….They do have animus towards… Whites. And calling that out in the loudest and clearest terms possible would be much more honest, accurate, and effective in terms of advocating against the left.
How to counter the Marxist left in a way that inspires conservatives and independents across the country.
on December 14, 2020
Speaking on a podcast last month, English commentator Douglas Murray expressed exasperation with the conservative establishment for how it treats the moral claims of the left. “The left is running rampant with resentment and the right is not playing something back with equal depth,” Murray told his interviewer. When the left exploits inequality to win popular support, Murray argues, conservatives leaders think “they can respond by talking about zoning regulations or a specific tax issue.” This hasn’t worked and will continue to fail, he said. Many, including myself, agree.
Calls for a re-orientation of how leading conservative thinkers respond to America’s alienated millennials and the Marxist left who exploit them have been bubbling up following the May/June riots. Conservative scholar and commentator Paul Gottfried, for instance, recently penned a piece lamenting the right’s long-time failure in realizing that leftists do indeed see themselves as fighting a moral fight, and are anything but nihilistic relativists. “It is unimaginable that the more fervent and more activist side in our culture wars is not driven by its own morality, which expresses itself in rage,” Gottfried writes.
Similarly, in a recent and widely shared essay, Yoram Hazony wrote that the Marxist left sees itself involved in a moral battle against oppression and injustice, one that’s quite literally between good and evil. All Marxists, he says, see “unfreedom and inequality in society” as evidence of oppression, and “that a revolutionary reconstitution of society is necessary to eliminate the oppression,” one that includes “bloodshed.” With that kind of dichotomous worldview, Hazony argues, appeals to abstract ideas like “equality before the law” or “freedom from coercion” (that ‘chilliest of virtues,’ as Isaiah Berlin wrote) simply won’t cut it.
The same can be said for using practical arguments against the moralizing left. For instance, using the rule of law as an argument against illegal immigration just won’t budge a progressive who sees all illegal aliens essentially as refugees done wrong by their governments (and ours). The same goes for proposing economic solutions to BLM’s list of oppression-based grievances, as Murray alluded to above. (The National Review has actually suggested cutting zoning regulations as a way to answer some of BLM’s claims of white-driven, black economic underperformance.)
Unfortunately, none of these commentators have offered much in the way of how to fight back “with equal depth,” as Murray says. Hazony and Gottfried were more or less silent on how to respond against the left, while Murray, for his part, argued that conservatives “should respond to [left-wing] resentment with aspiration, among other things, doing better for yourself, your loved ones and your family.”
Of course, countering the left with positive messaging is always essential. In hyper-politicized times such as ours, pushing the public to focus on their lives and family instead of politics is simply a must. But as to how much persuading of the left this can achieve is uncertain. Again, says Hazony, the left’s fight is premised on non-whites being unable to fulfill their aspirations due to white-driven “oppression”—not being able to achieve their self-actualization or “self-activity,” to put it in classical Marxist terms, because of whites’ self-interest and interference. It’s hard to see how conservatives messaging about hard-work, personal goals, etc., could find much resonance among people who feel oppressed.
Moral positions can only really be combated with competing moral positions. For instance, advocating explicitly against the left’s intolerance of white America is something that Murray and Hazony could have raised in their complaint about the GOP’s ineptitude—but didn’t. Today, it’s not hyperbole to say that the rhetoric directed towards whites, from sources both top-down and ground-up, is beginning to resemble what French and German Jews endured at the turn of the last century. Without question, it’s something establishment conservatives can and should get much louder about.
THE LEFT’S ANTI-WHITE ANIMUS
The so-called uplift programs designed to put post-civil rights blacks ‘close to the starting line’ with whites (to paraphrase from LBJ’s famous Howard University speech that birthed affirmative action), while clearly discriminatory and damaging, look almost quaint in the current year. There’s the recent example in Megyn Kelly’s kids’ school in New York, where a black functionary there wrote in a newsletter to parents that, among other things, “there is a killer cop sitting in every school where white children learn” and “[white children] happily believe their all-white spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against black bodies to keep those spaces white.” The school’s decision to distribute this kind of race-baiting propaganda was the final straw for Kelly, who announced her intention to leave the city.
During that same week, the popular YouTube channel The Cut (which boasts 12 million subscribers) published a video entitled “So what exactly are white people superior at?” The five-minute clip features various black “voices” who offer up a quick succession of responses to the all-too rhetorical question, including “lying, stealing, and cheating,” “taking our ideas,” and “destruction of land, destruction of people, destruction of humanness.”
One can now witness express “Europhobia,” anti-white animus, or “whitenessphobia” (as Daniel Greenberg calls it) pouring from nearly every major U.S. institution on a regular basis): major media outlets, places of work, governing bodies (federal and local), and schools at all levels. It would seem hard to argue that there’s little cause for alarm when professors at prestigious universities are sharing white-shaming memes or declaring things like “white lives don’t matter.” Or, when posters mocking white racial stereotypes are appearing in residential neighborhoods and storefronts have to advertise their non-white ownership in order to stave off arson attacks.
The toxic ideas borne out of Whiteness Studies…..