Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not entirely related to this post. The Covid stuff does tie into the new religion. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. There is the SubscribeStar version and the Substack version.
Many commenters have noted that American political discourse is much coarser and nastier today than it was a generation ago. The change can be dated to the arrival of the Clintons on the national stage in the 1990’s. They brought with them a crudeness that has become the norm in national politics. The great interregnum that lasted from the 1980’s into the 1990’s was replaced with an ugly and vulgar brand of politics that eventually led to the nasty and censorious present.
The question that never gets asked is why has public discourse become so nasty and unforgiving over the last three decades? The time for intolerance was the Cold War when mistakes could mean nuclear war with Russia. Instead, it was a time of relative tolerance compared to the present. Technological and material advances have made the margin for error extremely broad, yet the people seeking to shape public discourse carry on like one misused pronoun will end the world.
There can be no denying that the nastiness and intolerance is coming from the people we call the Left. The so-called conservatives continue to carry on like they are at high tea with the queen. The censorship, cancel culture and the harassment of dissenters all comes from the tribes of the Left. They are the ones trying to ruin people for explicitly stating obvious truths that suddenly run contrary to official dogma. The mobs threatening social order are all left-wing.
The funny thing is, the Left should be riding high, given that they control all of the high ground of American society. If the new fad on the Left is for “birthing people” to wear flowerpots on their heads, every news anchor will either have the flowerpot on her head or state in advance that they are not a person of uterus so they are respecting the culture of the birthing people. The Left has never had more power in American society, yet they have never been angrier.
One reason for the nastiness is left-wing politics has always attracted people who are full of self-loathing and have a resentment toward normal society. This was true in the French Revolution and it is true today. The conformity and identity provided by the hive mentality of radical politics is the appeal. Radical politics is by definition anti-social, so it attracts anti-social people. The phrase “happy go-lucky communist” is not a staple of our language for a reason.
Of course, the cult-like atmosphere of radical politics limits the ways in which a member can get attention. To get noticed by senior members of the hive means being more extreme than the rest of the hive. Without a limiting principle, virtue signaling quickly becomes a race to the most extreme position. This is how we quickly went from finding a legal accommodation to cohabitating homosexuals to a world where the Left demands that child molesters in drag have unlimited access to grammar schools.
Then there is the fact that people into left-wing politics tend to live in isolation from normal people. They may interact with normals at work or in daily life, but their political activity is exclusively around fellow believers. These ideas arise in a world insulated from the daily realty of normal society. The people operating like spiritual masters inside these movements are never challenged or questioned. They are never exposed to scrutiny or forced to defend their positions.
Someone like Robin DiAngelo is never going to sit down for a tough interview by a knowledgeable critic of her ideas. All of the thought leaders and influencers on the Left are like stage psychics in that they only ever allow themselves to be tested under conditions that allow for success. This serves to promote their brand, to use a marketing term, but it also legitimizes their ideas to their followers. DiAngelo always sounds authoritative, which serves to give authority to her ideas.
The counter here is that people on the Right do the same thing but the big difference is the institutions are run by the Left. A normal person cannot go about their life without running into left-wing assertions. Watch a TV show and it is full of propaganda about the latest causes. Ads are mostly for cultural ideas, rather than products. The workplace is littered with warning signs about offending the believers. There is no escaping the cult of progressive beliefs.
People on the Left can avoid almost all counter-programming. Normal people are naturally polite and non-confrontational. As soon as they learn that Sarah from accounting is a woke believer, word goes forth to avoid talking current events with Sarah or her friends. On the other hand, if a normal person dead names Barbara, formerly known as Robert, Sarah and her coevals will be all over the poor guy, demanding he be hurled into the void for intolerance.
This tendency toward politeness has the perverse effect of providing social proof to the people in these subcultures. The guy getting thrown into the void must deserve his fate as no one defends him, thus his crime is validated. On the other hand, the lack of pushback from the people around them, plus the intense loyalty of the people inside the subculture, is daily confirmation. There is no social cost to holding extreme ideas so the incentives to holding them are unchecked.
Compounding this is a poverty of information inside these movements. Since the leaders are never exposed to scrutiny, their ideas are never tested. In an environment of conformity, showing any doubt about the ideas risks a loss of status inside the group, so no one dares question anything. In the rare occasion when the members confront someone who directly challenges their belief, it is as if the person is questioning the very nature of reality. There must be something wrong with them.
This leads to the sort of performative confrontation we saw in the Senate between Josh Hawley and Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges. To normal people, the professor came of as obnoxious and unbalanced. To the people in the subculture, she heroically defended the one true faith against the violent attacks of a bigot. In other words, their brief confrontations with reality are quickly turned into confirmation. The normal feedback loop is warped by their general isolation.
All of this explains the increasing weirdness of the Left and the intensity of belief, but it does not explain the nastiness. Fifty years ago, progressives were just as committed to their agenda as they are today, but back then they were prepared to debate anyone in public on their issues. Today, the Left is trying hard to purge anyone from the public square who is not enthusiastic for their cause. Fifty years ago, the Left said you had to be open minded. Today, an open mind is violence.
The most likely reason for this is the focus of belief has shifted from the material world to the spiritual realm. In the 1980’s, lefty was all about economics. Progressivism was a material cause, not a cultural one. Today, the Left does not care about economics or the material wellbeing of people. In fact, they seem to think the material wellbeing of people is a danger to their cause. The evolving assault on food production in the name of Gaia is looking like the actions of a suicide cult.
There is the key to the nastiness. Radical politics has always had a religious vibe because ideology is a secular replacement for religion. Instead of God providing authority to the beliefs, it is the will of the people or the tides of history. Until this age, ideology was rooted in the material world. The door through which mankind would enter paradise was economic relations. Today, the door is cultural relations. Once all cultural barriers are removed, everyone is free to fulfill their potential.
The old ideology of the Left had a tangible vision. They thought that in the future, a man would be able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night. He would be free to live as he chose because his material wellbeing would be secure. The new religion offers an image of the present like a haunted house, in which the monsters are normal people. How can you be a happy warrior when you imagine yourself surrounded by spiritual enemies?
What we may be seeing is the end of ideology. Ideology is a new thing in human history, which means it has a beginning and therefore an end. This great replacement for religion as the set of shared societal beliefs may be in an end phase. The reason it is so nasty and violent is the same reason a trapped animal is nasty and violent. Suicide cults choose death over disbelief. This last ideology is looking to destroy this fallen world rather than give up their beliefs.
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The question that never gets asked is why has public discourse become so nasty and unforgiving over the last three decades?
In a word, multi-culturalism?
America has always consisted of multiple cultures – but those were mostly geographically based. And from roughly 1880 – 1980 industrialization and mass media were heterogonizing forces. Which hit peak heterogeneity ca 1965, following the success of WWII and the exongenous threat of Soviet communism.
But since that time America has ceased being a heterogeneous culture. Some of that was inevitable in such a large and populous area. But it was accelerated by policies pushed by political elites. First with “integration” and then with immigration and a politically driven schizmo genesis – creating ever more splinter groups as a means to electoral success.
At this point, there are dozens of subcultures – all with their own behavioral norms – jostling with each other in overlapping geographic space. This inevitably leads to friction and conflict. Reflected in politics as the issues become centered around identity instead of performance.
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Despite the claims from cultists on the Left, none of the hostility is coming from these other subcultures to the other subcultures, other than as resistance to left-wing assaults. Familiarity breeds contempt and the mass media age makes us all too familiar with one another, but it it these subcultures on the Left making war on the rest of us.
The difference is that the various subcultures of American society are rooted in things other than ideology. They may be regional, cultural or political, but they are not ideological. A southerner can appreciate Yankee culture, even though he strongly prefers Southern culture. An ideologue, on the other hand, sees everyone outside the belief set as a threat.
2
The Left has never had more power in American society, yet they have never been angrier
The liberal-enlightenment movement is nearing the end of the line.
They’ve been successful at every step over the last two centuries, liberating individuals from one thing after another. And yet utopia is still as far, or further, away than it was at the beginning of the project. Their multi generation reason for existence has turned to shit so explicitly that even they cant deny it. Worse, the only things left to liberate, to advance the ball, are reality and life itself.
Who wouldn’t be pissed on realizing that the life’s work of themselves and their parents, grandparents, great grandparents etc was all for naught – all hubris producing shit?
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Exactly. The reason that they’re so angry is because they are in control of every facet of society and their utopia still isn’t materializing.
This means that either their beliefs are wrong, which they don’t accept, or there is this unseen force (white male racism and misogyny) preventing their utopia from arising.
Because this mysterious force is hidden, they lash out wildly at anything that might be associated with it in hopes of landing a blow.
I think the internet has also made it easy to prove that leftists were wrong on every issue in the last 60 years. In a few keystrokes we can see the data on how awful society has become thanks to their ideas. Immediately after all of their 1960s victories, murder, rape, violent assault, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, homelessness, and single motherhood all shot through the roof, while math and reading scores plummeted. Turns out, giving $50k a year in free stuff to female, low IQ, highschool dropouts in exchange for having more babies yields exactly the permanent underclass breed that our grandfathers said it would. Life was better on almost every metric by which we critique a society before the mid 60s. Liberals and leftists can’t handle a debate on any of this. All they can do is hide, censor, and shame us for pointing out the obvious, then retreat to some corporate sponsored echo chamber and cry about how mean the facts are.
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Fully agree. And I’d add that the damage is not immediately apparent. This is captured in many phrases, like “there is much ruin in a nation,” or borrowing from the future for present consumption (we’ve done that, in spades!), and so forth.
One whitepill is the almost universal realization outside the D.C. beltway class that forced bussing was a disaster. We haven’t gotten to the point where we can say point blank WHY it was a disaster, but baby steps and all.
Even Kamala supporters were blasting her when she gave her fake story of how forced bussing benefitted her, largely because of many progressives realize how it destroyed the old ethnic communities, even if there is extreme cognitive dissonance about the ramifications of that.
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If modern left wing ideology is indeed a suicide cult, how do we encourage its leading proponents be first in line to shuffle off their mortal coil?
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jim jones died last…
I can honestly say that I have no idea who Robin DiAngelo is. I ascribe this to my studious avoidance of the mainstream media.
2
You can see the nastiness and religious impulse with the J6 defenders, all of which are forced to stand trial with a Jury of their “peers” in Washington D.C. The Juries are, of course, deciding they are guilty of all counts. If the FBI added a murder charge to people just walking around in a building, the Jury would rubber stamp that also.
The entire idea of a jury of peers is to ensure the legal system is treating their fellow in the community fairly, with our new brave society, it’s all about whether the person is a bad thinker. With the precedent, any right winger who angers the Eye of Sauron in D.C. will get hauled to D.C. for a farce trial whose conclusion everyone knows.
People mock the Stalinist Show Trials without realizing the D.C. machine has almost the exact mechanism in place, right up to the coerced “confessions” of the victims.
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Aye.
Re. ‘fbi’.
Always scratched my head on fbi records found laying around in ‘Ceegar Bill’s White House…and the lack of investigation on how they got there.
No more.
The ‘weaponization’ of 3 letter agencies against political enemies…
…began with the Clintons.
might the left have turned nasty *because* they have achieved dominion over the country? they now want to hold onto *all* power. wasn’t this what the pigs in Animal Farm did, as well?
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I’m speculating but you probably have to go back a but further, to the 1960s counter-culture. It was (possibly) in the early 1990s that these creatures of the counter-culture came to the forefront of national politics. Including Slick Willy (“I smoked but didn’t inhale”). I believe whole books have been written on the nature of the ’60s counter-culture, including how anti-intellectual, superficial, and self-centered it was. In essence it was a pampered post-WW2 generation that was “rebelling without a cause.” The so-called “left” we see today is the bastard child of that counter-culture. Over the years I’ve encountered many aging specimens from that era. They are, to put it politely, the scum of the earth. Any attempt at rational discourse ends in hysterical screeching (by them, not me). These people have no foundation in books, in history, in the development of ideas, and more generally speaking, Western civilization.
As affluence recedes in the West, these creatures will die out.
1
Well, Fukayama talked about the end of history.
What may be in the offing, short-term, is a totalitarian future for the rump of the U.S followed, long-term, by the U.S., its people divided and set against one another, becoming colonized by the rising pan-Asian hegemon that may loot North American resources (the Canada/U.S. merger) and leave the new “Native Americans” impoverished and living, via a social credit system, on reservations.
This scenario is fanciful, but an end to ideology in the sense of a “transvaluation of progressive values” could be the prelude to a social/political leveling in which groups, hating one another in ways reminisicent of the last days of the Habsburg Empire, are, via mutual standoff, unable to do much harm to one another, each having to devote the lion’s share of its attention to feeding, clothing and housing themselves.
People here always mention 1984, and Brave New world as the guides to modern society. Sometimes Kafka or Nietzsche get a mention. To my mind, Lord of The Flies captures leftist rule almost perfectly. I see Kevin Williamson in the role of “Piggy”…
1
We say that they control “everything,” but that’s not true. They don’t control us, and that’s the problem. They are finding that controlling the institutions isn’t bringing them control over all the people.
It’s like a teacher not being able to control the students. She has the authority, the school behind her, the city, the cops even. And yet the kids just don’t want to be told what to do.
“The conformity and identity provided by the hive mentality of radical politics is the appeal.”
This seems a bit puzzling, but think of it this way: we are taught that we are killer apes, but no, what we are, is prey.
Being more like bonobos*, we learned in the hot, wet Miocene to climb trees or jump in the water and swim away from the many things with bigger fangs and claws.
Our fantasies are often a dream of uniting to defeat a larger threat.
A monster movie writ large.
This deep instinct enabled us to tackle large game- mammoths and buffaloes!- and is tapped to move the softer urbanites against their rougher brothers.
* bonobo chimp females hold great sway, have extended estrus, allowing us to live in larger groups of 60 to 100 versus violent alpha male ape groups of 15 to 25.
“Once all cultural barriers are removed, everyone is free to fulfill their potential.”
Which, for the majority of the mouth-breathing leftist masses approaches zero.