Socialists: Deplorables of the Left

Prior to Trump's election, we were all warned to fear the "basket of deplorables" that constituted a hefty portion of Trump's electoral base: racists, misogynists, homophobes, xenophobes and Islamophobes. I think there might have been some transphobes in there too. You get the picture. Trump was an evil fascist bogeyman who was going to destroy all things good in America if the ruling DNC regime were removed from power. So not surprisingly, a frustrated electorate removed them from power. Shocker.

Two years on, Trumpenreich has not materialized. Muslims and Latinos have not been rounded up and deported. Blacks and whites are not being forced into separate amenities. Women have not been relegated to the status of either marthas, econowives or, of course, handmaids. Worker's rights are getting trampled, but that's par for the course Stateside. Nothing new there.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. Increasingly, millennials are growing frustrated with their economic lot in post great-recession America, and more and more of them are expressing their dissent via an ideological outlook that one doesn't typically associate with the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Socialism.

That's right. Socialism is on the march in the good old U.S of A, of all places. And now the shoe of political moral panic is on the other foot. Now, the deplorables come from the left, and the red flag is the their banner. While CNN not so long ago tried to paint Trump up as a goose-stepping ultra nationalist, they're now asserting that Bernie Sanders once favored the wholesale nationalization of American industry. Self described socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is daily lampooned by conservative social media as a kind of leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin. Indeed, they both used the term "death panels" unironically. However, only one did so accurately.

My hope would be that anyone smart enough to roll their eyes at the idea of Trump being literally Hitler would also be smart enough to react the same way at the thought of Chairman and General Secretary Bernie Sanders becoming President of the Supreme Soviet of the American Socialist Republic, and immediately kicking off agricultural collectivization, anti-religious campaigns, and the pouring of legions of blue haired red guards into the country side to hound God fearing, gun toting red state, white skin, blue collar Americans as if they were the kulaks of the 21st century.

Because if you think anything like that is going to happen, you've lost the right to ridicule "THE RESISTANCE" for its propensity to hyperbole and overdramatization.

Yet despite all this, it's not just the right that's gotten in on this new red scare that's swept social media in the last year or so. The classy classical liberal minded blog Areo, which typically engages the noble cause of attacking campus social justice culture from the left, has recently published a piece by one Aaron Tao, urging us to "Listen to Immigrants Who Have Lived Under Socialism." Tao cites his own parents, who grew up in Maoist China, a Romanian student whose parents grew up under Ceaușescu, a student who recently left Maduro's Venezuela, as well as anti-socialist commentator and author Jordan Peterson.  All remind us of the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism.

They are not wrong. I'm not unfamiliar with the Black Book of Communism, as a matter of fact. It proudly adorns my shelf.  Yet I can't help but think that this is precisely the problem with Tao's article. It's attacking something with arguably even fewer supporters than Hitler and the Nazis have. Bad as they are, and as anyone who's ever delt with leftbook can tell you, they are insufferably bad, there just aren't that many tankies in the USA. Tao even admits that:

"For the purposes of this article, I will use the Library of Economics and Liberty’s definition of socialism: “a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.” This is synonymous with communism. The end goal of socialism is to abolish private property, free markets, exchange, prices and profits, and substitute collective ownership and decision-making to determine the allocation of resources."

I wholeheartedly support Tao's opposition to this political and economic system. And so too would Bernie Sanders. Why? The reason for this is that rhetoric aside, Bernie Sanders is a social democrat, not a Marxian communist. Big difference between the two, and it's past time the specter of communism was exorcised from the fevered nightmares of reactionaries and libertarians the nation over for once and for all.

Here's the difference: Social democrats come to power through the democratic process. They face the voters periodically as democrats and republicans do, and if they lose elections, they step down. They do not aim to seize the means of production wholesale. Typically, the most they end up doing is nationalizing a handful of key industries and essential services. Most of the economy is left in private hands.

Just in case you missed that, let me repeat it: most of the economy is left in private hands. Moreover, successive governments can simply privatize state owned enterprises that are not performing well and might be better run by the private sector.

How do I know this? Outside the United States, social democrats actually win elections and the results are, well, actually quite good more often than not. Some notable examples:

I'm Awesome. Deal with it.

Great Britain, 1945. World War 2 has recently ended and the UK is going to the polls. To the surprise of many, Conservative war hero Winston Churchill loses to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. This ends up resulting in the creation of the UK's National Health Service, as well as nationalization of several industries, making him among the most socialistic of social democrats. Due to his reforms, UK citizens got access to health care, housing and other necessities via an elaborate social welfare system, in the late 40s after the nation had been devastated by the blitz. They live longer and better, which is what conservatives and libertarians go to great lengths to tell us won't happen under socialism. In case you're wondering, Attlee hated communism. In 1951, the UK electorate voted for a Conservative government, Churchill's back in, and Labour stepped down as democratic parties in democratic societies do when they lose. No purges, no famines, no gulags.

Sure, many European social democratic parties had more radical, revolutionary and Marxist origins. But these were abandoned for various reasons, mostly because they were impractical and were achieving terrible results in the USSR and its client states. Sometimes on paper, always in practice, the social democrats were pragmatists and reformers. Perhaps too much so in some cases.

From the 1990s onward, the British Labour Party had, until the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, been existential proof of the falsehood of Conquest's and O'Sullivan's laws mandating an inevitable leftward drift in all non explicitly right wing organizations. Tony Blair's Labour Party was not Attlee's party, that's for certain. And socialist purists derided Attlee in his day in similar terms.

Elsewhere, According to Wikipedia,

"In 1959, the SPD (West German Social Democratic Party) instituted a major policy review with the Godesberg Program. The Godesberg Program eliminated the party's remaining Marxist-aligned policies and the SPD became based upon freiheitlicher Sozialismus (liberal socialism).  With the adoption of the Godsberg Program, the SPD renounced Marxist determinism and classism and replaced it with an ethical socialism based on humanism and emphasized that the party was democratic, pragmatic and reformist."

When social democrat Willy Brandt became West German Chancellor in 1969, he did not initiate a great leap forward or a cultural revolution. Instead, again according to Wikipedia:

According to Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt's domestic reform programme had accomplished more than any previous programme for a comparable period. Levels of social expenditure were increased, with more funds allocated towards housing, transportation, schools, and communication, and substantial federal benefits were provided for farmers. Various measures were introduced to extend health care coverage, while federal aid to sports organisations was increased. A number of liberal social reforms were instituted whilst the welfare state was significantly expanded (with total public spending on social programs nearly doubling between 1969 and 1975), with health, housing, and social welfare legislation bringing about welcome improvements, and by the end of the Brandt Chancellorship West Germany had one of the most advanced systems of welfare in the world.

For most of the 20th century, the Swedish social democrats and their Nordic Model were the standard bearers for social democracy, and prior to the party's more recent descent into radical feminist and open borders nonsense, they did quite well. The Scandinavian social democracies, which are not limited to Sweden but also encompass Norway and its brilliant Government Pension Fund, as well as Iceland, Denmark and Finland, consistently score at or near the top of international indices measuring overall prosperity, social equality and yes, political and economic freedom as well.

Far from being communist dungeon-states, these Nordic social democracies are a kind of capitalism that works for everyone, not just a tiny rich few. Imagine that. Even in my own home province of Alberta, Canada, the social democratic government of Premier Rachel Notley (daughter of former party leader Grant Notley) elected in 2015 has, among other things, cut child poverty in half. That's right, they've reduced hunger, not increased it. I thought resentful and peevish socialists were supposed to starve everyone to death because they hate the rich. What does Notley think she's doing? How does that work?

And crucial to all of this, so much so that it bears repeating, is that social democratic parties face the voters in periodic elections, as per the election laws of their respective lands, and step down when they lose. Plus they're constrained by the same constitutional (or comparable) factors that constrain executive and legislative branches of government in all liberal democracies. Were a social democrat to be elected President of the United States, they'd still have an independent congress, an independent judiciary, the constraints imposed by the constitution and the bill of rights and a free press, such as it is, to constrain them. And most significantly of all, an established tradition and history of democracy, which the crumbling monarchies of Russia and China didn't have when their respective communist revolutions took place.

On top of all of this, the reasons for the millennial generation's resurgent interest in socialism is often barely touched upon by anti-socialist commentators. In the Areo article, Tao does admit that

Many millennials lived through the 2007–8 financial crisis and graduated college with uncertain job prospects and crushing student loans. Gen Z (iGen), the newest kids on the block, grew up with smartphones in their pockets before they started high school and “do not remember a time before the internet.” Living in an economically uncertain world, in which anyone with a smartphone can easily document an unjustified police shooting, it is understandable that many young people are drawn towards social justice activism. 

And this is generous, compared to what your average macho reactionary libertarian has to say on the matter. I suppose that a generation faced with dismal work prospects, low wages, poor working conditions, lack of access to affordable health care and a host of other poverty related concerns should just shut up and be a good little peon because some internet tough guy with a lot of yellow and black in his profile pictures figures he's an economics major because he's read a bit of Ayn Rand, possibly Economics in One Lesson, dabbled a bit in the theories of Mises and Friedman, listened to some Jordan Peterson videos and so storms into any online space, invited or not, to sound off about how stupid left of center millennials are and how they're just resentful towards those saintly billionaires, who've acquired every dime they have because they're just so smart and so moral and just. Nothing to do with lopsided tax and trade policy and a broken trade union movement, or anything like that. They're rich because they're virtuous, end of story you commie wimps! Beginning each display of false bravado with "lol", of course.

If your millennial (or any) leftist should walk away from an interaction with this kind of jackass with a newfound appreciation for Antifa, a thought that the SJWs might be on to something (these free market tough guys are always white guys, I hate to say), and a suspicion that a gulag might not be such a bad thing, I increasingly wonder: can you really blame them? It should be noted that I do not regard Aaron Tao as one of these phony tough ancapistani types.

These boors insist that social democracy and Stalinism are indistinguishable, and are no more honest in so doing than your typical smug urban liberal Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart types are when they conflate Trump and Hitler, or when a woman's studies prof suggests that disagreeing with feminism equals misogyny. Which is not honest in the least. In all these cases it's willful dishonesty, contrived to feed red meat to the base, and they damn well know it. This may well suit the interests who benefit from the status quo and frustrate social democratic reform just fine. But it has real consequences for poor and working class Americans of all racial and demographic backgrounds who struggle to acquire basic necessities. It needs to stop.

The facts are plain here: social democracy, while not perfect, works just fine overall. Even in times where the popularity of social democratic parties wane, their core ideas do not. The performance of the Nordic countries proves that. Libertarian neckbeards have been shrieking that the sky is falling on the European welfare state for decades now. The only real concern is actually taking the hysterics seriously and buying into the ideology of neoliberal austerity. The improvements over central planning this results in are marginal.

The more the no-step snake crowd flies into hysterics trying to deny or suppress this, the more alike their SJW cousins they become as far as ideological hysteria is concerned.

Indeed, they've been at the game of baseless political hysteria a lot longer than the SJWs have. Remember the Tea Party? Remember the birthers? Remember Obama somehow managing to be a Muslim, a communist, a Nazi and a liberal all at the same time? It was old hat even then. Newt Gingrich takes that shameless playbook back into the Reagan years.

If they keep it up, they should be no more welcome than grandstanding SJWs in the company of people who want to take political discourse with the intent on solving pressing issues facing the western world at all seriously. With any luck, their shrill hysterics will backfire in like manner to the manner in which the Clinton campaign's fear mongering against the basket of deporables backfired and got Trump elected. A social democratic America can't come soon enough, in my opinion.

Aaron Tao, Jordan Peterson (himself a former social democrat, from Alberta no less) and pundits the nation over are correct to be opposed to authoritarian socialism and authoritarian leftism in general. But they should be assured also. Electing a Bernie Sanders will result in an Attlee, a Brandt or a Notley, not a Mao, a  Ceaușescu or a Maduro. America could do worse. A social democratic USA will result in considerably less poverty, not more.

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Those Classy Classical Liberalists

Work Harder. For Freedom, of Course.

YouTuber Sargon of Akkad has launched "The Liberalists" as a means of reviving classical liberal thought - the finer points of which he finally got around to hashing out on a livestream, which he'd postponed for a day due to having committed himself to dungeons and dragons. Good for him. I admire his sense of priorities. D&D is good fun, though I've had my fill of it since I first started playing the game back in the days of Reagan and Thatcher. My character was a thief - well suited to the era.  Anyway, I digress.

Liberalist-ism, if you can call it that, boils down to seven principles that would be familiar to anyone knowledgeable on classical liberal thought.  They are: individual rights, democracy, economic freedom, freedom of speech, self reliance, blind justice and secularism.  These ideas are fleshed out somewhat on the Liberalist Society blog. 

I do like classical liberalism, and think it one part of the foundation for the alt left.  One half of the equation - social democracy or democratic socialism being the other half.  So I joined the Liberalists Facebook group, of which Sargon himself is a member.  I'd encourage realist alt-leftists to do likewise.  Not as part of a group takeover but because, as I've said, classical liberalism is an important ingredient in realist alt-left thinking.  But, as I've detailed elsewhere, I also have some misgivings about what some of my fellow realist leftists have termed 'Sargonism.' 

While I think classical liberalism has many key insights regarding the nature of liberty and how polities are best constituted to protect individual rights, I likewise have misgivings about classical liberal takes on economics.  Not much liberty in a sweatshop or a workhouse, I hate to point out.  While I thought the liberalists would be good allies in the realist/alt-left's struggle to reclaim civil liberties as a center-left cause, I feared what I'd get at the Liberalists is a whole lot of the gospels of Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises.  

There is some of that, of course.  But a whole lot of Liberalists did a good job passing their intelligence checks when this question was posed:

Opinions, privatization or publicly owned services? Police, fire, ems, public transport?

Most of the answers this question got were damn near enough to restore my faith in humanity. The best news I've had in awhile.

• Public. Privatisation of essential services just leads inexorably to abuse of power.
• Too many externalities not be public, IMO. If your house burns down, there's a good chance of the fire spreading to the next house, then the next (eventually reaching mine). Or, at minimum, it creates a neighborhood blight, hurting me economically. You don't have to abandon all rational self interest to support public goods and services.  If you have the option of making it private, those who don't opt in will require some sort of free-rider carrier. So, no.  Also, the idea of private police is just... alarming.
• Privatisation will always mean that the main goal of the service will be money. How to produce more money, how to save money. Publicly funded means the main priority will be to serve the people. Ofc i believe if you can have private management to achieve the same goal, example publicly funded hospitals but private management, is the best way to go.
• It all depends on how it is done. For instance, Sask and Alberta are very similar jurisdictions, but one has government car insurance and the other uses private. The private insurance is basically twice as much with worse customer service and more inefficient administration. The government run insurance is cheaper, easier to manage, and more effective.
• All of these need to be public services.
• (my own answer)  Keep core infrastructure and essential services public. Oftentimes, they are services that are not easily provided as commodities for a profit: barriers to entry and capital requirements are high, earning potential limited, deterring investment. If there's not a sufficient market to bear numerous competitors, then the competition that is supposedly privatization's biggest advantage becomes null. Plus, does universal access to essential services not simply make for a better, more inclusive polity for all?
• So private police? so would you need insurance to be able to call the cops? what happens if you cant pay, "I'm sorry you were raped ma'am but your credit sucks, have a nice day."
• I don't think that's a good idea for essential services. Certain services shouldn't have a profit motive factored in, for moral reasons.
• The idea of private fire ems or police terrifies me, it should be a responsibility, not a business decision whether your house fire is put out or the burglary investigated or the ambulance takes you to hospital.
• From an economic perspective privatizing some services creates wasteful an redundant infrastructure so it is more efficient to keep them public. Think about the multiple fire departments in early New York. What if one has it's own set of hydrants that only one department can use, so the other departments install there own hydrants so now we have multiple hydrants on every block.
• This is why we only have one provider for certain services here in the US, like water of gas, because installing multiple pipes underground for every house is terrible wasteful. This solves one problem but creates another, a captive market. This allows the utilities to price fix. Making these public and thus removing the profit motive would fix this, but it would add more bureaucracy which might be a net bad.
• The privatization of essential services is always exploitative to citizenry. The government has a responsibility to ensure basic protections and freedoms of it's citizens. Police, Fire departments, health, incarceration, all of these should not be designed for profit.

There were, quite naturally, some dissidents:

• Imo, looking at the handling of other services compared to government run programs I think privatization could lead to streamlining of a lot of these things. It may then come with a price tag. Especially public transport and the police force.
• University libraries vs public libraries is the only one that comes to mind right off. But as it stands, government run services are kind of beyond the law. Given infrastructure status and water treatment. I feel that If these were taken over by a company that is trying to make a profit, the motivation to do it properly to turn the dollar would be higher. As it is now, the taxes are already paid up-front, so there's no drive to do the jobs in a timely manner or with any form of quality.
• It comes down to how its done. Voluntarism and small government sound nice.
• As individualists it would be hypocritical to deny an individual the freedom to start their own security, transport, fire service etc. Or force that individual to pay for such services through force (taxation)

Admittedly, privatization isn't always bad.  Stopped clocks are right twice a day.  My home province privatized its liquor stores (why they were state run to begin with, I'm not sure) and the results weren't bad.  But privatization more often than not tends to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The responses to this question were positive and hopeful, but the Libearlists and the broader cultural libertarian movement remains a lightning rod for the Von Mises fan club, which has been a powerful force on the internet almost since its inception. Libertarianism is not liberal; it is essentialist and dogmatic to the core. It sees liberty entirely in terms of the absence of government, and ignores or rationalizes away the very real capacity for private sources of power to tyrannize over individuals, especially if joined to a laissez faire capitalist system.  

The millennials in particular will not be drawn away from the excesses of intersectional social justice by those who take a devil-take-the-hindmost attitude towards economics and inequality more generally.  Moreover, being made to choose between freedom of speech and social security is a choice no one should have to make.

Libertarianism has as firm a grip on the young male mind as feminist theory has on the young female mind, especially on social media. It is a toss-up as to which doctrine is more harmful. Both dragons need slaying, and the campaign promises to be a long one. 

Arm yourself with the facts. Powerful arguments against SJW and Libertarian excesses
Social Democracy for the 21st Century

Additional Commentary from the Alternative Left
Beware Sargonism
The Theory of Surplus Value
Do You Even Socialist, Bro?

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Why I am Left Wing

This little gem turned up in my Facebook feed the other day.  The meme on the left - fittingly, and the response from the comments.  This was a typical response, most other critical responses said roughly similar things.  

Neither side really captures the essence of it.  Many leftists no doubt think of themselves in the manner described in the meme.  And there's nothing wrong with it.  Universal health care, education, housing and assistance to the poor are fine things in and of themselves.  The problem with standard leftist arguments is that they assume the right wing disagrees in principle.  Not necessarily.  The ends, as far as the right winger is concerned, do not necessarily justify the means.  That's the basis of the right's objection, and the impasse they find themselves at.

Fair enough, but the right winger is not conceptually framing this properly.  This kind of vulgar economism underlies a lot of right wing fallacies.  The problem with the right wing counterarguments boil down to this: The right winger thinks of socialism as robbing Peter to pay Paul.  This isn't what it is.  It is both Peter and Paul paying into something that both can use when both have need of it.  I bold and italicize this so that its importance can be impressed upon you.  It is crucial to understand this.  

The left has, in part, itself to blame for the right's successful misframing of social democracy.  Their own framing of social welfare is that they're going to make "the rich" and "the corporations" pay for programs that are intended to help the needy because they are "not greedy bastards."  They're setting themselves up for the right's "robbing Peter to pay Paul" counter criticisms.  A better way to phrase support for social programs than would be "everybody pays into what everybody benefits from."  

This kind of socialization of expense and benefit is not necessarily the best way to provide for all goods and services in an economy.  There are plenty of things for which people can and should provide themselves, government bureaucracies come with their own pitfalls and private incentives and capital markets matter in economic activities and can't be dispensed with without serious economic chaos.  In my experience, the advocates of pure revolutionary socialism do not understand what it is they're plugging for on anything but the most superficial level, and are usually intersectional social justice warriors beneath a thin red and/or black veneer for that reason.  So central planning is not what I advocate.  Full out worker's control would be fine if the working class actually wanted it, but in my experience they're content to have professional management run things.

But sometimes it makes more sense to socialize, both from an economic and a social point of view.  This is generally the case with core infrastructure that is widely if not universally used and makes other kinds of economic activity possible.  Sometimes, as with public health insurance, the wisest thing is to realize superior economies of scale and nationalize it in the form of a universal public healthcare scheme.  

That in mind, let's have a look at the comment's counter-claims against the original meme.

Your parents never taught you to respect private property ... A straw man and an ad-hominem.  There is nothing about belief in social welfare that would imply this, unless its advocates also insist they be exempted from the taxation required to pay for it.  A person willing to pay their share into a public insurance scheme or for social infrastructure that all people make use of, and when socialization really is the better way to provide said infrastructure, is not showing a lack of respect for private property, but is giving it a higher valuation than the "annoying kid" who does not recognize his own responsibility to pay into what all make use of.

It means you are an ideologue, who wants things based in wishful thinking rather than rationality.  This is no less true of the fiscal libertarian, who thinks unbridled free markets the solution to all ills and an axiomatic moral principle that is beyond question.  If you are not such a libertarian, then congratulations!  You are a pragmatist who doesn't insist upon either privatization or socialization on principle, but rather on the basis of what is most fitting for the market under consideration.

It means you don't see the difference between education and indoctrination.  And that concerns public health care and education how, precisely?  Again, this can be said of any ideologue.  While there is a lot of dogmatism on the left, especially on the cultural left these days, dogmatism is not an inherently leftist characteristic.  Again, free market fundamentalists in their think tanks are no less guilty of this.

It means you care enough about the sick and disabled to give them other people's stuff, but not enough to help out yourself.  Go back and reread the bolded and italicized text in my third paragraph above.

It means you are less fortunate and want others to care for you instead of working hard to get out of it.  It means being wise enough to know that misfortune can happen to anyone, and collectively insuring ourselves against at least the worst catastrophes might not be a bad idea.  It means that in the real world, no one "gets out of it" or even comes at all into fortune and wealth entirely of their own efforts - though this is important - but rather with the assistance of a support network.  Perhaps the objecting commentator is fortunate enough to have a private support network that can help him out when things go off the rails in his world, and thereby takes for granted his relative wealth and fortune.  Perhaps having safety nets in place can mean the difference between the misfortunate being able to get back on their feet again via hard work, and being completely mired in poverty and hardship due to the lack of leverage in the marketplace that marks those clustered at the bottom of the social hierarchy.  

It means you want to use buzzwords to signal your virtue while not doing a thing about the things you say you want to stop. This is sadly true of many on the left, again especially surrounding social and cultural issues.  But again, willingness to pay into a social program intended to combat a social evil hardly constitutes "not doing a thing."  

Good for you, you understand there is suffering and want to change it. Problem is, you are going about it all wrong. "Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you have fed him for life". The left knows only how to give fish, and doesn't bother with the teaching part, until it runs out of fish and collapses. After all, teaching people to help themselves would be "blaming the victim" or such other nonsense.  Rubbish, for the most part.  

If the left "didn't bother with the teaching part" then why do so many of them advocate for free college (which I don't personally support), universal public education or for full employment.  The left can thrive on learned helplessness, and yet again, I think they do this more where cultural issues and identity politics are concerned.  This is why I'm alt-left rather than mainstream left and oppose these kinds of politics.  

Reasonable people on the left are all for "teach a man to fish and feed him for life."  They also know he has to eat in the meantime.  They also know that trawlers are too capital intensive for even the most industrious of fishermen to procure for themselves by their own efforts alone, and mere nets and fishing rods cannot compete with them, especially after the stocks have been depleted.  

For a relatively small portion of the population to own entire fleets of trawlers to then tout the morality of self reliance to those who do not seems a tad disingenuous and self serving, to put it mildly.  Doubly so if it was much more by fortune than by effort that they got to become part of the majority shareholding class to begin with.  Perhaps it is they who have been the true beneficiaries of fiscal policy that has robbed Paul to pay Peter.

It is not always for lack of knowledge of how to fish or the willingness to do so himself that it is necessary to give a man a fish and feed him for a day.  You can teach a man how to fish and feed him for a lifetime if fishing rods and nets are as far as the need or ability to fish can practically go.  In a capitalist economy, however, a share in the fishing fleet might just be what's required. 

Beware Sargonism

Lord Keynes over at Social Democracy for the 21st Century is a sharp fellow.  He makes the following observation:

Ever since Gamergate, there has been a newfound hostility to SJWism, Cultural Leftism, and Third Wave feminism amongst some Liberals and leftists, especially the young.
This movement has manifested itself in the popular YouTube personalities like these: 

(1) Sargon of Akkad

(2) Dave Rubin, The Rubin Report

(3) Gad Saad 

The most popular of these are probably Sargon of Akkad and Dave Rubin.  The ideology of these latter two is rapidly degenerating into Classical Liberalism and libertarianism-lite, because they lack any alternative perspective on economics.

Keynes later warns us:

"Sargonism,” if we can call it that, is an intellectual dead end, and a Hayekian-lite rehash of the libertarian movement of the early 2010s. Don’t be seduced."

Sargon of Akkad (the Kekistani, not the Mesopotamian) comes in for a lot of flak and criticism, most of it unjustified.  On any given day, he's attacked from the neoreactionary right for being a cuck and a liberal sellout.  From the left he's attacked for being a nazi, a misogynist and an all round garbage person.  Welcome to the club, Sargon.  If you're catching flak from both sides, it means you're doing something right.

But Lord Keynes's issues are not so easily dismissed, although Sargon does come across as recognizing some need for curbs on the excesses of capitalism.  But this is not merely about Sargon himself, but about the recent surge in opposition to the excesses of cultural leftism overall.  Just about every anti-SJW space I've seen online seems prone to a sort of rightward drift.  The SJW criticism of libertarianism and liberalism as a sort of camel's nose that once let in the tent is quickly followed by a more decidedly reactionary and even hateful body does seem to verify itself with disheartening frequency in anti-SJW spaces.  It was largely for this reason that I decided to involve myself in the alt-left.

The issues that I have with the cultural libertarian and skeptical communities are basically these: 1) I distrust the libertarian stance on economics and 2) I saw and continue to see these movements and their supporters repeatedly overshoot the mark in their opposition to political correctness and descend into genuinely hateful and spiteful views. It's one thing to rightly object to the campus feminist's love of censorship or bouts of misandry. It's quite another to attack her personally, mock her appearance and weight, and engage in doxing, threats and the like.  Like the social justice warriors, the cultural libertarians - who inevitably succumb to capture from the alt-right, are essentially postmodern: they're movements of identity and self serving moral relativism, not movements of principle.

Another problem with both the SJWs and the Alt-Right is that both are economically blind, and this blindness is actually driving a lot of the toxic narratives on both sides. No, Ms. Intersectional Feminist and Mr. Neoreactionary, neither the patriarchy nor the Elders of Zion are out to ruin your life. You're victims of rapacious global capitalism.  This is exactly where the unions were telling us we'd end up back in the mid 1990s when globalization, deregulation, privatization and free trade were touted as the ultimate panacea. 

The social injustices sustained by women and people of color, as well as the economic dislocation suffered by working class white males, had no means of articulating itself via economic theory, so the only thing either one could do was to keep doubling down on a cultural or identitarian critique that has no chance of addressing their real grievances because the whole realm of political economy is essentially invisible to them.  But, as long as these grievances are not effectively addressed, these movements will continue to exist and will only grow more strident.  The situation seemed hopeless to me until I saw the public enthusiasm for the campaign of Bernie Sanders for POTUS. Of course Sanders was far from perfect, but he showed that there was potential for a candidate running as a socialist, even in the USA.

The anti-SJW left is in a tricky position. It's turned out to be difficult to disentangle the culture of leftism - the revolutionary romanticism, as I think of it - from the actual economics of publicly or cooperatively owned (or at least regulated) economic institutions. It comes naturally to me because I have actual experience in housing cooperatives, labour unions and non-profit societies that are actually run by the same kinds of people who operate heavy machinery and crunch numbers in cubicles all day, instead of deconstructing the patriarchal elements of Shakespeare or LARPing as anarchist revolutionaries on college campuses. The real problem, though, is that the organs of the left have long since been hijacked by the kinds of people who figure that African blacks were the real lost tribes of Israel or that all penetrative sexual intercourse equates to rape. This loss of direction began innocently enough back in the 1970s, but is likely to be next to impossible to recover from except over a long time span, regardless of how harmful it is to the left. Narratives hold a powerful grip on the human mind.

Cultural libertarians and the skeptical community have a mirror image of the same problem. Their admirable message that free speech should be absolute and that the mob and the state have no business in the bedrooms of the nation gets too easily hijacked by people who figure a Jewish conspiracy is behind the decision to abandon the gold standard, or that the emergent trans-acceptance movement is the latest wedge of a cultural Marxist plot obsessed with destroying western civilization. 

Plus, neither the SJWs nor the alt-right have any kind of real answers to the economic side of either rising inequality or of national decline.  The entry level libertarian or Marxist platitudes they're respectively prone to expressing aren't going to cut it. Beneath the veneer of admiration for Che Guevara or Augusto Pinochet is virtually zero understanding of how macroeconomics actually work in any real appreciable way.   

People like Lord Keynes and myself are in a difficult position. We are navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, and the raft we're doing it on is not at all that seaworthy.  Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin and their ilk are one half of the map we need to not crash upon the rocks.  But if we don't likewise want to sink and drown, we'd do well to steer clear of the economic ideas Hayek and Friedman.  Civil libertarianism and a solid regulatory welfare state cannot be mutually exclusive.  In fact, they need each other.

Lord Keynes blogs regularly at Social Democracy for the 21st Century and can also be found on Twitter.  Highly recommended.

Also on Samizdat Broadcasts

Ernest Everhard on Economics and Class Struggle, now on Samizdat Broadcasts!