In a healthy and orderly society, the ruling class maintains a set of rules for arbitrating disputes, allocating power and disciplining transgressors. The rules governing the ruling class are intended to defend the ruling class from internal threats, as well as external ones. The rules make sure that people entering the ruling elite are the sort who will improve and defend the system. It also protects those new members, by giving them an orderly path up through the hierarchy.
Imagine if it was acceptable in the Senate for a back bencher to murder his rivals in order to gain a senior position in the Senate. That could be tempting to an upstart, but then again, killing off newcomers would also make sense. Having rules against murdering rivals protects everyone. An orderly system of distributing power and promoting new people up the hierarchy encourages everyone in the ruling class to defend the ruling class system.
It’s why so-called conservatives rush to the nearest microphone to disavow challenges from their right. They always frame it is a choice between reasonable compromise versus unreasonable extremism. Their calls for civility are essentially a defense of the current order. The rules work for them, as it allows them to enjoy a one percent lifestyle as the opposition to the Left. While not as gratuitous, progressives will also call for civility when they sense a threat from their Left.
That’s what makes the debate on the Left about tactics interesting to those on this side of the great divide, even though we have no role in the debate. There is no one speaking for our issues in the halls of power and our people are excluded from the political debate. On the other hand, the most radical progressive crazies get at least an audience with the people in charge. This Atlantic piece gives a little hint that maybe the moderate middle is about to collapse.
American politics is today a brutal boxing match of harassing confrontations. The disagreements renew two enduring questions: one philosophical, one historical. Is political harassment civil? And do the ugly political confrontations signal a sharp departure, or have they always existed in the United States of America?
Moderates in both major political parties have long argued no on both fronts. Their political brand is unity. They pursue the absence of tension. That has meant avoiding confrontations through building political bridges high above the audible river of children crying in detention facilities, in police cars and cells, in abandoned schools, in abuse-infested homes, in rat-infested apartments, in searches for incarcerated and deported parents, in funeral homes over closed caskets, in plantation shacks after their first whipping, and in slave auctions fearing their new harassers.
These political moderates classify as uncivil those, like Donald Trump, who would toss children into those crying spaces. They classify as uncivil those, like Maxine Waters, who run down into those crying spaces and call for the all-out harassment of the harassers. They look down on both the Trumps and the Waters’ from the heights of their self-styled civility. They look down on those crying children—and their comatose or raging defenders—and counsel patience, preaching a religious belief in the American political process.
Now, you have to put aside the fact that the author of that piece is a ridiculous person with a fake name. His lack of authenticity is part of the act that gets him a place in the prevailing orthodoxy. The angry black man routine allows him to play the part of house anti-white among the ruling class Progressives. If he had stuck with his birth name, he would be forced to play a different role, as no one is going to take seriously a guy playing the Malcolm X part with the name “Mister Rogers” and sporting a cardigan.
What matters is his argument that justice requires the just to be uncivil, by which he means overthrowing the rules. After all, incivility is by definition the rejection of the rules of discourse. Radicals have always been attracted to this formulation, as they always imagine themselves as the righteous underdog fighting the powerful system. In the last century, this was at least plausible, if not entirely accurate. Communist revolutionaries wanted a new system. The New Left was in revolt against the previous generation.
Today, the Progressives are in total control of American life. If you doubt this, name a left-wing web site that has been banned from the internet. The terrorist group Antifa is allowed to operate on Twitter and Facebook. Post FBI crime stats on social media and you risk being doxed by a Huffington Post writer and losing your job. In other words, the people in total control of the system are now losing faith in the system, because they do not think it is effective enough at crushing their enemies. Ibram X. Kendi wants more blood.
This is not surprising. From Robespierre through Marxism, into the multiculturalism of today, the Left has always been a spiritual cause, because all of their schemes require a certain type of person, a certain moral understanding. Ultimately what is required for their society to work is a certain moral order that can only be imposed. As Progressivism has curdled into an anti-white ascendancy, it means erasing all traces of whiteness, which is going to mean erasing white people. You cannot do that and remain civil.
What we are seeing is that the anti-white ascendancy that was birthed by cultural Marxism, brings with it the same defects as Marxism. That is, it lacks a limiting principle, so it inevitably proceeds to the most extreme expression of its core beliefs. There was no end to radical intolerance in 20th century Marxism. There will be no end to the racial bloodlust by anti-white radicals. It is why anti-whites are offended by calls to civility. The inevitable end point of their ideology is unrestrained vengeance against whites.
A dozen years ago, Mark Steyn made the point that the history of ruling elites reforming themselves is not very encouraging. That was in the context of immigration. All these years on, we see that our ruling classes have done nothing to stem the flood of migrants into the West. Therefore, it is hard to imagine them standing up to the anti-white radicals they have cultivated the last few decades. Guys like Ibram X. Kendi exist to hate whitey and they will not be restrained by calls for civility or compromise.