While I understand the point you were making with the Sun Tzu quotes, it seems that the leftish are very much practicing the acme of skill: by silencing their enemies, they no longer have to fight.
I thought the left were meant to be all about "the people" (or at least rhetorically claim to be)! Seriously, it's a noticeable shift as the leftish project/s became more and more the domain of the educated middle classes, that the "people" became seen as an unfortunate stumbling block rather than part of the collective. (See Gordon Brown with his "bigoted woman" comment. He was just expressing a widely held view, that the WWC just needed to see what was good for them and get with the program).
The "everywhere" and "nowhere" discourse is also interesting. Yes, immigration and globalization are economically good, and you get cultural dynamism in some ways. But you lose social trust. This is replicated everywhere. And you need a high-trust society to get everyone's buy-in on what *should* be left agendas: more generous welfare state, social provisions. There was a choice basically made by the left a generation ago to lean in on the "diversity" angle. Which has its benefits, as noted. But there's a harsh tradeoff. Because it is a choice: celebrate multiculturalism, or make insulin free. Pick one. And the latter requires focusing in hard on "unity", "we're all in this together", and yes, making it seem like being a citizen HERE makes you more important to your politicians than some other people over there.
The (recent) left position that patriotism is cringe, the nation state is just an awkward anachronism, really doesn't help with what should be NATIONAL programs of social provision etc.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting
While I understand the point you were making with the Sun Tzu quotes, it seems that the leftish are very much practicing the acme of skill: by silencing their enemies, they no longer have to fight.
I thought the left were meant to be all about "the people" (or at least rhetorically claim to be)! Seriously, it's a noticeable shift as the leftish project/s became more and more the domain of the educated middle classes, that the "people" became seen as an unfortunate stumbling block rather than part of the collective. (See Gordon Brown with his "bigoted woman" comment. He was just expressing a widely held view, that the WWC just needed to see what was good for them and get with the program).
The "everywhere" and "nowhere" discourse is also interesting. Yes, immigration and globalization are economically good, and you get cultural dynamism in some ways. But you lose social trust. This is replicated everywhere. And you need a high-trust society to get everyone's buy-in on what *should* be left agendas: more generous welfare state, social provisions. There was a choice basically made by the left a generation ago to lean in on the "diversity" angle. Which has its benefits, as noted. But there's a harsh tradeoff. Because it is a choice: celebrate multiculturalism, or make insulin free. Pick one. And the latter requires focusing in hard on "unity", "we're all in this together", and yes, making it seem like being a citizen HERE makes you more important to your politicians than some other people over there.
The (recent) left position that patriotism is cringe, the nation state is just an awkward anachronism, really doesn't help with what should be NATIONAL programs of social provision etc.