If you call everyone who disagrees with you racist and fascist they might start to say yes
Progressives are excellent at finding new ways to make the same mistakes.
I really don’t like the term woke right. It elevates copying the methods over advocating rather different things. What we are seeing is folk who are ostentatiously anti-woke yet using a version of the same (i.e. Critical Constructivist or Post-Enlightenment Progressivist) playbook as well as taking from the same intellectual sources of Hegel, Critical Theory and postmodernist thought.
Using that playbook includes claiming that we have been consistently misled and lied to about the “real” history—particularly World War Two history—and “real” political and social dynamics. It includes claiming that they are victims—and/or speak for its victims—of the forces that generated those lies and dominate those dynamics. It includes claiming that only they have the “true” understanding of all this, and of the real threats, so that is why they should have power. It includes claiming that all disagreement with their understanding is based on malice, delusion or ignorance. Such folk seek to network into institutions, bypassing the electorate.
So, they are following the “woke” playbook, including mobilising the same underlying intellectual framework, though they valorise very different identities. They look at the Critical Constructivists, the Post-Enlightenment Progressives—the “woke”—and saying (1) we hate you; (2) you are an enemy to everything we want to keep or build; and (3) we can use your tactics and methods against you.
This is so a pattern we have seen before. It is the pattern of Fascism and Nazism adopting and adapting the operational techniques of Communism. The real Fascists and Nazis of the interwar period, not whomever left-progressives are currently screeching those terms of moral abuse at.
Mussolini was a former radical socialist who took the Leninist operational tactics and applied it to the project of Italian nationalism. He shifted from being a collectivist of class to being a collectivist of nation.
Hitler studied the Left of his time—particularly the Communists—intensely and adopted and adapted their operational tactics, both in his politics before he took power and in his remaking of Germany. He was a collectivist of race, but he admired Stalin and clearly learnt from him and Lenin about the operations of politics and power, of how to dominate and remake a society.
When in power, Hitler built a Party-state as had Lenin and Stalin. Institutionally, Nazi Germany ended up looking far more like the Soviet Union than it did Britain or the US. If your program involves an intrusive state, with bureaucrats pursuing moral projects, it is a bad program.
Well, this oppose-yet-copy, this adaptive mimicry, is happening all over again. The left-progressives build their networked politics of institutional capture, and delegitimising of dissent, and the opposing-yet-copying network-authoritarians are deciding that they can copy it for their own political project.
Mistaking history
The post-WWI Leninists in Hungary and Italy decided that by destroying the existing Parliamentary orders, they would come to power. The Stalinists in Weimar Germany and Republican Spain thought the same.
Of course, the interwar wave of Communist left-progressives turned out to be very, very wrong in this overweening confidence. In the case of Germany, catastrophically wrong.
There was a deep moral arrogance behind their error. They thought they understood both the proper, and the actual, direction of history. Therefore, the dissolution and subversion of “ordinary” politics favoured them.
Modern left-progressives take the same view, using different methods. Current left-progressives are busy undermining liberal freedoms and bypassing democratic choice, so that their agendas are advanced institutionally regardless of whether or not folk have voted for them.
Since the existing societies are “structures of oppression”, their destruction would be liberating. Liberal-democratic protections—as they enabled all this “oppression”—are just pretences, they are hollow, so undermining or getting rid of/subverting them in the name of anti-oppression “liberation” is “real” progress.
It is utter nonsense. It is catastrophically stupid nonsense. But modern left-progressives typically live in such intense bubbles of moral arrogance that reality is not in much danger of breaking through. Not to those who are explicitly pushing such politics, nor to those who do not see themselves as supporting democracy-undermining politics, but are.
They have, in the standard progressive way, a pathological relationship to information. The imagined future—that can be as perfect as they wish—becomes their utterly un-reality-tested benchmark of judgement. Past and present become the morally tainted realms of sin and moral failure, so the only sources of reality-tested information are massively discounted (including—indeed especially—past left-progressive failures).
Meanwhile, those who disagree are dismissed as stupid, ignorant or maleficent. (Who is most likely to notice problems with what you are doing? People who do not agree with you.) Hence progressives can end up in massive information bubbles, even in societies flooded with information.
Both the true-believer activists and their “supporting this narrative makes me a good person” enablers are also creating the networked-authoritarians (“woke Right”) monster. Not merely by giving lessons in what works, operationally, to undermine liberal democracy. But also in who they are infuriating, how and why.
The revolt of the dismissed
For the fuel of the contemporary networked authoritarians are angry young men. Angry young men who have a great deal to be angry about.
In so many modern schools, universities, and much of social media, if you are a low melanin count, heterosexual male you are absolutely at the bottom of the “woke” oppression-bingo hierarchy. You will be implicitly, or explicitly, held to be somehow tarred with every bad thing any person “like” you has done in history, no matter how long—even how many generations—before you were born that it happened, nor how dubious an historical characterisation it might be. There is no identity open to you that you can celebrate, or feel positively attached to, without potential or actual denigration.
If you do any reading, you can quickly work out that this is a ludicrously one-sided—and deeply unfair—way to look at history. Even in its own terms, it is nonsense, as “folk like you”—i.e., low melanin count heterosexual males—voted for every single legal advance any of the celebrated-as-oppressed groups made. “Folk like you” built the Scientific Revolution, Parliamentary Government, mass prosperity.
Of course, this was a matter of culture, institutions, the happenstance of history, not melanin content. The trouble with the racialisation of history and identity is that it is, indeed, the racialisation of history and identity. As Jews are currently (re)discovering.
Nor can many of these angry young men take much refuge in the good life, work or entertainment. Online dating has turned into a hypergamous nightmare that excludes most guys, in-person connections are fraying and migration-plus-restrictive-land-regulation has shot rents up and made home-owning unattainable.
In entertainment, masculine heroes are being replaced and degraded. Online games are being systematically “wokified”. There are systematic attacks on their heritage. Sport and advertising is also being wokified, is “bending the knee”. Where to go?
If folk systematically tar or denigrate someone’s identity, a natural response is to say “no, my identity is great, it is wonderful”. There will be certainly a market for such a response. The natural response to systematic denigration is some form of “fuck you!” and the politics of “fuck you!”.
In the contemporary world, what is the most dramatic way of saying “fuck you!”? To take the racist!, fascist! abuse and go “right on!”. Even more so if you take the ideas they invoke and turn them back against them.
Of course, if you just reverse what left-progressivism—in its “woke” iteration—stands for, you are still dancing to their tune. But rage can easily work like that.
So, these angry young men look at the folk who treat them with such continual, institutionalised, contempt—who stack everything they can against them—and decide “we hate you”. If you are going to abuse us anyway no matter what we do—the seductive logic goes—then why not simply embrace the identity you impose on us if we put our heads up? There is, after all, no more in-your-face way to shriek their anger and rejection back at those who are abusing, denigrating and excluding them than to embrace racism and fascism.
They look at ordinary conservatives, at ordinary liberals, they look at Boomers, and think “you did not stop it, you did nothing to protect people like me”, so they—and their politics—get no respect.
Instead, they go to the politics of using the operational tactics used against them—the operational politics of “wokery”—in support of politics that most completely expresses their rage. This is the updated version of what happened with 1920s Fascism in Italy and 1930s Nazism in Germany. Like the original versions, they are using—and so helping to legitimate—the operational methods of the left-progressivism.
Not that left-progressives, the “woke”, will see it. They are way too full of the stupidity of arrogance, of the blindness of moral narcissism, to pick what is happening, still less take any responsibility for it. They utterly fail to see themselves; to understand how much they come across as smug, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous, shits whose politics again and again ends up favouring people like them and whose recurrent response to disagreement is to de-legitimise, denounce and censor. Their entire view of themselves is they are the oh-so-clever, oh-so-moral people. Nothing they do is ever seriously counter-productive or fundamentally mistaken.
Faced with the rise of actual racism and actual fascism, they will shriek racist! and fascist! even harder. But they are in the situation of the boy who cried wolf! Except worse, as the boy in the story neither created, nor trained, the wolf.
They have so debased that currency, so debased historical analogy, that fascism has lost its rhetorical, or even its warning, power.
Besides, how many people will say: these folk against whom you are shrieking the same terms of abuse you have shrieked at people for decades. Are they making excuses for the mass sexual predation on young girls by migrants we did not want? Are they supporting the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors? Are they teaching folk to despise their own countries and heritage? Are they pushing the narrative lies of the moment? Have they proved to be incompetent at elementary things, such as fighting crime and managing fire risk?
No? Then they sound good to me.
Left-progressives: so good at finding new ways to make the same mistakes. It is almost as if they have a pathological relationship with information. Oh, wait, they do.
ADDENDA: Having steeped herself in Communist and Nazi propaganda to write The Hand That Signed The Paper,
noted that Communist propaganda is motivated by anger, Fascist propaganda by love. James Lindsay, after reading passages from Melita Maschmann’s book Account Rendered: A Dossier On My Former Self, makes the following observation:She [Melita Maschmann] explains somewhere in here that love of country, love of Germany was far more than hatred of Jews that brought her in. So what you will see then is what made people in Germany become Nazis was we love Germany so much and everything's not going perfectly. Therefore, who's the enemy?
Oh, it's the Jews. So the hatred is derivative to the love, right? So that's a satanic inversion of love that you have the love of your country becomes the explanation for your hatred of the outsider, the other.
Progressives—with their ostentatious care and compassion—can be notoriously vicious to, and about, those who disagree. Similarly, politics that gets a lot of its original energy from hate can parade as hate-because-love.
References
Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Fourth Estate, 2014.
Yes, but this is not just an emotional response on the part of young men. It's pretty clear that we cannot have a functioning society if we go on like this (how many more incompetent females, for example will be LA firefighters or helicopter pilots? Who's going to be the "second female VP" of Bud Light?).
If your political opposition is opposed to reason, how are you supposed to move forward without turning into a total dick? If all that matters is power and identity, how do you beat that if the movement refuses to accept any other terms? Also, melanin is not the only thing that differentiates people - IQ is probably around 80% heritable, and different groups have different IQ distributions. Is it possible that *on the average* some groups lack the intellectual gifts to live in a liberal democracy?
Edit to add: Also, if race politics is so easy for unscrupulous politicians like Obama to use, is the loss of civil liberties (the government uses your paycheck to censor you or force experimental medicine on you) necessarily going to occur in a multiethnic society?
This constant white male bashing does more than piss people off. It consistently raises questions for which progressives have no answer.
This is one of the things I have never understood. If you argue that all white people are racist, and no matter what they will continue to be racist - then why shouldn't all the white people move 'racism' out of the column of things they care to do something about ... not be racist ... and into the column of things that it is impossible to do something about, and thus foolish to try. It becomes more like the problem of 'anger' ... being angry is part of the human condition, and sometimes people do terrible things out of anger. Some people really would benefit from learning techniques to control their anger, and to control their behaviour whenever they get angry. If they do not learn this on their own, the rest of us may end up imprisoning them, or even in extremis killing them, because it is too dangerous to have them walk around free but subject to their uncontrolled anger. But for the rest of us, getting angry is just something that happens, isn't a big deal, and mostly doesn't need any more fixing than an apology. I suppose racism is too much of a big business for the people making a living out of it to ever reach a point where they celebrate that their services are no longer needed. If you ever wanted evidence that the state isn't going to 'wither away' when we reach the promised utopia, this is what it looks like.