In light of recent European elections my blood runs cold remembering when Trump opened all those death camps for minorities even as my heart sings that Obama didn't build a border wall with Mexico
I am very much in the same position, having been a liberal libertine my entire adult life only to watch all my friends gradually transform into dogmatic puritanical moralists who seem to have all swigged the same Jekyll & Hyde potion: with one drop the Dr Jekyll preaching about love and tolerance becomes Mr. Hyde who only wants to see all his political opponents destroyed and driven from society.
As we all have our own theories I might as well add mine:
Sometime in the past decade a toxic virus escaped from a lab in American academia, and when infected, this virus makes its carriers reductively Manichaean, paranoid and prone to fits of rage, piously convinced of their own virtue and holiness, and absolutely certain that whoever disagrees w a syllable of their dogma is a dangerous Nazi bigot. And the name of this virus is Critical Theory.
Leftist Critical Theory (aka "the ruthless criticism of all that exists") and its foundational premise—nothing exists but Power and Oppression, and all Good People spend every waking moment pointing out whatever they deem "problematic"—is designed to make its believers into constantly crusading moralists, denouncers of everything and everyone outside their tribe, and much like their w their Marxist forebears it provides a highly reductive and oversimplified view of human conflict, a dogmatic belief in the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, and an obsession with rooting out ideological impurity and suppressing dissent.
There will be no "nice normal liberals" interested in free thought, free speech, and open good-faith debate until we somehow find a cure for this virus or until most of its bearers develop an immunity or die off.
I think there’s certainly a Manichaean quality to a struggle for dominance between the working class and the educated middle class. What’s funny though is that the majority of sneerers wouldn’t know the first thing of critical theory. They just want to preserve the hierarchy that grants their elite privileges.
Despite some modest quibbles here and there, the framing of this was superb...nice piece of writing and another view of the "red-pilling" so many formerly left and far-left folks that actually have a few brain cells have been undergoing -- often kicking and screaming that "what I see cannot be true" but as time goes on, realizing that it is.
Like you, I'm more than fed up with a political consensus built on a message of "stop noticing things, bigot".
I'm also skeptical that the goal was really cultural liberation of the working class since the 1960s. More like the goal was to substitute a new group as the pet proletariat for champagne socialists, and newly-grateful (wonderfully diverse!) immigrants suddenly fit the bill. Better than those blue collar white men with their retrograde views on women, not to mention their tendency to *notice* the effect on unskilled wages of mass immigration, and later the offshoring of their jobs all together.
(The fact that the diversity coalition contains a lot of men of various backgrounds who aren't up on their Gloria Steinem is also something not to be NOTICED)
I think a couple of things might have happened with the shift from a materialist to a cultural ‘emancipation’ of the old school working class. One was a genuine desire to elevate them in some way, to better suit the utopian ideals of the postmodern left. The other was to keep those animals in their place, which is what today’s Brahmin leftish & their educated middle class water carriers are happy to do. Because. Status.
The liberation movement (of the feminist variety) was/is about elites liberating themselves - because of course they're the ones with the means and access to push hardest against social strictures. And the progress has been good. But the liberation that trickles down to the working class is not always ideal ("you don't need a man!" Somehow metamorphosed on its way down into an epidemic of births out of wedlock. Etc)
Lots of other "let's throw away those stupid social rules" vibes don't hurt the elites pushing them, but create chaos at the bottom.
Well, here's the obvious question: what made you (personally) think they were "your" people in the first place? Try to answer with as few externalities as possible.
To be liberal is to prefer the child rapist to live and be given new opportunities to abuse children, than to the right thing and shoot him dead after sentencing.
Open is to be willfully stupid, living in the fallacy that new equals better.
Tolerant means nothing - either something can be allowed to exist because it isn't a threat, or it is a threat and the sooner it's handled the better.
Cosmopolitan means being pro cultural extinction in favour of us all becoming alienated consuming/producing units.
Left-leaning means being a coward. Either own up to being a marxist, and argue truthfully for why and how you want communism, or admit it's just a fancy fashion statement.
Moderate is as meaningful as boiling one foot while freezing theother, since the average is a nice moderate.
Proof? Look at all western cultures. Up until liberalism/leftism really broke through during the latter half of the 1960s, virtually all metrics pointed the right way. And when it became dominant in the early 1990s. Control for proof: eastern Europe. Thanks to the Iron Curtain, these nations and peoples were spared the US/french idiocies summed up in the phrase "pomo-PC culture". Compare Sweden and Poland if you dare.
There's your proof what leftism results in, as compared to conservatism 'a la 1950s and earlier.
Denmark does well on measures of wellbeing. But then, it’s pragmatically left-leaning. My personal preference is not to see things in the binary way your comment seems to illustrate.
That has been part of my "red pill" experience these past few years: realizing that educated liberals are actually not my people and never have been. I grew up being indoctrinated in their schools and psyopped by their music, movies, and literature, and so I identified with them. But that self-identification was more like Stockholm syndrome, and now I realize I was just their useful idiot for much of my life. They never believed in or practiced their own professed liberal values. Their morality was a veneer to cover their grift and a weapon they used to keep me and those who actually are my people docile. But now more of us are waking up, and I hope it's not too late.
Look at the world we live in. Does it look like the ruling class actually believes in liberal values? Or do they just chant "human rights" and "democracy" and the "rules base international order" to keep their subjects distracted while they run their modern-monetary/big pharma/war-profiteering grift?
Indeed. Keep worse off people too busy defending against charges of bigotry to organise in favour of improved material conditions. Keep the professional middle classes wary of losing moral status if they stand with them.
You're probably correct that I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but at this point, I think there's something deeper going on that requires something that radical.
Another commenter likened it to a virus, and maybe I would liken it to a software virus that has hijacked the operating systems of erstwhile classical liberals and turned them into Maoists. Or maybe there's a spiritual dimension to it, or something like a hive mind that has bewitched the Left (and maybe even the Center). But at this point, I don't see the Maoists changing their mind because they encountered some new information or argument that helped them see the error of their ways.
Today’s Leftists are true believers in a death cult, at best, or psychopaths evangelizing for what they know to be a death cult, at worst. Either way, I'm afraid the only way back from this is a de-Nazification type process, with all that that would entail. And given the way things are headed and the type of people steering the ship, I am pretty sure that the need for that will become obvious in the next few years.
And though I don't by any means think this is the ideal, I am pretty sure that an American Caesar will emerge promising American strength as an antidote to cultural suicide by wokeness, but at the price of any hope of restoring political freedom to the republic. And because the alternative is Maoism, with none of the freedom but all if the poverty and suffering of North Korea, Americans will probably see such a Caesar as a good alternative.
I wish I could be optimistic, but very likely that will be the dilemma facing Americans soon: literal fascism or literal Maoism. The days of pretending that post-Enlightenment Liberalism is a viable alternative will soon be over, for better or worse.
Can I say that personally I hate the labels of everything now for example "you are a cat and I am a dog so I don't like you because cats aren't supposed to like dogs".
Obviously with cats and dogs being substituted for many other words.
Everything also is a "war" like "war on Woke" - sorry but what the actual fuck does it all mean any way?
I am in the UK so I do not know that much about the two main American political parties (not even going to type their names) but in 2020 there was a debate live between Trump and Biden.
It was on live TV here at stupid o'clock (I think 03:00 - 05:00) and I specifically made the effort to watch it.
The one thing that struck me more than anything else is that these two men who cliamed to be complete opposites of each other were equally so similar in many ways.
And one other thing too was why are the younger generation not being given the opportunity to get ahead in politics?
As I say I am in the UK so I have no real deep knowledge of the current politics in the USA so please forgive me if I have offended anybody.
Might be fun for you to know that the Sweden Democrats are centre-left on economic policies and even more classic left of social ones, if we use US metrics. The other major oppositional party is the moderate party (who for some reason don't capitalise their name) which is 1980s Chicago/Austrian neoliberal on economy and more liberal-progressive on social issues than ACLU.
The reason for this is that the centre (or Overton window) in swedish politics is far left of the US Democrats.
And the further left you go, the more opinions and facts become "right-wing", simply because you yourself (general you, not you specifically) are continouly becoming more extremist; this of course only if we stick to the silly notion of politics being measurable on a linear scale, which is rubbish and about as factually true as "My mask protects you - your mask protects me".
Fun fact: Orban is the only leader in the EU who has been elected by a majority of voters. Making it perfectly obvious that van der Leyen and the rest of the EU politbüro shares the Kim family's noton of democracy: the people vote and then the politicians rule no matter the vote, because all parties and leaders must follow the same set of rules anyway, making the vote a magical ritualistic behaviour.
Sad fact: Sweden sees more armed violence per capita than Detroit or Chicago. Or Kabul. All of it due to negroes, arabs, syrians, gypsies, and so on. Any swede who like me is old enough to have lived here when we were 95% swedes and 99% whites in our nation (the odd percent being adopted children, it was all the rage among the politically correct left in the 1960s and 1970s to adopt a darkie child, very chic and solidarity and brotherhood and so on in the typical parlour pinko bourgeois way) knows that our present troubles re: social issues and crime, and a lot of the financial ones too, are 100% due to letting such races settle here.
For us swedes, this is an issue of us either being made extinct like the native americans were, or fighting for survival.
I am very much in the same position, having been a liberal libertine my entire adult life only to watch all my friends gradually transform into dogmatic puritanical moralists who seem to have all swigged the same Jekyll & Hyde potion: with one drop the Dr Jekyll preaching about love and tolerance becomes Mr. Hyde who only wants to see all his political opponents destroyed and driven from society.
As we all have our own theories I might as well add mine:
Sometime in the past decade a toxic virus escaped from a lab in American academia, and when infected, this virus makes its carriers reductively Manichaean, paranoid and prone to fits of rage, piously convinced of their own virtue and holiness, and absolutely certain that whoever disagrees w a syllable of their dogma is a dangerous Nazi bigot. And the name of this virus is Critical Theory.
Leftist Critical Theory (aka "the ruthless criticism of all that exists") and its foundational premise—nothing exists but Power and Oppression, and all Good People spend every waking moment pointing out whatever they deem "problematic"—is designed to make its believers into constantly crusading moralists, denouncers of everything and everyone outside their tribe, and much like their w their Marxist forebears it provides a highly reductive and oversimplified view of human conflict, a dogmatic belief in the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, and an obsession with rooting out ideological impurity and suppressing dissent.
There will be no "nice normal liberals" interested in free thought, free speech, and open good-faith debate until we somehow find a cure for this virus or until most of its bearers develop an immunity or die off.
I think there’s certainly a Manichaean quality to a struggle for dominance between the working class and the educated middle class. What’s funny though is that the majority of sneerers wouldn’t know the first thing of critical theory. They just want to preserve the hierarchy that grants their elite privileges.
Despite some modest quibbles here and there, the framing of this was superb...nice piece of writing and another view of the "red-pilling" so many formerly left and far-left folks that actually have a few brain cells have been undergoing -- often kicking and screaming that "what I see cannot be true" but as time goes on, realizing that it is.
Many thanks.
Thank you - I wrote it as a personal viewpoint exactly so that others might recognise that what they fear to acknowledge isn’t so unusual.
Like you, I'm more than fed up with a political consensus built on a message of "stop noticing things, bigot".
I'm also skeptical that the goal was really cultural liberation of the working class since the 1960s. More like the goal was to substitute a new group as the pet proletariat for champagne socialists, and newly-grateful (wonderfully diverse!) immigrants suddenly fit the bill. Better than those blue collar white men with their retrograde views on women, not to mention their tendency to *notice* the effect on unskilled wages of mass immigration, and later the offshoring of their jobs all together.
(The fact that the diversity coalition contains a lot of men of various backgrounds who aren't up on their Gloria Steinem is also something not to be NOTICED)
I think a couple of things might have happened with the shift from a materialist to a cultural ‘emancipation’ of the old school working class. One was a genuine desire to elevate them in some way, to better suit the utopian ideals of the postmodern left. The other was to keep those animals in their place, which is what today’s Brahmin leftish & their educated middle class water carriers are happy to do. Because. Status.
The liberation movement (of the feminist variety) was/is about elites liberating themselves - because of course they're the ones with the means and access to push hardest against social strictures. And the progress has been good. But the liberation that trickles down to the working class is not always ideal ("you don't need a man!" Somehow metamorphosed on its way down into an epidemic of births out of wedlock. Etc)
Lots of other "let's throw away those stupid social rules" vibes don't hurt the elites pushing them, but create chaos at the bottom.
Well, here's the obvious question: what made you (personally) think they were "your" people in the first place? Try to answer with as few externalities as possible.
Because we all self-identify as liberal, open, tolerant, cosmopolitan, left-leaning and ‘moderate’
No me.
Patriot. Atavistic. Reactionary.
Family: Kin: People: Nation: Tradition.
-
To be liberal is to prefer the child rapist to live and be given new opportunities to abuse children, than to the right thing and shoot him dead after sentencing.
Open is to be willfully stupid, living in the fallacy that new equals better.
Tolerant means nothing - either something can be allowed to exist because it isn't a threat, or it is a threat and the sooner it's handled the better.
Cosmopolitan means being pro cultural extinction in favour of us all becoming alienated consuming/producing units.
Left-leaning means being a coward. Either own up to being a marxist, and argue truthfully for why and how you want communism, or admit it's just a fancy fashion statement.
Moderate is as meaningful as boiling one foot while freezing theother, since the average is a nice moderate.
Proof? Look at all western cultures. Up until liberalism/leftism really broke through during the latter half of the 1960s, virtually all metrics pointed the right way. And when it became dominant in the early 1990s. Control for proof: eastern Europe. Thanks to the Iron Curtain, these nations and peoples were spared the US/french idiocies summed up in the phrase "pomo-PC culture". Compare Sweden and Poland if you dare.
There's your proof what leftism results in, as compared to conservatism 'a la 1950s and earlier.
Denmark does well on measures of wellbeing. But then, it’s pragmatically left-leaning. My personal preference is not to see things in the binary way your comment seems to illustrate.
You'll always have a seat on my ship, Rikard. :)
I don’t.
That has been part of my "red pill" experience these past few years: realizing that educated liberals are actually not my people and never have been. I grew up being indoctrinated in their schools and psyopped by their music, movies, and literature, and so I identified with them. But that self-identification was more like Stockholm syndrome, and now I realize I was just their useful idiot for much of my life. They never believed in or practiced their own professed liberal values. Their morality was a veneer to cover their grift and a weapon they used to keep me and those who actually are my people docile. But now more of us are waking up, and I hope it's not too late.
This sounds like a pretty extreme swing for you. Carrying some risk of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Look at the world we live in. Does it look like the ruling class actually believes in liberal values? Or do they just chant "human rights" and "democracy" and the "rules base international order" to keep their subjects distracted while they run their modern-monetary/big pharma/war-profiteering grift?
Indeed. Keep worse off people too busy defending against charges of bigotry to organise in favour of improved material conditions. Keep the professional middle classes wary of losing moral status if they stand with them.
You're probably correct that I'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but at this point, I think there's something deeper going on that requires something that radical.
Another commenter likened it to a virus, and maybe I would liken it to a software virus that has hijacked the operating systems of erstwhile classical liberals and turned them into Maoists. Or maybe there's a spiritual dimension to it, or something like a hive mind that has bewitched the Left (and maybe even the Center). But at this point, I don't see the Maoists changing their mind because they encountered some new information or argument that helped them see the error of their ways.
Today’s Leftists are true believers in a death cult, at best, or psychopaths evangelizing for what they know to be a death cult, at worst. Either way, I'm afraid the only way back from this is a de-Nazification type process, with all that that would entail. And given the way things are headed and the type of people steering the ship, I am pretty sure that the need for that will become obvious in the next few years.
And though I don't by any means think this is the ideal, I am pretty sure that an American Caesar will emerge promising American strength as an antidote to cultural suicide by wokeness, but at the price of any hope of restoring political freedom to the republic. And because the alternative is Maoism, with none of the freedom but all if the poverty and suffering of North Korea, Americans will probably see such a Caesar as a good alternative.
I wish I could be optimistic, but very likely that will be the dilemma facing Americans soon: literal fascism or literal Maoism. The days of pretending that post-Enlightenment Liberalism is a viable alternative will soon be over, for better or worse.
Can I say that personally I hate the labels of everything now for example "you are a cat and I am a dog so I don't like you because cats aren't supposed to like dogs".
Obviously with cats and dogs being substituted for many other words.
Everything also is a "war" like "war on Woke" - sorry but what the actual fuck does it all mean any way?
I am in the UK so I do not know that much about the two main American political parties (not even going to type their names) but in 2020 there was a debate live between Trump and Biden.
It was on live TV here at stupid o'clock (I think 03:00 - 05:00) and I specifically made the effort to watch it.
The one thing that struck me more than anything else is that these two men who cliamed to be complete opposites of each other were equally so similar in many ways.
And one other thing too was why are the younger generation not being given the opportunity to get ahead in politics?
As I say I am in the UK so I have no real deep knowledge of the current politics in the USA so please forgive me if I have offended anybody.
Might be fun for you to know that the Sweden Democrats are centre-left on economic policies and even more classic left of social ones, if we use US metrics. The other major oppositional party is the moderate party (who for some reason don't capitalise their name) which is 1980s Chicago/Austrian neoliberal on economy and more liberal-progressive on social issues than ACLU.
The reason for this is that the centre (or Overton window) in swedish politics is far left of the US Democrats.
And the further left you go, the more opinions and facts become "right-wing", simply because you yourself (general you, not you specifically) are continouly becoming more extremist; this of course only if we stick to the silly notion of politics being measurable on a linear scale, which is rubbish and about as factually true as "My mask protects you - your mask protects me".
Fun fact: Orban is the only leader in the EU who has been elected by a majority of voters. Making it perfectly obvious that van der Leyen and the rest of the EU politbüro shares the Kim family's noton of democracy: the people vote and then the politicians rule no matter the vote, because all parties and leaders must follow the same set of rules anyway, making the vote a magical ritualistic behaviour.
Sad fact: Sweden sees more armed violence per capita than Detroit or Chicago. Or Kabul. All of it due to negroes, arabs, syrians, gypsies, and so on. Any swede who like me is old enough to have lived here when we were 95% swedes and 99% whites in our nation (the odd percent being adopted children, it was all the rage among the politically correct left in the 1960s and 1970s to adopt a darkie child, very chic and solidarity and brotherhood and so on in the typical parlour pinko bourgeois way) knows that our present troubles re: social issues and crime, and a lot of the financial ones too, are 100% due to letting such races settle here.
For us swedes, this is an issue of us either being made extinct like the native americans were, or fighting for survival.