame the circulators of this petition one bit.  

What's suspicious about this is that, like every other regressive left-wing fad, from privilege theory to "Islamophobia" to just about any manufactured social justice grievance you can think of - cultural appropriation, safe spaces, trigger warnings, men complimenting women as harassment, attacks on due process for men accused of sex crimes, on and on and on, its emergence seems strangely choreographed. 

Amidst all the hubub, I keep reading - mainly in right wing sources, about paid protesters and conspiracy theories surrounding the Clinton Foundation, George Soros and the like.  I used to just scoff at such tinfoil hat talk.  Now I'm not so sure.  Regressive left stupidity emerges in all kinds of places almost spontaneously, and spreads like wildfire before reasonable people have even begun to respond - by which time media coverage has long since moved on.  

The silver lining, if there is any, is that liberals are now getting bashed from the left for a change.  This might just be the wake up call they need.  But then again, the emergence of political correctness was supposed to be a wake up call.  The excesses of online social justice warriors was supposed to be a wake up call.  Trump's victory was supposed to be a wake up call.  As I've recently said elsewhere, the center left has been hitting snooze on the alarm for a very long time now.  

Instead, the regressive left just keeps doubling down on the regressive.  Which isn't what we need, because enough bad crap is going to come down the pike from the Trump administration and GOP dominance at both the congressional, state and soon enough the Supreme Court level that we need to be on our game. We're heading in exactly the opposite direction.  We're getting conspiracy theories from people who should know better, that these riots were provoked by Breitbart, Yiannopolous and the Trump administration to bring about increased federal control over higher education.  Because it's easier to blame a conspiracy than it is to admit your side screwed up and really has no good ideas.

Perhaps I should consider becoming a professional protester.  George Soros and the Clinton Foundation on the one side; Trump, Bannon, Yiannopoulos and Breitbart on the other can bid against each other for my loyalty.  Kind of like Clint Eastwood's nameless protagonist in those old spaghetti westerns, playing one side against the other, a guy could make a fistful of dollars doing that.

I have no love of censorship and certainly balk at the prospect of government control over curriculum in higher education, but look at what a disaster the colleges have become in the last quarter century.  The censorship going on inside the Ivory Tower is beyond ridiculous.  Something needs to be done.  It's been left to fester for far, far too long now.

More seriously, trying to talk to left leaning people about the idiocies present on their own end of the spectrum reminds one of the words of Charles McKay in his 1841 opus Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds.  It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Is it too much to ask my fellows on the left that we think and scrutinize a little more, and goose step along with the party line and follow baseless and stupid fads a little less?