Check out the Seven Theses of one Phil Green over at the lair of Howlin' Wolff.
This is the direction in which the Dems are headed.
Category: Leftism and Political Correctness
If Trump Were a Nazi . . .
. . . the Raging Bull of the HollyWeird Left, Robert De Niro, would be in a concentration camp along with Sleazy Rider Peter Fonda and the sick comedienne Kathy Griffith.
And if Trump were a Nazi, would he be tight with the NRA, defender of Second Amendment rights?
But of course for the Left the smear is everything and it doesn't matter whether one is actually talking sense.
Related:
The Contribution of Hollywood Cultural Polluters to Violence
Political Correctness Comes at a Price
"Starbucks may have appeased progressives with its social-justice workshops and open-bathroom policy, but such moves have failed to caffeinate the company’s bottom line."
Story here.
‘Progressive’ Hate, ‘Progressive’ Projection
The Bad Hate the Good: The Southern Poverty Law Center vs. Prager University:
The SPLC smears individuals and groups it differs with by labeling them as some form of "hater": "racist," "white supremacist," "extremist" and the like. That it is cited and even relied upon by The New York Times, Facebook, Amazon, Google, CNN and others, and that Apple gave the organization a million dollars, is testimony to the moral state of mainstream media and corporate culture in America today.
[. . .]
Any organization that labels Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the extraordinary Somali-American woman who devotes her life to fighting for oppressed women, especially in the Islamic world — an "extremist," as the SPLC has done, is not a moral organization. No wonder it just agreed to pay Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million and issued a retraction for smearing him as an "anti-Muslim extremist."
This kind of behavior should surprise no one. Since Stalin labeled Trotsky, the ideological leader of Soviet communism, a "fascist," the left (not liberals, to whom the left is as opposed as it is conservatives) has libeled its opponents. Without lying about its opponents, there would be no left.
For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue
David Horowitz (2013):
Here is another statement from [Saul Alinsky's] Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party.
In 1996 Senator Bob Dole — a moderate Republican and deal-maker — ran for president against the incumbent, Bill Clinton. At the time, Dick Morris was Clinton’s political adviser. As they were heading into the election campaign, Clinton — a centrist Democrat — told Morris, “You have to understand, Dick, Bob Dole is evil.” That is how even centrist Democrats view the political battle.
Because Democrats and progressives regard politics as a battle of good versus evil, their focus is not on policies that work and ideas that make sense, but on what will make their party win. Demonizing the opposition is one answer; unity is another. If we are divided, we will fail, and that means evil will triumph. (emphasis added)
A good recent example of how, for the Left, the issue is never the issue is the furor over the separation of the children of illegal immigrants from their parents. Why are 'liberals' apoplectically concerned about the separation of the children of criminals from their parents? Because the issue is not the issue. That is, the issue is merely a means to the end of more power. They have no objection to the use of State power in separating children from criminal parents when the ones affected are citizens.
This meme bears the title 'Hypocrisy.' But it is worse than hypocrisy. And it is not correctly called a double standard. Leftists, liberals, progressives — whatever you want to call them — don't share our values and standards. They use them against us in the approved Alinskyite manner.
Wolff on Anti-Natalism: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist
In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:
I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?
Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.
From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything. One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.
Our sane, conservative appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.
I call this The Conservative Disadvantage.
Leftists as Politically Retromingent
A retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards.
Posturing as 'progressive,' the leftist pisses on the past, seeking to erase its memory by destroying monuments and redacting the historical record. There is no piety in the leftist, no reverence. Try using those words at a Manhattan or Georgetown cocktail party and see what happens.
This political retromingency helps explain the leftists' lack of respect for language.
Related: On Reverence
No Day Without Cultural Appropriation
Cultural appropriation is not a glitch of American life. It's a feature. It's part of what makes the country great. We take your culture, we get rid of the oppression, the mass murder, the slavery, the intransigent poverty and the endless internecine wars. We keep the pasta and the funny hats, and occasionally we dress up as you on Halloween. It's a good deal for everyone.
I think I'll make me a curry tonight, thereby paying tribute to Indian cuisine. I love Indian food. Americans who find it too hot are culinary pussies. They need to get out of their gastronomical ghettos and celebrate diversity. My curry might not turn out as good as a gen-u-ine Indian curry, but then again it might turn out better.
Klavan is being combative above, but it is well-justified punch-back against willful and vicious stupidity of the sort that leftist lunkheads specialize in dishing out. Cultural appropriation is good: blacks on the bottom could improve their lot by 'acting white,' by appropriating those bourgeois values that Amy Wax was recently waxing enthusiastic over, and rightly so.
I engage in cultural appropriation every day. Why just this morning I read a bit from the Old Testament. Am I a Jew? And then I prayed the Ave Maria in Latin with special emphasis on the beautiful Ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Am I a Roman?
Is English your native tongue? No? Then by what right do you speak OUR language? You are engaging in cultural theft!
An Italian told me that there is no dish in Italy called pollo alla marsala. But there ought to be as you will readily agree after you've tasted mine.
Klavan is right: it's a feature, not a bug.
David Rubin: Why I Left the Left
David Rubin, who describes himself as gay, pro-choice, and classically liberal, explains why 'progressives' are in fact regressive. (A point I have made many times.) A Prager U video under five minutes in length.
Trigger Warning! The video contains vicious, racist, incendiary content sure to melt snowflakes. Richly deserving of being 'demonetized' by Google if it hasn't been already. [Irony off]
Rubin, like so many others including Tucker Carlson, makes the standard mistake of conflating race with skin color.
Annals of Leftist Autophagy
Roger Kimball on recent examples of leftists devouring themselves.
The Essence of Cultural Marxism: No Truth, Only Power
Rod Dreher:
There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism” that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power.
Lenin understood this well. This is the meaning of his famous dictum, “Who, whom?” In Lenin’s view, co-existence with capitalism was not possible. The only question was whether or not the communists will smash the capitalists first, or the other way around. One way of interpreting this is to say that the moral value of an action depends on who is doing it to whom.
This is why it is pointless for us conservatives and old-school liberals to stand around identifying contradictions and hypocrisies in how the progressives behave. They don’t care! They aren’t trying to apply universal standards of justice. They believe that “universal standards of justice” is a cant phrase to disguise white heterosexist patriarchal supremacy. They believe that justice is achieving power for their group, and therefore disempowering other groups. This is why it’s not racist, in their view, to favor non-whites over whites in the distribution of power. This is why they don’t consider it unfair to discriminate against men, heterosexuals, and other out-groups.
The third paragraph is exactly right. Why did it take me so long fully to appreciate this? To accuse leftists of double standards as I have done and as many conservative do is to fail to understand that they don't accept our standards and values.
They will use things like “dialogue” as a tactic to serve the long-term strategy of acquiring total power. Resisting them on liberal grounds is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. The neoreactionaries have seen this clearly, while conservatives like me, who can’t quite let go of old-fashioned liberalism, have resisted it.
I have resisted it because I really would like to live in a world where we can negotiate our differences while allowing individuals and groups maximum autonomy in the private sphere. I want to be left alone, and want to leave others alone. This, I fear, is a pipe dream. Absent a shared cultural ethos, I can’t see how this is possible. I hate to say it — seriously, I do — but I think that today’s conservatives (including me) are going to end up as neoreactionaries, just as today’s old-school liberals are going to end up as progressives, because the forces pulling us to these extremes are stronger than any centrism.
Unfortunately, our politics is becoming increasingly 'centrifugal.' In the "widening gyre," "the centre cannot hold." (Yeats) Rod is right: many of us conservatives are moving in the neoreactionary direction. You could say that we are becoming 'radicalized' by the insanity of our leftist enemies.
Why then is Dreher so bloody hard on Trump, when he is all we've got? In a war you have to take sides. Push has come to shove, and shove may come to shoot. So you'd better be ready. Trump stands with the NRA and the NRA with Trump. And as Dreher is aware, you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
Addendum (5/6) Dreher is wrong when he says that the denial of truth is a Marxist principle. It is not. It is a culturally Marxist principle. Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are not precursors of post-modernism. So it is wrong for Dreher to suggest in the second paragraph quoted above that V. I. Lenin denies objective truth. On the contrary, he upholds the objectivity of truth in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Addendum (5/7) Edward comments:
I don’t entirely agree. In The Communist Manifesto section II the authors consider the objection that there are certain eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc ‘that are common to all states of society’, but Communism abolishes all such eternal truths.
Their reply concedes the objection, or rather denies the existence of any ‘eternal truth’ except the historical existence of class antagonisms ‘that assumed different forms at different epochs’. The commonality of these forms is simply ‘the exploitation of one part of society by the other’. These common forms, i.e. the supposed eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice etc, will completely vanish with the total disappearance of class distinctions.
This is a large topic, Ed. But I would insist that on a charitable reading of Marx, he is not a relativist about truth. He may be setting the stage for POMO, but he himself is not a POMO man. On the page before the page about Freedom and Justice (p. 102 in my Pelican paperback) we are told that man's consciousness, his ideas, views, and conceptions "changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life." Marx is asserting this as TRUE and is exempting it from the changes in material existence. He is not countenancing the possibility that a change in material and social conditions could bring it about that his version of materialism is false. The Commie Manifesto is littered with assertions like these, assertions that are intended to be TRUE. Old Karl is trying to get at the TRUTH about the human condition.
To your reply that ‘Marx fancies his dialectical materialism a science’. Correct, but dialectical materialism is the science of class antagonism. That is the only ‘eternal truth’. All the rest, i.e. Freedom, Justice are simply a form that class antagonism takes at different epochs.
No, not the only eternal truth. What about the one I gave above? And all the others, e.g., the one about religion being an opiate, the sigh of the oppressed creature, which implies that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, that these are all fictions that keep people from achieving happiness here on earth?
Surely Marx would not say that God existed in Medieval times but does not exist today. He would say that God never existed.
Note also that it cannot be an 'eternal truth' that there will always be class struggle, but that until the classless society is achieved history is the history of class struggle.
After reading the Manifesto, I am thinking about the various ‘No True Scotsman/Marxist’ apologetics for Marxism that we see from time to time. E.g. Marxist/Leninism not true Marxism, Pol Pot not true Marxism, Cuba Venezuela etc. It seems to me that previous brutalist regimes have interpreted the Manifesto pretty well. Look at its 10 points carefully. Abolition of private property, justified on the grounds that for the proletariat (read ‘99%’), there is no property at all, and that it is the property of the bourgeoisie (read ‘1%’) that must be seized. Bringing the means of production, communication and transport into the hands of ‘the State’. Centralisation of credit by means of a national bank etc etc.
Right. The hard Left is Communist in inspiration. The bastards never give up. One has to read the Manifesto to know what they are up to, and what we are up against.
Prager on Fear of the Left and its Consequences
Read it. Excerpts:
There are two reasons the left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.
[. . .]
It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported: “Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.”
One hopes that the solution to leftist scumbaggery won't require a 2A invocation.
We would like to think well of our fellow citizens. But most on the Left are making it impossible. They are not, in the main, good people. It is time to face reality and realize that many of our 'fellow citizens' are domestic enemies.
Stella Morabito on the “Feral” Michelle Wolf
'Feral' is precisely the word for this disgusting leftist. The vile specimen cannot seem to distinguish between being foul-mouthed and being funny. There is no humor in what she said. Succeding as a scum bag, she fails as a comedienne.
She actually joked about abortion in the crudest terms imaginable. "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it." And then something about knocking the baby out. But she missed the one pun in the vicinity, 'being knocked up' as a slang phrase for 'being pregnant.'
Even the left-wing 'journalists' present thought Wolf's trangressivity excessive.
What Alfie’s All About
Is Leftist Politics Anti-Identity Politics?
S. J. writes,
Reading your posts lately, the following thought struck me. I wonder if it's struck you, and if you'd agree:Identity politics is a misleading name for the recent catastrophic turn in so-called progressive politics. For what it actually aims at primarily is the *destruction* of traditional modes of identity, which are, loosely speaking, summarised by the slogan "faith, flag and family". What it replaces those with is of secondary importance to that central mission.That's why the obvious contradictions, and vicious internecine rivalries, on the left seem not (with certain honourable exceptions) to lead to anything approaching the self-doubt and ideological re-evaluation that conservatives assume – logically from their own frame of reference – that they ought. For it simply doesn't matter to the contemporary leftist that his preferred categories are flimsy and self-contradictory. They're only a means to an end; a solvent to be applied to the older forms of identity and self-understanding.On which account, it would be far more truthful to reckon it "anti-identity politics".(I might also add that we should therefore avoid the trap of playing up too much the individualism that, rightly understood, is central to much conservative thought, to the point of downplaying those old and authentic attachments – and so allowing the left to pose, utterly falsely, as the champions of community and relational life.)With heartfelt thanks for the stimulation to thought, not to say sheer enjoyment, that your blog continues to provide.
My kind reader is suggesting that left-wing politics is destructive of traditional forms of identity and therefore best understood as anti-identity politics rather than as identity politics.
I see matters differently. There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. This became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.' See If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist! (56 good comments).
As I see it, there is nothing inherently leftist or rightist about identity politics in the way political correctness is inherently leftist. (Anyone who is politically correct is by definition a leftist.) So what is it to be identity-political? I suggest that it is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.
In a separate post I hope to clarify and develop this suggestion.