What Jordan Peterson gets Right and Wrong About the Regressive Left

Controversial University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson begins this video thus:

Now the Marxist ideas are predicated on the fundamental assumption that, I would say, individualistic western capitalist culture is corrupt beyond redemption, and that it's fundamentally erected to nothing but benefit those who have maximum power.  So then you get the racial issue like white privilege and you get the patriarchy idea, that it's white men in particular who've created this only for themselves and that all of the processes that are used to support this system, including logic, rationality and dialogue, all of those things, are only offshoots of the desire for that small group of power mad creatures to maintain their dominance over the rest of the world, and the only reason that there's any wealth associated with that is because the wealth was generated as a result of oppression.  Now, the thing is is that story is partially true.

What parts would be true, I wonder?  That Marx's works critiqued white privilege or patriarchy?  These had very little to do with Marx, for whom oppression was a matter of economic relations, as were most things. He and Engels touched on the implications of women's reproductive role in their broader subordination to men (Engels would pursue this much more thoroughly than Marx), but otherwise had little to say about identity and culture except that it was ultimately derivative from economics.  Base and superstructure, remember?

Patriarchy did not enter into the leftist lexicon until the late 1960s and early 70s, with Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, published in 1970 being exemplary, and white male privilege would have until feminist theorist Peggy McIntosh unpacked that knapsack in 1989.  In both cases, more than a full century after the publication of Das Kapital.

A more apt comparison would be with Lenin, and his authoritarian notions of a vanguard party that would exist only to advance the interests of the social class whose identity it usurped in order to justify its extremely machiavellian and opportunistic approach to gaining and wielding power for power's sake.  Whether what happened in the USSR was truly in line with Marx's hopes for the future development of man is highly debatable.  Replace a romanticized notion of a red flag waving working class with a romanticized construction of women, people of color and other marginalized identities to emerge out of the new social movements of the summer of love era, led by a vanguard of academics schooled in critical race theory and feminist theory, and you have the basis of today's SJW regressive left.

What are these "Marxist ideas" which hold that logic and rationality were to be dismissed as tools of the white male oppressor?  Really?  Marx regarded his take on historical materialism as a scientific means of understanding history and society.  Its core problem might be that it's too logical and rational.  Two words that all too often fail to accurately describe human behavior.  That it claimed a foolproof means of understanding human social organization.  This was precisely the kind of thing that postmodernism, with its rejection of "metanarratives" and skepticism towards absolute truth and universal morality arose in opposition to.  And this is what's crucial here.  Postmodernism arose out of disillusionment with Marxism (and other strands of western philosophy), not as an extension of it.

Likewise for critical theory.  While it began with a view of social conflict between oppressed and oppressors as an axiomatic principle of social organization that was modelled on Marx's analysis of class conflict, their critique went well beyond mere relations of production to posit that western civilization itself was somehow fundamentally wicked and oppressive. This view was based on the observations that nationalism and racism seemed to trump class consciousness during the era of the world wars, just as Trump uses nationalism and, some would say, racism to similar effect today.  However, the idea that culture and identity, not economic relations, drove history and social relations was a 180 degree deviation from core Marxist thinking.

Leftist identity politics arose out of a quasi Marxist oppressed/oppressor dynamic, but crucially divorces the concept of class struggle from class itself, defined by Marx in terms of relations of production.  Privilege and marginalization in identity politics become intrinsic characteristics of certain racial and gender identities, and so no means of resolving the contradiction via politics - through the creation of a democratic system of universal suffrage and individual rights or via economics - via the social ownership of capital, becomes possible.  What we are left with, then, is a darwinian struggle between the races, defined by relationships of zero-sum adversity.  While it won't be phrased specifically in this way, implied is the notion that noble races must strive against naturally exploitative races for mastery of the world.

Where have we seen this before?

It's worth noting that the whole reason that the fascists and Nazis of early 20th century Europe hated both socialists and liberals is because the primacy of identity and race was to take a backseat to universal ideas of liberty and equality.   This is why Hitler and Mussolini railed against them back in the early 20th century, and why paleo-cons and the alt-right go so wrong when they attack "cultural Marxism" today.  Cultural Marxism is an inherent contradiction in terms.  Any philosophy in which culture and identity are to be axiomatic in social relations, that philosophy ceases to be, by definition, Marxist.

Today's regressive left, which Professor Jordan Peterson rightly criticizes, doesn't hold to postmodern philosophy or Marxism in any principled sense.  Much like their predecessors in Bolshevik Russia and Fascist Europe, today's militant feminist and critical race theorists cherry pick Marxist and postmodern kinds of ideas for their own ideological convenience.  Marxism and postmodernism both have their flaws, but these flaws are not what is wrong with the regressive left.

What drives them is no core philosophical or moral convictions at all, but rather raw machiavellian collectivist egocentrism and opportunism.  To advance their own group interests ahead of all else, at all costs.  They must be stopped, but before that, they must first be properly understood.  This will not be successfully done by a reactionary right that can't let go of its cold war era obsessions with anti-Marxism.

Why did Hitler Lose the War?

Any discussion of why Germany lost WW2 is likely to result in a long list of strategic errors that Hitler committed, and perhaps a few strokes of genius on part of the Allies. Hitler should have captured the British expeditionary force at Dunkirk.  He shouldn't have invaded the Soviet Union before having first an armistice with the British.  He shouldn't have declared war on the United States. He should have better prepared for the Russian winter.  He shouldn't have forbid his generals, especially in the east, strategic withdrawals, nor should he have meddled in command decisions nearly as much as he did.  For their part, the victorious allies managed to break the enigma code and better coordinated with one another strategically, amongst other things.  So on and so on.

There's merit to these claims, of course, though agreement among historians as to their relative weights of importance on the grand scheme of things is by no means universal.  These arguments cut both ways, mind you.  What if peace in Chamberlain's time ended after the Austrian Anschluss or Munich crisis? What if Hitler squared off against a France that actually had the will to fight and fight hard as it theoretically could have, or at least wasn't caught off guard by Hitler's implementation of Manstein's strategy of striking through the Ardennes forest?  What if Stalin hadn't ignored the numerous warnings of Hitler's impending attack, and what if he hadn't so thoroughly thinned out his officer corps or not been in the process of reorganizing his forces, possibly in anticipation of a surprise attack of his own against Germany because he damn well knew the Germans were planning one, when Barbarossa was launched?  Blunders are not restricted to one side or the other in war, and a fair treatment of the 'what-ifs' has to allow for both sides not making their worst mistakes.

So it's not so clear that defeat for European fascism boiled down to this or that strategic or tactical error.  Some would suggest that the war was unwinnable from the get-go, or at least from the time of Operation Barbarossa.  Perhaps the disparities in population, territorial size and resources enjoyed by the USSR vis-a-vis Nazi Germany were simply insurmountable.  But the problems that the Axis had went beyond the more obvious factors of demographics, supply, logistics and command.

Germany had the most potent military machine in the world at the outbreak of hostilities.  The commanders, troops and equipment of the Greater Germanic Reich were top rate and it didn't face adversaries who were simply impossible to beat.  Despite being larger and more populous, the USA and the USSR were far from unbeatable, and both were defeated or at least fought to a standstill in the 20th century by relatively minor powers, so it's not like the military machine that the likes of Rommel and Manstein commanded could not possibly have beaten them.  Victory in war is not all about comparable sizes in population or resources, though these are doubtlessly important.  The will to fight is crucial, and not something that either postwar superpower was always able to create and sustain indefinitely, as the Americans later discovered in Vietnam and the Soviets learned in Afghanistan.

In any war, much depends on the objectives and the overarching strategy employed by the supreme commanders.  In particular, the role played by the official ideology of the state in determining what those objectives and the strategies used to achieve them will be.  And that's where the real story of Hitler's defeat rests.

People today who would take an interest in rehabilitating Hitler's image and ideology would do well to take heed here.  For ultimately, Hitler lost the war for one single overarching reason.  For as UK military historian Andrew Roberts puts it in his 2009 opus The Storm of War, "Germany lost WW2 because Hitler was a indefatigable, unregenerative Nazi."  The truth of this statement reveals itself progressively as the war unfolds.

The problems this caused began well before the war.  Consider the fact that up until 1933, the world center for nuclear research had been in Gottingen, in the German state of Lower Saxony.  The leading physicists involved in nuclear research were predominantly Jewish and not sympathetic to Nazi thought.  Thus they were expelled, or fled voluntarily to the United States.  The Jewish man whose name has become a byword for intelligence: Albert Einstein, immigrated to the USA after the man whose name certainly is not be a byword for intelligence: Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany.

Well, perhaps that's not entirely fair.  Hitler was not unintelligent.  He had, among other mental gifts, an almost savantish memory when it came to technical facts about weaponry and hardware: the water displacement of ships, gauges of trains, maximum ranges of various weapons and similar things.  Nor was he strictly speaking irrational - at least not until the very end of the war when he ranted and raved in his bunker and issued orders to units that no longer existed.  Hitler was not always the military imbecile his generals would later make him out to be. He sometimes supported the good decisions of his generals, such as Manstein's plan to have the main thrust against France be through the Ardennes Forest, and was not incapable of strategic and tactical soundness.

Hitler was neither insane nor stupid.  He was something worse than either.  He was an ideological fanatic, who was utterly convinced that the ends justified any means used to achieve them, and created about himself an echo chamber of sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. At times he even evidenced a sort of messiah complex, and claimed that he was chosen by "providence" to achieve his extremely lofty and ambitious goals within his own lifetime.  His uncanny successes in the 1931 to 1941 timespan seemed as if to conspire with this illusion, and so it should not surprise us quite so much when the entire nation drank the Kool-Aid, as it were, in the early to mid 1940s.

For his part, Einstein would later go on to affix his signature to a letter advising President Eisenhower of the potential of nuclear weapons, resulting in the eventual development of the Manhattan Project.

This and this alone may well have made world war unwinnable for Hitler.  A decisive advantage would be gained by whichever power first developed nuclear weaponry, and because the virulent anti semitism of Hitler and his Nazis drove the best and brightest nuclear physicists off the continent, that power was to be America, not Germany.  So at best, a cold-war style stalemate with the US is the very most that Nazi Germany could ever have hoped for.

This same antisemitism alienated not merely the nuclear physicists, but the millions of other Jews who had been patriotic enough during WW1.  This same antisemitism that drove the SS to divert an admittedly small number of its own forces, though a force still more useful actually fighting in the war, to slaughtering in the millions people who otherwise could have shored up declining industrial production at precisely the time when it was most needed.  To say nothing of the rail and industrial capacity similarly wasted on mass slaughter rather than supplying and reinforcing his forces.

Hitler would later claim that posterity would thank him for his efforts against the Jews, and hopefully be willing to carry on his work.  One wonders whether the hosannas sung to der Fuhrer on 4chan's politically incorrect forums or in YouTube video comments sections are worth the destruction his genocidal mania wrought on millions of innocent people, including his own who lost the war as a result?  Do antisemitic idiots raving on social media about cultural Marxism make it all worth while to old Adolf, in whatever corner of Hell he happens to be burning in?

Asking why Hitler invaded the USSR before having first subdued Great Britain misses the whole point of why the war was fought as far as Hitler was concerned.  This question assumes that one is looking at the war from a military strategy rather than a Nazi ideological standpoint, and der Fuhrer was using the later lens.  His real objectives, as outlined in Mein Kampf, were these:

• Living space in the east.
• Toppling the bolshevik government in Russia.
• Ethnic cleansing of the Jews

All of these objectives were central to Nazism, and depended upon one another.  There's a certain intersectionality, if I may borrow the term, about these goals.  They intersect on the need to invade Russia in order for them to be accomplished.  It should also have been easy to accomplish, or so they thought.  After all, France was far tougher to beat in WW1 than Russia, and France fell easily enough in 1940 so how tough could Russia possibly be, especially with unmanly and non-Aryan Judeo-Bolsheviks running the place?  Following the Wehrmacht's sterling performance in Poland, Norway, the low countries and in France especially, in contrast to the Soviet Red Army's shameful performance in the winter war against Finland, I suppose you can't blame the Germans - notice I didn't say Hitler specifically, for his high command was much less opposed to the idea than their postwar alibis would have you believe - for thinking it was going to be a cakewalk.  

Hence, why it didn't matter if Great Britain were knocked out of the war or not, nor how this was to occur.  The USSR was sure to fall easily, and this would cause Churchill to come to his senses and sue for peace, so that the British Empire, of which Hitler was fond due to its being white anglo-saxon, could live in peace with a German hegemony on the continent.  Or so Der Fuhrer thought and hoped.  Like so many of his thoughts and hopes, it would turn out to be catastrophically wrong, and rooted in the absurdity of racial ideology, not reality.

This is also why diplomatic means were eschewed in preference to raw force and brutality, especially once the eastern campaign began.  There was no consideration of allying with the Poles, Ukrainians or even disaffected Russians in a campaign aimed solely at taking down the deeply unpopular communist government in Moscow and replacing it with something everyone could better live with, or some other rational and attainable goal.  As far as Nazism is concerned, anticommunism was never really about being opposed to communism as a system of government or economics - "national socialism" was actually quite a close cousin to Stalin's take on communism, "socialism in one country."  Note the fact they're virtually identical linguistically.  To the Nazi mind, from the pages of Mein Kampf to the edgelords of 4chan, communism was always a codeword for internationalism, effeminacy and cosmopolitanism.  Themselves, in turn, code words for Jewishness.  

The master race does not ally with inferior slavs.  Rather, it forces their backs to the wall and thus motivates them to fight to the last and fight hard to drive out the hostile invader.  One wonders how hard you have to try to bully and abuse the Ukrainian and Russian peasantry into actually preferring Stalin; famines, purges and all, over your own invading forces?  Yet hats off to Hitler and his SS for actually managing it.  Thus the war in the east was condemned to become a meat grinder that naturally could only be won by the side that had more manpower, resources and land to sacrifice on the altar of attrition warfare.

That side was not Nazi Germany, especially after Stalin began getting his act together militarily, after Stalingrad.

Everything that followed was ancillary to those core points, and would merely have hastened or delayed the inevitable, as the case may be.  August of 1945 is the deadline on any other outcome post December of '41, whatever other decisions could have been made and outcomes achieved by anyone.  For reasons outlined above, this is when the bomb was ready for delivery, and Fatman and Little Boy would most likely have been detonated over German rather than Japanese cities by that point.

The core tenets of Nazism, inseparable from Hitler's character which was so instrumental in his rise to power in the 1930 to 1940 timespan, wherein he was fortunate enough to not face unified and determined opposition, condemned him to bloody failure from 1941 onwards, when he did face determined opposition. 

Yet even in the face of defeat for reasons that would be obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of military acumen - the populations and economies of the UK, USA and USSR make quite clear why their victory was inevitable - Hitler's coup-de-grace, delivered amidst his infamous deluded rantings (Fegelein!  Fegelein!  Fegelein!) was to condemn the German people to death and desolation for their failure to achieve his absurd and atrocious goals.  The so called Nero Decree, issued in March of 1945 and fortunately deliberately disobeyed by then minister of armaments and war production Albert Speer, was to destroy all German facilities and infrastructure in advance of the coming allies, along with forced marches of his populations from west to east, where hopefully (in his rotting mind) their surrender would be to the advance of the harsh Soviets, rather than the relatively more lenient western allies.  

That's what happens when you're not the master race and fail in your historic destiny. 

Something to consider before you start thinking Hitler might be edgy, or even that he did nothing wrong, even if it is "Just about the memes, bro."  

Alt Right vs. Alt Left

According to Alt-Right blogger Vox Day:

"The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy."

If this is the Alternative Right, what then would be the Alternative Left?

The Alt Left believes Enlightenment civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its own foundational pillars.  Of these, the first is reason and rationality, the second is individual liberty and the third is the enlightenment era philosophical tradition.

This promises no panacea, and often results in tension between competing ideals of the good.  The libertarian/individualist traditions and the egalitarian/collectivist traditions - think Adam Smith vs. Karl Marx for example, are often at odds with one another.  But common to both in the end is a commitment to a rationalistic world view and a belief in concepts such as scientific and social progress, however imperfectly these are often expressed or implemented.

We are skeptical of religions as dogmatic systems and romanticism (in its original meaning) and are likewise skeptical of deterministic and closed systems of "rationalist" thought such as Marxism and Randian objectivism - though ideas may be taken from both if warranted.  The labels of reason and rationality cannot be applied to closed and non falsifiable systems of thought, and individual liberty is not upheld by anyone who would demand the sacrifice of human well being to a dogmatic insistence on either market or plan.

It would be easy and correct to respond that man does not live by reason alone.  Fundamental to man's nature is the need for meaning and purpose which often find themselves expressed in the forms of religion, identity, artistry, creativity and mythology.  It is because of and not in spite of these needs that enlightenment civilization must be upheld.  The absence of liberty and reason in theocratic and fascistic spaces testify to this.  It is for the sake of poetry and spirituality, of philosophy and the arts that the foundations of society should be reason, liberty and enlightenment philosophies.  It is not the case that the alt-left eschews questions of identity and spirituality in favor of a narrowly economic and rationalistic conception of man.  Rather that a rationalistic and free social order is an essential foundation for man to satisfy his spiritual and philosophical yearnings.

There are those who assert that the enlightenment has failed, and advance a "dark enlightenment" calling for a return to tradition, religion and monarchy.  This is fundamentally misguided in that the neo-reactionary critique accurately targets not modernism, but postmodernism - or at least the bastardized implementation thereof, and its own neoreaction is really just a different version of the same thing: the replacement of reason, liberty and philosophy with identitarian subjectivism, tribalism and fanaticism.

To these ends, it is clear that the majority of the self described Alt-Left adheres, above all, to the disentangling of romanticism from leftist thought, and it is this that satisfies our definition of both alternative and left wing.  To this end:

·      We favor the redressement of the extremes of economic inequality and corporate power, not the quasi-religious glorification of revolution for its own sake. 

·      We favor equality of right and - ideally - opportunity for women and people of color, not the quasi religious glorification of the foreign and the feminine. 

·      We favor conservationism and environmental sustainability, not the quasi religious glorification of “Mother Earth” or back-to-the-land utopianism.

·      An approach to reform that emphasises implementable policy, not some or another kind of change of consciousness.

Vox Day would see the unseating of a democratic polity marked – in the words of conservative luminary Russell Kirk - by division between “all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal” in favor of a polity marked by division between “men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage.”

It should be apparent to any reasonable person that this is the forcing of a choice of evils by means of a false dilemma, and one not marked by greatly different choices in any event.  Ultimately, would not a “genetic heritage” be every bit as binding and deterministic in the long run as an “enduring moral order in the universe” and a “constant human nature” if not more so? 

The neo-reactionaries have observed the morass that the postmodern regressive left has inflicted on western civilization via its capture of academia and mass media, and advance in defiance to it merely a belief in either ethnic or racial nationalism, or a belief in a reassertion of religious traditionalism or fundamentalism.  Utterly absent is any rational analysis of either the institutional structure of the organs that propagate culture in the west, the philosophical underpinnings of regressive left thought nor the strategies employed by the regressive left to gain the influence that it has gained.  Meme warfare - essentially online culture jamming - is child’s play compared to hegemony at the governance level of the very internet platforms whereon the memes are hosted and spread.

Due to their mutual faith in identity above all, the failure of both the reactionary right and the regressive left alike should be a foregone conclusion.  But that failure threatens to be very costly, and presents a fundamental threat to the western tradition that neoreaction so claims to cherish and want to uphold but simultaneously undermines, and that the regressive left claims to despise and wish to supplant but simultaneously depends on.

Erroneous philosophical foundations will not produce polities that last.  The extent to which western civilization has declined is quite proportionate to the extent to which its academics and professors extol their “genetic heritage” in preference to their responsibility to understand art, science and philosophy in any sort of nuanced and sophisticated way.  One look at a black studies or a women’s studies department makes that perfectly clear, and a white male version of the same thing will only hasten this decline.

The great demarcation in modern politics is between men and women who uphold a humanistic vision of reason, liberty and philosophy, and those who uphold a tribalist vision of fanaticism, authoritarianism and dogma.  In the later camp, it does not fundamentally matter if one’s loyalty is to the white race or the black, heteronormative machismo or radical feminism, the Christian Church, Islamic Sharia or state Atheism, libertarian capitalism or socialist planning.  When tribe, dogma or ideology supersede humanity, reason and philosophy, the end is always a bloodbath and the beginning is denial that we have a choice between the first three and the second three options.

No need to Falsely Tar Antifa. They're Their Own Worst Enemies.

A lot of false nonsense has come out of 4chan and similar circles regarding Antifa, such as a Snopes recent expose of faked Antifa flyers calling for the murder of white children.  Other hoaxes have involved a flyer from Emerald City Antifa warning people against dating white people, a man being stabbed for allegedly having a “fascist haircut” and a phony “Antifa manual” that appeared in, among other places, a site that equates Antifa with the alt left. 

Don’t believe any of it. 

While I worry about Antifa's propensity to mob rule and vigilante violence, let's keep in mind what they profess to be up against here.  While actual neo-Nazi activity in America is very low and quite marginal, the history of the appeasement of the Nazis both inside the Weimar Republic and, later from Britain and France during the 1930s should teach a clear lesson. Had Hitler been stopped much earlier in his career, and there were countless opportunities to do this right up until the 1938 German annexation of Czechoslovakia, the inevitable war against him would have been far less bloody.  Those who would take the fight to a resurgent Nazism before it's allowed to take real roots have a strong historical case to back them up.

But so too do Antifa's critics.

The good cause that is fighting fascism does not excuse Antifa from the very real dumb things they do.  Plus a lot of the false flags being carried out against Antifa, while not justifiable in and of themselves, are carried out because the nature of hard line ideological movements make them especially vulnerable to those kinds of tactics, as well as rule out the more moderate forms of dialogue and debate.  The actions of 4chan and other right wing sources, despite their own glaring disconnects from reality, shouldn't surprise us.  We should rather be surprised that it is 4chan and not the FBI that are carrying these kinds of actions.  This is how radical politics have played out in the west and in America in particular for a long time now. Many parallels with the new left of the 1960s and 70s burning itself out on ideological excesses abound here.

It might well behoove Antifa to adopt some semblance of a formal national structure and issue a statement of principles, a manifesto or something of the like outlining precisely what they believe and how they hope to go about achieving their goals. This could include a statement to the effect that persons who are not fascists have nothing to fear from them. They'd do well to resolve their differences with Trump supporters through debate or the ballot box, and make clear that they'll fight only in self defense at this time.

The decentralized and utopian nature of the far left in America mitigates against this kind of thing happening, however.  Especially so given the Manichean worldview that's so typical of extremist thinking in general.  There can be no negotiation with pure evil, and that being anything other than themselves.  The western left, from Antifa to its antecedents in Occupy Wall Street to their antecedents in anti-WTO protests and going all the way back to 19^th century communal utopians, have a long history of utopian naivety and reliance on ideological purism for movement cohesion. There’ve been exceptions, of course, but they had their own problems, such as the Communist Party USA parroting the Soviet era Kremlin’s line on damn near everything. 

But, by and large, English speaking radicals have tended to eschew the procedure and organization of parliamentary institutions in favor of an admittedly well intended but ultimately ineffective commitment to purity of consensus.  Doubly so now given how committed to a lot of critical theory/postmodernist concepts (the "authority of experience" for example) the western left has become, lending themselves to eschew classical definitions of fascism (if not the very concept of classical definitions) in favor defining fascism along the lines of being anyone unwilling to give "marginalized peoples" a complete moral blank check vis-a-vis the rest of the population to decide on everyone's behalf what is and isn't oppressive and offensive.

In a similar vein, they've opened themselves up to these old Leninist arguments of "revolutionary violence" that Herbert Marcuse also explored in the 1960s, which basically said that violence was justified if carried out on behalf of "marginalized" "oppressed" or "revolutionary vanguard" groups against their "oppressors", be these the police, the state, peaceful conservatives or anyone so hateful enough as to be born with white skin. 

The left have largely sold their souls to these kinds of concepts, and the result is the creation of echo chambers that are short on reality testing and dissent and long on boundary policing.  This not only alienates potential support and doubtlessly drives away those supporters who end up on the wrong end of some internal power struggle or another, but makes groups like Antifa vulnerable to infiltration and subversion via false flag operations, both from their political opponents (think 4chan) and from state enforcement agencies wanting to avoid dirtying their image via open police state tactics.

Expect COINTELPRO types of activities to be carried out against Antifa - if they haven't been already, because that's what the historical precedent would suggest. I don't support such tactics, of course, but through its embrace of that eternal albatross around the neck of the western left, revolutionary romanticism, Antifa is doing little to help themselves here and I find them hard therefore to sympathize with.

Simply saying "you've all been duped by the conservative media" isn't going to help any, especially given how much media (CNN, Huff Post, the Guardian, Salon, Mic and a host of other news blogs) are decidedly not conservative.  Plus, as any politically minded YouTuber these days would be more than happy to tell you, anti fascism has now become a full fledged moral panic on the left and even in the center, so blaming Antifa's poor reputation entirely on the media dodges the core issue.

The real way to fight fascism is to shore up the center - to create and defend robust democratic institutions that are transparent, inclusive and accountable to the people they're intended to serve.  Most western nations have a long way to go in that regard.  This is especially true in the US, where unrestrained money in politics has all but completely compromised the integrity of political institutions, and the resulting lack of public confidence should therefore not surprise us.  That's what got Trump into office, and that's when extremist ideological movements start becoming attractive to people.

Likewise, that's when people stop believing in the power or even the desirability of the state maintaining order in the face of rising extremism, and take matters into their own hands via groups like Antifa.  This should trouble us, for this is precisely the kind of scenario that makes the rise of authoritarianism more palatable to the mainstream, who would otherwise eschew it.  While groups like Antifa overstate the threat posed by Trump himself - the man is no Hitler, he's not a step in the right direction either.  The great danger is that by contributing to a climate of chaos and political violence, Antifa may well lend legitimacy to calls for a strong man to come along and restore order the old fashioned way, and thus end up with a kind of tragic self fulfilling prophecy.  

I don't believe that Antifa are the moral equivalent of Nazi skinheads and I grow weary of those who suggest that they are.  If Antifa were a Marxist Leninist movement, a case for that could be made.  If they extolled Stalin or Mao, you can say that they’re as bad, or at least in the same league, as Hitler and the Nazis.  There may be some of these inside Antifa, and Antifa may themselves be clear that they regard the fascists as a much more clear and present threat than the bolshevik types and choose therefore to prioritize fascists as a target and even ally with hard line communists against them. Much like our governments did in WWII.  But they primarily identify themselves as anarchists, not cold war era Kremlin mouthpieces with red flags.

But that does not place Antifa above criticism, however much one may agree with the stated goal of fighting Nazis, and does not mean that Antifa are not dangerous in their own ways.  If Antifa are dangerous, at least to their targets at "free speech" rallies, can their targets really be blamed for taking action against them, becoming a kind of AntiAntifa, if you will? 

Antifa are burying themselves in their own ideological excesses, and they have no one to blame for that but themselves.

Antifa, Nazis and the Alt-Left

This whole "alt-left = antifa" kerfuffle has, I think, made clear that the real alt-left fights a two front war, and that there is a definite moral asymmetry between our two groups of opponents.
The regressive left certainly comes in for criticism. No question about that, and I make no apologies for the criticisms I've made of them over time. But they're simply not in the same league as the reactionary right in terms of being completely disconnected from reality.
The regressive left will either deny that the alt-left exists at all, for which they can be forgiven because the alt-left is still very miniscule, measured by the number of people who identify as alt-left. Or the regressive left will throw their typical bromides of "racist", "misogynist" and "privilege" at us. Again, this is not entirely unwarranted, though it is most certainly not entirely true either, since alt-left groups on social media do draw a good number of "left wing of the alt right" types. The regressive left is wrong, of course, in their typical lack of understanding of nuances of any kind of political thought that isn't drenched in white male guilt. So pooh pooh to the regressive left.
But the reactionary right? They're something else all together. The amount of absolute and utter nonsense that I've read from paleocons about this whole matter will make your head hurt. The alt-left = the democrats = Marxists. We're all marionnettes of Hillary Clinton and Obama, who are full-on Stalinists hell bent on destroying America. As with everything that comes from the InfoWars, "don't tread on me" section of the internet, EVERYTHING they have to say about us is a reflection of their completely epistemically closed and delusionally paranoid view of the world. Between them and the regressive left, there's just no comparison. They both lie and they're both obsessed with and completely preoccupied with their own ideological pet fetishes to be sure, but not on nearly the same scale. The difference is one of orders of magnitude.
In the same vein, there's likewise no real comparison of antifa with actual neo-nazis. Antifa are, of course, light years from being blameless. Attacking peaceful Trump supporters, as they have yet again in recent days, is stupid and repugnant, and cheapens and undermines the very cause that Antifa professes to be about. Their behavior is inexcusable and sickening.
But don't even try to compare it with actual Nazis and fascism. Just don't. Antifa's antics are bad, to be sure. But they've got a ways to go to catch up with Auschwitz. To put it very mildly. Or even the Jim Crow era of the US south.
If I could address antifa - and given the recent equation of the alt-left with antifa, it's quite possible that I might be able to with at least a few of them, I'd implore them to understand actual politics a little better than they apparently do and refrain from equating Trump supporters with actual fascists.
Don't like Trump? I don't like him either, but he ain't Hitler. His supporters are not the SS Einsatzgruppen, and you cheapen the horrors of Nazi Europe when you even hint at making that suggestion.

That's what really gets under my skin about a lot of this. Eastern Europe in the 1940s was horror beyond reckoning. Whole populations were systematically abused in the worst ways you can think of, right up to wholesale slaughter. It's a slap in the face to the survivors and the families of the survivors of the barbarism that real totalitarianism unleashed in 1930s and 40s Europe when that horror becomes a mere rhetorical gimmick for incendiary pundits trying to score points in 21st century American partisan party politics. I remember saying this to the Tea Party dumbasses who tried saying Obama was literally Hitler, and I'll say the same thing to the antifa idiots regarding Trump. Shut up already. He's not Hitler. And you're a disrespectful asshole for even suggesting that he is.
But I have WAY less than no use for any piece of shit who profess to admire Hitler, display a swastika, SS runes, death head insignia or any other trappings of Nazism unironically, or start spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense. Espouse that crap and you're signalling support for the worst atrocities humans ever visited on each other. As bad as you've been taught Hitler was, he was worse.

My grandfathers went overseas to fight that monstrosity, and not with mere pepper spray and bike locks either. The "antifa" they belonged to used Sherman tanks and Lancaster bombers, or at least Enfield rifles. They didn't go there to engage in robust debate. "Deplatforming" in those days usually involved a lot of explosives dropped from high heights. And a lot of people died. That was tragic and unfortunate, but way better that than a Nazi hegemony in Europe.
And we call them heroes today, and so we should. I have no problems, none whatsoever, casting my lot in with antifa provided they confine their direct action tactics to actual real Nazis, skinheads, Klan and real bonafide fascists. Not mere conservatives or libertarians who, however much we may disagree, are not in the same universe of ugliness as Hitler and his goons, and with whom our differences can still be settled at the ballot box.
For antifa to commit violent assaults against peaceful conservatives and Trump supporters is repugnant, criminal and inexcusable, and I would implore them to stop if I could, or else implore the powers that be to step up police action to put a stop to it. But what I will not do is equate antifa's violence with the ugliness of the Nazis themselves. The memory of what happened at Auschwitz does not deserve that kind of dishonor.

A Specter is Haunting Social Media.

The Specter of the Alt-Left.

By now, we should all be familiar with Trump's claims regarding the "alt-left" who came "charging at" the alt-right during the recent tragic events at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, which saw one leftist killed and others injured when a car sped into a gathering of counter protesters.

This is not the first time the term "alt left" has been used by the right to describe the violent and fanatical segment of the regressive left.  We have, for example, an entire article full of unmitigated gibberish by one Joseph Farah.  This article is much more a reflection of the extremes of conspiratorial paranoia, flagrant partisanship and personalized hatred for the persons of prominent democrat party politicians and the tired old "democrats are the real racists" obsessions of the paleoconservative blogosphere than they are of anything faintly resembling reality.

Among the allegations he makes against the alt-left:

Supports abortion on demand, taxpayer support for the largest abortion provider in America that maintains nearly all of its abortion facilities in minority communities in the cities controlled by Democrats. That same abortion provider was founded by a leading eugenics advocate, Margaret Sanger, who remains a heroine to Hillary Clinton. 

The “Alt Left” is 100 percent Democrat – a party birthed in the support of slavery, a party whose military arm was the Ku Klux Klan, a party that fought civil rights and integration through the middle of the 1960s. 

Today, the “Alt Left” Democrats ferociously fight any attempts to woo minorities from their political plantation. Those efforts consistently include smearing their opponents as the racists.

So we're actually a vast democrat party conspiracy to keep the blacks in their place via welfare and abortion?  That's certainly news to me.  Perhaps Mr. Farah should join forces with those of the SJW blogosphere who call us "brocialists" and rail against our white privilege. They might be able to save on overhead that way.

Farah is not the only rightist to spout this kind of rubbish.  Sean Hannity has been on about the alt-left for some time now.  Writing in Fox News opinion, Dan Gainor claimed in December of 2016 that "Liberals get hysterical over the 'alt-right' but we are living in their 'alt-left' world."  In September 2016, Katie Kieffer introduces us to the alt-left, and describes us as "accurately describing the ideology of the Democratic party."

Certainly news to me.  Does not accurately describe the views of any alt-leftist I actually know.  And I know quite a few.

But even centrists and moderate liberals have gotten on the alt-left = violent extremists bandwagon.  Writing in Time in December 2016, Gil Troy describes how "The Bernie Sanders–Fueled Alt-Left Viciously Attacked Me."  In March of 2017, James Wolcott makes clear in Vanity Fair why "The Alt-Left is a Problem Too." Where the paleocons peg us as America hating socialists with democrat party membership cards - more about giving red meat to the base than accurately describing a damn thing -  Wolcott appeals to his urban, female readership with equally invalid fears of - you guessed it - frat boy, ass swatting "Bernie Bros" who opposed the Clinton campaign out of racism and misogyny.

The standard bearer for the regressive left, Salon, very recently published an article entitled "Donald Trump is right (about something): There really is an“alt-left,” but it’s even weirder than he thinks."  Kudos to Salon for getting back into the habit of doing a bit of actual research for a change.  Author Matthew Sheffield actually google searched the term and came into Altleft.com, hosted by early alt-left pioneer 'Rabbit.'

Rabbit, along with blogger Robert Lindsay over at Beyond Highbrow can be fairly credited for coining the term alt-left and can reasonably be called the movement's genesis. I've spoken with both men on Robert Stark's Stark Truth radio broadcast.  They're no less aghast than I and many others at how the alt-left label has been continually misappropriated.  So kudos to Sheffield for at least trying to do a bit of homework here.  He outlines Rabbit's vision of an alt-left quite extensively in his Salon article.  Doubtlessly, Rabbit appreciates the coverage.

Sheffield then goes on to say, "Given that almost no one besides “Rabbit” willingly affixes the “alt-left” label to themselves, it’s pretty clear that in the U.S., there isn’t much of a market for socialist-flavored white nationalism."

Nobody willingly affixes the alt-left label to themselves?  Again, news to me.  And news to the thousands who belong to alt-left groups and who follow the Alternative Left page on Facebook, that I founded.  But my own vision of an alt-left is much less a socialist flavored white nationalism a-la the bro's Strasser in the early NSDAP and rather more of the British Labour Party of roughly the same era and immediately postwar.

What I sought to do is distance the concept of an anti PC leftism from so called "race realism."   Race realism is fundamentally an alt-right concept.  In a lot of ways, it's a return of the political right to its first principles - to the centrality of relationships of "blood and soil" so to speak - in right wing politics.

So I asked myself what would a left wing equivalent to this be?  What are the first principles to which leftism needs to return if it is to escape the doldrums that the SJWs were leading it into: safe spaces, 67 genders, trigger warnings, etc?  If the alt-right is about race realism, I concluded that the alt-left should be about class realism.  Not that exclusively.  But that's our niche, I think.  The view that not all people fare equally well under an untrammeled capitalist system. 

Now where we go from there is another matter: for some, nothing short of a Marxian worker's revolution will do.  These would be your leftypol types.  This is the alt-left equivalent to the 1488 crowd on the alt-right.  These are the people who unironically meme about Stalin and the gulag in the same sort of way that some on the alt-right do about Hitler.  I do imagine you'd get some antifa supporters in this crew as well.

That's not my personal take on it, though.  I suppose you could call people like me the alt-left's equivalent to the "alt-light."  Not revolutionary socialists.  Closer to postwar European social democracy.  Think Attlee in Great Britain as an example.  There were others.  A revival of postwar democratic leftism in that vain was what I had in mind.

I don't think this vision is compatible with race realism, for reasons that history has made obvious.  Racial antagonism has shown itself to be a barrier to the development of class solidarity.  That was the case with classical racism in the American south, and is the case now when notions of "white privilege" are invoked as explanations for the problems faced by the black underclass.  Both the reactionary right and the regressive left have much invested in the maintenance of class blindness, and therefore in misrepresenting what the alt-left is really about.

The center-left in the first world drifted away from its postwar vision for two reasons: a disenchantment with socialism and subsequent rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s, and the deepening radicalism of the new left, as represented by critical theory and postmodernism. According to these theories, it wasn't just capitalism, but western civilization itself that was inherently oppressive.  In the social media era, these ways of thinking have burst out of academia and into the cultural mainstream as the SJW - social justice warrior phenomena. 

But the SJWs have no lasting and real way to achieve any real social justice because it takes an almost deterministic approach to its ideas of privilege, marginalization and identity.  While the SJWs are commonly tarred by the right wing as being "Marxist" they are actually near as far from the thinking of Marx as you can get.  Political economy and relations of production were absolutely central to Marx, while they are completely absent from the SJWs.  They are near completely blind to the economic side of inequality: even when they do acknowledge class, they do so as if class were another vector of intersecting identities rather than based on relations of production, of which the SJWs and the paleocons alike know next to nothing.  It is this void that I hoped the alt-left would be able to fill.

The relative success of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign suggested to me that there might be a prospect for social democracy to make a comeback, and even to become a political force in precisely the place where it is most needed and has been longest absent: The United States of America.  

Other things that I believe in and I think that many of us believe in: civil libertarianism, a rejection of censorship, opposition to racism and sexism of both the regressive left and the reactionary right and so on, are tackled adequately by the so called "new center", "cultural libertarians" or the "skeptical community."  The Sargons and the Dave Rubins over on Youtube, and so on.  And that stuff is all perfectly fine.  But glaringly absent is a social democratic economic vision.  

My vision of the alt-left is thus much closer the realist left vision developed by blogger Lord Keynes over at Social Democracy for the 21st century.  Highly recommended.

That's the niche I've hoped, and continue to hope, the alt-left can fill.  In light of how much confusion surrounds the label of alt-left, it's been suggested repeatedly by some of those who share this ideology that we abandon the label.  I don't think the time is yet right for that.  We should cease to be the alt-left once we've become the mainstream of left of center thought. While the term alt-left is a subject of public controversy, it will succeed better in drawing the curious alt-left spaces on social media and exposing more people to what we truly believe than a rebranding - a "rationalist left" or the like ever would.  

The Judean People's Front-ification of the Regressive Left

Black Lives Matter protesters disrupt Montreal Pride during a moment of silence for AIDS and hate crime victims.

"Employees of Pride Montreal then broke the circle of protesters and took away Rose’s megaphone. People in the crowd shouted at them to “shut up during the moment of silence” but the BLM protesters refused."

"To make our voices heard we chose to do this during the moment of silence,” said Brian*, a protester and member of Black Lives Matter Montreal. “It wasn’t disrespectful because the moment was meant to commemorate the people who died [of AIDS or homophobic and transphobic laws], and most of them are trans women of color so we reclaimed that moment.”

Black Lives Matter punching down and keeping to easy targets that they know won't fight back, yet again.

The spirit of the NAACP or the SCLC is definitely NOT present with BLM. 20th century civil rights movements risked their lives standing up to state power and violent lynch mobs to win basic rights for downtrodden minorities.

BLM is itself a violent lynch mob that "disrupts" the activities of other marginalized people, and does so with only the remotest likelihood of legal repercussions despite their flagrant disregard for the civil rights of others (which they hold dear for themselves) and near total immunity from criticism from government, media and academia. If this is your idea of civil disobedience and speaking truth to power, I laugh in your face. Looks pretty damn performative to me.

BLM was founded by a trio of western educated anti-sex "queer" feminists, their ideology is a thin veneer of black consciousness overtop French postmodernism, German critical theory, heavily bastardized pseudo Marxism and puritanical feminism rooted in anglo American Victorian era social purity, and topped off with just the kind of Ford Foundation and George Soros money that so effectively co-opts so called "radical" movements. Perhaps the group should rename itself Guilty White Consciences Matter. Sounds like Romanticism, but OK.

One leftist group I doubt that BLM will be trying to shut down in this manner any time soon is Antifa.  Because our favorite faux alt-leftists actually punch back, as they did in a recent protest where both groups originally showed up, apparently on the same side.  At least at first. "One Antifa member wound up punching a Black Lives Matter activist after the Black Lives Matter member chastised the Antifa radicals for hiding behind their masks."

Were Antifa to confine their hard line tactics to real bona fide fascists, I'd be all for them. Let's keep in mind here that Hitler was not defeated by rational persuasion and claims to the moral high ground. Fascism as an ideology was always explicitly clear in both theory and practice as to the central role played by redemptive violence in both its rise to power and exercise of power once claimed. Sadly, an entrenched fascist movement only understands one language, and when our grandfathers went to Europe in the 1940s, it wasn't to convince the Nazis of the error of their ways through superior logic. And we today look at our grandfathers as heroes, and rightly so in my opinion.

The issue I have with Antifa is the issue I have with vigilantism more generally. Antifa are not elected by the people and they are accountable to no one, save their own collective group conscience, which we've all seen to be driven by moral panic and group hysteria. So we should not be surprised by Antifa’s propensity to lapse into senseless destructiveness and failure to distinguish between conservatives and libertarians - whose differences can and should be resolved by debate and at the ballot box - and actual fascists.  

Or in this case, Black Lives Matter protesters.  

"The BLM activist stood in front of the Antifa crowd, bellowing, “Take the mask off! Take the mask off.” His compatriots started chanting, “Mask off! Mask off! Mask off! 

That prompted the Antifa crowd to start yelling at the black man, “He’s a cop! He’s a cop! He’s a cop!” 

One masked male white member of Antifa got right in the black man’s face, then punched him directly in the face, prompting another BLM activist to start yelling, “You f**king hit ’em! You f**king hit 'em! Take the mask off! 

A young female Antifa member then started screaming, “He f**king pushed me! He f**king pushed me!” She and the BLM activist started screaming curses at each other. 

Later, a BLM member addressed the Antifa crowd, saying, “We ain't gonna let some outsiders make us look bad."

You're doing a good enough job of that yourself, BLM.

The whole charade reminds me of that brilliant scene, one of so many, in the prophetic satire of prophecy, Monty Python's Life of Brian:

"Brothers! We should be struggling together! We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!"

"THE JUDEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT!"

"No! No! The Romans!"