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.
I want to understand more about the intellectual left's turn away from universalism & materialist reform, in the 1960s, toward the moral or religious fervour of today's project to 'enlighten' (or 'save') the WWC. It feels intuitively as if their avowed atheism may have left them with little choice but to focus on moral purity, to replace the meaning previously provided by the church.
If you think about it, this religious turn might make sense. Given that universalist programmes of material improvement are already difficult and then even more expensive when open to incomers, perhaps a pause is required to 'educate' that pesky populace, with its old-school loyalties to community, hearth and home.
I've seen it said that they made this turn after giving up on material economic reconstruction, but it seems more likely to me that standard human nature - undiluted by the programming of education - was seen as an impediment which had first to be ironed out.
In short, perhaps we risk underestimating their ability to take the long view.
I've never interpreted the goal as uplifting the WWC - not since the 1950s anyway. Rather that the (home grown) poors ceased to be of interest so they looked elsewhere for a pet proletariat.
Joan Didion suggested the left were disappointed with the fact the WWC didn't want the revolution, they wanted a 3 bed house and a pension. So the activist left had to look for a new group and picked women (for a time). Women did turn out to be useful foot soldiers but writ large the left don't actually care that much about women's interests.
Then their preferred victim group became minorities. Hence the pivot to the multicultural angle in the 70s-80s and support for mass immigration. Meanwhile their international outlook was not the IWW types of the interwar period but designated victim groups abroad (the pet project seems to have been Palestine since the 1980s).
More recently the LGBTQ has also become part of the preferred proletariat.
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.
Not inclined to argue with that, here.
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.
I want to understand more about the intellectual left's turn away from universalism & materialist reform, in the 1960s, toward the moral or religious fervour of today's project to 'enlighten' (or 'save') the WWC. It feels intuitively as if their avowed atheism may have left them with little choice but to focus on moral purity, to replace the meaning previously provided by the church.
If you think about it, this religious turn might make sense. Given that universalist programmes of material improvement are already difficult and then even more expensive when open to incomers, perhaps a pause is required to 'educate' that pesky populace, with its old-school loyalties to community, hearth and home.
I've seen it said that they made this turn after giving up on material economic reconstruction, but it seems more likely to me that standard human nature - undiluted by the programming of education - was seen as an impediment which had first to be ironed out.
In short, perhaps we risk underestimating their ability to take the long view.
I've never interpreted the goal as uplifting the WWC - not since the 1950s anyway. Rather that the (home grown) poors ceased to be of interest so they looked elsewhere for a pet proletariat.
Joan Didion suggested the left were disappointed with the fact the WWC didn't want the revolution, they wanted a 3 bed house and a pension. So the activist left had to look for a new group and picked women (for a time). Women did turn out to be useful foot soldiers but writ large the left don't actually care that much about women's interests.
Then their preferred victim group became minorities. Hence the pivot to the multicultural angle in the 70s-80s and support for mass immigration. Meanwhile their international outlook was not the IWW types of the interwar period but designated victim groups abroad (the pet project seems to have been Palestine since the 1980s).
More recently the LGBTQ has also become part of the preferred proletariat.