American socialism offers an alternative explanation of the classical theme of economic inequality, why some are wealthy and others are not. Under the logic of traditional socialism, class is the barrier to economic prosperity. If class were eliminated, then wider prosperity would be possible. But if the struggle is to equalize minorities, the principal barriers to economic prosperity are now sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia.
…The new villain is not the bourgeois, but the white heterosexual American Christian male.
…there is only one vanguard, the “woke.” To enforce unanimity, the vanguard deploys its activists, media-adjuncts, and ultimately the power of the state not to persuade but to destroy opponents. The vanguard seeks to destroy rather than to persuade because persuasion involves compromise with those who have reservations about some of particular practical goals of the moral crusade, as well as self-examination about the whole theoretical basis for the moral crusade. The upshot of these hesitations is to risk falling back unto mere reformism, giving up the revolutionary passion. The vanguard cannot allow this. A revolution permits no obstacles, delays, or scruples.
#bioleninism
The original Bolshevism was also very much a bourgeois enterprise. E.g. in the first Politburo, Lenin came from petty nobility, Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov and Zinoviev came from well-to-do Jewish families, Bubnov came from a Russian merchant family, and only Stalin could claim proletarian (peasant) extraction. Plekhanov and Ordzhonikidze came from petty nobility, etc.
* proletarian / peasant. Stalin’s father was a shoemaker, not really proletarian by Bolshevik standards either, but at least the family was poor.
This is good! Reminds me of Hayek’s “Counter-revolution in Science.” Hayek shows that original socialism in France of the early 19th century was an anti-Christian movement. It had two goals – destruction of property and freedom from sexual morality. Christianity is all that stood in its way. Helmut Schoeck makes a similar point in his classic “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.” He says that envy is the enemy of innovation and only Christianity managed so suppress envy enough to allow economic growth.
BTW, has anyone referred to your fans as Klingons?
>has anyone referred to your fans as Klingons?
& if not, why not?
“The vanguard seeks to destroy rather than to persuade because persuasion involves compromise …”
Persuasion also involves being able to understand the ideas of the person who is to be persuaded.
Minorities with lots of Asabiyyah beat majorities without it every time. The Bolsheviks were a minority of the country and even a minority of socialists. But they had the will to act. How can one act so decisively when one is uncertain.
I can easily nod along to stuff like this, but at the same time it seems just as much of a fever-dream of the intellectual right as the one it attacks on the intellectual left that believes systematic racism and sexism are the source of major, current economic problems.
Also, I think the social cohesion of the anti-white male left is (fortunately) vastly overestimated. There is no amount of brainwashing that’s going to convince young white men to go out and inflict revolutionary violence on anyone, but especially upon themselves. Likewise, there are a pretty vast number of white women who, despite the occasional WaPo columnist, generally don’t want their fathers, brothers, and children rounded up and killed or even reduced in status.
Young white men go out and inflict revolutionary violence on white men? Who’s ever heard of such a thing? Good heavens. War is what young (white) men do. Chimps do it. Black Block in Portland does it. American Revolutionaries did it. French Revolutionaries did it. You bet
Corded WareBattle-Axe people did it while seeding Europe with IE genes and languages.Sarcasm aside, you are falling into a common error by considering “whites” as some kind of united block, when there’s no more (and arguably much less) love lost between badwhites and goodwhites than between the various parts of the rainbow coalition. The latter at least have the KKKrazy glue of hatred of (bad)whites to hold them together, whereas the former have nothing left to hold them together. The threat of indiscriminate violent action from the rainbow coalition, who are not the most scrupulous in distinguishing between badwhites and goodwhites, as many an Yglesias learned by experience, is too far-fetched.
You’re kind of proving my point.
Sure, White guys will kill other white guys to dominate them. The winner assumes a high-status position. Never said they wouldn’t.
On the other hand, I find it very unlikely that the average white guy will kill en mass to institute a system which has the primary goal of reducing their status. Or worse. People fight to improve their status, not reduce it. Yglesias’ experience is case in point.
The closer you get to the wackos, the more you see they’re wackos.
Did you miss my second paragraph? You’re persisting in putting all whites in one heap. Goodwhites raise their own status to stratospheric heights by dumping on badwhites. They may suffer a few indignities from their own women and more minor minorities, but status is relative. Yglesias’ experience is not a case in your point, it’s rather perceived as being in the class of unfortunate accidents concomitant to a basically extremely useful institution, like personal cars. Very few people propose to dispense with cars on the basis that they generate a single-digit number of accidents per billion passenger-miles traveled.
I didn’t miss it, I didn’t find it accurate or convincing.
Now I don’t suggest that the goodwhites’ perception of their invulnerability is necessarily correct, but look at Brazil and Latin American countries like it: variously colored teeming masses ruled by Conquistador-American white elites quite comfortably ensconced in gated communities etc. Oh wait.
“The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.“
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
It’s a good phrase, but notice how the doctrine Macaulay describes only works in very special circumstances: namely when the bigoted sects are more extreme versions of the stem creed, one that emphasizes tolerance to begin with. Imagine what would happen if say a Taiping tried that line on Qing officials.