It was my intention to get this post out of the way last week, but life happened. I also couldn’t really coherently give an honest perspective as I was “woke” to the many great moderate and conservative minds that a liberal media and intelligentsia had marginalized by virtue of their divergent opinions from the establishment. There was much to learn. After considering many angles, I settled upon the evolution of community organizing movement by the flawed absolutist ideologies of academia and the bitter argument it eventually caused with my brother’s girlfriend, a community organizer, about a month ago when she protested a “Muslim Ban,” which didn’t pass the courts. The reason it did not pass should have been illegal, as the basis for the decision was Trump’s character instead of the legality of the measures of his executive action. Al Jazeera says as much.
I’m not sure if her actual job title is community organizer, union organizer, union manager, protest organizer, or some combination I couldn’t invent in my wildest dreams that includes cis gendered female, but she is tacitly of the left, a true leftist who has worked in unions and protests her entire life and eventually came so close to calling me a racist that I don’t feel bad in the slightest calling her out, but won’t divulge her name due to the family dispute trolling of her account would decidedly cause. While she doesn’t make six figures, she makes a comfortable salary fighting perceived injustices. She is what I would call a leftist. This is how our argument began on Instagram…
…If you want to skip my esoteric, but fascinating examination of the intellectual forces behind modern politics and see the conclusion, you’re more than welcome to scroll down to the end.
Since it may cause confusion, I’m going to give a rough designation of terms. Liberals are people who vote for the democratic party in all instances. They may be advocates of free speech. They can even have a libertarian streak and support Israel. However, in spite of the fact there are very rational liberals, the term includes all Democrats, essentially anyone left of center. For my purposes, I’m talking about moderate liberals like Bill Clinton in the 90s, JFK, FDR, Steven Spielberg, Sam Harris, Martin Luther King, Dave Rubin, maybe Bill Maher. I say maybe Bill Maher, because he and other classical liberals are beginning to embrace socialism. I did until it was made clear to me that you could tax the 1% at 90% and it wouldn’t cover universal healthcare. As someone who believes the deficit is actually a problem, I couldn’t responsibly support that.
Leftists are socialists who usually have extreme points of views and tactics that are meant to quiet any opposition. When science or economic reality opposes their narratives, they attack the enemy to misdirect them. They are disciples of community organizing movements invented by Saul Alinsky. While it’s confusing to group Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into this camp, Obama was a community organizer greatly influenced by extremists like Bill Ayres and Reverend Jeremiah Wright in his personal life and the works of Edward Said, who he shared a table with at least once at an extravagant fundraising dinner. The irony of socialists and their culinary sophistication.While the media portrays Hillary as a moderate, Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis at Wellesley was entitled “There is only the fight…: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model,” you know the community organizer guy. John Podesta and George Soros follow the Alinsky model in their ill-fated attempt to control American politics in order build a globalist society without borders. Leftists now control the Democratic party, the intellectuals, mainstream culture and mainstream media excepting Fox. To combat stories that are favorable to the right Soros has built alliances with leftist journalists for years and funded Media Matters, an Alinsky style far left fake news site mainly functioning as a place to discredit right wing journalism often cited by the mainstream media.
Leftists generally have little regard for America, as they see the thirteen colonies who escaped as an Imperial power that can never be forgiven for the genocide of Indians and slavery. I do sympathize with Native Americans on this issue, but it does not make me discount the vastly wonderful things America and capitalism has done, such as eradicating much of the world’s hunger indirectly. In the leftist view, much like the refugee state of Israel, America’s success means it was stolen. As Ben Shapiro notes about Bernie Sanders, “He sees somebody in a room with five dollars and somebody with one and he immediately says the guy with five dollars must have stolen something from the guy with one dollar.”
In foreign policy, leftists always side with the underdog. Their hatred of even moderate nationalism and Imperialism (even in cases where the narrative is pure fiction) makes liberals side with bad hombres. Leftists believe in cultural relativism, an anthropological approach which eventuated the ubiquitous belief that all non-white cultures implicitly have more or at least equal merit to Western cultures. They ignore the billions of people whose lives have been improved by liberal democracy. This is the genesis of the insanity you see on campuses today.
They may believe in Democracy, as long as Democracy is intended to benefit minorities, the transgendered and women. If they don’t believe in Marxist theory, they general believe in the welfare state and cultural Marxism, the ideas of The Frankfurt School, a group of hugely influential German philosophers who left Nazi Germany and found American capitalism distasteful.
While I sympathize with many of their positions in a vacuum, the Frankfurt School’s pessimistic view of American society in the 1940s and 1950s (I view America in that time period as one of the great eras in human history in technological innovation, education and the arts), is to me quite troubling when combined with the notions of cultural relativism. While I do not suggest it was The Frankfurt School’s intention to impede on free speech and the free exchange of ideas, by separating societies into the two main classes of victim and oppressor, the following narrative prevailed.
Victim oppressor narratives create a system of multicultural tribalism that has infected young academics and turned them into something not unlike the totalitarian powers their work aimed to refute. When liberal public policy proves to only intensify the inequity between ethnicities, arguments against social welfare (aside from Denmark, Norway and Sweden whose combined population is equal to the New York Metropolitan Area flush with natural resources and until recently with Protestant work ethic) are to attack the “oppressor” as a bigot.
This is the “no skin in the game” problem, Nassim Taleb, one of a handful of people who predicted the 2008 financial crisis and one of a handful of public intellectuals who publicly supported Trump speaks of. People become a lot less absolutist and theoretical when their lives are at risk. Academics are hugely influential in shaping the majority opinion of the ruling class with no risk to themselves, teaching five hours a week making six figures and taking five months off to “research” or ostensibly do whatever they want. If you don’t agree with my assessment of the intellectual class, look at Karl Marx writing absolutist economic principles based on social structures that became the foundation for the Soviet Revolution and nearly a century of suffering, hunger and mass extermination of dissenters.
A less famous example of an intellectual altering the course of the world is Leo Strauss. Born into an Orthodox Jewish household, he evacuated Nazi Germany as a young scholar. Though a contemporary of the Frankfurt School thinkers, Strauss came to wildly different conclusions when he too embraced secularism and came to the similar conclusion that democracy’s fatal flaw, that individualism would lead to nihilism. Strauss didn’t divide the world into victim and oppressor, but philosophers and everyone else. The philosophers became political strategists. They were responsible for maintaining national security and myth-building, sometimes bizarre myths painting the picture of America’s destiny to triumph over evil-doers.
Pessimistic is a kind word for his Old Testament view of human nature in which, “The Philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large, but also to powerful politicians…in order to keep the ignorant masses in line.” He accepted the inevitable unfairness of life and knew the only remedy was unity, a shared purpose. If the better world was based on myth, did it make the better world any less real?
Strauss’ students used their professor’s belief system to create neoconservatism, clearly the most influential political philosophy in the late-era deep state Cold War through the war in Iraq. These philosophers were to rule through empty vessels, famous men with charisma who spoke with gravitas, like Ronald Reagan, and likable populists with name recognition whose fathers were already president, like George W. Bush. Strauss’ ideas and politicians like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld were implementing anti-utopian ideology in the form airstrikes, coups, wars and nation building. While their policies were mired in failure after Iraq, they admirably believed they could form a better world. Strauss never had name-recognition in the era of the intellectual celebrity, but his work had more impact on America than any of his contemporaries. They ultimately failed because of their ignorance of the Middle East, but they were not evil warmongers. They had ideals that they believed could be the savior of a crumbling world, in a corrupt world that looks quaint in the splintered society we now exist in.
By all indications Hillary Clinton wanted a mix of Kissinger style globalists and good vs. evil neocons in her administration. This could have created some insane mix of politically correct Cultural Marxism on the edges of totalitarianism, open borders, aggressive wars in the Middle East and a possible reigniting of the Cold War. Or it could have been the stabilizing force, wherein the smartest men in the room could reevaluate the errors of the past overseas.
Saul Alinsky, like Strauss was an ex Orthodox Jew aiming to bring theory an opposing theory into practice. The endlessly charismatic man made real social progress by fighting those who went against his protests by characterizing his detractors as well as neutral parties to them as an evil opposition. While we champion Martin Luther King’s nonviolent resistance, guys like Alinsky were attacking the power structures behind the scenes by demonizing detractors of progressive politics as simpletons and bigots. “The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.”
We see the same strategies in a world where all races and ethnicities have the same legal rights to this day. Like terrorism, our enemy is not easily identifiable. It’s called racism and when that doesn’t track, there’s phantom terrorism that some call unconscious prejudice. To combat the tribalist instincts of humanity, the liberals have brilliantly devised the strategy of making words less offensive and helping you find your hidden prejudices you probably aren’t even aware of, to make certain your lack of prejudice doesn’t stop you from grouping people by race and ethnicity. According to leftists, opposition to this way of thinking is assumed to be racism, just as it was racist to oppose Barack Obama. Tell that to Thomas Sowell.
Ask yourself, is it socially acceptable for an Upper Middle Class person to support Trump? Is it OK to be critical of Barack Obama’s foreign policy?
Unless you follow extremist politics pretty closely, you probably first heard the job title “community organizer” when Obama was taking down Hillary in the primaries in 2007. The job title sounds about as fishy as Bachelor contestants claiming to be an “Oil Trader,” or a “Sport Fishing Enthusiast.” As strange as it may sound (you may be having the why the fuck should I care thought as you’re reading this, give it a second to simmer) in the 1930s, Saul Alinsky, who only right-wing conspiracy theorists, the Barack & Alec Baldwin crowd seem to care about, devised the community organizing movement ostensibly to give those without power a voice in the zeitgeist.
David Horowitz, the Marxist Huey Newton confidante turned conservative thinker gets to the core ideology of our last administration in his pamphlet, “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution. The Alinsky Model.” He writes, “The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what ’60s radicals called ‘boring from within.’ … Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.”
While there are curiously no large anti-war rallies, social protest has amped up since the Tea Party and Occupy Movement, culminating in a large-scale continual protest of Donald Trump. The media is complicit in its attack of Trump, pointing to a conspiracy that Trump and The Kremlin rigged the elections. The left claims post-truth politics belongs to the right, which is simply not the case. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and CNN are no longer different than Info Wars, spending inordinate amounts of time speculating on Trump and Bannon’s actual intentions without a shred of evidence. Never mind how underreported it is that Obama was spying on Trump’s administration according to Bloomberg. Salon and others like the New York fucking Times go to great lengths to discredit actual Watergate-style scandals of the Obama White House while they cling to the hope they can prove collusion between Trump and Russia with no real evidence. There doesn’t even seem to be evidence that Russia hacked the DNC, which all mainstream news outlets reported as fact.
One example of an irrational conspiracy theorist, who the left trusts without reservation is Rachel Maddow, who embarrassed herself by proclaiming with a stolen tax return that Donald Trump made about 150 million dollars in 2005 and paid an effective rate of 24%, about as much as Tim Kaine and nearly triple Mitt Romney. Rachel Maddow is either playing 4-D chess (she knows something we don’t), or is just not all that bright. I would assume the latter. Maddow is the perfect encapsulation of the Democratic Party Media complex. She lives in the Alinsky bubble.
Since I am not an institution, I think it is OK for me to follow their lead. Right here, I’m going to introduce another conspiracy. My thought is on Bannon’s recommendation Trump supports Russia, because he believes The Middle East will become more stable under the rule of secular dictatorships than Sharia states. Devoid of religious dogma, the Middle East does become more predictable at the very least.
Clearly it is no longer acceptable for the left to consider the right’s position on any issue. Even Maher, who is highly critical of Islam, will never defend things like “The Travel Ban,” in spite of his personal position. Maher is still clinging to the value of institutions and can’t wrap his head around the idea that all these Trump/Russia conspiracies are speculative, including Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s ten-million-dollar salary from a Putin ally in the Ukraine. Where there’s smoke there doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence. Though the segment was called “More Than Circumstantial,” which shouldn’t be a surprise on a News Network, all I saw was circumstantial evidence.
Democracy is being compromised by Republicans shaken by the accusations of letting people die and being racists. Conservatives cannot present their ideology in the service of discourse. Liberals have been forced to use the totalitarian leftist methods, simply because, as William F Buckley proclaimed half a century ago, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” If you look below, Bill Maher, after pretending to be a libertarian, as a big defender of institutions like partisan papers, he hypocritically explains why it is moronic to be right of center in this climate. He is claiming idleness creates apolitical conservatives, without evidence other than the badmouthing of liberals who believe they are more evolved than conservatives, because they are of the pseudo-intellectual class.
Liberals see Maher as some sort of intellectual titan. He is undoubtedly intelligent, but I see something not unlike the fool of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn…If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people… and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
There are very real reasons to be concerned about a Trump administration, particularly Trump’s word being worth very little. Democracy cannot function without two sides working with agreed upon facts. This is why democracy hasn’t functioned very well since a few months after 9/11. Both sides have lost credibility, including bedrocks of formerly falsifiable news organizations. While it is encouraging that Trump tends to be right more than he is wrong, if he were to keep his mouth shut from time to time his administration would actually be flourishing. It is not, but still, the alternative was a lot worse. Below, I lose my shit at my brother (in purplish blue and blue blue) and his girlfriend (in red) below for making leftist arguments that made it very clear that supporting Trump over Hillary was a no brainer in spite of the conventional wisdom.
Rather than continue to stoke the fire, my fourth and final installment in this series, which will be revealed in the coming weeks will be looking towards solutions. After outlining the mess of American politics, I believe (as is the way of news and blogging) presenting huge problems without offering solutions is fundamentally useless. Everything is malleable, including the dictatorial power of radical Islamists in the Middle East and a broken democratic system. You, the citizens have the real power, but you don’t know how to use it against a right wing that appears to have fascist tendencies and a left wing that does have fascist tendencies. Believe it or not, I do have constructive ideas for our uncertain times. The ball is in your court.
To catch up on the first installment click here.