From my new essay at VDARE on the hardening of class taboos:
In recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, a glance at the original poster in Adbusters that kicked off the movement should raise doubts. The irony is that this Photoshopped image of a ballerina surmounting sculptor Arthur Di Modica’s iconic symbol of Wall Street, Charging Bull, struck very few protestors as ironic. Ballet is perhaps the most expensive and aristocratic of all performing arts, having attained classical perfection under the patronage of the Czars. Ballet would wither without the rich.
But that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks.
Read the whole thing there.
upper class vs upper class
ReplyDeletethat's what it was all about.
I wonder if Marxism (or other form of socialism) will make a comeback as a way for people with un-PC thoughts on race & immigration to retain some left-wing cred. It's harder to paint someone as reactionary if they're sticking up for the "working poor."
ReplyDeleteBut that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks
ReplyDeleteWhy you be trippin'? We all know you know that's not true. Keep it real, dawg.
There have been minor Democratic public figures criticizing open borders in the last decade--ex-Rep. Brad Carson of Tulsa comes to mind. I realize elected official < blogger guy from The New Republic in the 90s
ReplyDeleteFree silver was enough of a hot button in the 1890s that Brown Univ. president Benjamin Andrews was forced out by the trustees over it (mostly for public effect; his career survived). Just as with Nancy Hopkins/Faust, the trustees who were Providence industrialists had a material interest there. Apart from C-SPAN Saturday afternoon programming I've only once heard a TV commenter say anything complimentary about William Jennings Bryan (creationism being quite a faux pas these days), oddly enough it was Dorothy Rabinowitz. Strange because "Inherit the Wind" was also supposedly a favorite of Bob Bartley's FWIW
It brings up a good point about the way it was (the 90s). For example the Buchanan speech at Houston convention has been completely retconned. It was no big scandal at the time. NYT's main gripe was his perceived sympathy for Jefferson Davis or whatever; they were certainly more neutral on borders and probably agreed re: NAFTA. Of course the WSJ/supply-side crowd was slamming the refuseniks on a weekly basis, which might have disinclined the leftish elite, observing this, from joining in. The driver of political passion is What Sort Of People you want to be associated with. And support for Prop 187 in California, though stained by controversy enough to be the subject of a Simpsons episode, was not outside the mainstream. Post-riots there was an abundant feeling that maybe Daryl Gates was on to something. I believe the Gilded Age of the Clinton boom changed it all, making the '92 "culture war" speech retroactively scandalous; Andrew Sullivan discovered he was really teed off at Pat Buchanan for insensitivity to gays. Then 9/11 happened, and everyone busily updated his c.v. and revised the narrative to include fresh developments.
ReplyDelete"I wonder if Marxism (or other form of socialism) will make a comeback as a way for people with un-PC thoughts on race & immigration to retain some left-wing cred."
ReplyDelete????????
Marxism rejects innate biological differences among races.
Yikes.
"Marxism rejects innate biological differences among races...Yikes"
ReplyDeleteMarx himself was a racist (yikes indeed). Maybe not in the strict biological sense, but he certainly had a full set of prejudices against Jews and non-Europeans, and even against some Europeans (mainly Slavs).
In any case, one doesn't need to buy the full HBD version of racial differences to make arguments based on culture, behavior, assimilation and so forth. There is no inherent contradiction between promoting a socialist program and believing that all men are not created equal after all.
In fact, if you disbelieve in human equality, you should be able to make a stronger argument *in favor* of socialism, on the grounds that some groups won't be able to compete in the free market.
Important and cogent points in your article:
ReplyDeleteThe most obvious explanation: class-based economic self-interest.
Since then, the immigration debate has been increasingly paralyzed by the same racial taboo.
IMO the latter seems more dominant. A perfect example: the idiotic remarks of General Casey after the Ft Hood shooting.
Of course from a WN perspective, the racial angle of the immigration debate is the most important. The other factors -- legal or not, educated or not -- are less important.
Dude.
ReplyDeleteMarxists
do not believe
in innate ANYTHING.
They are against the very idea of there BEING a human nature. This is one of the huge criticisms of them.
Read Pinker's The Blank Slate if you want to see this discussed in detail. I'm really surprised anyone can even know what a Marxist IS without knowing how anti-group-differences they are ideologically. It's Marxist dogma.
Sounds to me like someone's just a socialist and doesn't want to give up his HBD views, even though they are completely contradictory to Marx. Well, crack a book.
"American elites have overseen the importation of a vast Hispanic population, largely working class or below. In pre-21st Century Marxist theory, this swelling of the ranks of proletariat could turn out bad for the upper classes if the workers ever overcame, to use Friedrich Engels’ term, their false consciousness."
ReplyDeleteThe honestly self-interested Mexican immigrants don't seem to suffer from 'false consciousness', but it does seem as if the white working class do. Either they are 'right wing' and support Big Business Republicans or they are 'left wing' and support New York Times Liberals. The Republicans' pro-immigration, pro-low-wage policies are hostile to the WWC. The NYT's pro-immigration, pro-racial spoils system policies are hostile to the WWC.
From what I can tell, the WWC seem to believe in a dream of America that died in the '60s. They're shackled to a corpse.
I believe that this is not just one of those essays by Mr. Sailer with very deep contents,
ReplyDeletebut the one written in _the_most_ sophisticated way.
The only one place where important subject of essay is named explicitly, is an immigrant labor leader.
Bravo, Mr. Sailer !
It is not an attempt of sarcasm, but fascination with your ever increasing mastery.
Your Florida resident.
>But that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks.
ReplyDeleteYet hasn't cultural refinement and aesthetics always played a part, to some degree, in Leftist movements? What was "bread and roses" if not an emphasis on material inequality AND an emphasis on the aesthetics and beauty of life?
Vintage Sailer.
ReplyDeleteToo much treacle for me to pontificate upon, but nevertheless, I shall begin:
It seems to be that pro-immigrationism of the most rabid sort (ie open borders as the late, unlamented Bob Bartley recommended), really took to the fore after the neo-liberal, globalist, free trading, big business brown nosing ascendancy of the early 2000s, imeadiately before the monumental f*ck-up of the Great Recession - which was, of course, directly engendered by the same forces - who managed to dominate the discourse with no opposition - that 'liberalism' (ie nation states had no moral right to control their borders) was the way to go, leading to prosperity for all ( a most dubious proposition at the best of times) and prosperity in particular for the 1%, who by then basically bankrolled a dirty congress.
The main cheerleaders were the usual suspects namely the damned fools and charlatans at the WSJ and 'The Economist'
As ever there was a whole confluence of factors that combined at once.Therewas also unamity between America's two parties on the issue, big business wanted cheap labor.The lefties jettisoned 'reactionary' white workers and cherished as perpetual victims 'persons of color'.
The universities indoctrinated generations in 'white guilt', there simply was no effective opposition to immigrationism - the Ellis Isalnd myth was evoked again and again.
I wonder if Marxism (or other form of socialism) will make a comeback as a way for people with un-PC thoughts on race & immigration to retain some left-wing cred. It's harder to paint someone as reactionary if they're sticking up for the "working poor."
ReplyDeleteIt won't. It will be called fascism.
Of course that's the most overused term of the last century, but it would also be dishonest to say that socialism with a race angle has no connection to fascism. Many fascist elements have tapped working-class, anti-bourgeois sentiment. What sets fascism apart from marxism, though, is how it claims to eliminate class struggle in the interest of national unity. Few people are up to discuss such subtleties, and the F-bomb is still attractive. I really doubt that any class-based movement would gain traction in this country.
In keeping with the 'clever' , 'intellectual' zeitgeist of the early 2000s that mass immigration was always an unmitigated good in itself, Britain's disasterous New Labour maladministration succeeded in sneaking in a policy of uncontrolled immigration when the thought no one was looking.You see the British have always but always absolutely hated, loathed and reviled immigration like nothing on earth, most particularly if the immigrants are markedly different from themselves.
ReplyDeleteEvery Briton knows this - every polltician, it would be thought, knows it as well.
Anyhow, Labour got found out - and duly punished.In Britain mass market poular newspapers such as the Daily Mail (of which politicians have a real and palpable terror, they unashamedly brown-nose, no pun intended, the editor of this paper), unabashedly and unashamedly are strongly anti-immigration, and regularly stir up trouble on immigration.
Of course, it is the aftermath of the madness of that psychotically stupid b*stard, Adolf Hitler, who is really responsible for today's white plight.
ReplyDeleteThe pendulum following the horror of Hitler was pushed back far too much in the anti-white direction, and generations of students have been indoctrinated thus.
White gentiles should curse and spit after the mention of his name, just as Jews do.
Steve - the Left quietly tiptoeing away from its former causes is one of the more under-remarked trends. I comment on this here.
ReplyDeleteThe Wiki article on bimetallism is excellent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallism).
ReplyDeleteI particularly enjoyed the reproduction of an 1896 Republican campaign poster conflating the Democratic party, free silver and increased immigration! Those were the days!
Spot-on analysis, Steve. It is astounding that views have changed so much over a relatively short time. It is like reading John Paul Steven's opinions from the beginning of his Court tenure, and wondering how he could change so much.
ReplyDeleteWhat is salient is that when White elites quit advocating for their co-ethnics, they went all the way over to advocating for non-White ethnics.
i think it more has to do with the idea of radical chic - upper class ethnic warfare, with a lot of useful idiots/fellow travelers.
ReplyDeleteI do find it funny how the left champions warren buffet ,george soros and other super billionaires, they don't seem to 'get it' that the politics they advocate eliminates the civic (middle) class and sets up a society ripe for a despotic regime..
The upper class are defined more by money than erudition these days. I'd prefer "wealthy" and "influential" as descriptors rather than class. Honestly, nobody knows nothin' anymore and the rich are no exception. And, no, they aren't more articulate. If anything the reverse is true: the more liberal arts education you have, the less easily you are understood. Those who do "get it" aren't allowed to feel superior to those who can't crack the code anyway.
ReplyDeleteThe Marxists believed High Culture existed as a preserve of the rich only because of the class division - come the Revolution, ballet would be for the masses and not only the monocles. And come the Revolution, the Bolsheviks did keep the Bolshoi open. During 1917, Lenin and the boys occupied the Petrograd mansion of the company's top ballerina Kshesinskaya and used it as party HQ up to the days of the aborted July revolt against the Kerensky's provisional government. Stalin had published fairly decent poetry as a young man in Georgia's leading literary journal and once ruler of Russia he patronised famous writers such as Maxim Gorky (enticing him back to the Soviet Union with the offer of a nice residence and pension). He also groomed composers such as Shostakovich. To Marxists, culture had an important political function. Communist society needed to tower over its rival in economic, technological, scientific and artistic terms and so demonstrate its superiority.
ReplyDeleteSteve did a good job of describing the incentives of Indian tribes in restricting casino profits to an inner circle, also of the beneficiaries of affirmative action in trying to to recruit more AA beneficiaries (because there is no theoretical limit to those who can benefit from AA preferences).
ReplyDeleteBut he has not shown a similar understanding of the economic incentivization of leftism in general.
Leftists maximize their take if they are 50% plus one vote of the electorate, and if the minority has as much private wealth as possible.
If leftists have 60% or 70% of the voters, it just means they have to divide their loot among too many greedy constituencies. It also means their target is too small. They want their target to be as big, and fat and juicy as possible.
So now we observe that the left has swapped out the white working class for recent third-world immigrants. If the left still has its majority, it makes economic sense.
The white working class may not have too much saved wealth, but they do have jobs that can be stripped by AA and by other means. They should be part of the target group, and not part of the left's coalition of predators.
The left would rather be plundering the white working class than dividing the spoils with them. It's an economic decision and it's that simple.
Great column, particularly on change at NY Times. According to their website Lawrence Downes handles immigration editorials. Does anyone know much about him?
ReplyDeleteIn recent months, the Left has begun congratulating itself on rediscovering class with its Occupy Wall Street protests.
ReplyDeleteThis mistake is almost as bad as your mistake in assuming that Obama wrote "Dreams".
The purpose of the "Occupy" movement is to seize control of the [entirely legitimate] anti-Wall Street sentiment in this country, and to re-direct it AWAY from its rightful target - namely Soros & Goldman-Sachs & their ilk - and TOWARDS a bunch of folks, like the Koch brothers, who never had anything to do with the catastrophe in the first place.
In fact, I will go so far as to assert that "Occupy" is funded & coordinated & given its marching orders DIRECTLY by Soros & Blankfein & their compatriots*, precisely so as to deflect attention away from what really happened back in late 2008 & early 2009.
*And I can pretty much guaran-dadgum-tee you that Geithner père and Minow fille are not much more than a few Kevin-Bacons-of-separation removed from the inner inner party which is orchestrating the "Occupy" movement.
BTW, two other data points:
1) It has recently come to light that none other than Charles Schumer blackmailed the Bush 43 Administration into installing Paulson at Treasury [which Treasury department then worked aggressively to sabotage and torpedo the McCain campaign; Limbaugh talks about it some here].
2) As I pointed out to you several months ago, the very moment that the "Occupy" movement first started toying with the idea of targetting Goldman, you immediately saw Sheldon Silver et al come out against "Occupy" & its trespassing.
This stuff is nothing more than classic, textbook, canonical Kevin-MacDonald-esque-connect-the-dots-ism.
Frankly, if one has access to the information [which, admittedly, most don't], then even a retard would notice the pattern - it's so glaringly obvious.
"Marx himself was a racist (yikes indeed)."
ReplyDeleteAnd the very first Red Stater. After our first Republican president was re-elected, Marx wrote to Honest Abe:
"We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority... The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
Lincon's response sounded vaguely Ron Paul-like (its odd that libertarians are the world's foremost Lincoln-haters):
"The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world."
I'm reading the Murray book now, and I'm up to the new lower class chapter...really sad stuff for me, as I recognize it from my own acquaintances, just as he says we would.
ReplyDeleteIt also explains the depressing social stratification in my own flyover town, whereas different groups used to rub shoulders in the local dives when I first arrived here 35 years ago.
But the omissions of both immigration and globalization really are glaring. Murray really seems to believe that the average guy should have been making out great during the stock market bubbles of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. Or, he's faking it out of noblesse oblige.
There clearly aren't enough jobs left for average to low IQ, and what's there is being taken by cheap labor.
If becoming an ignorant, shallow-thinking Eloi becomes the thing to do, yes, many people will do so. And many will fake it.
ReplyDeleteLofty moralism always masks class and political interests of the most base kind.
ReplyDelete"But that’s the point of much Leftism in the 21st Century: to assert one’s expensive cultural refinement over the hicks." - Steve
ReplyDeleteUp until very recently the right was very reactionary. As a consequence their positions were never very well thought out. Your uneducated uncle would come across as a crackpot, racist, or religious nut. Now there exists a framework on how race is real and why moral order is necessary for civilization. This stuff just didn't exist in the past.
"And support for Prop 187 in California, though stained by controversy enough to be the subject of a Simpsons episode, was not outside the mainstream."
ReplyDeleteProp 187 passed in California with 59% of the vote. Pete Wilson, who was governor and a huge proponent, wasn't thought of as a racist but as an elitist. In fact he was well admired by the left for being a pro-choice Republican. Dick Lamm, a former Colorado governor, a Democrat, and an environmentalist, is also strongly pro-sanity on immigration, and he was a hero of the Left, too.
It is only in the last 14 years or so that being pro-enforcement has been made equivalent to "racist," with much aid from the Cheap Labor lobby, especially the Wall Street Urinal. The feeling is that if even conservative newspapers and businesses won't support enforcement, then how can pro-enforcment people be respectable?
We need to pressure supposedly "conservative" media outlets, especially Fox, WSJ, and local newspapers, to see the light on immigration. We need defenders in the media, or our case is lost.
I recall reading somewhere that the survival of ballet after the Russian revolution was the result of pure happenstance - an influential Bolshevik had a ballerina as his mistress. The attempts in 1919 of the revolutionary regime to close the Bolshoi and Mariinksy ballets as relics of the tsarist past were accordingly thwarted. If this claim is true, I'd be curious to know further details. At any rate, the old Soviet Union at least preserved the fine arts, and produced some fine classically-trained musicians.
ReplyDeleteFar worse from a cultural standpoint has been the American new left and its intellectual heirs. To quote Susan Sontag (who strongly approved), these people "have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent.” Elsewhere she wrote, "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
Sontag and other figures of that ilk cultivated a nostalgie de la boue, presumably finding it more authentically proletarian and therefore more satisfying than the bourgeois "Matthew Arnold notion." Such intellectual leadership has brought about the progressive demotization and vulgarization of popular culture we have witnessed over the past forty years.
There seems to be another kind of taboo. There is precious little mention in the essay that many elite institutions like New York Times are dominated by Jews and their liberal wasp running dogs. When Sailer says most of the editorial board of NY Times, it gives the false impression that they are like most white people, or even most affluent white people. No, they are like affluent Jewish liberals and their puppets.
ReplyDeleteWhy you be trippin'? We all know you know that's not true.
ReplyDeleteThat's a non-sequitur, dude. "Trip" has nothing to do with the truth of an assertion, but rather is black for worry. Doubtless you've noticed that blacks, and whites desperate to appear cool, never say "don't worry."
Of course, it is the aftermath of the madness of that psychotically stupid b*stard, Adolf Hitler, who is really responsible for today's white plight.
ReplyDeleteI am not saying this is not true. But why is there no backlash against the left for that psychotically stupid b*stard, Josef Stalin? Why don't the Holodomor and gulags engender the same contempt for the Left and its policies?
Then 9/11 happened, and everyone busily updated his c.v. and revised the narrative to include fresh developments.
ReplyDeleteSeems to me Peter Brimelow had become portrayed as a monster well before 9/11. And almost immediately after 9/11, the border question suddenly became part of the terrorism issue, suggesting that "America for Americans" was already too hot to handle.
But Lind’s influence seems to have diminished over the years.
ReplyDeleteIf he ever had any. I think it's the power of a photograh. I have his "Vietnam, The Necessary War," and his pic makes him look like a Skull & Bones party guy.
Why don't the Holodomor and gulags engender the same contempt for the Left and its policies?
ReplyDeleteFor whatever reason, I think our official state religion doesn't want us to take notice of the Holodomor:
http://desip.igc.org/HolocaustAndHolodomor.html
(...)
A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:
“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”
. . . All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.
See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Nicolas Werth, “The Great Famine,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism, pp. 159-68 (Harvard University Press, 1999); Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 257-59 (1996); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, pp. 84-85 (2003); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.
Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, pp. 248-49 (2000) gives this description, drawn from still further sources, all cited in his notes:
A population of “walking corpses” . . . even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of seed it contained. . . . Cannibalism became so common-place that. . . local authorities issued hundreds of posters announcing that “EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM.”. . .
They staggered into towns and collapsed in the squares. . . . Haunting the railway stations these “swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice,” followed passengers with mute appeals. . . . [They] “dragged themselves along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy. Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.” Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by wolves.
(...)
Of course, it is the aftermath of the madness of that psychotically stupid b*stard, Adolf Hitler, who is really responsible for today's white plight.
ReplyDeleteThe pendulum following the horror of Hitler was pushed back far too much in the anti-white direction, and generations of students have been indoctrinated thus
I know that everybody believes this, but as so often the case, everybody is wrong. Hitler was not a "white supremacist" waging war for "white people".
The notion that Nazi Germany discredits the concept of white countries is flat out nuts. The countries which defeated Hitler were all themselves very "racist", by our standards. And of course, they were all white.
the anti-racist movement is probably more deeply rooted in European colonialism in Africa and Asia than in Hitler.
Delete"But why is there no backlash against the left for that psychotically stupid b*stard, Josef Stalin? Why don't the Holodomor and gulags engender the same contempt for the Left and its policies?"
ReplyDeleteNo one cares what happens to the east of Vistula.
"Rough-handed sons of toil?" No! Lord Salisbury's phrase was "horny-handed sons of toil!"
ReplyDeleteit would also be dishonest to say that socialism with a race angle has no connection to fascism.
ReplyDeleteThe name you're looking for is Ludwig Woltmann, who with Gobinau and Chamberlain makes the unholy trio of 19th century scientific racism. His heterodox brand of Marxism is a fusion of socialism with social Darwinism. He believed that race was missing from Marx's theory. What he wrote in his books is word for word of what later appear in Hitler's ideology as the notion of Lebensraum.
All totalitarian regimes, including Fascism and National Socialism, have their vantage point in Marxism, or better said in attempts of wrestling with unanswered questions that Marx and Engels left after their death to their followers like Woltmann, Lenin, Sorel, and Mussolini.
Heliogabalus: Marx himself was a racist (yikes indeed)...In any case, one doesn't need to buy the full HBD version of racial differences to make arguments based on culture, behavior, assimilation and so forth.
ReplyDeleteActually, my strong impression is that until about 70-odd years ago, just about everyone in the entire history of the world, Marxists certainly included, had been a "racist" by modern standards. Obviously, there were degrees of "racism" among these various "racists", just like there are among "racists" today. Some of the old-time "racists" believed in "racism" even more than was scientifically correct, and others less, but pretty much all were "racists".
Anonymous: Marxists do not believe in innate ANYTHING...Read Pinker's The Blank Slate if you want to see this discussed in detail. I'm really surprised anyone can even know what a Marxist IS without knowing how anti-group-differences they are ideologically.
As for Pinker's book, I'll admit it's been a decade or so since I read it, and I can't recall his exact discussion of Marxists. But I suspect you're confusing his discussion of modern-day Marxists (who are obviously anti-racist) with original Marxists (such as Marx and Engels) who were racists. Similarly, most of the present day conservatives are anti-racist, but the conservatives of the 1950s were pretty strongly racist. The views of Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck don't really correspond to the NR editorials of 1956.
Here's an analogy. Suppose a liberal denounces Bismarck for probably opposing Gay Marriage, and a conservative hits back by arguing that Marx also probably opposed Gay Marriage. Big deal! Until around 1995 or so, everyone in the entire history of the human species had "opposed" Gay Marriage, so much so that the subject had never once been raised in all of human history.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201103/criminals-look-different-noncriminals
ReplyDeleteKylie, I know I've been neglecting you lately, this
ReplyDeleteBud'sfor you!
The whole point of Leftism is allied with soft-feminism and an appeal to female driven politics. In part this is natural, the biggest social change post 1945 was the economic and social emancipation of women, the pill and condom, anonymous urban living, and the like.
ReplyDeleteCompare/contrast pre-War leftism, very class based, see Grapes of Wrath, and how based on working White male grievances the whole thing was. Now look at the "New Left" which is an aristocratic (and thus deeply appealing to women) set of pretensions. OWS has nothing for Joe Average White guy worker, whom OWS would rather annihilate off the planet anyway. But it does have housewives running off to "find themselves" and a lot of posturing, with people who major in feminism, or Black studies, or stuff like that. Aristocratic pretensions.
OWS likely was ginned up by the Obama crowd, using their minor aristocracy as a Red Guard for their own mini-Cultural Revolution. It died when its very nature (mini aristocrats) made it repulsive to struggling working families.
If asserting one's expensive cultural refinement over the Hicks is Leftism, that in and of itself is a red flag denoting female orientation, given that men prefer generally flat hierarchies and women nobility. Its why boys dream of being firemen and astronauts and girls dream of being princesses. Deep rooted biological differences that drive politics once women were freed from old social structures.
tea party was never this obnoxious but it's been called 'extreme'."
ReplyDeletethis diversity thing... is it more white guilt or color quilt? even among swpls who don't think much about guilt, there is much fascination with cultural and racial spices and flavors.
ReplyDeletewould activist academics be actidemics?
ReplyDelete"Marxists
ReplyDeletedo not believe
in innate ANYTHING."
dude ...there is no single kind of marxist.
"dude ...there is no single kind of marxist."
ReplyDeletelol
/arguing on the internet
Being right? Having sources? WHO CARES? If you have such a pathetic life that you can get in the last word every time (helps not to have a family or job!), you win! The other guy outproduces and REproduces you, but you win! An argument! On the internet!
You win teh prize.
Excellent analysis of our current situation. I wonder what Christopher Lasch would think our society today.
ReplyDeleteWhat libs care about now are: abortion and gay marriage. I wonder what Marx would think? I wonder what Dorothy Day would think? I wonder what JFK would think? I don't think they would recognize the modern liberal.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting is when socialists gain total control of a nation such as the USSR, North Korea, China, etc., they seem to crack down on behaviors disruptive to society such as gambling, drugs, prostitution and homosexuality. But when their ideological brethren operate as an opposition in a nation they do not control, they seem to embrace any deviance that goes against that society's norms.
Currently the left in the US embraces homosexuality, promiscuity, etc. But I wonder if they would still support it if they had absolute control and felt that every last vestige of old America was dead. At some point the left will probably begin to think this new nation is theirs and will start to take care of it as though it is. Maybe at that point they might act more like the rulers of the old USSR where they feel it is in their interest to protect society.
I don't think that the WSJ changed the NYT mind so much as the leftists hated the fact that right wing libertarians had stolen the moral high ground away from it's rightful champions, in other words the NYT. Here was a bunch of believers in a minimalist government making the believers in intrusive government seem less cool, that could not stand. Once the left was all in on the illegal immigration question, the sheer number of leftists with a voice would soon completely drown out the far less numerous libertarians in the MSM and academia. After this happened any member of the GOP who changed their mind or began to doubt the benefits of millions of illegals could be painted as a venom spewing racist.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that even some libertarians who might be doubting the supposed benefits of illegal immigration are now scared to death of being labeled racists and therefore continue to see the issue in emotive terms, less they be excluded from polite society like Charles Murray, a libertarian who broke a different taboo was for nearly 20 years. Another interesting left wing change on this issue is that of enviromentalists who were strongly oppossed to illegal immigration are now passive to active supporters of it. That guy on the Discovery Channel who attacks Japanese whalers is one of those old fashioned enviromentalists who wants the Sierra Club to return to neutrality on the issue, because even he as radical as he is knows it's very un-PC to be actively against it.
Man, that Adbusters Photoshop poster job would've made Leni Riefenstahl drool with envy.
ReplyDeleteWe are officially a classless society working on becoming deracinated as well. No supposed class gets exempted from the race taboos. It's just that whites are absolutely not allowed to be racist while the rest only have to put on a facade of not being racist.
ReplyDeleteRKU:
ReplyDeleteActually, my strong impression is that until about 70-odd years ago, just about everyone in the entire history of the world, Marxists certainly included, had been a "racist" by modern standards. Obviously, there were degrees of "racism" among these various "racists", just like there are among "racists" today. Some of the old-time "racists" believed in "racism" even more than was scientifically correct, and others less, but pretty much all were "racists".
You see how this Orwellianism just cries out for an equal and opposite counterweight.
70 years ago, almost everyone was a racist, and almost no one was a communist. Today, almost everyone is a communist, and almost no one is a racist.
Bella Dodd was a CPUSA Politburo member, a slightly dim New York Jewish teacher's union lady not at all unlike my own grandmother, who made the principled mistake of siding with Browder after the Duclos letter. She was duly purged. The charge: racism, against her Puerto Rican building superintendent. Of course Ms. Dodd was an anti-racist to the tips of her toes, so this one stung.
60 years ago, only communists had to undergo show trials for racism. Now, racists in Britain are routinely prosecuted for tweeting their racist tweets - a level of ideological persecution not seen since Mary Stuart. We can't be far behind and we're not.
(Now there's an idea. How would Mary Stuart suppress American communism - aka, "liberalism"? Bear in mind, I'm not talking about Mary Queen of Scots here...)
(Of course I meant <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_I_of_England>Mary Tudor</a>. It's difficult to read the Times these days without getting a powerful gut feeling of what <i>de heretico comburendo</i> was all about. If only they'd all known that the end state of Protestantism was Elton John - oh, wait, some of them did know.)
ReplyDeleteEven in Heaven there is a class system.
ReplyDeletegiven that men prefer generally flat hierarchies
ReplyDeleteWhiskey - you have clearly never been in the military or a fire or police department. Men THRIVE in organic hierarchy. They are able to detach the person from the position and follow orders without getting bogged down in personality conflicts like women do. The problem with our society is it is too FLAT--a Marxist/feminist construct, rather than a multi-tiered medieval society where people find their own level. Where this ties in with your endless Game analysis is Marxist society is merely two-tiered: glib, too-clever alpha Haves using the enormous footprint of the democratic State to crush everyone else into egalitarian dependency. That's Roissy's whole point: Game is how men compete for female attention on a broken playing field.
Please internalize this.
"60 years ago, only communists had to undergo show trials for racism."
ReplyDeleteLee Benson (Benofsky), a very influential American historian, was kicked out of the Communist party in the late 40s for being racist, or engaging in "white chauvinism". He and his wife were tasked with befriending a black couple for recruitment purposes, but they refused to do so on the grounds that they didn't like that particular black couple. The issue was really that he wasn't left-wing enough, and had become too willing to cooperate with liberals, white populist farmers, etc.
My impression is that anti-Racism was a very successful cold-war tactic for the Communist movement.
Even in Heaven there is a class system.
ReplyDeleteIn hell too, called circles.
OT, anyone see Charles Murray on PBS news last night? They duly sneered at his notions of religiosity, marriage, industriousness...then followed with an interview of Condi Rice and Joel Klein raising the state of our nation's schools as a "national defense" issue.
ReplyDeleteMaking no connection of course, to the decline in the virtues Murray noted. By all means, more money, more testing, more screwing with the curriculum will cure the problems of rotten students and their cretin parents.
Steve, to better understand NY Times position on illegal immigration circa 2000 you need to know that in NYC the biggest illegal immigrant groups were often blond and blue eyed. In the 1980s it was the Irish; in the 1990s, the Poles. So, before 2000 being against illegal immigration in NYC did not mean you were racist.
ReplyDeleteadbusters already got in 'trouble' for being 'antisemitic' for pointing out that the iraq war was pushed through by jewish neoconservatives.
ReplyDelete"this diversity thing... is it more white guilt or color quilt? even among swpls who don't think much about guilt, there is much fascination with cultural and racial spices and flavors."
ReplyDeleteThey are trying to be interesting and worldly.
For example, they said racial conflict in the Jim Crow South was stirred up by the landowning class to keep black and white sharecroppers from uniting against their oppressors.
ReplyDeleteYes, James Webb unconvincingly makes this argument in "Born Fighting," his history of the Scots-Irish in America.
"Bruce Banner said...
ReplyDeleteEven in Heaven there is a class system.
In hell too, called circles"
Copy that;
We're moving someplace, don't know exactly where yet. ITZ too early to tell.
"For example, they said racial conflict in the Jim Crow South was stirred up by the landowning class to keep black and white sharecroppers from uniting against their oppressors."
ReplyDeleteNot only that, they openly encouraged Irish, and other white women, to marry blacks because of laws in which any wife of a slave became a slave.
Funny: not on immigration but, on changing mores - I remember it was about 1 year after "The Bell Curve" came out, and you started hearing about 'equality of opportunity, not of outcome' and though everyone disavowed the book, I thought it was connected. Well, that was a tiny blip, long gone now. Now it's just 'gap's (outcome).
ReplyDeletePerhaps, he who can describe something in the simplest way favorable to himself, wins.
@MM: "...the end state of Protestantism was Elton John..."
ReplyDeleteThat's just superb. Arguably true, and undoubtably funny.
I wish that *I* had said that.